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A half-dozen 20-something math, economics and neuroscience whizzes form Contemporary Analysis, an Omaha-based firm that is making predictive analytics available to a wider array of firms faster and for less money.

The team, which has a penchant for roaming around its Old Market office shoeless, is led by Grant Stanley, 23, the company's chief executive. He founded the firm in March 2008 with Tadd Wood, 23, who is now a senior analyst.

For nearly three years, Contemporary Analysis has built a customer base mostly of companies and businesses with lean budgets, meaning they didn't have a lot of cash to spend on analytics products. Traditionally, analytics firms lock clients into expensive, long-term contracts.

Not Contemporary Analysis.

Their products are designed to yield results in about a month, and average contracts are about $5,000, Stanley said. The company's analytics tools use data to solve sales, marketing, customer retention, employee management and planning problems.

“We can apply predictive analytics to those five areas, which are the same in businesses and industries of all sizes. They just scale up,” Stanley said. “If we can solve those problems, then the business owners, the employees, can focus on what's unique to their business versus trying to build systems for those five areas.”

The company's business model was born during the recession, when most businesses were scaling back their budgets, not splurging on things like predictive analytics.

To land customers, their product had to be cheaper and easier to use than the competition's. So instead of providing companies with hefty software packages, all of Contemporary Analysis' analytics are done in-house. At the end of each month or business cycle, clients get physical reports on the metrics they requested.

Contemporary Analysis is growing its business by focusing on extinguishing the negative for their clients, the parts of companies that are failing or weak.

“What we do is we use math to predict human behavior. The accountants and finance people have to get the numbers right; our goal is to get things less wrong,” Stanley said. “That doesn't mean we're lazy, it just means that in business you're never going to be completely right. The winners are just less wrong.”

One of the areas where Contemporary Analysis helps clients is in hiring the right employees based on their measurable qualities, using data from public databases, social media and about 70 other sources.

A current deal in London has Contemporary Analysis working to predict the probability of crimes being committed against residents based on their demographic information, such as where they live, their age and sex. They've also worked with Graffiti Tracker, a company that has Omaha operations and helps law enforcement agencies arrest and press charges against graffiti taggers.

Qwest Communications, which is now owned by Monroe, La.-based CenturyLink, hired the company to predict the failure rate of server huts.

Businesses long have used data and historical trends to make decisions and mold their firms, but using predictive analytics is growing in popularity, data show.

According to a study by Computer Economics, which provides metrics and consulting for information technology clients, 28 percent of companies currently are using predictive analytics. By the end of 2011, Computer Economics expects about one-third of firms to use data-driven software developed by companies like Contemporary Analysis.

A second, separate report from the IBM Institute for Business Value found that top-performing organizations use analytics five times more than lower performers.

Of the 3,000 executives, managers and analysts polled for the IBM report, those who came from high-performing companies said they used analytics to guide future strategies 45 percent of the time and day-to-day operations 53 percent of the time. By comparison, lower-performing firms used analytics 20 percent when addressing future business matters and 27 percent on a daily basis.

Those figures bode well for Stanley, Wood and their team, but there are also numerous hurdles.

Like age.

“It's a little challenging when we go out to clients,” Stanley said. “What we did was we found clients that are willing to pay you but also mentor you and go to bat for you. We don't come in and pretend like we know it all.”

Todd Murphy, an early Contemporary Analysis client who runs Omaha-based Universal Information Services, had doubts at first about employing Stanley and Wood. But those questions were quickly tucked away.

“I think what Grant shows in unbridled enthusiasm is tempered by the personality of Tadd,” Murphy said. “Together, any doubts about their ability to perform were removed.

“From my perspective it is all about performance. I don't care who you are or where you are, as long as you can perform to specification.”

On the surface, Stanley and Wood couldn't be more different. Stanley is enthusiastic and outspoken. Wood — who once spent part of a three-week vacation building an equation that predicted the performance of the Standard & Poor's 500 at nearly 70 percent accuracy — is quiet and reserved. In their roles at Contemporary Analysis, Stanley handles sales, marketing and other responsibilities that fit an extrovert, and Wood tackles analytics, mathematics and software issues that sometimes take weeks to solve.

Together, they expect to keep growing their business as predictive analytics become a commodity for more businesses, Stanley said.

“Before 2008, the people doing predictive analytics were Fortune 50 companies. Not Fortune 500 companies, Fortune 50,” Stanley said. “Because it was just that expensive and just that complicated.

“The fact is that we were able to scale down to a size where a small gym in Council Bluffs — one guy — can use it to grow his business.”

Contact the writer:

402-444-1414, ross.boettcher@owh.com

twitter.com/rossboettcher

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