The Flerlage Twins Story Part 1: We Started as Babies

 

For a while now, people have been suggesting that we write a post sharing the story of our journey—how we got started, created flerlagetwins.com, joined Moxy, and ended up with the opportunity to speak on the keynote stage at Tableau Conference 2025. The problem is that we don’t like to talk about ourselves. We prefer to write about data stuff and Tableau—things that help others to get better. But after receiving several requests to write this, Kevin and I discussed and decided to just go for it. After all, understanding our journey could help others as they build their careers in this field and, ultimately, helping others has always been what it’s all about. So here we go…we’re just going to ignore the discomfort and share our story!! So here’s part 1 and we’ll share part 2 very soon.

 

We Started as Babies

That’s right—believe it or not, we were once babies. We were born on August 2, 1976 in Hebron, KY (technically, we were born in a hospital in Covington, KY) to Sheryl Ann Flerlage (Riley) and Michael Leo Flerlage. Hebron, you might know, is the home of CVG, the Cincinnati International Airport. Yep, the Cincinnati airport is in Kentucky!! So, if you’ve ever flown into CVG, you’ve been in our hometown! At the time of our birth, Hebron was a tiny place, but it would later grow at a rapid pace when, in the mid-80’s, it became one of Delta’s hubs. And it’s now a booming metropolis with a population of over 6,000 people.😉 So just imagine how tiny it was back in 1976!!!

 

Here’s a photo when we were around 1 year old.

 

Mom, Dad, and The Twins (Unsure Which is Which)

 

The first thing people ask when they see photos like the one above is “Which one is Ken and which one is Kevin?” The answer, of course, is that we have absolutely no idea whatsoever. Seriously, I have been staring at this photo for about 10 minutes now and I honestly have no idea which one is me. We literally have to ask our parents! (and I sometimes think they just pretend to know because they don’t want to admit that they don’t know either).

 

Photos of “The Twins”

 

Given how similar we looked, the next question is always “Are you identical?” We generally say “Yes”, but the truth is a little more complicated. We don’t actually know for sure. When we were born, our parents didn’t have a lot of money and it cost money to test twins to see if they are truly identical. That test wasn’t covered by their insurance and it wasn’t cheap. As our parents were considering whether to shell out the cash for the test, the labor and delivery nurse whispered to them, “Don’t do the test…Trust me, they are identical.” So we’ve never been 100% sure that we’re identical, but given our similarities, we’re just going to keep saying that we’re identical—it’s a lot easier than telling that whole story.

 

From the day we were born, we did everything together. It was like having a built-in best friend. We were in most of the same classes in school and even attended the same college. It wasn’t until college that we started to develop slightly different interests. Kevin entered college as an engineering major, while I entered with an intention to study chemistry. But neither of us was quite sure that those subjects were right for us. In our Freshman year, we both took an introduction to computer science class (we learned how to program in Turbo Pascal!!). I loved it and immediately changed my major to computer science. Kevin didn’t really care for it and continued on his engineering track (he eventually changed his major to math with a concentration on statistics).

 

During college, we lived together, worked part-time at the same company, hung out at the same places and with the same people. So, other than our academic interests, we still pretty much did everything together. But, in my last semester of college, I decided to study abroad. I spent about five months in early 1999 studying at Glasgow Caledonian University in Glasgow, Scotland. For me, that was a life-changing experience because it gave me an opportunity to travel and get to know a group of international students from all over the world. When I got back, I graduated college and moved to Pennsylvania, about 500 miles away.

 

Other than my time in Scotland, Kevin and I had never lived this far apart. And, as things go, we began to live separate lives—we were no longer Kenny and Kevin, the Flerlage Twins. We began our own careers and our own families. Then life began to speed up—work, family, new friends, etc.—and our lives became more and more separate. We made regular trips to visit each other and spoke on the phone once in a while, but we just weren’t as close as we had always been. The physical distance was just too great.

 

And our careers were quite different as well. I became a programmer and then got into a variety of areas in information technology—database administration, ERP administration, etc.—eventually landing in analytics near the end of 2012. Kevin worked in a number of different industries—cable television systems, ticket sales, and healthcare—but one constant was that he was always dealing with data. Over the years, he became a guru with Excel and other tools. So, while we had very different paths, both of us somehow ended up working in data analytics. But, despite having that in common, we still didn’t talk that much. We saw each other a couple of times a year and exchanged an occasional text from time to time, but that was pretty much it.

