Brian Geier graduated in 2014 with an MBA in Corporate Finance & Investment Banking. He is Vice President of Business Intelligence at Recurly, a software company that manages all of the subscriptions and billing for over 2,000 different businesses. A recent interview with Brian reveals his passion and inspiration for his new role.
What fuels your passion for finance and business analytics?
I’m passionate about business analytics because it offers great variety. I might spend the morning reviewing data with executives to help make decisions and the afternoon might be spent reviewing code with my team or writing code myself. I also get to work with a lot of different functional areas, ranging from marketing and sales to product and engineering.
I also love the ability to chart a path for the business analytics function. This is a new field that first popped up in the last decade or so. The number of new tools and technology is constantly changing and that keeps the job very interesting. For example, just a few years ago it would take an engineering team a couple of months or longer to ingest a data set, but today there is software that allows it to be done in minutes.
Lastly, I love showing people what’s possible with data. There is a whole range of outcomes with data projects that range from providing some basic raw data to insights that help reshape how people think about their businesses. A lot of times you go into projects not knowing what you might find and its a ton of fun to poke in and prod data to see if there are hidden insights lurking beneath the surface. It might be somewhat analogous to how gold miners felt when they set out into the mountains from Denver to find gold (where I sit now) 150 years ago. Except I get that feeling each week!
What inspired you to pursue your MBA ten years ago?
My first engineering internship drove me to get my MBA. It was the summer after my sophomore year in college, and I was interning at a large manufacturing company. I loved engineering courses, but I realized very quickly that engineering jobs were more independent and less hands on than what I desired. I decided that I would pursue my MBA after I graduated, so I would have more multi-dimensional career options.
I also gained experience working for my Dad’s construction company doing manual labor. That hands-on experience helped me to land a construction management job after graduating with my civil engineering degree. I managed $40 million dollars of projects in three incredibly intense summers after graduating and learned more than I ever hoped to learn about project management.
Describe your experience since graduating from WSB.
I started as a Senior Financial Analyst at DISH Network in Denver immediately after graduating. Eventually, I led a team responsible for DISH’s customer lifetime values. This involved determining all the components of the acquisition costs and monthly cash flows from various cohorts of customers. We then used those customer lifetime values to make decisions around pricing, plans, and promotions as well as strategic retention and operational decisions.
We spent 80% of our time in Excel crunching numbers and just a small portion of time working with the business to make decisions. I felt like this was a waste of time so I made it my mission to find a way to automate the process using SQL and R rather than going through a laborious calculation process. I spent nights and weekends for several months teaching myself those languages while simultaneously building a proof of concept with our data team.
Once the proof of concept worked, my team and several others got involved. It took over six months, but once when we were done we had a clean, simple, repeatable process to determine each customer’s lifetime value. We cut down the customer lifetime value calculation process from over two months to more like two weeks. Naturally, this made my team concerned about job security, but our ability to churn out complex analyses very quickly made us more valuable (and busier than ever).
After that, It was clear to me that I needed to go into analytics. Fortunately, DISH made it easy to transition teams and gave me the opportunity to manage the analytics team at Sling–their online TV business.
Since then, I have led a couple other analytics teams and love it. I still use concepts and experiences that I have gained over my career. The finance background is valuable since it allows me to transform interesting insights into estimated dollar impacts.
How have you leveraged your MBA degree in your current role?
Analytics -like most things- requires a mixture of both soft and hard skills. Getting my MBA gave me a leg up to hone both of those things simultaneously. The group work was hugely beneficial for me to help me hone my soft skills. The breadth and depth of coursework allowed me to develop knowledge of functional areas I help support today. I speak to marketers, sales, product, engineering, and operations on a daily basis so being able to wear different hats and speak their language is very helpful.
Making an impact in analytics requires partnering closely with people across the business. That spirit of partnership is really embodied in the MBA program and I carry that forward with me. Knowing what executives, managers, and the team cares about can sometimes spark ideas that turn into really impactful data products. Its very very rare that a brilliant data project is well articulated before the first data point is pulled. More typically, a simple question evolves into something bigger through collaboration.
Analytics requires a lot of very technical skills as well. I have personally worked very hard since graduating to make sure that I can read and write code. It’s very hard to build trust with data, and one line of code written wrong can destroy that trust. It has proved immensely valuable to get really good at the technical aspects of this role and has paired very well with some of the skills I gained in the MBA program.
What is your favorite part of your job?
My favorite part of this job is helping merchants on the Recurly platform make better decisions. One big initiative we have right now is benchmarking. Post launch, all merchants on the Recurly platform will be able to see their churn, acquisition, and several payment metrics compared to peers in their industry. They will be able to see exactly where they rank today and historically as well to understand if they are making the right changes to their business. These benchmarks will help businesses separate their unique performance vs what is happening more broadly in their industry.
Another thing that I appreciate about my job is the tech stack. Since its a software company, we have an amazing engineering team that makes some of the latest and greatest tools available. The productivity of my analytics team is probably 3-5x what it would otherwise be without these tools in place.
How do you spend your time when you’re not working?
I used to have more hobbies, but with a three year old and another baby on the way in February, my time for hobbies has shrunk significantly. However, I love doing outdoor activities and live in the perfect place to do that (Colorado). I love hiking, biking and camping. I’ve taken my three year old back country camping several times (the first time when he was not quite two years old!). I also have biked up a 14,000 foot peak near Denver every summer the past few years. Outside of outdoor activities, I like to read and my goal is to restore an antique car some day (my high school hobby was restoring antique tractors on my family’s farm).
Brian Geier is currently a member of the Nicholas Center Business Analytics team, a group of alumni who lead their respective organizations in business analytics. They are working with Nicholas Center leadership to advance the CFIB curriculum strategy in business analytics. Follow Brian along on his career journey on LinkedIn HERE!
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