In this episode of The Entrepreneur to Author Podcast, host Scott MacMillan speaks with Feliks Golenko, founder and CEO of MultiBase and author of Decide: An AI-Enabled Framework for Mid-Market Leaders to Turn Data into Profit.
Feliks shares how three and a half decades and 1,500+ BI projects led to his six-step DECIDE framework (Discover, Engage, Clarify, Illustrate, Develop, Embed), why he focuses on mid-sized companies, and how working directly with entrepreneurs drives faster, more meaningful impact. He explains why most organizations skip straight to “Develop,” creating “perfect chaos” instead of clarity and profit.
Feliks discusses how he distilled decades of experience into a focused, practical book while running a busy consultancy, why the hardest part was deciding what to leave out, and how his 64-year-old mother getting her driver’s license inspired him to finally write.
SHOW LINKS
Get the book: Amazon
GUEST BIO
Feliks Golenko is the founder and CEO of MultiBase, a Business Intelligence and Decision Intelligence consultancy that has helped hundreds of mid-sized European companies turn their data into better, faster decisions. Over more than three decades and 1,500+ BI projects, Feliks has worked at the intersection of business strategy, technology, and human decision-making. Through MultiBase he developed the DECIDE framework — Discover, Engage, Clarify, Illustrate, Develop, Embed — that helps CEOs and CFOs of mid-market companies move beyond dashboards to embedded, AI-enabled decision-making. He is the author of Decide: An AI-Enabled Framework for Mid-Market Leaders to Turn Data into Profit and lives and works in Germany.
CONNECT WITH FELIKS
Websites: feliksgolenko.com &
multibase.de
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/feliks-golenko
CONNECT WITH SCOTT
entrepreneurtoauthor.com
grammarfactory.com
LinkedIn (@scottmacmillan): linkedin.com/in/scottmacmillan
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Episode Transcript
Please note: The transcript is produced by a third-party company from an audio recording and may include transcription errors.
Scott MacMillan:
You're listening to the Entrepreneur to Author podcast.
Announcer
Welcome to the Entrepreneur to Author podcast, the podcast that brings you practical strategies for building authority and growing your business. And now, here's your host, Scott MacMillan.
Scott:
My guest today is Feliks Golenko. Feliks is the founder and CEO of Multibase, a business intelligence and decision intelligence consultancy based in Germany. And over more than three decades and 1500 plus projects, he and his team have helped mid-sized national and international companies turn their data into better, faster decisions.
And he's just published his new book, Decide, an AI enabled framework for mid-market leaders to turn data into profit, in which he lays out a six step framework for moving beyond dashboards and finally making BI deliver profitably. Feliks, welcome to the show.
Feliks Golenko:
Yeah, thanks for inviting me.
Scott:
Before we get into the book, give us a short version of who you are and how you ended up running a BI consultancy and what specifically drew you to the mid-sized companies market rather than, say, the Fortune 500 end of the market.
Feliks:
Well, Feliks Golenko, you already made a nice introduction. So the listeners, they know a couple of facts. Why I decided to run or start a BI company.
To be honest, this whole thing started already in the university. All my life has been for my, let's say, in the educational part of my life and then in the professional part of my life. I was only dealing with data, nothing else.
So in one way, I'm a very, very boring person. I only dealt with data and it seems worse right now. Every day I'm more passionate about it.
So the whole thing started, I was doing some reporting already at the university for my professors and my first job was actually already at a company called Compaq. Some of the more experienced listeners will remember this great, great computer company. What was I doing there?
Reporting, planning and reporting. Then I made a decision to become an entrepreneur and what did I start with? Analytics, reporting data.
So, and I've been doing this since 35 years. Now on 1st of July, it's really going to be 35 years of Multibase. Now, an interesting question that you asked about mid-sized companies.
Why mid-sized companies as opposed to large corporations? Well, I would still say about 20% of our customers are large corporations. But my focus, my personal focus preference is mid-sized companies for a couple of reasons.
Number one, I'm an entrepreneur. I love being an entrepreneur. I love entrepreneurs.