 

Before you feel sad about this distance, let me just say that I think this was ultimately a good thing. When you grow up as identical twins, your sense of identity is always tied to the other. We shared all the same family, friends, co-workers, etc. so we were always sort of a package deal. So, living apart allowed us to establish our own paths and form our own identities. There was a time in my life and career that people had no idea I even had a brother, much less an identical twin. It truly allowed us to develop into the people we are today. And, interestingly, enough, that end result is pretty similar—but it was still useful to do some of that growth independently.

 

Ken’s Story

Let’s take a quick step back and talk about our professional histories a bit. As mentioned earlier, I graduated with a computer science degree in 1999 and quickly moved to Pennsylvania. I got a job at a small consulting firm, where I built custom applications for various clients. I was unhappy in that job, unfortunately, and left after a year, getting a job in at a growing manufacturing company, where I would stay for almost 16 years! I started that job as a programmer, but would end up doing a little of everything in the IT space. At different times, I worked as a business analyst, a database administrator, ERP administrator, enterprise architect, etc. I loved working in the IT space and I loved trying new things. So, when my supervisor at the time came to me in 2013, asking if I’d like to lead a newly-formed Analytics team, I eagerly said yes! I jumped in head-first, learning everything I could about the space and started to build a team and some really great analytics tools. While there were certainly some failures and setbacks due to my inexperience, we were able to create a foundation on which the organization could continue to build and I’m proud of that work.

 

What’s really interesting about that first role in Analytics is that, while I loved IT, I loved this role more than any other. It felt like this was where my career had been leading all these years. Even before I worked in Analytics, my brain had always been wired to think about data and ensuring that it could be valuable when analyzed after the fact. When you’re working in ERP, most of your work is focused on getting data in so that the business can run its day-to-day operations, but I always thought about what was needed to make that data valuable for more strategic purposes. And the same was true when I was programming custom applications—my mind was always focused on how this data could be leveraged to make better operational and strategic decisions. Ultimately, it felt like I was destined to work in Analytics.

 

In 2015, I began thinking about moving onto something new. While I was proud of the work I had done those prior 15 years, it was just time. But I also realized that I had very little to show for what I had done. The company was privately-owned and in a very competitive industry, so I rarely had an opportunity to share my work publicly via blogs, presentations, conferences, etc. I had no portfolio to show any of my work and exactly zero people knew who I was. So the job search was tough and took quite a while. After a relatively lengthy job search, I would eventually land a job as a Business Intelligence Analyst at Bucknell University in April, 2016.

 

Bucknell was a breath of fresh air. I was part of a team of three and my first project was to rearchitect our entire analytics and data platform. One of the key decisions that came from that was the need to build a data warehouse from the ground up. Between a team member and me, we built a fantastic data warehouse platform that became the foundation of everything we would do for the next several years. The work we did on that project remains one of my proudest accomplishments and I’d put Bucknell’s data warehouse up against some of the best I’ve seen.

 

And, of course, Bucknell is where I first had an opportunity to work with Tableau!! (You’d knew we’d get there eventually, right 😉). When I first got the job at Bucknell University and learned that they used Tableau, I figured I could get a head start by teaching myself the platform, having worked with similar tools in the past (Qlikview, anyone??). I found a great online course by Matt Francis and learned all the basics of the tool. But, given my work on the data warehouse, I spent almost no time on Tableau whatsoever. But I wanted to…So, if I didn’t have an opportunity to work with Tableau at work, I decided to use it for personal projects. In June of 2016, I started using it to build charts, largely in support of some analyses on sports and the 2016 Presidential election. The more I used Tableau, the more I “got it”. It could do everything! And it helped to satisfy a certain creative passion that I couldn’t get from writing code or building data warehouses. I loved it so much that I spent hours at night just building stuff on Tableau Public—it quickly became a bit of an addition. It’s funny, back in my programmer days, I knew people who’d go home and write code for fun. I remember thinking these people were nuts—who would write code for fun??? But here I was spending all my free time building Tableau visualizations.

