5 Signs Your Company Has Outgrown Its Data Setup

Stop me if this sounds familiar.

For the past few years, your entire business has operated on a simple data setup: all your customer data flows into a single, overburdened SQL database. Your reporting is conducted through a basic business intelligence tool that directly connects to this database. When you were a plucky start-up with less than one hundred customers and a handful of sales reps, this worked just fine.

Today, you have over 2,000 customers and a product line that has grown substantially. You have a sales team, a marketing team, and a database that is struggling to keep up as users, queries, and pipelines grow. Your business intelligence tool - when it’s not broken - shows out-of-date or inaccurate data. And you’re spending a lot more time fixing issues than strategizing.

A common issue among growing companies is a simple one: legacy data systems create massive bottlenecks that negatively impact informed decision-making, and ultimately, their bottom line.

Fortunately, there are many early warning signs for you to detect and plan for.

Your Reports Are Always Out of Date.

You're making critical business decisions based on data from last week or last month because your systems can't process and update information promptly. This lag creates a significant disadvantage in a fast-moving market, forcing you to steer the ship by looking at its wake rather than the horizon ahead. You miss fleeting opportunities and react to problems long after they've begun impacting revenue.

Everything Breaks When You Add a New Data Source.

Integrating data from a new marketing platform, sales tool, or operational system is a monumental, multi-week engineering task. Your architecture is brittle and inflexible, slowing down innovation and preventing you from gaining a unified view of your business. This creates a powerful disincentive to adopt best-in-class tools, locking you into legacy systems and hampering your team's ability to compete with more agile competitors.

Data Analysts and Scientists Spend Most of Their Time "Firefighting."

Instead of analyzing trends and building predictive models, your data team is constantly troubleshooting broken data pipelines, reconciling conflicting numbers, and identifying and resolving data quality issues. This is a significant drain on productivity and morale, wasting high-value talent on low-level plumbing tasks. This not only delays strategic projects but also increases the risk of burnout and turnover among your most valuable data professionals.

Key Metrics Change Depending on Who You Ask.

Different departments (sales, marketing, and finance) report different numbers for the same metric (e.g., revenue, customer acquisition cost, and lifetime value). This points to a lack of a single source of truth, often caused by siloed data and inconsistent transformation rules, leading to debates about data accuracy instead of business strategy. Meetings that should focus on what to do next are consumed by arguments over which numbers are right, eroding trust and paralyzing decision-making across the leadership team.

Scaling User Access Grinds Everything to a Halt.

Your database or BI tool performs fine with 10 users but becomes unusably slow with 50. You're forced to limit access, creating bottlenecks and preventing a data-driven culture from flourishing across the organization. This creates a data "priesthood," where a small group controls all information, stifling employee empowerment and ensuring that daily decisions in departments like marketing or operations are made based on intuition rather than evidence.

Get Your Data House in Order with Velir x Brooklyn Data.

Your data should drive growth, not create roadblocks. We streamline your operations by modernizing your data stack and ensuring you have a data strategy that scales alongside your business. From data reliability to cost optimization, we can help you reduce downtime, increase data relevance and accuracy, and turn your sluggish data systems into a positive return on investment.

If you’re experiencing any of the above five signs, it’s past time to give Velir x Brooklyn Data a call. Let’s work together to build a modern data setup that works for you.