Freese Corporation has been in the heating and air conditioning business for more than 60 years. The founder, Jim “Deep” Freese started the business in Orange County, California in the early 1970’s as the Southern California suburbs began to grow.
Freese Corp is preparing for a management transition. Deep, the founder, is about to turn control of the business over to his son, Junior Freese. When he started the business and for most of its first 40 years, Deep Freese knew almost every customer of the business personally. However, he never created a formal customer data base. Today, he has more than 150 employees and 50 trucks operating in Orange and Riverside Counties.
Junior Freese recently graduated from the highly rated business administration program , but never took the Marketing Analytics class.
He believes that the company is poised for major growth by expanding nationally and by providing a more extensive set of products and services. As he looks around the heating and air conditioning industry, he does not see companies leveraging data and analytics as a growth strategy. He thinks that it might be the key to the company’s future growth.
The company, however, has no formal data function in marketing and sales. Its culture is characterized by a suspicion of technology and analytics.
You have been hired as a consultant to the company in the area of data and analytics.
How should Junior organize his company to get the best results from analytics, and what organizational issues should he consider?
What kinds of analytics do you think can provide him with fast “wins” in a short time frame?
Answer preview
The long-term goals for analytics that Junior should consider helping his company grow include setting up a good analytics foundation and avoiding the common pitfalls. The significance of setting up a good foundation should not be taken lightly because of the huge difference it can make for the company. This means compliance with regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation should be prioritized, and a data management office set up (Kokina et al., 2017). Secondly, some of the pitfalls that should be avoided include vendor lock-