 

At this point, I was still very much a newbie, only having worked with Tableau for a few months. I had been posting my work on LinkedIn and Twitter, but I hadn’t yet fully discovered the community. That is, until the community started taking notice of me. This started with my Famous Trees visualization winning Viz of the Day, Josh Tapley noticing my Snowflake Chart post, and Ben Jones sharing my idea of a “sized bump chart.” Josh, Ben, and the Tableau Public team probably don’t realize what these recognitions meant to me, but I was (and still am) incredibly thankful. They both validated my efforts and introduced me to the incredible Tableau Community.

 

Ken’s First Viz-of-the-Day, Famous Trees

 

From there, I really started to engage with the community. People like Adam Crahen and Pooja Gandhi, though maybe not realizing it, acted as mentors to me (they’ve since gotten married!). I discovered projects like Makeover Monday and Workout Wednesday. I started diligently reading others’ blogs, as well as downloading and dissecting Tableau Public workbooks. The community gave me so much and my pace of learning really started to accelerate because of it.

 

Eventually, I thought it was time to pay it forward. Perhaps I could play the same role for others who were new to Tableau. That’s when I started www.kenflerlage.com. Initially, most of my posts were analyses of data that I found interesting—I spent lots of time on politics, sports, and religion. But I soon began to focus almost completely on content that was intended to teach others various skills in Tableau. I was not yet an expert, but I found I did have a certain talent for sharing complex ideas in a way that made it easy for others to understand. Largely because of my writing and continual creation of visualizations on Tableau Public, I was honored to become a “Tableau Zen Master” (now known as a “Tableau Visionary”) in February 2018. While I had not set out to achieve this title, it was an amazing feeling to have Tableau recognize the work I had been doing and it helped energize me to keep going.

 

Ken’s First Tableau Zen Master/Visionary Rock

 

In retrospect, there was some part of me that felt really driven to get good at Tableau. I think that was partially because it was fun to work with and I thought it could be helpful for my career. But I think it was more than just that. As I mentioned previously, I left that second company after 16 years and really had nothing to show for it. And that hurt. In many ways, it felt like I had left my entire professional self behind and I had to build it from the ground up again, much like the new data warehouse we were building at Bucknell. I didn’t want to do that again. I wanted to carve out a piece of my professional life that was entirely mine own—something that I could take with me regardless of the job I held at the time. Ultimately, I think that acted as one of the big driving forces that helped bring me to where I am today.

 

Kevin’s Story (Written by the Man Himself)

Surprisingly, at the age of 18, I had no idea what I wanted to do as a job for the next 50 years. I went to college for Engineering simply because I was really good and math and science. But I hated it! Specifically, I hated all the physics. I actually dropped out for a bit to just work and figure some things out, but after a year break, I went back to finish out a Mathematics/Statistics degree. That break was a good one and when I returned, I worked hard and absolutely crushed it. I ended up with a degree in Mathematics/Statistics and minor or Physics (thank God those two astronomy classes counted toward my Physics minor—I rarely went to either class and still got 99%+ in both).

 

After I graduated, I stayed with the same company that I had been working at for a while. I moved up the ranks and got placed in a small home automation startup…but they put me in Sales because they liked my personality (not sure why). I’m here to tell you that Sales is the absolute last place I wanted to be, but I decided to give it a go. But…like Engineering, I hated it! I was completely miserable. Luckily, another opportunity arose. We had met someone who worked at a nursing home for people with severe disabilities. Most of the people living at the facility could not walk and many couldn’t even use their hands. I saw this as an opportunity to not only help to build a business, but more importantly, to help these folks. Working with our software development team, we build a tool called REACH and a company called Break Boundaries…and they essentially put me in charge of making a lot of this happen. REACH allowed people to control their television, open doors, control lights, etc. using minor head movements or voice activation. And this was over 20 years ago, long before plug and play automation devices and voice recognition were commonplace. It was an exciting time.

 

Several years into this, I decided it was time to move on and, in 2006, I landed a job with a ticket company doing operations and pricing analysis. This was the first time I truly focused on analytics. The company, at that time, did a lot of gut-feel decision making and I was instrumental in changing that. We built analytic tools and processes that allowed us to more accurately price and make better purchasing decisions. As all of this was done in Excel, I quickly became known as “the Excel guru”. I stayed there for about seven years. I learned a lot and really developed my skills, but I had a young family and this job did not have the work/life balance that I was looking for.

