Analytics - It is a Practice, not a Technology

The thing holding your winery back from insightful and actionable analysis of your business and customers is not technology. The biggest challenge centers on establishing a practice, a habit, of applying analysis to shape your decisions and by extension your winery’s success.  In fact, a 2021 survey, 91.9% of executives cited cultural obstacles as the greatest barrier to becoming data driven (here.)

What underlies these cultural obstacles?  Winealytics has found it can vary from winery to winery but it always includes three points of friction: time, talent and technology. Let's start with the last point, technology.  Technology creates friction in two ways:  paralysis and false expectations. We often see organizations get paralyzed as they look for a “silver bullet” in technology.  Remember, technology isn’t the key to your progress.  Too often, the investment in technology becomes akin to a gym membership bought in January.  It might help you achieve your goal, but it won’t do anything if you don’t use it.  Whether you take a small step with a free tool like Google Data Studio, a free visualization tool from Google, or build out a full analytics and visualization solution your results depend on how well you use it.  In fact, we started Winealtyics so that you don’t need any technology.  Removing the need to learn a new technology removes a second obstacle to your success:  talent.

What about talent? How do we overcome a gap in this area? Let's be honest, for small and medium sized wineries, it doesn't make sense to have a data specialist on staff. The good news is you have options to overcome the talent issue. Most data visualization tools have online training and active user communities sharing how they solved different solutions.  However, that takes staff time away from your core business: making and selling wine.  Even with a set of canned reports provided by a reporting solution, you still have to sift through the results, do the analysis, and understand the actions to take next.  Let’s go back to the gym membership analogy.  Some of us join the gym because we enjoy working out.  However, the majority of January memberships view the gym as the tool to achieve a goal such as better health, more energy, etc.  Analysis of your winery falls into this category.  Analytics is a tool to achieve your goals.  The less time you spend on doing it, the more time you have for using it to strengthen your business. This sits at the foundation of Winealytics, where we designed all our practices and technology to take the work of analysis off your staff so you can use the insights for the decisions and actions that improve your business.

Time. How do you overcome the friction around finding the time to do the analytics?  We just discussed how you don’t want to do analysis, you want to apply it.  But there is even more you can do to optimize your time spent on analysis. This is a much broader topic and we'll address it in a separate blog post. The short answer is it's a matter of focus. Business analysis can be a true rabbit hole that you fall into. The key is to understand what you want to do with it.   You can’t afford to waste time noodling around looking for random insights.  Instead, get hyper focused on what drives your business strategies, take actions that improve those metrics, measure the impact of your actions, learn from that and repeat the process.  This cycle is the engine of your data practice and creates more and greater success for your winery. Again, we'll have separate posts that go into more detail about how to provide this focus without creating blind spots for your business.