Welcome to Peanut Butter Intelligence!

You know that feeling...

It arrives in that meeting where leadership presents a new dashboard concept – beautifully designed, carefully considered, and completely disconnected from reality. At some point after the 3rd slide, you stop listening and the quiet dread settles in. You know what they don't: that the data feeding this vision doesn't exist yet. That the source system tracks it in a different way. That what they're describing would take six months to build, not the two weeks implied by the timeline on slide four.

You smile. You take notes. You'll figure it out later.

Or maybe your meeting looks different. Two department heads, same metric, different numbers, vehemently insistent that their data is correct. The room goes quiet and slowly rotates toward you – the person who is somehow expected to explain, in real time why Marketing's and Finance's revenue have a 7% delta and which one the CEO should believe.

Or perhaps your personal favorite: the Tuesday afternoon Slack message asking if you can pull together a performance summary dashboard by the end of the day tomorrow. This is the dashboard that requires manual reconciliation of thousands of rows because the only thing you can join metrics on is a free text field containing first and last name.

If any of this sounds familiar, you've come to the right place.

Peanut Butter Intelligence is written for the analyst doing the actual work. Not the vendor selling the tool, the consultant billing by the hour, the executive presenting the big idea, or the data consumer being promised everything fast and easy.

This is for the person who discovered SQL on a random afternoon and by the following week had a report running in production that made their co-worker's lives easier. Maybe you are the embedded business analyst who fights to carve out three uninterrupted hours on a Thursday just to build something that matters. Or, perhaps you are the IT Data Analyst who knows the pipeline cold but can't seem to get a seat at the table where the decisions are made.

You straddle two worlds – the business and the data – and that position is both your greatest asset and your biggest frustration.

Peanut Butter Intelligence exists to change that.

Here's what you'll find here:

1. Honest takes on the tools, advice on the politics, and the strategy of working with data inside a real organization. Not a certification course. Not a tutorial series.
2. Perspective — the kind earned from boardrooms where the numbers didn't match, from having built BI programs from scratch, and from having made expensive mistakes with an audience watching.
3. Tactics and frameworks that enable sustainable growth with data in your organization. No fancy slide-ware. Instead, resources that have actually been implemented in today's evolving business and commentary on their outcomes and pitfalls.

The BI space takes itself very seriously, and most of the content out there reflects that — dense, vendor-driven, and oddly reluctant to admit that most of our hardest problems aren't technical. They're human.

Peanut Butter Intelligence is Business Intelligence that sticks. To do that, we have to win hearts and minds, not just budgets and deadlines.

Subscribe if you want to be a better analyst – not just a better Power BI user. Reply if something resonates, or if something doesn't. Tell me what meeting you've been sitting in lately that you can't stop thinking about.

I'll bring the peanut butter.