You’ve never taken a ride in a time machine. Neither have I. But I sure felt like I had.
This week, I attended the Round Rock Chamber’s Women Who Mean Business event, and the latest episode of Rock Solid: Round Rock Business Leaders released. It’s a conversation I recorded a couple of months ago with two of the most impressive young entrepreneurs I’ve met in a long time. Femke Munting and Arantza Garcia Delfin are the co-founders of Amralytics, and what they are building matters. Not just as a business story, but as something every small business owner in this community needs to hear.
A Little Context on Why This Hit Me Differently
In 2001, my friend Jim Novo and I co-authored The Marketer’s Common Sense Guide to E-Metrics. There was no JavaScript tracking. No platforms. No dashboards. I was analyzing log files in Excel spreadsheets, and that was genuinely cutting-edge work at the time. Three years later, Jim Sterne, Andrew Edwards, and I co-founded what became the Web Analytics Association (eventually renamed the Digital Analytics Association), because our original vision was always that data was going to touch everything, not just websites.
We were right. Just about a decade early.
When I sat down with Femke and Arantza, it occurred to me that when I was doing that foundational work, these women were likely not yet born. Through all those years of building the frameworks, tools, and community that would support a generation of data practitioners, they were probably in grade school. To see what they are accomplishing now is everything I hoped for when we started the association.
But this post isn’t really about me. It’s about what they discovered and what it means for your business.
The Problem They Keep Finding
Femke and Arantza spent 30 days visiting 30 small businesses across Round Rock: coffee shops, construction companies, interior designers, lawyers, consultants, home services. What they heard was the same in nearly every room:
Overwhelm.
Every platform promises simplicity for another $100 a month. Fifteen platforms later, nothing is simpler. And now someone’s telling you AI and machine learning are the new requirement, and you feel guilty for not keeping up. Business owners are drowning. Not in a lack of data, but in too much noise, too many tools, and too little clarity about what any of it actually means for their specific business.
Here’s the reframe Femke offered that I think every business owner should tape to their monitor:
Data is a passive income stream. It’s flowing into your business whether you’re paying attention or not.
Your POS system, your social media, your scheduling software, your email list, your Google reviews. All of it is telling a story right now. The question is whether you’re reading it.
What “Reading It” Actually Looks Like
Let me tell you about a coffee shop.
Their first client, a local coffee shop owner, opened their very first meeting with: “I’m not a numbers person. I don’t want to see the numbers. I don’t know the numbers. Hopefully everything will be fine.”
Sound familiar?
Four months later, that same owner was reaching out asking: “Can we run the numbers? I want to walk through the numbers. I want to implement this new thing.”
What changed wasn’t the data. What changed was translation.
Femke and Arantza started where they always start: inventory. What systems are you using? Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, yes. Square for point of sale, yes. Oh, and a spreadsheet for grandma’s recipes. They centralized all of it, and then asked the only question that matters: what outcome do you actually care about?
For this shop, the answer was simple: sales. And labor costs that were eating them alive.
The owner’s defense strategy against unpredictable sales had been to over-hire. Schedule everyone, every day, just in case. Platforms told her she was spending 50-60% of revenue on labor. But no platform told her how to fix it. They only told her it was broken.
So Amralytics built correlation models connecting social media activity to in-store sales. What they found: a 4% increase in followers drove a 17% increase in sales, four days later. With that insight, they could forecast weekends on a simple 1-to-5 scale. Not a percentage. Not a regression coefficient. Just: this weekend is a category 4, make sure you’re staffed.
They applied computer vision and sentiment analysis to the shop’s social content, machine learning techniques that went beyond impressions and clicks to understand what in the content was driving the correlation. Colors. Facial expressions. Time of day. All of it fed into a model with one goal: help the owner make better decisions next week.
In four months: $45,000 in conservatively estimated owner profit returned to the business. (They’re careful about that word “conservatively” because they’re numbers people, and they don’t claim what they can’t prove.)
But here’s what I think is the real headline. When they asked for a testimonial, the owner said: “Yes, they made us money. But the best result is how confident we feel. We will never open another location without them.”
That’s not an analytics story. That’s a peace-of-mind story.
The Insight Most Small Business Owners Miss
One of the most striking things Femke and Arantza shared was a demographic finding that changed everything for one of their Round Rock clients.
Only 13% of people who live in Round Rock actually work here.
Most residents commute out. Most daytime workers commute in. That single data point explained a completely baffling pattern: why afternoon foot traffic disappeared, why weekend numbers were so different from weekday numbers, why certain social media targeting was reaching the wrong people at the wrong time.
Logical in hindsight. Completely invisible without the data.
This is the kind of thing that should make every local business owner stop and ask: what do I think I know about my customers that I’ve never actually verified?
How They Translate Data Without Drowning You In It
Here’s the part I want you to pay close attention to, because it’s where most analytics efforts at every company size fall apart.
Femke and Arantza don’t deliver dashboards. They deliver one or two things a month, ranked by impact, translated into the language that matches how you receive information. Some business owners want a graph. Some want a to-do list. Some want you to just tell them the story.
One piece of advice I gave them when we first met, right at the start of their 30 businesses in 30 days journey, was this: no data vomit.
If you’ve ever sat in front of a screen full of 20 different graphs and had no idea where to start, you know exactly what they’re solving for. The goal isn’t to show you everything they found. The goal is to show you the one lever you can pull this month that will move your number.
And critically, if it’s a variable you can’t control, they don’t show it to you. The weather might help you plan. But if a book about hurricane preparedness isn’t selling because there were no hurricanes this year, that’s not actionable, so it doesn’t make the report.
What I’d Ask You To Take Away
I’ve spent over 25 years arguing that measurement, customer centricity, continuous optimization, and agility aren’t just for Amazon and Fortune 500 companies. They’re available to any business willing to pay attention. When I wrote Be Like Amazon in 2017, I went looking for small businesses using these same principles and found them.
Femke and Arantza are the living proof of that argument.
They came out of graduate school with machine learning and statistical modeling capabilities that large corporations pay teams of analysts to apply, and they chose to point those capabilities at the small businesses in our community. Not because it was the easy path. Because it was the right one.
If you’re a business owner sitting on data you don’t know what to do with, or you’ve been told by one too many platforms that their dashboard will finally make everything clear, go find them. They’re at basically every Chamber event in Round Rock. They described it themselves: “Roam the streets of Round Rock and you’ll probably see one of us.”
Schedule a free 30-minute conversation at their website. Ask them what your data is already trying to tell you.
Because it’s talking. You just might need a translator.
Femke Munting and Arantza Garcia Delfin are the co-founders of Amralytics, providing data analytics and business intelligence services to small businesses in the Round Rock area.