Behind the joke
Hi, I’m James.
Power BI consultant by day. Corporate satirist on lunch breaks. The two jobs are more related than they sound.
That Data Guy™ is short-form satire about Power BI dashboards, AI procurement, requirements that arrive in Excel attachments, and the meetings that follow. It works because none of it is invented — I’m still inside those rooms, building reporting for clients in defence, engineering and manufacturing.
James
Grimsby, UK · JR Data Solutions Ltd
How I got here
Twenty years of dashboards, mostly the serious kind.
Started in control & instrumentation engineering — fault diagnosis and systems thinking in regulated environments. Wrong numbers caused incidents, not awkward town halls.
Moved into defence as a capability manager and analyst. DV cleared. Spent years inside the Microsoft enterprise suite (Power BI, SharePoint, Teams, Power Apps) building reporting senior leaders actually used to make decisions.
Now consult independently for defence, engineering and manufacturing clients under JR Data Solutions, alongside running the channel. The dashboards I roast in 30 seconds are dashboards I have actually built — to spec, to deadline, and occasionally to the wrong audience. I’ve sat through the meeting that became the video.
Currently shipping
Three things. Same thesis.
Corporate data is broken. The channel describes the symptoms; the other two try to fix them.
The channel
That Data Guy™
@_thatdataguy across TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. 38M+ views, 90K+ corporate audience — data, ops, engineering, IT. Brand partnerships live at /partners.
Media kitThe day job
Clarity — Data & AI consulting
Power BI modelling and governance, Microsoft 365 architecture, workforce reporting, and data team leadership. Reporting senior leaders actually trust, built properly the first time.
Try ClarityThe side build
WingMarq
Helping teams find the documentation they already have. Came out of years of watching organisations write good guides nobody could locate at the moment they needed them.
See WingMarqWhy the joke lands
The satire and the day job are the same problem.
Corporate data is broken in extremely funny ways. It’s also broken in expensive, slow, decision-killing ways. I’ve spent twenty years on the inside of that — first as the engineer being asked to build the dashboard, then as the consultant being asked to rebuild the dashboard, now as the person who also explains in 30 seconds why the dashboard was always going to look like that.
If you’re here to hire for any of those three jobs, the contact details are below.
Other details
- Based in Grimsby, Lincolnshire. UK-wide client work.
- Microsoft certified. DV security clearance.
- Trading as JR Data Solutions Ltd.
Get in touch