The experience behind Octane.

When I joined Aptive in 2019, it was doing a couple hundred million in revenue and still running like a startup: QuickBooks Desktop, no centralized reporting outside the sales app. I’d been brought in to lead strategic analytics. Before we could get very far with that, we needed reliable answers to questions as basic as how many appointments we’d run yesterday or what our AR looked like.

So the first order of business was something I kept hearing couldn’t be done: building a data foundation from scratch. My team and I built Aptive’s first data warehouse, brought in service and call data, and created shared models and a centralized reporting suite. That work became the starting point for Aptive’s Business Intelligence and Strategic Analytics functions.

From there, I took over the customer support organization. Support had been handled locally at branches across the country, each with its own way of doing things. We centralized it into one contact center, established common standards, and gave customers an account manager they could contact directly.

Over my six years there, we used the data to find where we were losing money or customers and work through the causes. We redesigned the retention team’s compensation model, helping double how long customers stayed after a save while cutting the average discount in half. In AR operations, we brought bad debt down from 8.6% to roughly 3% over a couple of years.

When we found that one in nine new door-to-door customers cancelled within their first month, we dug into their cancellation conversations and started uncovering gaps in what they expected from the first treatment.

We also used that foundation to guide cost improvements and strengthen gross margins ahead of Aptive’s private equity acquisition.

That’s the work I do now through Octane: build a data foundation you own and help you use it to find and fix what’s costing your business money. The models and business logic stay with your team, so you can keep building as your questions and tools change.