A senior analyst on your team every month, without the full-time salary
You keep asking good questions about the numbers, and the answers come too late to use. Raquel becomes the person you send those questions to. She keeps your reporting honest and answers what comes up between meetings. She also works through the analysis your managers never have time for.
Who is a fractional analyst for?
- Firms that have outgrown the owner's spreadsheet but can't justify a full-time analyst
- Teams with a dashboard nobody maintains, or reports nobody checks
- Owners who keep asking good questions and never get the answers in time to use them
- Companies that just finished a dashboard or KPI project and want someone to keep it working
Imagine a fitness studio operator with five locations, about 60 staff, and no analyst. Membership and class data sits in the booking software. Payroll sits in another system, and marketing in Meta and Google. The owner wants to know three things. Which locations are losing members? Which class times should be cut? Did the last promotion bring in people who stayed? Each question is a few hours of work for an analyst and impossible for a studio manager. On a retainer, those questions go into a queue and get answered in order. Month after month, the answers build on each other.
Why is this a retainer instead of a project?
A project ends with a deliverable. Most analysis needs don't end. A new question follows every answer, data sources change, and dashboards drift. The retainer keeps the context Raquel builds in month one. Month four's questions get answered faster and better.
What does a month look like?
- 01Week one: planning call and question queue set
- 02Week one: recurring reporting checked and delivered
- 03Weeks two and three: priority analysis
- 04Ongoing: questions answered as they arrive
- 05Week four: monthly readout and next month's queue
Raquel ran recurring data office hours in-house, taking questions from busy teams. The retainer works the same way.
The month, in detail
- In the first week, a 45-minute planning call with your owner or operations lead sets the month's priorities.
- Raquel keeps a shared question queue. Anyone you approve can add a question; your lead decides the order.
- She checks that your recurring reports and dashboards refreshed correctly and that the numbers still tie out.
- She delivers the recurring monthly view, with a short note on what changed and why.
- Through weeks two and three, she works on the month's main analysis: churn by location, say, or the payback on a promotion.
- Quick questions get answered by email or in the shared queue, usually within two business days.
- She flags any data problem she finds, even if it wasn't on the list.
- She logs hours in a shared tracker you can check at any time.
- In week four, a 45-minute readout covers findings, decisions needed, and hours used.
- The queue gets reprioritized for the following month.
How do the hours work?
- About 20 hours ($3,000 a month): recurring reporting upkeep plus one main analysis a month and a light question queue.
- About 40 hours ($6,000 a month): recurring reporting plus two or three main analyses, a busier queue, and small dashboard or query builds.
- Tiers in between are set on the discovery call to fit your volume.
- Unused hours roll into the next month only, up to a quarter of the tier.
- Going over: if a month runs long, Raquel tells you first. You choose to defer work or approve extra hours in advance at the retainer rate.
- Changing tiers: up or down with 30 days' notice.
What's in, what's out, and what you need to bring
What's in
- Recurring reporting checks and upkeep
- Ad hoc analysis from your question queue
- SQL, spreadsheet, and dashboard work in your existing tools: BigQuery, Snowflake, Tableau, Looker Studio, Sheets, or Excel
- Small fixes to existing dashboards and reports
- A monthly readout with your leadership
What's out
- Not a full dashboard or reporting build from scratch. Those are scoped as their own projects. The retainer covers upkeep afterward.
- Not on-call, same-day support for every request.
- Not bookkeeping, tax, or financial statement preparation.
- Not people management or decisions on staff performance.
- Not a guarantee that any analysis will raise revenue or retention. It gives you evidence; the decisions stay yours.
What you need to bring
- A single point of contact who sets the monthly priorities
- Read access to the systems Raquel needs, with an IT contact for new requests
- A shared place for the question queue, such as email, Slack, Teams, or a project board
- 45 minutes twice a month for the planning call and the readout
Five questions that set the monthly tier
- How many recurring reports or dashboards need checking each month?
- How many people will be sending questions?
- How many systems does your data live in?
- Is there a big question already waiting, like pricing, location performance, or churn?
- Do you need occasional builds, or mostly analysis on data you already have?
Price
- Hours
- About 20 to 40
- What moves it
- Question volume, number of reports to maintain, systems in scope, and how often small builds are needed
- Payment terms
- Billed monthly in advance; 3-month minimum, then month to month with 30 days' notice
What if it isn't worth it?
Hours are logged in a tracker you can check any time, and every readout shows hours used. If you regularly use less than your tier, Raquel suggests a smaller one.
Questions people ask before booking
What if we need fewer hours one month?
Within the rollover limit, unused hours carry into the next month. Regularly using less than the tier? Raquel suggests dropping to a smaller one. You shouldn't pay for an analyst who's sitting idle.
Why is there a 3-month minimum?
The first month goes partly to learning your systems, definitions, and quirks. Months two and three are where that context pays off. A shorter commitment means paying for the learning without much of the return.
Is Raquel the one doing the analysis?
Yes. The retainer is with Raquel. She does the analysis, reads your data, and runs the readout herself. If a request turns into a larger build that needs extra engineering, it gets scoped and quoted separately first.
What background does Raquel bring to a retainer like this?
She spent close to 20 years in in-house analytics, including roles as Manager of Digital Analytics and Senior Manager of Analytics. That work included recurring data office hours for business teams. It's close to what a fractional analyst does: take questions from busy people, answer them with data, and explain the answer plainly.