Welcome to Our 1st 10 Freelancers!

I can’t say enough about Sekou. He owns and operates Royal Blue Analytics out of Nashville, and he’s a recognized expert in Power BI, Tableau, and SQL. Yes, all three – he’s a “utility knife.” And Sekou is a true giver. He has joined the board of multiple non-profits, and his popular Ten Minute Tuesday video interview shines the spotlight of other very talented people in the data world.

A couple years back, a top client of my company, Data Literacy, approached us asking for assistance building out data models and dashboards in Power BI. Who did we tap? Sekou. He delivered.

Maggie, like me, is and avid data literacy champion. When it comes to designing data content and curriculum, she has experience at more than one of the world’s top data learning platforms. So if you want to know how the most popular training companies do it, she can tell you, because she actually helped to build their offerings.

She’s also a champion on the court – formerly tennis and now pickleball. Not content with merely competing in athletics, she has channeled her skills and energies into entrepreneurial pursuits, as well, founding Blu Court Sports to deliver pickleball lessons and clinics.

Dave is the host of the popular YouTube channel DataOnData, with over 80,000 subscribers to date (including myself). Dave teaches his YouTube followers and training clients how to use Excel, python, and SQL to apply machine learning algorithms like k-means clustering and decision trees to analyze their data.

He also shares free tips each week to subscribers of his newsletter, The DIY Data Scientist. I’ve personally relied on his videos more than once to learn how to get it done. Dave is at the cutting edge of application of these tools, focusing lately on how Microsoft Copilot can be used within Excel to supercharge traditional analytics with generative AI.

I was super impressed with Helena when I first had a chance to speak with her. She’s as sharp and well-spoken as they come, and she has an incredible (and very rare) mixture of backend and frontend skills within the modern data stack. We’re talking Databricks and Azure, but also Looker Studio and Qlik Sense. She even has a cat named Snowflake, so there ya go!

She has professional certifications from Google and AWS, and has applied her expertise to cybersecurity and to marketing analytics, among other pursuits. And get this – she’s a champion powerlifter! That’s right – she’s the 2024 USAPL Rising Tide women’s champion. Worried that your data woes require some heavy lifting? Helena can handle it.

Christopher is a seasoned market research expert, with expertise in customer segmentation and retail locational analysis. He operates ClearEdge Market Intelligence out of Charlotte, NC, where he helps startups and small business glean competitive intelligence insights. He has deep experience in both the energy & utilities and consumer products industries, among others.

And he’s been doing this work for decades now. He has been particularly helpful to me, and to our nascent platform overall, as he as a high level of exposure to and familiarity with the kind of massive online talent marketplaces we’re trying to improve upon.

Kim is a true BI industry pro, with expertise in both Tableau and Microsoft Power BI. She has many accolades to her name, including being named Tableau Public Ambassador in 2023 and 2024 as well as being the 2nd place finisher in the Americas bracket of the 2022 Iron Viz competition.

I, of course, have a soft spot for Tableau Public ambassadors and Iron Viz champions, having been involved with Tableau’s free visualization sharing platform for many years in my own career, so I can tell you that her Tableau Public profile page is chalk full of some of the best interactive dashboards I’ve ever seen. These “vizzes” prove that she is at the very highest level of skill with this tool, and companies in need of such expertise would be delighted with her work.

I found out about Kim from Eric Balash. Eric is a 2X Tableau Visionary, Tableau’s highest form of recognition of expertise and community leadership. He is also a 5X Tableau Public Ambassador, and he runs the Data Afterhours podcast, where he speaks with popular experts about their interests and hobbies outside of the data world.

Along with Maria Brock, Eric created The Tableau Student Guide, and he runs the popular “Back 2 Viz Basics” project to help people build a solid foundation in visualization best practices. I consider Eric a friend and colleague, and if your organization needs help with Tableau, Eric is your guy. He’s no one-trick pony, though, he is also skilled in SQL, Fivetran, SQL Server, Excel, Google Sheets, Power BI / Fabric, Canva, and Figma.

I found out about Michela thanks to Alberto Cairo, Knight Chair in Visual Journalism at the University of Miami and author of many popular data visualization books (How Charts Lie, The Truthful Art, The Functional Art). Michela recently completed Miami’s MS in Data Science program, and she has a remarkably wide array of skills in machine learning, AI, data science, generative AI, and data visualization. You have to check out her website!

She even created her own chatbot called ACUNAO, a generative AI system that uses the Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) framework to access a repository of documents and thereby enhance response quality. She is also multi-talented, having been named the 2020-21 NAIA PING WGCA Player of the Year in golf. We’re delighted she’s on board, and you will want to keep a close eye on this rising star in the data world.

Nathan is a Seattleite like me, and he is an experienced leader across the full data stack. Luckily for us, he specializes in online marketplaces, having worked at one until very recently. He also has very valuable experience in data science and analytics roles at Expedia, Boeing, and Meta’s Facebook, so when it comes to using data to solve complex business problems, he can tell you how to do it, and how not to do it.

Those who have worked with him and for him call him Nate, and they describe him as a supportive leader and great listener. I can say that, over the course of my conversations with Nathan, I experienced that too, and I just know he’d make for an excellent strategic advisor to organizations looking to develop a data culture and drive adoption of data-informed decision making.

Nicholas and I both worked at Tableau prior to the Salesforce acquisition, and I really enjoyed working with him. I found him to be the kind of coworker who gets a lot done, but is also very easy to work with. That’s actually quite rare, as those attributes are often in direct opposition to each other. He was in a technical support engineering role, but he was highly active on Tableau Public. Given his Tableau roots, you won’t be surprised to know that Nicholas has a passion for data visualization and data storytelling.

Since his time there, he has expanded his repertoire of business intellgence tools, including both backend tools like Airbyte, and frontend applications such as Mapbox and Figma. Outside of the data space, Nicholas specializes in mediation and conflict resolution. And remarkably, he recently ran for public office in Multnomah County, part of the Portland metropolitan area.