And in mid-sized companies, I get a chance to talk to entrepreneurs. And they are still involved in their business. And I love that.
I'm involved in my business. And this is where then real good, funny, interesting things happen. When you talk to the business owner, when you share your vision, how data can be turned into profit.
Okay. And if that catches their attention, then they do it. You know, there's no big decision process.
And a couple of days later, we start the first project. As opposed to large companies, you know, when there is RFPs, months and months and dealing with this. And, you know, these are the reasons why focusing on mid-sized companies.
But on the other side, I actually think that mid-sized companies is also, it's the market segment where BI, business intelligence, data analytics, what we do, really can make major difference. Really. Okay.
See, large companies can afford BI teams, data analytics teams, five people, 10 people, 20 people, maybe 200 people. So the reporting there, you know, it's kind of normal. Now, smaller companies, mid-sized companies, they cannot afford that.
Okay. But still, or maybe even more for them, reporting can create even more leverage. Okay.
And especially now, and I'm writing about this in my book, the BI, the data reporting, data analytics and reporting has become accessible to mid-sized companies. So now more than ever, I'm focusing on mid-sized companies.
Scott:
Beautiful. And then, you know, I remember Compaq. That goes way back for me.
And, you know, I love that you're passionate about data. I think data has become a bit of a buzzword, you know, as people have gained a little bit more access to it, but that you've been sort of immersed in this world for, you know, the better part of three decades plus now, that's a real testament to not just your passion for it, but your experience with it. And, you know, the framework at the heart of your book, DECIDE, which, by the way, I think is a clever acronym for our listeners.
It stands for Discover, Engage, Clarify, Illustrate, Develop, Embed. You know, without unpacking all six of those in detail, we'll encourage listeners to pick up a copy of the book and do that themselves. Is there one of these steps that mid-market companies in particular, perhaps almost always skip or maybe underestimate?
And what does that cost them in practice? One.
Feliks:
Five. Five out of six. Okay.
I mean, you named them. We might discuss them to a bit of level of detail later, but they skip most of the companies, not only mid-sized companies, by the way, the big ones as well. They skip most of the steps and they go just to the second D, that means develop.
So when there's a need for a new report or dashboard, but it's a, all right, so we've got a person who knows how to spell BI or who've attended a workshop, a dashboard in a day. Okay. They spent, yeah, first day developing a dashboard, they develop a dashboard, but then they see it doesn't really work.
Okay. Well, then they spent another couple of days or another couple of weeks expanding on that and it still doesn't work. So they start working on a set of other dashboards and reports.
And in six months, they created perfect chaos. So that then a responsible person says, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, we are stopping this. Okay.
And see, this is one of the major issues. People, when they think of dashboards and reports says, yeah, fine, we know we can create dashboards very quickly. We've got some data.
Let's just put the dashboards on top of that data and everything's going to be okay. All the steps before, meaning in a short way, thinking about the dashboards and reports being tools that should help us make decisions and take actions. Okay.
And then thinking who is going to work with these reports in what situations. Okay. What questions do these dashboards and reports need to answer for them?
What kind of signals these people are looking for? And then thinking how to visualize, how to present these signals, how to present the answers to these questions. All these things don't happen.
Okay. And if you don't design a tool properly, what are the chances of this tool really helping your business? Virtually none, as a matter of fact, in this case, they actually even hurt your business.
We can discuss that later. But not even that, even if they then, by chance, design and develop a good dashboard and report, then they forget about the last step. Okay.
And then when it then comes to the last step of the decide framework, when it then comes to, well, I mean, your management processes are going to change. All of a sudden, you've got tools that help you make better decisions faster. Well, what are you going to do with these tools?
I mean, this has got, in some cases, severe consequences. All of a sudden, some things become transparent that may never have been transparent. How are you going to deal with this transparency?
Yeah. And so this is what then really leads to, in many, many cases, that BI initiatives, data analytics projects are being viewed as doomed, are being viewed as a major failure. And they are, for the reasons I just mentioned.
