Drill to Detail Ep.114 ‘Building a Solopreneur Data Analytics Consultancy’ with Special Guest Christian Steinert

So, hello and welcome to the Drill to Detail Podcast sponsored by Magnetic's and I'm your host Mark Whitman. So, I'm really pleased to be joined today by Christian Steinert, who's joining us all away from Ohio. So, Christian, welcome to the show. Hey Mark, I'm honored to be on the show. I've been watching or listening rather to this podcast for about the last two or three years. So, it's definitely really exciting to be here. Fantastic, fantastic. So, Christian, just for anybody who doesn't know you, just give us a brief intro to who you are and let's start with that first of all. So, who are you and what do you do? Yeah, so I like to kind of classify myself as a business strategist and marketer and using data in that strategist piece very heavily. I originally have marketing background, so I actually formerly education is all in marketing and then emphasized in digital marketing and information systems in university. I kind of leverage that marketing background to ultimately deploy myself into sales operations, marketing analytics and ultimately analytics engineering, which is now what I'm doing on a consulting capacity, but have a lot of different experiences across various industries from manufacturing globally to telehealth into commercial real estate investment management. So I've seen a lot of different areas of marketing, marketing analytics and then data analytics as well in my six plus year career so far. Okay, interesting, interesting. So, Christian, there is no one to get you on the show was I've been following, it sounds like a stalker, but I've been following your progress over the last couple of years. And there's a lot of parallels really between, I suppose, your career and my early career in that you are a solo entrepreneur at the moment, you're getting started, I suppose, really in the consulting world, data consulting world. And you've been quite sort of good about documenting it and talking about the challenges and the opportunities and kind of your success is really with the clients you've been building up. So I thought it would be interesting to talk to you and really sort of frame the discussion as a general, so I suppose discussion about modern data stack and data consulting at the moment, but also really maybe it's an inspiration to kind of other consultants who might be interested in going down the same journey as you and I really. So that's the background to this, but let's kind of set the scene really a little bit for people on this kind of listen to this episode. And so you can sold in the modern data stack, don't you? So give us a bit of a kind of briefing on what that is today really as far as your consent. Yeah, so the modern data stack, I mean, poor refrigeration tools and everything that makes I guess the barrier to entry to data engineering and analytics engineering even easier, not having to deal with on prem data warehousing management and whatnot of course, but yeah, I so the bread and butter of my modern data stack experience and I think it's fitting being on this podcast is in looker, which I know you've had many other guests on before me that were either part of the looker team or I know you used looker yourself Mark. So that's really been like the core expertise and really how I've been able to, you know, position myself as an analytics professional is through looker. And yeah, I think I think that's been, you know, a huge, a huge unlock for a lot of my clients dealing with the semantic modeling to look at Malaya. But then, you know, the piece that I'm starting to get into now as a consultant from an infrastructure standpoint too is the the data integration layer, which I would like to touch on maybe as we go into this a little bit more, but I'm partnered with, you know, a tool called Kabula, which is out of Prague and the UK and they're starting to make a presence in the United States and they're really a, you know, a competitor to five trend, but a very versatile data integration tool that ultimately builds data applications and their whole premise is let's get actionable insights as fast as we can by lowering the barrier to entry on the data integration piece and being able to use this tool to create actual relevant data apps that you can take action on your data very swiftly. So that's kind of my newer fold of my skill set is not just the BI and the semantic layering of analytics engineering, but also getting into more of that data integration piece now. Okay. So, so and we'll get on to I suppose the particular niches you work in a bit, but you generally consult with I suppose small to medium sized businesses. Okay. And so, so what challenges do you typically hear from them that warrant, you know, things like Kabula and things like data pipelines and so on? What's the kind of general business problem you're solving there? Yeah. So I guess to just to take a step back a lot of the small businesses that I've been working with are very immature in their AI maturity life cycle. They're either at like level one or level two. I know shout out to Vin Vesheeshda for from data to profit. That's a book that I've really been reading a ton and trying to absorb as much information because a lot of the clients like for instance with the roofing niche not to get ahead of myself on the industry niches, they're not even at a stage where they haven't historically been at a stage where they're ready or they're at a maturity level for data infrastructure to begin with. But what I've seen is all of it's coming down to conversion rates and lead sources and how are our lead sources actually leading to closed one revenue. And for companies of this small to medium size in my experience consulting with them, it's been very, very difficult