Kixik pitches an outsourced data team for small businesses

Kixik Technologies says it can give owner-operated companies the kind of data team usually reserved for large corporations by digitally reconstructing a business from its own systems and running analysis on top of it. The company is targeting U.S. businesses with $2 million to $50 million in annual revenue and pricing the service at $5,000 to $11,000 a month.

Why it matters: - Kixik is targeting a long-standing gap in small-business operations: the inability to afford a full in-house data team. - The company says its model can turn owners' day-to-day questions about pricing, margin, staffing, cash and growth into fast answers. - Kixik positions the service as a way for smaller companies to compete with larger rivals that already have dedicated analytics staff.

What happened: - Kixik Technologies said it built a service that digitally reconstructs a business from its own data and then runs a data team on top of that model. - The company said the service is aimed at owner-operated U.S. businesses with $2 million to $50 million in annual revenue. - Kixik said it prices the service at $5,000 to $11,000 per month, based on business size. - The company said it rejects businesses under $2 million in annual revenue and customers who want a software login instead of a managed service.

The details: - Kixik said a typical in-house data team can cost $1.1 million to $1.6 million a year and include seven people, such as a strategist, analysts, a data scientist, a risk specialist and an industry consultant. - The company said its system pulls together a business's register, books, scheduler, payroll file and bank feed. - Kixik said it reconciles those systems against the profit-and-loss statement until every day of the year matches to the penny. - The company said it creates a business-specific dictionary so it can translate each company's terms correctly. - Kixik said the result is a working model of the business in its own vocabulary. - Kyle Nix, Kixik's founder, said the company is trying to solve the problem of businesses having data but not usable intelligence. - Nix said the service reads the business every morning before opening, answers questions in plain English and builds forecasts to test decisions before owners make them. - Nix said Kixik also looks for money left on the table each month and handles reporting and reconciling. - Kixik said it works with companies across industries, including a four-store retailer and a contractor, and assigns different specialists based on the business. - The company said it offers a 3-month money-back guarantee and lets customers keep the findings if they cancel.

Between the lines: - Kixik is selling more than reporting software. The pitch is a managed decision-support layer that aims to act like an embedded analytics team. - The pricing and revenue floor suggest Kixik is focused on businesses large enough to benefit from data operations, but still too small to build them internally. - The company's emphasis on reconstruction and reconciliation signals that data quality is part of the product, not just the output.

What's next: - Kixik said its longer-term goal is to move from reporting to acting, including an operating system that learns how each owner runs the company and helps make decisions. - The company says that approach could eventually let small businesses operate with capabilities closer to those of much larger enterprises. - For now, Kixik is positioning itself as a hire-on service for owners who want the benefits of a data team without building one in-house.