CUSTOMER STORY • DATA BUREAUX
A data bureau, built from scratch on Cygnus
How John Knight and Sam Cocking turned a two-person startup into a high-volume data bureau, with Cygnus as its heartbeat.
Cygnus is a big part of the reason DPS exists at all
When John and Sam decided to start their own data bureau, the sums only added up because of one piece of software. They knew that with Cygnus they could offer the full suite of data processing in-house, deep enough to go toe to toe with any bureau or in-house data team, without hiring a big team or sending a client’s data out of the building.
That confidence has been repaid. Two years on, a team of two has processed and mailed 35 million records, posted record months, and won over clients who no longer bother asking the price.
The story in brief
THE CHALLENGE
Building a bureau from scratch
Starting a data bureau from scratch is a bold thing to attempt right now. The skill is getting rarer, not more common, and most outfits only do a slice of the job: one service just does cleaning, another only does processing with the tricky parts sent off elsewhere.
John and Sam wanted the opposite. They set out to offer the whole thing, done properly and in-house, without ever shipping a client’s data out of the building to fill a gap. For a team of two, that only works if a single tool can do everything.
“Cygnus is the industry standard, without a shadow of a doubt.
You really can’t do this job now without it.”
John Knight, Co-founder & Director, DPS Direct
THE SOLUTION
Where the care goes in
John treats every file like a story. “You know how it starts, you know how it ends, and you’ve got to create the story in the middle.”
01
A proper health check
Every job begins by finding duplicates, people who have moved, people who have sadly passed away, and addresses that will never arrive. The analysis is free, and because DPS is not tied to any one supplier, John matches each client to the cheapest option.
02
Then the real craft
Splitting data into segments, building personalised ask amounts from a donor’s giving history, generating raffle numbers a million at a time with no room for error, and writing the logic that turns messy name fields into a greeting that actually reads properly.
03
Proof it properly
The step John is proudest of is his proofing script, which surfaces every version of a mailing so a client can check the entire job in about thirty records. “If that’s good, your 200,000 is probably going to be good too.”
THE HERO JOB
The hero job: everything, in a day
A job John had priced as a single day’s work landed on the morning it was due to proof, and then it grew. Fresh instructions brought sixty variable paragraphs, three donation ask amounts driven by monetary-range lookups, and donor segments matched from a table of more than a hundred permutations. All of it had to be split across four randomised cells and personalised right down to the greeting, including around two hundred broken salutations he rebuilt so that nobody opened a letter reading “Dear Mr S”.
He built the whole thing in Cygnus inside a day. The moment that would have sunk most teams came during approval, when the client realised their own lookup tables held errors. Because every step in Cygnus is a visible, editable flow, John simply dropped the corrected tables back in and refreshed the job. A few mouse clicks, where other software would have meant redoing hours of work with no record of what had already been done.
It passed clean first time and mailed on schedule. The client was delighted.
1-day turnaround · 60 variable paragraphs · 100+ donor segments · 4 randomised cells · clean first-time pass
“Without Cygnus there’s just no way we could have done this as quickly as we did. And it’s not only the speed. I can see every process broken down, and check everything as I go.”
John Knight, Co-founder & Director, DPS Direct
Why it matters for other bureaux and in-house teams
If you are juggling half a dozen tools, or sending data out for the parts you cannot do yourself, DPS is proof there is another way.
The whole suite
One piece of software deep enough to run processing, personalisation, quality checking and advice, so nothing has to be farmed out.
Volume without headcount
35 million records processed and mailed by two people, with a record 2.5 million in a single month.
Visible every step
Every process broken down on the canvas, so mistakes are spotted and corrected in a few clicks rather than reworked from scratch.
Standards that win trust
Jobs from 2,000 records to 600,000 treated exactly the same, which is what keeps clients coming back and stops them haggling on price.