The Founder

Dana Whitfield

Operations background, analytics practice, and the reasoning behind teaching store owners to read their own reports.

Dana Whitfield seated at a desk with printed analytics reports and a laptop showing a dashboard

Background

Years spent inside the reports, not just presenting them

Before teaching, Dana worked across operations and reporting functions for online retailers, the kind of role where the dashboard is opened every morning because someone has to decide what to do about yesterday's numbers. That work involved setting up tracking across several store platforms, rebuilding broken funnels after site redesigns, and explaining customer segments to teams who needed a plain answer rather than a spreadsheet.

Over time it became clear that most of what took months to learn on the job could be taught directly, without the trial and error, if it was broken into a set order: tracking first, then funnels, then segments, then lifetime value, then one dashboard tying it together. That sequence became the backbone of this workshop series.

Why this course exists

Hiring an analyst is not always the right first step

Many stores reach a point where the data feels important but nobody on the team has time to make sense of it. Hiring an analyst is one option, but it is not the only one, and it is not always proportional to what a store actually needs. A smaller store with a handful of acquisition channels and a modest order volume often gets more value from a founder or manager who understands three or four core reports well than from an outside hire who has to first learn the business.

This course was built for that middle ground: store owners who are comfortable with their own business but have never been shown, specifically, how to configure tracking correctly, read a funnel report without guessing, or turn order history into a lifetime value figure that means something.

Close-up of printed funnel and segmentation charts pinned to an office wall

Teaching approach

Built around a workflow, not a feature tour

Sequenced deliberately

Each of the six workshops depends on the one before it. Tracking has to exist before a funnel report means anything. A funnel has to be understood before segments are useful. Segments have to be defined before a lifetime value figure is trustworthy.

Live, with real questions

Every session ends with open Q&A. Store owners bring their own screenshots and reports, and questions are answered against that specific setup rather than a generic example.

Kept deliberately small in scope

The goal is one working dashboard, not a full analytics practice. Anything that does not serve the three core questions is treated as optional and left out of the required material.

"The point was never to make store owners into analysts. It was to remove the excuse that the data is too complicated to look at." — Dana Whitfield, Founder