for them to keep a gauge and a pulse on those lead sources that are actually converting to closed one revenue. Okay. Interesting. So I remember years ago there was an article that Tristan Handy wrote about. I suppose the degree to which companies should take on technology at different stages in their sort of maturity. And you mentioned there about data pipelines, Kabula and so on. And there's also I suppose the whole category of sort of data warehouses as well. And back in my day when I first started consulting, you know, to do a data warehouse required you to have a DBA, have an Oracle database, have servers and so on. Sure. But you know the cloud, the cloud, to what extent do you think the cloud has made that technology available to SMBs? And to what extent do you kind of think it's needed or is warranted in someone really? Yeah. Well, I think just looking at right my experience with snowflake, I mean, it's everywhere now and it is making the data warehouse very, very accessible at a low cost. You know, obviously you've got to be careful with optimizing your snowflake instance specifically. But I think it makes it very, very easy. And then to layer another piece on top of that with, you know, Kabula back to, you know, my partner, you know, they have a fully managed snowflake data warehouse that sits basically underneath Kabula as the storage layer. So then you as the Kabula engineer or the data team manager of your company that uses Kabula doesn't even really need to worry as much about optimizing the data warehouse. They take care of that. You just have to worry about getting the data, using the different components and then working with the data and the whole idea is, you know, that speeds up your time to actually drive insights from the data that makes profitable decisions as opposed to being hung up optimizing all the backend infrastructure. But yeah, I think I think it does make it very, very accessible for small businesses, especially in the roofing niche, you know, to be on the cloud and to use data warehousing in the cloud. Okay. So you start the conversation. You position yourself as being more of a, I suppose a consultant to the business really, as opposed to maybe a technology implementer. So where do you, how do you kind of make the decision about when the problem is a technology problem and when it's a business problem? And how do you sort of decide when it's appropriate to bring in a tool like Kabula, for example, or whether it's maybe a problem they can solve using Google Sheets and say, gee, for example. Yeah. That's a great question. So yeah, I'm going through this right now with one of my roofing clients. And I think it really comes down to understanding their digital infrastructure workflows. And how mature those are. So starting at their source system, so typically like in a roofing company to get industry-specific or probably across a lot of different industries and small businesses is they've got a CRM. They have a marketing automation tool. They have a financial management software like a QuickBooks. And that's pretty much their entire digital stack. So seeing how those systems are, you know, working together and how they're actually getting, you know, lead information entered into their CRM in a streamlined way, you know, is a big determinant as to how ready are you to actually connect Kabula, you know, a data integration tool into these systems and pull that data into a data warehouse to actually start trying to drive insights from it. So you know, I think a lot of the exercises recently have been, let's just export a lot of the data from raw reports, from the tools themselves, from the source systems themselves, and see what does the data look like, you know, just studying it on a very tabular Excel level, seeing what data is missing, why are there redundant record, job records specifically in the roofing space, right? Like you have a lot of job records and there's a lot of duplication going on with my current client. And so it starts there and then you take that and you have to talk to the people that are in charge of the digital and the operations pieces, why is that actually happening? And it's interesting because as a full-time data engineer for a large corporation, like when I was working at the global commercial real estate investment company as an analytics engineer, I didn't get as much exposure to that and actually get the opportunity to be very, very close to the business and their workflows within the source systems. That was something that was newer to me once I actually embodied and embraced being a consultant and getting into the consulting world and the critical business role that you play, not just the tech role. Yeah, interesting. So you mentioned about Kabula. Okay, so just tell us what that is and tell us where, why you choose that as a product to consult with, with these kind of customers and what kind of problem it solves. Yeah, so Kabula takes data from a source, sorry, I like to say I kind of just keep a generic takes information from a source and basically spins it up in a way that's going to be presentable to the executive so that they can interpret it, understand it and make decisions that drive profit with it. And so it's really just that again, blanket term data integration tool, but then the layer deeper with Kabula is that there's really two folds. One, they refer to it often internally. I think it Kabula is the the Lego, the Lego of data because you can do so many kinds of data applications with it. They have connections for data destinations where you can write data to a tool like Streamlit and you can create customer sentiment analyses very quickly and swiftly on the fly. You can run all of the different Google reviews for a specific company through a chat GPT node that then spits out a sentiment score based