Blackstone & Cullen
A Data Journey to Bring the Art of Global Business

If you throw a data scientist in a room with a business executive, they typically don’t speak the same language. We grew up as both and decided to stand as global business leaders. We don’t need an interpreter in the room as we have perfected the ability to bridge between the global business, the data scientist and the business executive,” explains Lee Blackstone, CEO of Blackstone & Cullen, a business analytics consulting firm. “Many business executives get intimidated or embarrassed once you get past the capabilities of an HP- 12C Calculator or an Excel spreadsheet and tend to lose patience when the data scientist cannot understand the simplest supply chain or global go to market concepts,” he explains.

Founded in GA in the year 1989, Blackstone & Cullen headquartered in Alpharetta, has over 25 years of experience building data warehousing and business intelligence solutions including collaboration/portal solutions, document management, enterprise project management, BI strategy and assessment, data integration and consolidation. It also includes report development, data mining, data quality, data governance, performance tuning, and platform tool assessment. The company focuses on solutions for delivering sustained competitive advantage for their clients.

“The quest to provide elegantly simple solutions to hideously complicated problems is what we are focusing on” explains Lee, who has a career spanning over two decades, working for large companies and over twenty five years as an entrepreneur.

The quest to provide elegantly simple solutions to hideously complicated problems is what we are focusing on

Blackstone & Cullen takes their clients on a data journey bringing the art of global business and the science of data, to acquire, analyze, report, predict and prescribe what “success” looks like. The company has clients ranging from mid-market to global enterprise in terms of size and complexity.

With Microsoft, Siemens KidsII, Imerys, Federal Home Loan Bank, and Gwinnett County Public Schools, being on the top list, the company’s account base goes into thousands. Blackstone’s strategic advice helps companies and organizations stabilize, thrive and grow during challenging times. Having completed their 200th project in Microsoft, “We operate for Microsoft in every country on various deals and products across channels and markets on different global go to market campaigns and initiatives. We do descriptive, predictive and prescriptive models at Microsoft,” explains Lee.

One of the most interesting projects done by Blackstone was to determine the next most likely purchase in a B2B world, then create a customized marketing campaign tailored to specific companies and specific individuals and then measure the return on marketing investment as well as the return on sales investment. Another was to benchmark partners who had common demographics, capabilities and competencies to predict their performance and prescribe a definitive roadmap for their success and progression through the partner channel. This led to the proper selection of the right partner on new go to market initiatives with the highest probability of success. Blackstone & Cullen aggregates over 50 data sources daily and delivers dashboards, scorecards, predictive, and prescriptive models to their sales, marketing, and finance and operations teams in every country every day.

Looking forward, Blackstone is driving growth with exceptional talent and geographic expansion as well as broadening the company’s extensive data and analytics experience, leading the way into the next great industry challenge of delivering prescriptive analytics today.