 

In 2013, I moved into pharmacy analytics for a huge pharmaceutical distribution company, but sat as a dedicated resource in a large hospital system who operated over 40 hospitals across the Midwest and East. In this role, I did more “grinding it out in Excel”. I created a lot of reports from scratch…many of those that were recreated month in and month out. I also did a lot of ad-hoc cost-saving analyses where we would compare drug products, their indications, costs, etc. to determine if we could, in fact, save money with a particular product over another. Please note that patient’s health was number the first priority, but if products were equivalently effective, then their cost became the priority. I worked there for nearly 6 years and was greatly respected by the hospital system as well as the distribution company. But toward the end, I knew it was time for a change. I started looking for analytics jobs within the distribution company and there was one common thread…you needed to know Tableau.

 

At this point, Ken had been using Tableau for a year and a half or so. I remember him talking on Twitter with his “Tableau friends” and I thought it was super weird. Then he went to the conference and I threw jabs like “have fun at your nerd conference”. He just ignored me. He was posting vizzes about Marvin Lewis (former Cincinnati Bengals coach), UFO sightings, and swimming world records and I just made fun of him relentlessly.

 

Kevin Poking Fun at Ken

 

Then, in 2018, Ken became a Tableau Zen Master (now known as a Tableau Visionary). Even though I picked at him, I thought that was pretty damn cool. So, of course, when I started looking for new jobs and they all required Tableau experience, I sent him a text. But instead of him (the Tableau Zen Master) offering to jump on a call with me to teach me how to use it, he sent me a link to a training video of some rando I didn’t know (it turned out to be that same exact course he took—the one taught by Matt Francis, who I now consider a friend). I cursed Ken and it was then that he offered to jump on a call. I remember the evening well, it was February 28, 2018. He walked through the basics and after 3 hours, I was totally hooked!

 

For the next month, I spent way too much time building dashboards using Tableau. I created 6 Tableau Public dashboards in the first month. In fact, my wife had to have a talk with me about me neglecting my family…she was right and I backed off. But truthfully, I was hooked. At 41 years old, I had finally found what I wanted to do for the rest of my life!

 

I spent the next several months building dashboards on Tableau Public in my free time because 1) I wanted to know the product as well as Ken and 2) I loved it! In fact, in my second month of using Tableau, I got third in IronViz with The Lorax. These were the days when they had 3 feeders and only the winner moved on. I had narrowly missed winning IronViz after two months of using the product. In retrospect, I’m thankful that I did not win because doing that on stage looks terrifying!!

 

About six months into me posting and sharing on Tableau Public, I got a message from Hall of Fame Tableau Visionary, Jeff Shaffer. He asked a question that would literally change my life forever…he basically said, “I’ve seen all the great work you’ve been doing on Tableau Public, how would you like to do it for a living?”. I was 100% in. I interviewed, got the job, and had the chance to work for and with some absolutely amazing people including Jeff, Ethan Hahn, Dinushki De Livera, and Jennifer Dawes. For the first time in my life, I LOVED my job! I got to build Tableau dashboards all day long every day! It was fantastic!

 

During that time, Jeff encouraged me to write about my learnings. He had been doing that for a long time with Data Plus Science. Ken had been doing the same thing with KenFlerlage.com, which I had already written a few guest blog posts for (and probably spent more time trying to be a comedian than actually providing value.) I bought the domain, KevinFlerlage.com and started writing. I believe my first blog post was about the History of Hex Maps and how to use them and I called it, What the Hex? I received a nice response. A month or so later, I developed my “No Polygons” technique, which, as the name suggests, is a way to create some cool visuals without drawing polygons. I recall Ken calling it “super clever” and even got a comment from THE Jonathan Drummey saying that it was an ingenious way to turn something that is really complicated into something that is really simple. Then people started using the technique over and over and over. I was already hooked on Tableau and now I was hooked on writing about Tableau.

 

Screenshot from No Polygons Blog Post

 

Eventually, in 2021, I would join Ken as a Tableau Visionary—the first Identical Twin Visionaries ever!!

 

Part 2: The Rest of the Story

So that’s all for part 1. In part 2, we’ll tell the story of formally establishing “The Flerlage Twins” website, our regular presentations at conferences and user groups, joining Moxy Analytics, and the incredible opportunity to speak on the keynote stage at Tableau Conference 2025. See you soon!!

 

Ken Flerlage & Kevin Flerlage, May 26, 2025