on the open AI model. And so those are just a few use cases where it's very versatile, but it's also the second fold, a data cataloging tool. So everything that you're doing in Kabula, it has logs and documents when and who did something in all of your different data pipelines on the platform. So that way of course, you know what do certain components mean? What pipelines are they associated with? What are the definitions of your fields and tables and what source systems are they coming from? And then also the layer of protection to the data pipelines. If someone changes something, you know exactly when and who broke it or fixed it. Let's say optimistic here, but that's just a big value ad piece, fricable. And yeah, I got connected to them quite honestly through just happen chance just being active on LinkedIn, ran into the now field CTO, one of the field CTOs. And we just kind of started hitting it off and talking and then I had him on my podcast data and impact actually back in 2022. And then he knew that I was starting my consultancy and I was very, very, very early stage then. And he had said, hey, when you start getting clients, like let us know, you know, we'd love to help you, you know, drive data in your clients organizations. And that's exactly what happened. So a lot of relationship focus there too. But yeah, it just kind of helps that, you know, I got certified in Snowflake with the Snowpro Core in 2021 and Kabul is very partnered up with Snowflake. And then, you know, obviously Kabul uses lookers. So then, you know, I'm a looker developer. So it's all I feel like the ecosystem of tech tools that I've created to partner with for my business and use for my business are all very cohesive. But yeah. Interesting. Interesting. So, so okay, so AI, Gen AI and those kind of technologies. So I imagine certainly for us for our business, it's the thing that people are inquiring about when they come to us, you know, asking about us working with them. It often ends up driving work that is not AI around say maybe data integration and so on. But how are you finding the interest and uptake and success of AI with the kind of customers you're working at the moment? And maybe any examples of that. Yeah. Interest level is extremely high. And I'll just stick with the roofing these years since that's kind of the lane that I'm going down right now. Interest for AI tools, whether in house or third party is extremely, extremely of interest to roofers that are looking to exit. You know, I think in the small business market and specifically, would you say roofers looking to exit? What do you mean? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Thank you. So, primarily like a lot of not primarily, but a lot of roofing companies are actually looking to scale and then exit to a private equity firm. So they're looking to sell. So they're building the company to sell. And I think that's because roofing is a very, very standardized and reusable model. If you're able to build a roofing company well and have, you know, 40% plus profit margins, you know, you have your sales process nailed down. You have every task delegated to respective teams between sales, admin slash finance, you know, you're able to make it reusable and repeatable, which is exactly what private equity companies, those are the types of businesses they want to invest in. So roofing companies become very appealing to them. So, you know, in order to exit successfully, you know, what I'll hear like my current client, the CEO of my current client, you know, he's talking to a lot of PE firms. All they're talking about is systems and data analytics. And, you know, I think the idea of being able to integrate AI in some capacity, for example, right now, my current client and the roofing space is looking to bring in an AI bot for phone calling, inbound and outbound. A very interesting use case and they're using a third party tool to do it. And to be honest with you, they haven't had a lot of success with it yet. And I think a little bit of that is in maturity in their digital tech stack because the AI bot that they're using integrates directly with their marketing automation tool that they use. And there's been a lot of recent improvements and enhancements on that that they've been undergoing that I've been helping them kind of guide so that we can start getting good reports. But yeah, I think the interest is high. I think the implementation is difficult, especially with roofing companies, you know, looking to exit. I think a lot of them, it's not your typical roofing company of, oh, we've been around for 20, 30 years where family owned my father started it. I'm running it now as the son. I inherited it. You see that a lot in the more blue collar businesses. This is more rapid growth. You know, they went from zero to almost 10 million in revenue they're going to do in 2024 in three, us than three years, really. So that that amount of growth, you know, the systems and whatnot have kind of lag behind. They've just been like, let's hit the gas and try to catch up later mentality because it's a sales business at the end of the day. It's a, it's not a technical business. It's a sales business. So implementation is tough for AI for sure. Okay. Okay. So you've talked, you've talked quite a bit about roofing businesses here and you are basically no hire. Okay. And so it struck me that looking at your, looking at your online presence and your case studies, you've kind of, I suppose you've focused on a niche, which is roofing businesses, which is supposedly a non-obvious one, certainly to us in the UK, you know, to me. And there's often a kind of, I suppose there is a general bit of advice in business, which is to find a niche and serve that niche and, and, and, and, and so I dominate that niche as opposed to trying to be all things to all