Russ:  Hi I’m Russ Capper and this is BusinessMakers USA brought to you by Insperity, inspiring business performance.  We’re in the Research Triangle today, the Raleigh Durham area, and my guest is Bryce Gartner, Founder and CEO of icimo.  Bryce welcome to the show.

Bryce:  Well thank you, welcome to the Triangle.

Russ:  You bet.  Tell us about icimo.

Bryce:  So icimo is a company that is squarely in the business intelligence space.  We focus mostly on helping companies use Tableau software to do data visualization, have a strategic plan for how they handle their data and also get up to speed so business users can take full advantage of all the data that’s available today.

Russ:  Okay, tell us about Tableau software.

Bryce:  So Tableau is the leader in the data visualization self-service business analytics space.  They started about 15 years ago, became publicly traded about 3 or 4 years ago and have grown to lead in the Gartner quadrant in their space in that we’ve gotten to benefit from some of their growth.  But really not just their growth but what their software enables our clients to do and be successful.

Russ:  So how big is icimo?  How many employees do you have?

Bryce:  Icimo is 25 people.  We continue to grow year over year, the last 3 years have been our big growth years; started small and took off from there.  We’re mostly made up of people who can help build data strategy, so analysts, consultants and then client success.  Our team is really focused on how we make our clients successful.  It’s less about us, more about them.

Russ:  What do you attribute your growth to?

Bryce:  The fact that our clients say that we make them more successful.  We talk to our clients a lot; we believe if we’re going to talk about data and data strategy then we need to gather it from our clients.  And in gathering that information from our clients they tell us that we’ve made them more successful, and then they share that with other people; with other potential clients.  That’s really what’s driven our growth, this track record that 100% of our clients will be references for us.

Russ:  So describe a typical client.  Do you cross industries?

Bryce:  Oh yeah, so we go across – we have really eight main industries – which sounds like well you do everything right – but we have eight industries where we have big depth of knowledge.  Whether it’s for manufacturing or healthcare or even into the legal space, we have industries that we’ve gotten very deep into what they need to be successful and how they can apply all the data that they have.

And so whether it’s companies as large as I can’t use their name but the largest technology company on the planet all the way down to companies that are nonprofits that have less than $1 million in annual revenue.  What we’ve focused on is making sure what we call the icimo experience carries through regardless of the size of the company and the type of the company which means we’re going to help you use your data to be more successful.  In some cases we’ve had single projects that have resulted in $50 million a year in revenue or expense savings.

Russ:  For your customer.

Bryce:  For our customer.

Russ:  And you said law firms too?

Bryce:  Yeah, law firms too.

Russ:  Tell us how a law firm uses data visualization.

Bryce:  What they can do is they can use data visualization one, on the operation side to keep an eye on how they’re doing; are they being as efficient as possible in billing, in who’s working on accounts, what the mix of staff and team are working on those accounts.  They can use it to daylight information to their clients that are going on in matter management and other things.  Or they may even take advantage of some of the things that data visualization can do just in general operations.  Like in the legal space file storage and all the documents and document management are huge and they can keep an eye and stay ahead of the curve on how they’re doing with storage and cloud management and all of those kind of things.

Russ:  I’m not going to go through all eight but what would healthcare – how would they use data visualization?

Bryce:  Healthcare is really interesting because data around healthcare is so big right now.  You’ve got all the different things about the reporting requirements, all of the other components of…

Russ:  The HIPPA requirements are huge.

Bryce:  Yeah, HIPPA requirements, but you also have just overall patient and the needing to share information on patient care.  And so a lot of times data visualization can quickly identify – and analytics – can quickly identify trends, but it also facilitates rapid delivery to a multitude of people.  So whether healthcare is about getting out to providers – individual providers – just information about how many patients are experiencing this condition in the area and what some of the treatments and successful treatment options have been to evaluating payments and accelerating payments from payers to payees and all of those things.  So healthcare has pretty much limitless bounds of the ways that they need to share information to make that whole process more efficient.

Russ:  Okay.  So tell us about this name – i c i m o.

Bryce:  So icimo came from the concept that in my background I had been both a Chief Information Officer and a Chief Marketing Officer.

Russ: Interesting.

Bryce:  And what I had seen was I would get very frustrated on the marketing side because my marketing people are all creative types educated in hey, how can we make the coolest campaign or whatever were not really pre-disposed to use data because it wasn’t their training.  And in that they also didn’t know what questions to ask or they couldn’t get at the data so they didn’t even bother asking the questions.

On the IT side it was our job to gather the data but our team wanted to protect it.  They wanted to make sure nobody got at the data because it was their job to keep it clean and secure and no data breaches or anything like that.  And so what I always saw and tried to push when I was in those two different roles was look, both sides can benefit if we understand a little bit more about what the other side is.  And so icimo was designed specifically to put the CIO and the CMO on the same page by getting data shared with the people who can use it the most.

Russ:  That might be your differentiator today.

Bryce:  Oh it absolutely is, it absolutely is.  Because the other thing as all of this big data trend has been happening is that’s where the driver is, right?  If you think about how Amazon uses machine learning in its recommendation engine to be able to drive hey, this is a product that you want to see, that is taking data and using it to its fullest.  Well a lot companies don’t even know how to do that.

And at the same time you have a lot of technologies that are out there like Tableau and products like AllTricks and other tools that allow you to facilitate that movement of data into the hands of the business user.  But what happens is you have all this great technology but it’s moving so fast that the business doesn’t have time to catch up.  So there’s this opportunity to help people not only obtain the technology and facilitate getting all the data there and exposed, but helping them understand how to use everything that’s at their disposal that they didn’t use to have access to.

Whether that’s in manufacturing and supply chain, whether that’s in law firms, whether that’s in healthcare; we even do stuff in – and it’s kind of funny because I didn’t spend a lot of time in the college library when I was in college – but even libraries.  Libraries became one of our biggest success stories.  We went overnight from having one library to having 50 libraries as clients because in the world they’re in they have to justify their existence and what we found in getting at the data is it’s not about checking out the books, it’s not about just media, it’s about what they do to serve the community and some of the more at-risk audiences in the community, but that’s discovered through the data that they’re collecting.

Russ:  Wow, interesting story and interesting business and I thank you so much for sharing it with us today Bryce.

Bryce:  Absolutely, thank you.

Russ:  You bet, you bet.  And that wraps up my discussion with Bryce Gartner, Founder and CEO of icimo and this is BusinessMakers USA.