October 28, 2021

phData Makes Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal’s 2021 Fast 50 List

By Mitch Rudolph

Achieving growth as a company is a huge milestone worth noting but growing at a rate that lands you on the Fast 50 List is worth celebrating. phData is thrilled to announce we ranked 16th on the Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal’s 2021 Fast 50 list!

This is phData’s second ‘fast growing’ award this year, ranking in on Inc. Magazine’s national list of Fastest-Growing Private Companies in America. This award is a direct result of our dedication to our customers, our ability to innovate with technology, and our ever-present focus on helping customers extract more value from their data. 

Here’s a brief interview with our CEO, Ryan Bosshart, on how we got here and what we’re hoping to accomplish in the coming years.

What were three business decisions your executive team made that were critical to your firm’s growth from 2018-2020?

We’ve made several strategic decisions over the last few years that have put us noticeably ahead of our competition and industry. First, we invested in making phData an amazing place to learn and work. Second, we made an early bet on the Snowflake ecosystem. Third, we stayed true in applying engineering principles to our work, helping us to be at the forefront of key industry trends in Data Engineering, DataOps, and MLOps.

As your company grows its workforce, what recruiting tools do you use?

Attracting top-tier talent is no easy task but at phData, we’re very fortunate to have a strong employee referral network that consistently brings in reliable and skilled candidates. We also leverage state-of-the-art tools to source top talent (LinkedIn Recruiter, TopFunnel, and Codility).  

Have you made any permanent changes to your business operations and/or service/product offerings because of the pandemic?

One of our biggest cultural changes was the transition into a remote-first organization. What that means is all of our current and future employees can choose to work remotely, in-person at our Minneapolis & Bangalore offices, or a hybrid approach. From the service side of the business, we launched a new data strategy practice to better help our customers derive more value from their data.

What are your top three goals for the year ahead?

We are confident in the bets we’ve made this far but need to increase our investment in a few pivotal areas:

  • Data and ML strategy – helps our customers build better data products.
  • Learning and development – expand our education programs to our consultants and customers.
  • Managed data and ML platforms – expand our managed data and ML platforms offering to reach more customers.

One Last Thing

This interview was published just before we announced some big news: in early October, we welcomed two new companies into the phData family. Tessellation is an analytics consulting company specializing in modern data transformation, reporting, and visualization. Additionally, Data Coach is a digital learning platform that offers in-depth analytics training and coaching. We’re pumped to work with the Tessellation and Data Coach teams and excited for the future!

Interested in Joining phData? We’re Hiring!

If you’re looking to solve complex data challenges, exponentially grow your skillset, and build lasting relationships, we’d love to chat!

Data Coach is our premium analytics training program with one-on-one coaching from renowned experts.

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