people, right. But, but B.I. and data analytics is quite a horizontal kind of service area in that the same solution can work for lots of businesses. So what's been your philosophy so far? And what's been your experience in this kind of niche versus generalization question? Yeah, it's, it's a great question. And it's one that I've been battling, you know, really since I started the consultancy because if you go on my website, right, you see small the medium-sized SaaS companies. And that's, that's by design because historically, like I said in the beginning, a lot of my experiences with software companies or, you know, manufacturing companies, you know, just of all the other things different from like a small business roofing type space. But, I would say that it, you starting out, in my opinion, so far, you have to blend both. You have to keep the end goal of a niche in mind, but you also have to get clients to keep the lights on. And so, I would say that when you're starting out, it's okay to be broad, you know, I think why combinator, you know, they're going to push the niche like a lot of the startup models. And that's great, especially when you're trying to find product market fit, you know, for like a SaaS company or something, but as a consultant in data, just like you said, it's horizontal. You have the flexibility to work with other businesses. And as you work with other businesses, you're going to build extremely valuable experience still that you can produce case studies on because at the end of the day, in my opinion, data is data. And as long as you're getting that experience and then have the end goal of a niche in mind, as you trend towards that while also staying broad to start, I'm finding that that's what's working for me. And it's helping me continue to, you know, keep my business healthy while I continue to grow it. So you say with the, so the roofing, so the roofing industry, you're obviously focusing on that to an extent. What's unique about that industry for its data needs and what's kind of common really in there? Yeah. So the unique thing is that it's a very underserved market. And after doing a lot of market research, talking to roofers, talking to business, roofing consultants, and working with my client, you know, people are stuck in their ways. It's, it's, let's, you know, maybe have a CRM. I mean, a lot of roofers don't even have like one digital system. So the level of opportunity after, you know, and one key point too is as you go into a niche tapping into podcasts, specific to that niche. And so I've listened to a lot of roofing podcasts. And the one thing they always tie it back to is if you want to run a high margin, high growth, consistently good roofing company, you need data. You need your growth profit margin. You need your sales close rate. You need to understand those metrics. And so I see all of these roofing companies that are really well run, maybe like seven, eight, nine figures in revenue, you know, using analytics, but they're not using it in a way that us data engineers or data management practitioners would like, you know, they have a CRM that they're exporting their sales revenue numbers out of. So I I always tell the COO and the CEO when I'm explaining the value of what we do with data warehousing and creating a centralized location for all of your information that you can consistently pull from. You know, they're having one expoone spreadsheet that has the Girl's Profit margin at this number and then another stakeholder or COO pulls the same report but with a few different filter criteria and they're getting a different number for the Girl's Profit margin that should be the same for the same time frame and then they're budding heads and they're wondering why internally hey, what's right, both of us have different numbers, what's going on. And so the big value add for what we do is that is that conformity and that consolidation in a data warehouse and you just don't see that as much in the roofing space and they're even talking to other roofing CRM executives because they do exist. Roofing CRM's are a big thing and they're like, well, we don't have any customers that talk about the need for a data warehouse. Why do they need that? They don't need that. had a stubborn approach but I'm like I think you're really missing out on an opportunity to take it one step further than just digitization but data infrastructure implementation. And that's where I'm trying to press right now to see how the product market fit actually pans out. So how do you qualify your opportunities you have there? So you've got a really you know everything comes to you and they're ever certain size. Do you look for there to be certain sort of things in place or commitments or people or whatever before you're engaged or do you engage with all of them or how do you decide which ones are going to be successes for you? Yeah I think the ideal client right it depends on the vision and direction of their company. And if like I said if they're if they're looking to exit if they're really serious about growing to eight or nine figures they are going to be a great candidate for selling the services that Steiner Analytics offers. And so that's how I would qualify it to be honest is that vision in that direction what's their intent because so many roofing companies I think like the smaller mom and pop ones they've kind of been staying at that same revenue mark for years. And so it's not going to be as you know fruitful of an opportunity to try to sell infrastructure to them. You have to sell value to them I think like and I guess you know I could maybe step back a little bit and say that other smaller roofing companies infrastructure aside there's still data problems that need solving it's probably just more a matter of exporting things into Google Sheets and