Why Start Runway?

Consultants as Innovators

Most people don’t love their jobs – I didn’t for a long time. I started work as a Consultant out of undergrad in 2014, enamored with the glamour of regular travel, important meetings, and sleek presentations. But as the projects went by, I saw how the reality of my engagements fell short of what I thought the role of a consultant should be.

I had an itch that I couldn’t scratch – for real problem solving and a depth of complexity that wasn’t present in most of the roles I played, which focused solely on consistent execution. It takes innovation to come up with a relevant market offering as a practice, but delivering on that offering requires a skilled, reliable workforce who can smile and deliver the same product repeatedly.

This business model makes consulting firms vulnerable to the very problems they are trying to fix – they get focused on delivering a known product, on scaling their practice, and on meeting dollar value milestones. They begin to see innovation as a risk to be avoided rather than an opportunity to be embraced.

Human organizations are being fundamentally altered by data driven developments such as forecasting, machine learning, and distributed computing. The value of additional, actionable insights has been demonstrated worldwide and have set a standard for innovation and competition in the economy.

Companies that continue doing business as usual willingly give up their competitive advantage, failing to identify time sensitive, high value opportunities. Consulting practices that fail to do so will eat themselves from within as they bill hours for outdated services to make their earnings targets, reducing the company values to a flimsy marketing veneer in the process.

Runway Analytics

I discovered the incredible leap forward that our capabilities in data science have made while working with a survey data set in Power BI. My first project with the tool had the potential to offer more potential innovation and actionable insights to a client, and our practice, in one weekend than I had delivered in the last six months in my capacity as a change management practitioner. The profundity of this tool’s potential, and the larger opportunity that modern data science represents, made everything else I had worked on recently feel a generation out of date. Organizations of all sizes can compete more effectively with unprecedented insight into their operations, people, and market. This is the new frontier.

Data is more available in readily consumable formats than ever before; the tools and infrastructure required to access, manipulate, and display it are only now becoming user friendly enough to begin the boom. Tools like Power BI, Tableau, arcGIS, R, and Python have made information accessible and useful at every level of the economy, creating opportunities at a scale that I truly cannot yet comprehend. We started Runway Analytics because we believe this technology represents an opportunity for every organization in the world. Our mission is to develop our capabilities as they relate to data science, identify innovative applications, and leverage our business experience deliver high value solutions for our clients.

We believe that the job of a Consultant is to sift through the latest technological and enterprise capabilities, identifying high value opportunities to innovate with new products and services. To partner with clients as trusted advisors who can provide honest, and sometimes difficult feedback that help them reach their goals. To respect their client partners and team members by keeping promises they make and living up to value they espouse, even when it’s difficult or inconvenient. To deliver excellence with each and every engagement, going the extra mile when it counts. Our passion for data brought us together, and our shared values set us apart.