Most small businesses aren't missing data. They're missing a single place to look at it. That distinction is small enough to ignore but expensive enough to eventually notice.
A recent BizTech piece by Nathan Eddy interviewed data literacy experts on why small businesses struggle to get value from their data. The consistent theme: information is fragmented across tools, which makes it nearly impossible to connect insights or see cause and effect across the business.
Fragmented isn't the same as missing. That's the difference that matters. A producer almost always has the data: commission statements from every carrier, case tracking in emails, renewal dates written down somewhere. What's missing is a single place where all of it lives, in a system that can answer a question in under a minute.
Small businesses are "commonly looking into the most critical data... on a regular basis, but they might be flying blind with many other kinds of data that would help them out." I've watched this happen with producers who reconcile their top three carriers religiously, and have no idea what their smaller, less frequent carriers actually paid them last quarter. It’s not negligence - it’s because the effort of keeping that specific information updated never felt worth doing until there’s a question.
This piece of advice in the article is the most important: start with decisions, not dashboards. Focus on two or three core questions, tied directly to revenue or cost, and build a foundation good enough to use daily - rather than one perfect enough to admire in a quarterly report nobody opens. Function over flash.
The AI angle in the article is almost a footnote to the real point: AI can only analyze data that's already been assembled. Applying it to disconnected accounting and case-tracking systems just automates the fragmentation instead of fixing it. The foundational work, consolidating what's already being collected, still has to happen first - by a person - before any tool can be justified.
That consolidation (bringing commission, case and revenue together in one place for a producer to actually use) is the groundwork I build with practices before anything more sophisticated gets layered on.
You're not missing data. You're missing one location to see it.
Source: BizTech magazine