Data. It’s one of the biggest buzzwords today, but it carries a lot of weight. It allows businesses to get real insights into their bottom line. So how do enterprises enable their end-users to interact with data, and how do companies bring business intelligence to the masses?

On this episode of Diving Into Data, Host Thomas Riley talked with Rob Nelson, CEO, Grow, a simple business intelligence (BI) software created specifically for growing companies. They are making BI accessible and affordable so that anyone can get answers unique to their business. The duo talked about data, analytics, and unlocking data in the workplace.

“Data is at the heart of really good decision making,” Nelson said.

The idea for Grow was born from a significant pain point from Nelson’s former company. They were having a hard time wrapping their arms around the data. They tracked KPIs in several spreadsheets and generated reports, but their process was clunky, and they were always looking at stale data.

“The process to log into all these different systems, pull the data, run the calculations, update the spreadsheets was kind of a nightmare,” Nelson said. “We only updated these spreadsheets once a month.”

He talked to some software providers, but he kept getting quotes for over $100,000. The companies also had high failure rates and long implementation times. It wasn’t accessible. He exited and went after the underserved BI market.

“That’s what really got me excited, was this big problem to be solved that everybody feels,” Nelson said. He elaborated that he wanted to create a simple, beautiful solution.