The Decision Stack: Stop Collecting Data. Start Answering Questions.

You can’t lead or scale a company without real clarity from your numbers. And you won’t get that by skimming a QuickBooks export or glancing at a monthly P&L summary. That’s the hard truth most founders and CFOs eventually run into, usually after a painful quarter or a tense board meeting.

They think more data, more dashboards, or a new piece of software is the answer. It’s not.

The business reality is this: Most of your data, in its raw form, is a liability. It’s messy, disconnected, and full of half-truths. Making decisions based on it is like trying to navigate a minefield with a tourist map. That’s why The Decision Stack—done right—is the start of real insight. It’s a system for turning chaos into clarity.

For those looking for the short answer:

What is The Decision Stack?
The Decision Stack is a three-phase system that turns your messy, disconnected business data into operational insight. It enables confident, data-driven decision-making by revealing the true story behind your numbers, not just the surface-level metrics.

It's the forensic-level process we use to build a single source of truth—the foundation for all meaningful Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A), strategic modeling, and confident leadership.

Why Most Companies Fly Blind - And Why It’s a Problem

Let’s be honest. Most growth-stage companies are operating in a thick data smog.

You have numbers coming out of your ears: website analytics from Google, payment data from Stripe, CRM records from HubSpot, payroll from Gusto, and a sprawling, often neglected, chart of accounts in QuickBooks.

Each system tells a tiny piece of the story. Nobody is connecting the dots. The result is a dangerous state of reactive leadership. You’re constantly putting out fires, making gut calls on big-budget items, and hoping your intuition is right.

It’s not a sustainable way to run a business, and the consequences are brutal:

• Wasted Spend: You pour money into marketing channels without knowing your true Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) for each one.
• Margin Erosion: You launch a new product or service without a clear view of its actual gross margin, slowly bleeding cash with every sale.
• Bloated Headcount: You hire too fast (or in the wrong departments) because you can’t connect payroll costs to revenue generation.
• Missed Opportunities: You fail to see that your most profitable customers all share a specific trait, a goldmine of an insight buried in disconnected data.

Flying blind isn't just stressful; it's a direct threat to your company's survival. The bigger you get, the more these small blind spots compound into catastrophic failures. This isn't a problem you can solve with another dashboard. You need a system.

Meet the Decision Stack - A System for Operational Clarity

The Decision Stack isn't a piece of software. It’s a rigorous, repeatable methodology. It’s a framework for building an operating system for your business—one that connects what happened in the past to what you can make happen in the future.

Think of it as three distinct layers, each building on the last:

1. The Foundation (Information): We transform your raw, messy data from a dozen sources into a single, structured, and credible set of information.
2. The Context (Knowledge): We apply business logic and map relationships between data points to create knowledge. This is where numbers start to tell a story.
3. The Payoff (Insight): We visualize this knowledge, run scenarios, and stress-test assumptions to generate true insight—the "aha!" moments that lead to smarter, faster, and more confident decisions.

This isn’t just Data Analytics Consulting; it’s a strategic diagnostic. By building the stack, we uncover the hidden mechanics of your business. It’s performed by strategists and former founders who know what to look for because we’ve been in your seat. We’re not just data monkeys; we’re a forensic accountant and a strategic advisor rolled into one.

The goal isn't a 50-page report you'll never read. The goal is a single, powerful tool that gives you unwavering clarity.

Before the Stack: Are You Even Ready to Decide?

Here’s a quick gut check. Can you answer these questions, right now, without digging for an hour?

• What is your true monthly burn rate, all in?
• What is your gross margin by product, service, or customer segment?
• How long is your cash runway, based on a realistic forecast?
• What was your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) last month?
• What is the Lifetime Value (LTV) of your average customer?
• Which 20% of your customers generate 80% of your profit?

If you hesitated on more than one of these, you’re not alone. But you also have a critical visibility problem. You’re making strategic decisions without the foundational knowledge required to make them well.

You might need a Decision Stack if:

• You feel like you’re guessing on major budget decisions.
• Your board meetings are filled with questions you can’t answer with confidence.
• Different departments report conflicting numbers for the same metric.
• You’re preparing for a fundraise and know your data room is a disaster.
• You suspect you’re losing money somewhere but can’t pinpoint where or why.
• Your “strategy” feels more like a series of reactions than a deliberate plan.

Strategy without data is just a wish. Building The Decision Stack is the first step toward grounding your vision in reality.

How to Build The Decision Stack - Step by Step

The process is methodical. We don’t jump to conclusions or pretty charts. We build from the ground up, ensuring every layer is solid before moving to the next.

• Step 1: Data Collection & Verification. We pull raw data from all your key systems—accounting, CRM, payment processors, analytics tools. This is the forensic accounting phase where we hunt down the numbers, no matter where they hide.
• Step 2: Structuring & Cleaning. We consolidate everything into a single, unified structure. We clean up duplicates, fill in missing information, standardize categories, and flag inconsistencies. This turns messy data into reliable information.
• Step 3: Relationship Mapping. We apply business logic to connect the dots. This is where we calculate key metrics and create relationships (e.g., mapping marketing spend from HubSpot to revenue from Stripe) to turn information into knowledge.
• Step 4: Visualization & Insight Generation. We build dashboards and models to visualize the knowledge, test hypotheses, and connect historical performance to future projections. This is where knowledge becomes actionable insight.