doing some quick analyses and maybe connecting a liver studio dashboard onto those Google Sheets and visualizing it that way. But for the ones that actually need a modern data stack implemented with you know in-house AI solutions and third party AI solutions you're going to need to see companies that are serious about growth. Yeah yeah okay interesting and so you're so you've done case studies you've done kind of you've been a lot marketing around that. How do you market yourself do you market yourself largely tipped in media that is is kind of roofing media or in analytics. Yeah it's a great question because I have recently been battling with that positioning piece. I you know I've invested in some media teams and whatnot and I did have a series of you know roofing short form video content for Instagram you know because roofers are a lot more present on Instagram than LinkedIn by the way and you know I've posted those on LinkedIn too but I've actually kind of stepped away from that for now and like I said I think long term the niche will you know nationally play out with the roofing space as I continue to find the product market fit and continue to go on this journey with my current roofing client of building this product that I you know because I'm ultimately going to try to productize as is what my end goal would be with the roofing niche but lately if you'll follow my LinkedIn you'll see a lot more small the medium size software companies is kind of more my focus from a positioning a marketing positioning framework right now and I I guess to my fault maybe like a little bit all over the place but I'm also just right now in the stage and this is something you know insight to other early stage data consultancies you kind of just have to throw stuff out into the ether and see what sticks and what's working on what you feel is giving your business a rhythm for traction to get leads and and right now the current approach of changing the positioning a little bit away from the roofing space and just focusing on putting out content for small the medium size companies and SaaS companies you know is getting me a lot of traction online didn't right now so that's okay okay and also in terms of another niche you've focused on Kabula and I think I think I've had Kabula on the show before and I certainly know what Kabula is but it's it's it's kind of it is a niche and it's they're I suppose they're from the Czech Republic and so on what's been the kind of the what's been the kind of the pros and cons and and kind of and surprises and so on and benefits of focusing on a particular vendor like Saika Bula is your partner here yeah so I think one of the things is you know they're not as present in the United States so I'm really focused on helping them expand at least in the central Ohio region for now really the Midwest United States with that comes you know definitely I think it's harder to get traction with a tool that doesn't have as much presence in the United States so from a partnership perspective you know I'm trying to find a lot of leads and then you know they're focused for so long and and understandably so has been on the European market and they're just now starting to deploy sales reps and a sales team designated specifically to the United States so you know when people think partnerships and you know you know getting a ton of leads back and forth like it's it's a little bit more challenging when you're working with a company that's just starting to break and show their you know show their uh there's their shower in in the United States but with that too comes you know they have a very tight knit team and they have incredible support so anything that you need if you need them to sit in on calls with you because you're new you know like I am admittedly and new to the sales side of the business right I've been a data engineer for so long like the sales side is is difficult for me so to have them offer up their time to say hey we'll sit in with you on sales calls and help you guide these discovery calls it is a huge advantage not only for my learning but of course the higher likelihood for actually getting you know a new client and onboarding a new client so you know that with each program their challenges but overall yeah it's it's it's it's been it's been a positive experience working with their tight knit team do your customers really care though about what the technology is I mean I've certainly found that with the you know with the with the with the high degree of trust and where the customer is maybe on their first stage as a data journey the actual technology itself isn't so isn't so the choice of it isn't so relevant as long as you can guarantee that will work on their project I mean how have you found that's worked and what about the kind of I suppose the long term maintenance of the things you build as well yeah um no I most of my clients at least in the small business based and I'll I'll caveat it small business base they don't they don't care about what the infrastructure is they just want something working where they can take away profitable insights like that's what they want that's all they care about they're like why build something that looks flashy if it's not going to deliver us value so that that's what I'd say and like I pertaining specifically to roofing there really um you know I have had some larger clients though um for example I'm working with the top five fast food company right now in the United States and you know their infrastructure is you know heavy Google Cloud and and and that is very important to them you know they've gone through some other vendors and whatnot I think in the past and uh you know Google has really they found a sweet spot with it and they've been having a lot of success with Looker and so like there's there's definitely um