When Matt Tischler joined RuffleButts as CFO in 2021, the company had been growing rapidly and—like so many organizations that experience rapid expansion—needed to get its data analytics up to speed. RuffleButts had new private equity funding and a greater need for detailed reporting. Although NetSuite had provided a solid foundation, the company wasn’t fully utilizing it. Tischler felt an urgent need to establish formal, deeper reporting.
“I wanted to have a scorecard of what’s going on in the business,” he said, “but anytime you develop something like that, it generates more questions—and that’s where I hit a wall with NetSuite CSV exports. You get to a point where you want to know what’s behind the number—but need four hours to go figure it out.”
Our Approach
RuffleButts was growing fast but still a small, lean company. Tischler had a clear vision of where he needed to go but also knew he didn’t have time or budget for “an army of DBAs and data engineers” to get there. He had an IT staff of two whom he could not supplement and refused to overburden. He also had a big sale coming up and wanted to be ready to learn from the data it generated.
Building a data warehouse can mean months of discovery and build time before the client sees any results—at which time the company has outgrown its original need. Our approach was to create a prototype and iterate from there. It’s discovery and build all in one, and it lays the foundation not to answer one question but to give the client the tools to answer whatever questions arise.
We helped RuffleButts establish a SaaS tech stack, and about seven hours later Tischler had an answer to his first question.