This structured approach is what separates real Data-Driven Decision Making from simply looking at charts.

Phase 1: From Disconnected Data to Reliable Information

This is the least glamorous and most important phase. It's the digital equivalent of an archaeological dig. Most companies live with data held together by digital duct tape and manual exports. Your financial data is in one place, your customer data in another, and your operational data in a third. They don’t talk to each other.

Our first job is to break down these silos.

We go system by system (e.g., QuickBooks, Stripe, HubSpot, Google Analytics, your payroll system) and extract the raw data. Then the real work begins:

• Verification: Does the revenue in Stripe match the deposits in your bank account and the records in QuickBooks? If not, why? We find the source of truth.
• Cleaning: We fix typos in customer names, standardize transaction categories, and eliminate duplicate entries that throw off your counts.
• Structuring: We organize everything into a single, logical format. Every transaction is tagged, every customer is classified, and every expense is categorized according to a master chart of accounts.

By the end of this phase, you have something most companies only dream of: a single, clean, structured, and complete dataset that is verifiably true. This is the bedrock. Without it, any analysis you build on top is a house of cards. It’s the meticulous work that a world-class forensic accountant would perform, but with the forward-looking lens of a strategist.

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Phase 2: Turning Information Into Knowledge That Matters

Once you have reliable information, the next step is to make it meaningful. A list of transactions isn't knowledge. Knowing the gross margin on each of those transactions is.

This is where we apply business logic and map relationships. We do this by organizing metrics and drivers into three distinct buckets, a framework that forces strategic thinking:

1. Universal Metrics: These are the fundamentals that apply to nearly every business on earth. Think Gross Profit, Net Income, Cash Flow, and Operating Margin. Getting these right is table stakes.
2. Industry-Specific Metrics: These are the KPIs that define success in your specific space. For a SaaS company, this is LTV:CAC, Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR), and Churn Rate. For an e-commerce business, it’s Average Order Value (AOV) and Repeat Purchase Rate. For a service business, it might be Utilization Rate or Revenue per Employee. We identify and build the metrics that your peers and investors are judging you by.
3. Company-Specific Metrics: This is your secret sauce. These are the unique drivers of your business model. Maybe it’s the "cost per successful client outcome" or the "revenue generated per webinar attendee." This is where we go beyond standard FP&A to codify what makes your business uniquely you.

By creating relationships across these buckets—for example, seeing how a change in a company-specific driver (like webinar attendance) impacts an industry-specific metric (like CAC)—we transform static information into dynamic knowledge. You start to see the levers you can actually pull to affect change.

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Phase 3: Insight = Clarity + Action

Knowledge is powerful, but insight is what drives action. This final phase is about making the knowledge accessible, intuitive, and future-focused.

This isn't about building overwhelming dashboards with 50 different charts. It's about targeted visualization designed to answer your most pressing strategic questions.

• Connecting the Past to the Future: This is where The Decision Stack becomes a powerful Financial Planning & Analysis tool. We use your newly structured historical data as a foundation to build realistic future projections. We can model scenarios: What happens to our runway if we hire three new engineers? What if we increase prices by 10%?
• Challenging Assumptions: Your strategic plan probably has a lot of "hockey stick" growth charts. We pressure-test them. Based on your historical CAC and sales cycle, is that revenue target even remotely achievable? This process replaces wishful thinking with a grounded, defensible plan.
• Surfacing Gaps and Opportunities: When all your data is connected, the patterns jump out. You’ll see that your most profitable customers all come from one marketing channel. You’ll discover a product line that’s secretly dragging down your overall margin. You'll find inefficiencies you never knew existed.

This is the point where you stop guessing. The conversations in leadership meetings change from "I feel like we should..." to "The data shows that if we do X, Y will happen."

This is also where more advanced tools can be applied. Once your data is structured, leveraging Artificial Intelligence Consulting for predictive modeling or anomaly detection becomes a real possibility, not a sci-fi dream. It all starts with a clean foundation.

ant the Clarity? Here’s How to Start.

If you’re tired of running on assumptions and ready for a ground truth-level understanding of your business, the first step is a conversation.

This isn’t a sales call where we show you a canned demo. It’s a diagnostic session. You tell us about your business, your goals, and your frustrations. We’ll ask hard questions. We’ll tell you, candidly, if and how we can help.

Building The Decision Stack is the single most transformative project for a growth-stage company seeking control and momentum. It’s the end of ambiguity and the beginning of real, strategic leadership.

Let’s investigate your business together—and uncover what your data’s really trying to tell you.

What Happens When You Actually Know What’s Going On

The change is palpable. The constant, low-grade anxiety about the numbers fades. It’s replaced by a quiet confidence. This is the progression I see with every client:

1. Visibility: For the first time, you see a single, reliable picture of your business. The books are clean, the data is organized, and the model reflects reality.
2. Insight: With visibility, you start seeing patterns. You understand what drives growth and what drains cash. The "why" behind the numbers becomes clear.
3. Alignment: With shared insight, your leadership team can finally have productive conversations. Debates shift from "whose spreadsheet is right?" to "which strategic path should we choose?" Everyone is rowing in the same direction because they’re looking at the same map.
4. Momentum: With alignment, you can make decisions faster and with more conviction. You deploy capital more effectively. You hire with confidence. You stop reacting and start proactively shaping your future. Your business gains unstoppable momentum.