Gbolahan Adebayo is a data and business intelligence analyst who specialises in turning complex data into clear, actionable insights through visualisation. He currently works as a Senior Data Analyst at Sanlam Fintech in Johannesburg, South Africa, and has previously built dashboards and analytics infrastructure for MAGNiTT, Aspire, and Subway across Nigeria, South Africa, the United Arab Emirates, Singapore, and the United States.
- Explain your job to a five-year-old.
Have you ever gotten food from someone who sells jollof rice and puff-puff by the roadside?
Some days, the whole street shows up, and everything finishes before noon. Other days, she cooks plenty, and it just sits there. If she’s only guessing, she either runs out or she wastes food and money she can’t get back.
My job is to quietly remember everything for her, how much sells, when the rush comes, whether rain brings more buyers, and then build her a small board that watches it all and tells her plainly, “Friday is busy, cook more rice.” Now she’s not guessing. She just looks at the board, and she can make better decisions.
- What does a business intelligence analyst actually do day-to-day that people don’t expect?
People expect it to be all about building a pretty dashboard. That’s the last 20%. The rest is detective work and translation of business questions. A lot of my day-to-day work is asking annoyingly basic questions, like “if this number moved, what would you actually do?”
I spend lots of time cleaning and chasing down why two “correct” numbers refuse to match. And the bit nobody expects: a good part of the job is just saying no. The craft people see is the visual. The craft they don’t see is deciding what deserves to be shown at all.
- How can someone break into business intelligence analytics, and where do they even start?
You need a free tool and one real question. Start with SQL, because that’s the actual workhorse, and a visualisation tool like Tableau, which has a free public version. And lean on AI tools as you learn. They’re the fastest tutors you’ll ever have, explaining a concept, getting you unstuck on a query, and making you understand concepts even faster.Â
Then here’s the part people skip: go and build something real, and put it where people can see it. Don’t wait until you feel ready, because you never will. Pick a question you genuinely care about, answer it with data, publish it, and ask people better than you to give feedback.
- How long did it take you to get to where you are, and what did that journey actually look like?
My journey started at an early-stage startup where I was the sole analyst and chart maker, steering the ship on how insights were derived. From there, I worked under a manager who knew so much that he sharpened the need for me to understand the business deeply before trying to solve anything.Â
Then I moved into consulting, brought in to drive big business intelligence changes across platforms while training in-house analysts along the way. And now I sit within a specialised data and AI team inside a larger corporation, finding ways to help different business units make sense of what they have and pull the maximum value out of it.
The journey has been less about collecting tools and more about getting closer to understanding businesses and combining that with my technical ability to help stakeholders make business-driven decisions.
- You co-founded the Lagos Tableau User Group and mentor across multiple programs. What’s driving that investment in the community?
Honestly, for me, I think it’s the simplest thing in the world. I am a product of community. I didn’t get here through some private mentor or an expensive programme.
I got here because folks on the Internet looked at my work, told me where it was weak, and pulled me up. Building community is just me trying to be that for the next person, except closer to home. There’s so much raw talent in Nigeria and across Africa. What’s usually missing isn’t ability; it’s access, visibility, and someone a few steps ahead saying, “here’s how.”