Meet the anti-consultant

Dan Lomartra

The Story

I grew up working in restaurants, where you either deliver or you don't. There's no hiding behind process, no blaming the timeline, no selling work you can't do yourself. That mentality never left. I taught myself data engineering because a vendor kept hiding behind complexity instead of delivering results. So I learned their stack, built what they said was impossible, and never looked back.

That turned into a decade building data capabilities across dozens of growth-stage and PE-backed companies and their owners. Two platforms I built are now sold as commercial SaaS products. I joined leadership at a PE consulting firm's data and analytics practice before realizing the consulting model was part of the problem.

I founded Danalytics to do it differently. I set the strategy, I build the platform, and I stand behind both.

“Dan is a trusted colleague who quickly translates data architecture into real operating leverage. He focuses on what matters to sponsors: cost discipline, operational visibility, and reliable data.”

— Chad Hensley, CFO

My Compass

“When said, then done. There is always more said than done.”

— Tony Lomartra

The analytics landscape evolves so quickly that even foundational best practices have completely flipped in the last 3-4 years. And AI has accelerated this 10x. Most consultants and hires don’t work out because they learned one stack, stopped building, started talking, and their playbook went stale in a year and completely rotten in two.
A data warehouse doesn’t fix a broken quote-to-cash or lead-to-close process. It makes it worse. Resist the urge to map your way around issues for “quick” time-to-value. When your data platform surfaces a broken process, fixing it IS the value.
A hammer can drive a screw. A flathead can turn a Phillips. But everything is 10x harder, takes 10x longer, and something will break. Most consultants stay “tool agnostic” so they never have to tell a client no. I won’t build on a tool that’s bad for your business. Always match the tool to the job, the team to the tool, and the tool to the team.
Every system I build gets a named owner inside your org before anything gets built. That also means having the technical resources to support it, whether that’s the owner themselves, someone else on the team, an upskilling plan, or an external partner. Without that, consultants come in, build a black box, drop it on your team’s head, and leave. No one knows how it works. They can’t fix it and can’t build on it. So you call another consultant to build another black box. The cycle continues, the tech debt compounds, and the whole thing collapses under its own weight.
I have sat in countless meetings watching teams argue about business logic only to discover later that the entire discussion was based on a false assumption. Alignment matters. But get in the data and build something first — then align around what you can see.
You can’t draw a map to somewhere you’ve never been. Data platform work is 75% discovery and exploration. The firms that spend months building implementation plans before touching any data are doing enterprise planning theater. The plan falls apart the moment they start implementing, and then they spend more of your money redoing the plan. Modern data platforms aren’t ERP migrations. They’re cheap to spin up, easy to tear down, and fast to iterate on. Point yourself in the right direction and start moving. The map comes later.

Ready when you are.

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