you know that that play from an enterprise level um long term maintenance so I would say you know part of the standard analytics process is in the end you know we we work with the customer to offload anything when we transition the project fully to them um so that involves heavy documentation as we build any additions or we build an entire pipeline from scratch we're giving them the documentation pieces that they need uh for their next in-house data engineer to come on and take that on like my med tech client that's what we did we just heavily documented everything and then we transitioned them and we'll sit with them for a week or two and literally on board whatever in-house engineer they have that's going to be long-term maintaining um their their their data pipeline uh you know for the marketing and finance departments at this med tech company specifically is what I'm talking about here um so yeah I would say just good documentation and then just working with them on a timeline that they see fit to to to on board and train you know the in-house talent or the talent that's going to be taking over the the data step and we leave as the consultants that are just temporary okay so let's go into the the suppose the main topic that we want to talk to you about actually your journey as a solo uh solo entrepreneur as a consultant okay so what made you want to become a consultant first of all um as opposed to becoming part of the in-house team somewhere or working for vendor like for example you know kabula yeah might you choose to do this yep so and I I told the story the other day um it's number one it's twofold number one my grandfather actually started and ran Steiner printing uh founded in 1947 they actually just got sold in 2022 but they were a multi-million dollar printing company out of Oshkosh Wisconsin and so I always grew up around entrepreneurs my dad was a private practicing dentist so I think I didn't realize it at the time but naturally I had always been around business owners and that energy just kind of genetically I think inherently was just you know bleeding in me um so I think that's a big piece you know my grandfather really had a lot of influence and then the second layer of that is in uh business school uh you know I actually went to University of Wisconsin Oshkosh and got to sit with my grandfather a lot during lunches we would go out because he they lived in Oshkosh and I would get to pick his brain about entrepreneurship then I started taking business classes then I got into a SaaS startup while in college where we actually pitched it to two different angel investor pitch competitions, kind of like a sharp tank. And there's one called the Culver's Model Contest. It's sponsored by Culver's Fast Food, Craig Culver's one of the judges, the founder of Culver's Fast Food. And we ended up taking third in that pitch competition and winning $7,900 with cash and income services. And feeling that liberation, I was just so like this is so aligned with my passion. I want to find an avenue to get back into that when I'm out of undergrad. And that avenue was analytics consulting for me. That's what I kind of realized as I spent so much time upskilling in it. I was like, let's just try to make this a side hustle. And then the side hustle started to expand. I had my full-time job at the commercial real estate global company as an engineer. And then finally, August of last year, I said, you know what? Let's grab the bull by the horns and just go for it. And that's exactly what I did. Okay. So I suppose the interesting thing is, you know, over the last few years, certainly, the trend has been people who are, you know, young and kind of ambitious and entrepreneurial going to products. So they're all, you know, it's been so easy to get funding for building products that it's actually, you know, far more, far more the case people would do that. So why did you choose consulting as opposed to say building a product really? You know, and also why did you choose to do it on your own as well? Which is interesting. Yeah. Number one, I think the consulting avenue was lower barrier to entry than starting a product or at least I knew that if I could secure some contracts, there'd be a higher likelihood that I could take that full time. And this is just me, maybe being a little risk averse as opposed to just diving all into a SaaS product or something like that. So that's, yeah, that's that's the, I would say that's like a big piece. I think I'm a little mad. To be honest, because yeah, there's so many great consulting firms out there that you can get your feet wet and you know, be a consultant without having to start your own your own brand and your own company. But I think I wanted to create something that was truly mine and to have the signer name kind of in lineage to my grandfather. This was a big win for me to just try and do this and very rewarding. And yeah, I think that's it. And then also kind of on the productization note, you know, now it's like as I'm getting into it, it's like, oh, like consulting is great. I kind of see the advantages or the pros of also trying to productize something about my service as well, which is kind of the route that I'm going in with the roofing niche. But you're sort of very much front and center in your your marketing and the way you talk about very kind of I suppose very from the heart about sort of what you're trying to do in your projects. So to tell us a bit about your I suppose your your your philosophy and approach around building your brand and and what the goal that you plan that. Yeah. So I would say that I you know, I I I pride myself on transparency and then one of my other core values or one of our other core very values at standard analytics is Egoless candor. And I think that at least in my experience working in a lot of these