About Forward Metrics
Forward Metrics is a data and analytics consultancy working across the US and UK, built for businesses that have outgrown spreadsheets and want serious data engineering sized to fit them.
01 Why we exist
At one end sit the large consultancies. Genuinely capable, priced for enterprise, and structured so that the people who won the work are rarely the people who deliver it. For a 60-person business with four systems and a reporting problem, engaging one is like hiring an architecture practice to fit a kitchen.
At the other end are individual contractors. Often excellent, usually specialists in one thing. You’ll get a good dashboard. You will not get someone who looks at the pipeline feeding it, notices the reconciliation is wrong, and tells you the dashboard was never the real problem.
Forward Metrics exists in the middle — senior people who can work end to end, from source system to boardroom, at a scale and price that makes sense for a mid-sized business. Small enough that you always deal with the people doing the work, broad enough to fix the actual cause rather than the visible symptom.
02 What we believe
A beautiful report nobody believes is worth less than an ugly one everybody does. Every technical decision we make is ultimately in service of somebody being willing to act on a figure without checking it first.
There’s professional prestige in recommending the sophisticated platform. There’s more value in recommending the one you’ll still be able to run, afford and staff in three years. We optimize for the second.
The hard part is rarely the pipeline. It’s getting three departments to agree what a customer is. That conversation is unglamorous, and it is where the durable value in an engagement actually comes from.
We’re genuinely enthusiastic about what modern AI tooling does for analytics work, and firmly against the framing that it’s a headcount argument. The businesses winning here are asking harder questions, not employing fewer people to ask the same ones.
If a client can’t leave, we built it wrong. Documented, source-controlled, handed over properly — support should be something you choose, not something you’re locked into.
03 The team
There is no bench and no account layer. These are the people who take your call and write your SQL.
Sam Norridge
Consultant · Louisville, KY
Sam is a data engineer and analytics leader who’s spent over a decade turning messy, fragmented data into the systems businesses run on. He’s built enterprise data platforms for healthcare providers, government departments, and fast-growing companies alike — the common thread being organizations that knew their data should be telling them more than it was.
Andy Smart
Consultant · United Kingdom
Andy has spent over twenty years making operational data usable — forecasting that reduces cost, warehouse and process design that runs tighter, and reporting leadership teams actually trust. He works at board level on strategy and hands-on in SQL, Python and the pipelines themselves, which is why complex systems tend to come out simpler than they went in.
Between Louisville and the UK we cover most of the US and UK working day, so questions tend to get answered rather than queued overnight. We deliberately run a small number of engagements at a time — which means occasionally saying no to good work, and means the quality of what we deliver never depends on who happened to be free that month.
Talk to us04 Who we work with
Our work fits organizations with real operational complexity but no full internal data function — typically somewhere between about 20 and 500 people. Several systems that don’t talk to each other. Meaningful transaction volume. At least one person losing days a month to manual reporting. Often one analyst, sometimes none.
Sector matters less than shape. We’ve found the same patterns in professional services, manufacturing, distribution, healthcare and financial services, because the underlying problem — data scattered across systems that were bought separately and never integrated — is remarkably consistent.
Geography matters less still. We’re based in Louisville and the UK, and the work is done remotely either way. The practical benefit of sitting on both sides of the Atlantic isn’t reach for its own sake — it’s that most of the US and UK working day is covered by someone who can actually answer the question.
We’re a poor fit for organizations wanting the cheapest available contractor, for one-off dashboard builds with no interest in what sits underneath, and for anyone who’d prefer a supplier that doesn’t push back on the brief. We’d rather establish that early.
Next step
Thirty minutes, no pitch deck. If we're not the right people for your problem, we'll say so on the call.