Nelbud: Growing 500 Basis Points with Business Analytics

[ CLIENT SUCCESS ]

Nelbud: Growing 500 Basis Points with Business Analytics

Industry

Professional & Business Services

Solution

Data & Business Intelligence

Client Since

2018

About Nelbud

Nelbud Services Group is the largest self-performing fire protection and hood cleaning company in the US, with 20 offices in every major market east of the Mississippi River. As the only ISO 9001 certified provider in the industry, Nelbud has earned the business of protecting the most prestigious addresses in the country including casinos, high profile corporate campuses, government facilities including the Pentagon, plus hotels, restaurants, airports, and hospitals. It takes more than outstanding service to make Nelbud the success it is — it takes access to strategic decision-making data about every aspect of its operations.

As a fast-growing field services organization managing a large network of locations and complex operations, Nelbud requires unified visibility into financial and operational performance to drive standardization, profitability, and competitive advantage.

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“Each of our applications holds a piece of the picture, and Domo pulls it together artfully. Essentially, if the data resides in one of our business applications, Domo can access it and BT Partners can bring it to life.”

Michael Crafton

Chief Executive Officer, Nelbud

The challenge

“Nelbud has always taken a progressive and modern approach to scaling our business,” explains Michael Crafton, CEO of Nelbud. “As a result, we outpaced the technology available to our industry. We needed access to data that could help us make real-time decisions. We need to think about what’s happening now and predict what will happen tomorrow — otherwise, it’s too late to make a difference.”

Nearly a decade ago, the company implemented NetSuite and Service Trade. Crafton recalls that while the cost of the applications was more than he thought the company could spend at the time, he realized that to scale the business, they’d need the financial and operational platform to support that growth. “We embraced NetSuite and Service Trade and put them to work for us,” says Crafton. “While they provide good reporting and analytics, we needed a better tool — a Business Intelligence tool that could bring together disparate data from all our business applications.”

Manual reporting was time-consuming and limited the ability to benchmark performance, spot opportunities, or respond quickly to issues. The company sought a solution that could bring together data from disparate systems and turn it into actionable intelligence for managers and executives.

Why BT Partners?

Nelbud chose BT Partners’ Executive Analytics team for their deep expertise in the field services industry and proven ability to deliver meaningful business insights from complex data environments.

Crafton explains that Nelbud originally purchased Domo through another reseller but switched when they found BT Partners. “Domo is a powerful and sophisticated tool,” he says. “To get the most from it, you need an experienced partner like BT Partners.”

The solution

BT Partners implemented a comprehensive analytics platform that aggregates data from multiple business applications into unified, real-time views. They built customized dashboards and automated reporting packages tailored to Nelbud’s operational and financial needs.

Key enhancements include performance benchmarking, productivity tracking, marketing and sales analysis, and automated distribution of key reports. The solution emphasizes intuitive visualizations that make data accessible and actionable for teams at every level.

“Before, we couldn’t analyze our financial and operational data efficiently — we couldn’t see it in context of the entire operation,” Crafton says. “BT Partners built the dashboards in Domo that allow us to visualize the inner workings of our organization and see how they all relate. We can see how marketing spend affects sales, how changes in service routing affect payroll, and which services yield the most profits. This is decision-making data at its finest. We are making smart, strategic, and informed decisions that directly impact our bottom line. Since we started using BT Partners and Domo, our overall margins are up by 500 basis points.”

Results & business impact

One dashboard BT Partners built in the Domo BI tool helped Nelbud discover that customer retention was higher when a customer spent more than $10,000 annually. Further, the analysis uncovered that the customer acquisition costs were similar, regardless of the annual spend. Armed with this information, the company worked to incentivize its sales team to help build these accounts. When the analysis provided indicators that a customer may not be renewing, Nelbud asked its customer service personnel to prioritize relationship building with that client.

“It worked!” says Crafton. “In the first year, we converted an additional 30% of our customers into over $10,000 spenders. It wasn’t simply about selling them more things, either. It was by increasing our touchpoints, informing them of services they might not be aware of. With the information BT Partners and the Domo BI tool provided, we built our sales and built stronger customer relationships.”

Another analysis BT Partners built allowed Nelbud to increase the margins it makes on its service calls. “We found that our margin drops if a three-person crew drives more than 50 miles,” Crafton explains. “So, we tweaked our schedule, and as a result, we’ve dramatically increased profitability and productivity. Our teams can handle more calls, putting more money in their pockets, while shorter commutes create a better work-life balance. Without changing our pricing, our margins jumped three percentage points.”