Scott:
Yeah. You talked about how sometimes poorly implemented BI can actually hurt the business. And I would imagine that if you're skipping the discover, engage, clarify, and illustrate stages of that decide framework and skip right to develop, why would you want to embed that into your organization?
You're embedding something that might hurt your business. Tell me more about how a poorly implemented BI solution could actually not just not benefit, but actually hurt an organization.
Feliks:
Well, see, that's what I'm saying. There's no such things as a useless dashboard and report. Okay.
It either helps your business or it hurts your business, black and white, black or white. Okay. So why?
First of all, if a dashboard and report has been developed, what does that mean? It might have taken weeks, months of extracting the data, all of the systems, operational systems that companies have got, putting this data in the form that it can be reported on. Okay.
Meaning creating data warehouses, data lake houses, and all the things that I don't want to be too technical. But there is a lot that needs to be done before reporting is enabled in the first place. And that lot costs time, energy, and money.
Okay. Now, if you, on top of that, put a dashboard to report that doesn't help your business, then you wasted all this time and money and energy. But that's just one aspect of it.
The second aspect is highly paid executives in very important meetings then look at these dashboards and reports and don't really know what this is all about. So you're wasting their valuable time. But all these things I mentioned, they are nothing in comparison to the fact that this organization is actually not leveraging the opportunity or not using the opportunity to improve.
And that is the biggest factor. If dashboards and reports don't lead to decisions and actions that lead them to improvement of performance, turn data into profit, then they hurt your business. Period.
Scott:
Very good. So there's actually two parts to that, right? There's the opportunity cost of opportunities not pursued because of lack of data to do that.
And then there's potentially wrong decisions that you've made because what you're looking at gives you incorrect information. And both of those together are very costly.
Feliks:
Yeah, you could say you could make wrong decisions, but that you would make if, let's say, the data in dashboards is wrong, if the dashboards conveyed wrong information. That I actually exclude, okay? I assume that whatever is shown on dashboards and reports is correct, at least technically correct, okay?
But the opportunity cost is more in the decisions you haven't taken. You missed the opportunities to improve. That is the biggest part.
Scott:
That's the part below the water of the iceberg.
Feliks:
Exactly.
Scott:
You know, three and a half decades of doing this work, more than 1,500 BI projects, many hundreds of clients, I'd imagine. How did you actually go about shaping all of that experience into a book? Was it mostly about organizing what you'd already crystallized in your head and in your practice?
Or did the process of developing it surface things that you hadn't quite articulated before?
Feliks:
Well, I might be a bit atypical here because for, let's say, up until maybe a year ago, I never thought of writing a book. I always thought, Jesus, you know, writing a book, that's a humongous task and I don't have the time for it, okay? On the other side, there's just so much in my head, okay?
And I knew that. And I was thinking, so what can I do to put this in an organized way somehow on a paper or in videos? Because I actually really believe, and don't consider me arrogant, that, you know, this is very valuable know-how, okay?
And then, you know, just moments in life where something that you thought was never accessible, all of a sudden you say, oh, if I get a bit of help, okay, then maybe, just maybe I could write a book. And the decision was made within a couple of weeks. Sorry, not weeks, a couple of days.
Scott:
Wow. Wow. You know, it's still a lot of work.
Even if you have all of that content in your head, you know, there's still quite a bit of work to extract that and put it into, you know, publishable form. How do you approach that when you're also running a business? It's not like you're a full-time author that can step away and take, you know, six months off to, you know, go into a cabin in the Alps and, you know, focus exclusively on capturing your thoughts, right?
You've got a business to run. How do you balance it?
Feliks:
Okay, so here's a great German saying that say, I'll translate it. It says, a day's got 24 days and there is still 24 hours and there is still a night, okay? I love that.
So, yeah, I was, then my eight, 10, 12 hours of work and then a couple of hours of working on a book. That's one way of looking at it. Second, you know, I was looking for help.
I knew I couldn't do it myself. And that's why we did this with you. And that was tremendous, really tremendous help.