larger enterprises, you know, engineers can have some ego about them at times. I don't mean to like call anyone out. It's just what I've kind of observed. I think, you know, maybe that's why data engineering gets a bad rap or like we you know, they they sit behind the scenes and they don't you know, they're notorious for at least at least the ones that aren't like recognized by the business, they're not translating for the business and then you know, they think they're smart and and so I try to to position myself in a way that shows my vulnerabilities like it shows the weak points, the failures that I've gone through. I document that I think I've been very public at least to my opinion about a lot of the failures or about some of the imposter syndrome that I feel occasionally or often as a new data consultant with six plus years of experience, but recognizing that there's a lot more tenured consultants and data engineering professionals out there than me. So that's that's kind of my thought is like let's just stay transparent. Let's be Egoless and let's just show the world that I'm doing this and maybe like I was telling Joe like I think my raw expertise is not coding and being a data engineer. I I learned it up to the point where I can deliver solid work, but ultimately for me it's who not how. I think there's going to be a team of standard analytics data engineers that are far better than me at code and I'm just going to be the one as like the lead technical product face delivering the data storytelling to the client. Your name is on the company and one thing and something I say to our potential clients and clients is my name being on the company is the ultimate guarantee that I will make sure this actually delivers for you. I mean how do you how do you make sure this thing actually delivers and how do you make sure that you aren't exited at the point the thing is built because actually that's when they really need you more than anything. Yeah I would say start with start with transparency like I was saying I think keeping an open line of communication for what they really need and what they're asking for is crucial and then and then just giving routine status updates and checking in with them and making sure that you approach the build with an iterative mindset not a perfectionist mindset and I think that that probably should have been the first thing I said but yeah I would say that piece is huge like for example you know we're building the first version ones of a lot of these workflow analysis dashboards for the Roofing companies CRM right now they're roofing CRM and we built the V1 and now we presented it to them but said hey like let's let's keep an open feedback loop we'd like to get a list of questions and feedback that you have on the dashboard once you spend some time using it and so that's kind of the phase we're in right now where they're going to send you know a laundry list of questions and a laundry list of potential enhancements and then we're going to kind of work with them to come up with something that is optimized from a data standpoint but also you know optimized for what they're they're actually wanting but yeah just just being transparent and and sticking with them and not trying to push a contract of infrastructure on them or try to push them on anything really just just stay open with them and try to really understand their needs and deliver on that so again one of the things that was a a surprise to me when I got into the solo consulting world and and then obviously transitioned on but but was the amount of time that you spend doing something other than actually building analytics systems so you become a consultant to actually become to build these things for customers but actually you spend actually most of your time doing finance and doing sales and so on how have you found that and how have you found the but have you found your ability to balance those things out so you still deliver for customers but you grow your business it's really tough but I would say it's it's probably a 70 30 split between you know CEO level activities and then 70% of my time is spent developing right now and I think that's also just the stage I'm in right in some of the contracts I have and the structures of some of the contracts I have take up a lot of my time because it's a lot of advanced look ML building and architecture and modeling work that I'm doing for them so that's kind of the phase I'm in but I always make it a point to have coffee chats at least once or twice a week you know I try my absolute best to always be going to local networking events trying to get my name out there and obviously talking to you know other other business owners in the area of central Ohio through coffee chats and virtual meetings and whatnot so that that that would be definitely like a big way that I would balance it and then two attending events and conventions I've attended a fair amount this year and I've actually got another one coming up October 23rd to 25th I'm going to Roofcon in Orlando Florida so that's a business roofing specific one but you know there's always at the end of the day when you're starting out I think you know you're always going to be pulled back to to building data systems and building you know business intelligence reports like I'm doing right now for you know one of my contracts and that's just that's just part of it yeah okay and you mentioned about productizing your services right so so that is always the holy grail for for consultancies but what's your thoughts on that and how do you intend to do that and how do you think that'll benefit you and customers yeah so I intend to do that through you know the roofing niche and understanding you know probably what's going to be you know I have one use case right now that I've confirmed and validated in