And, but see, what I actually vastly underestimated is the hardest part for me, and I don't know whether you get this from other authors, the hardest part for me was not getting all the things recorded as we did it, okay? And written down. The hardest thing was then to decide what to take out and how to structure this because the first draft was like, no, I was actually right never to think about writing a book.
That's a complete mess. Once you get over it, then it becomes easier. But, I mean, I would not like to make an impression that it is easy.
It just takes time. It does take time. And, you know, you need to be committed.
And here's this thing, I was thinking about this. Why would I, at my age of 64, write a book? I mean, I'm way too old to do that.
But then I was thinking of my mother. And my mother, my father, unfortunately passed away. He was 64, that's interesting.
And then my mother, when my father passed away, was left with not even having a driver's license, okay? So all of a sudden, she realized that if she wants to go to the cemetery on the grave of my father, then she had a car, okay? But she didn't have a driver's license.
So at her age of 64 then, she passed the driver's license. And she was the oldest, by far the oldest, in the area who would ever promise or attempt with a driver's license. And then I said to myself, if my mom could pass the driver's license at 64, then I can write a book at 64.
Wow.
Scott:
Well, good for her. Congratulations to your mom on that accomplishment. That's no small feat.
There's a temptation when writing. But I had this temptation with my book as well. When you've been doing something for so long to put everything in the book, right?
You want to showcase your knowledge and all of your experience. You talked about the more difficult part is actually deciding what not to include. Was there anything specific that you can think of or recall that you decided to leave out of the book to make it the effective and focused book that it is today?
And how did you make that decision?
Feliks:
I'll come to the point how I made the decision. But there are quite a few things that I left out of the book. I could tell you, I could write about countless stories of the projects, how they went, and what went wrong with these projects.
Some projects that we were working on went terribly wrong, really terribly wrong. I might write another book just on that. I think there are valuable, very valuable lessons to learn.
Let's say the things that went good and the things that went bad in the project, this is more or less completely left out of the book. Okay. And then there is now lately, there is one topic.
We call that insight discovery, where it's kind of counterintuitive how to approach business intelligence and analytics. And I think it's very, very interesting. But it was a hard decision for me to make not to include it in the book, because I think it's really, really great approach.
But I was really afraid that it would confuse the readers. It would give them possibly false picture or it could lead to false expectations. Let me put it this way.
Because the approach of insight discovery, the way we approach, start with some of our clients today, it's in a way controversial. But where it works, and in 80% of the cases it works, then it leads to very, very fast results and really great results. But not always.
See, but we are open to open advances. It can go wrong. Okay.
But apart from that, the risk here is wasting a couple of weeks of time. So it's not that bad. But those things I had to leave out and about both, I don't know.
I might write another book.
Scott:
Yeah. I think what you've raised is a really good point. And that's how I suggest to people that they make that decision around what to pull out and what to leave in.
Are there things that would actually make better sense as a separate book, that don't necessarily serve the goal that you have for the reader of this particular title? And so I'm really happy that you articulated that around what is it that the reader would need and understand and use that as the filter for taking certain things out. Feliks, for anyone who wants to get their hands on the book, or learn more about you and the work that you do at Multibase, what's the best place for them to find that information?
Feliks:
Two places. One, LinkedIn, Feliks Golenko. Just look me up.
And the second is my website, FeliksGolenko.com, with a slight challenge. Feliks not spelled with X, but Feliks spelled with instead of X, a KS. This is where they can find me.
Scott
Good. We'll include those in the show notes so that people don't get confused by the spelling. It'll be very clear to them.
They can just link and make it very easy to find you. Feliks, thank you so much for joining me today. What really lands for me in this conversation is there's a lot of hype right now around AI.
And you're not selling people on AI, right? You're warning them that AI put on top of broken methodology, this just delivers worse outcomes faster. I think that's a much more grounded message than most of what's out there right now.
And I really appreciate you sharing it so generously with us. You're welcome. It's my pleasure.
As we wrap up this episode of Entrepreneur to Author, remember this. Now is the time. Time to write, time to publish, and time to grow.
I'm Scott MacMillan. Until next time.