the market that it is a reoccurring problem for a lot of roofing companies and that's understanding what lead sources are actually converting to close one jobs like I said earlier so I think you know creating like a lead control dashboard will be a big piece there the thing that I think it'll do for my business is it's it's it's building to sell I think ultimately I would I would like to try to to exit something I think and this is a long you know a long-term pipe dream for me right just keep that mind but you know I think I think ideally as a consultant you know you're always gonna have a level of hands-on work and I yeah you can delegate it but I think you're still gonna have to be close to the client you're still very involved in a client whereas I think with a product going to market with it it's gonna lighten that load a little bit so I can almost buy back my time or at least leverage my time to be able to do more of the relationship building the sales piece the really a body that CEO founder that I want to become as opposed to just being an analytics consultant so I think that you know and talking to Joe Reese too about this like that productization just helps you leverage your time better so that's that's where I see that being advantageous to the business and yeah the biggest the biggest piece there though is is finding that product market fit and I'd still say I'm probably pre-product market fit right and and just talking and trying to understand what roofers are struggling with is this a recurring problem and would this be valuable and so far it's been it's been fun you know you know getting to do that okay so so one one last observation of mine is is when you have your own consultancy I'm already any business really it's how How do you avoid burnout? How do you know when to stop? Because there's always something needs to be done and there's always a client piece of work or something you can sort of do. How do you avoid burnout and how do you keep yourself kind of sharp and healthy, really? This is a great question. The number one thing I'd say is I go to the gym and that is my outlet. That is my favorite time of the day. It's early in the morning, I'll wake up at 5 or 6 a.m. and hit a lift and lift weights. And that helps me equalize and balance out. It's interesting, I'm in this phase right now where I'm still so new to everything and that it's only been a little over a year that I'm one of those people that do feel guilty when I take time off or I take time away from being on. And I'm trying to get better at that because yeah, I have to be honest with you this week even, I woke up on Monday and it worked parts of the weekend and I was just like, "Oh, I just don't feel like coding all day today." And it's like, "Man, is this burnout? I'm not sure. It's probably burnout." Yeah, I think it is burnout. And yeah, I would say the gym and then going on long walks and long bike rides on the weekends have really, really saved me else. I think getting out in nature is cliche as it sounds really, really helps me just clear my head and clear my imposter syndrome or whatever other doubts I'm feeling that week from all the things going on with running. Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, the other thing for me is just passion for what you do as well. I mean, I've been doing analytics consultant for 25 years now and I still really enjoy doing it. I still spend evenings trying out new techniques and new approaches and I still really enjoy it really. I think that's one of the, that's a good thing but certainly the same as you, actually getting out there, kicks and exercise, getting some fresh air is really important as well and there's always something else to be done in the business. But it's, what point do you think, last question from me? What point do you think you might your first hire if you've not done so already and how do you decide amongst kind of hiring and contractors and partnerships and so on? Yeah, so I haven't made my first full time hire. I do have one contractor that really is my lead data engineer. He handles all of the code base for my MedTech client. He's helping me build a lot of the dashboards for the roofing company client right now. So I do have that contractor and then I also just recently brought on a content marketer as well and that was definitely a big step for me. It's not cheap. So anyone getting into consulting, hiring a marketer is not cheap but I think a lot of people already know that that are in business. But yeah, the full time hire, I think realistically if, you know, if I'm having a consistent, you know, it's probably going to be a numbers game like three to five contracts a month, consistently month over month over month over month over month, that is at that point, you know, it'll make sense to bring on a full time engineer. But right now the flexibility that the contractor provides me and staying lean in the current as I'm still early has been, you know, it's been great. And it still gives you that project management, that leadership, that data leadership that I'm looking for. So it's been good. Fantastic. Okay. So do that things up then? How do people find out more about you and the services you're your consultancy office? Yeah. Number one place, right? Mark, we met here, LinkedIn. So I believe my LinkedIn URL, like in the URL, I think it's Christian Steiner. 96. I think Christian Steiner was taken. So I had to have the 96, which is my birthday here. So there's that. And then Steiner to analytics.com. So STINER to analytics.com. And yeah, that's those are really the main things. And then Instagram too, if you're interested, Steiner 96. Great. Well, Christian, it's been great speaking to you and best of luck for the future and Steiner touch. Thank you, Mark. This has been a pleasure. [Music] [MUSIC] [BLANK_AUDIO]