The Flerlage Twins Story Part 2: The Rest of the Story
A couple weeks ago, we shared part 1 of our story, We Started as Babies. Today, we’re picking up the story where we left off, telling 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.
Starting The Flerlage Twins
After Kevin started his blog in late
2018, we continued writing on our own separate sites. It didn’t take long
before people started confusing the two of us. People would reach out to me to
ask a question about something he’d written. Others would post on social media
giving him credit for something I created. At first, we’d correct the problem
since we didn’t want to take credit for the other’s work, but we eventually
just agreed to ignore it and be happy that our name was being mentioned.
This was not a new experience as we
had dealt with this as children and teenagers. We had always been known as
“Kenny and Kevin” or “The Flerlage Twins”. But I had moved away 20 years
earlier and, for those 20 years, we had carved out our own identities, largely
apart from each other. While that was important, we also missed that shared
identity and we were ready to fully embrace it. This time, it would be our
choice to do so, however. So, in December 2019, we
merged the blogs,
creating one shared site, www.flerlagetwins.com.
Since then, we’ve posted a blog
almost every single week, typically alternating weeks between the two of us.
That’s accounted for hundreds of blogs—we hit 400 on June 10,
2024—the vast majority of which are focused on how to do cool stuff in Tableau.
Nine years after I started, seven after Kevin started, and six since we merged
the blog, we’re still publishing something nearly every week.
The goal of the blog has always been
to simply share knowledge. We don’t advertise on the site and we’ve made
exactly zero dollars from it. We’ve learned so much from others’ willingness to
share what they know so we just want to continue paying it forward as much as
possible. We love writing about this stuff and we love teaching others and
we’ll continue doing that as long as we can keep coming up with new stuff!!
The blog has also provided a platform
for us to highlight other voices as well. If you’re a regular reader, you know
that we openly welcome guest writers. One of our favorite things is using the
blog to highlight diverse voices, new people doing interesting things, old pros
who’ve come up with some super cool technique, or folks who have skills that we
don’t (like Don Wise and his
Regex skills).
So, if you ever have any ideas for new posts, let us know and we’d love to host
you!!
Joining Moxy Analytics
As we’ll discuss momentarily, Tableau
Conference 2022 was a very special conference in many different ways. It was
our first post-COVID conference so we were super excited to see our old friends
again. And it was our first time presenting How to Do Cool Stuff in Tableau.
But it was also the first time we met Serena Roberts, Chief Get-Shit-Done
Officer at Moxy Analytics. Serena had been in the Tableau
space for many years—she’s run the Twin Cities TUG for over a decade—but this
was our first time meeting. We immediately knew that she was our kind of person
and we hit it off right away, spending lots of time with her that week, and
becoming fast friends.
Kevin, Serena, and Ken at a TC22 event
On the last day of the conference, we
were hanging out with Serena and talking about how we’ve considered leaving our
jobs and becoming consultants, but just didn’t want to run a company. That’s
when Serena said, “You should come work for me!” I’m not entirely sure how
serious she was at that time, but it was the first time we really considered
making the jump into consulting. About six months later, prompted by that
conversation and ready for a change, we got really serious about making this
move and Moxy Analytics was our top choice. We started having conversations
with Serena and her fellow badass partner, Laura Madsen, and we just
knew this was the perfect place for us.
So, in April 2023, we both resigned
on the same day and joined Moxy Analytics. We’ve gotten to
focus almost entirely on Tableau—building dashboards, training, advising
clients on Tableau governance, etc. We’ve learned so much about different
businesses and industries and there’s so much variety that it’s impossible to
get bored. It is, without a doubt, the best job ever!!! We’re so thankful that
Serena and Laura took a huge chance bringing us on board and we’re super
excited about what the future holds for this amazing team!
Speaking at Conferences & User
Groups
My first Tableau Conference was 2017
and Kevin’s was 2018. 2018 was also my first time speaking at the conference.
That year, I presented along with fellow Tableau Visionary and good friend, Matt Chambers, and we talked
about going “Beyond Show Me” in Tableau. The
name came from a series of blogs I wrote introducing
the basic building blocks of creating custom charts—plotting x & y
coordinates and trigonometry. Our goal was to introduce these concepts to our
audience and show them that there’s so much more to Tableau than what you can
create using the “Show Me” panel. We had a great audience and received
incredible feedback and I was hooked on presenting at the conference.
The next year, Kevin and I decided to
pick up where Matt and I left off, presenting a second iteration of Beyond Show Me. We covered much
of the same content as Matt and I covered, but we dove a littler deeper showing
exactly how to apply our three pillars of custom charts in Tableau—1) Plot X
& Y Coordinates, 2) Automate using Mathematics, and 3) Data Densification. We
introduced the basic concepts of trigonometry, showed how to create radial bar
charts, radar charts, and even introduced the basics of drawing sankeys. It was
so much fun to present with Kevin and we knew that we would continue presenting
as long as Tableau kept letting us.
A terrible selfie during our TC22 presentation, taken by Kevin’s very old phone. Given the awful quality, all subsequent selfies have been taken by Ken.
When we got home from the conference,
we immediately started thinking about what we’d present for Tableau Conference
2020! We couldn’t wait!! But, as you know, that never happened. COVID hit and everything
changed. The world shifted to doing everything remotely and the Tableau
community responded. TUGs moved to completely virtual events and even teamed up
to sponsor larger events. It wasn’t long before it became clear that TC20
wasn’t going to happen—at least not in person—but Kevin and I still wanted to
present, even if it was just virtually. So, we built a presentation called A Little Obscure, a Little Random and
a Lot Useful – Tableau Techniques. Looking back now, that title is a
mouthful!! The presentation was really just a series of random tips, tricks,
and techniques. We didn’t realize it at the time, but this kind of presentation
would soon become our bread and butter (with a much more concise title!!). We
presented A Little Obscure dozens of times in 2020 to any audience that
would have us. It wasn’t the same as presenting live, but it was still an
opportunity to share with others and to engage with the community.
Of course, TC20 did happen
that year—but it was an entirely virtual event. The community sessions were
limited so we didn’t have the opportunity to present that year, but we would be
invited to present at the virtual conference the following year. That year,
Kevin came up with the idea of taking a dashboard and making it better,
providing lots of useful tips and tricks along the way. Like the previous year,
we presented “Make it Better” several times
throughout the year. And we had a lot of fun presenting it for the virtual
conference since it would be broadcast out to a huge global audience.
While Tableau and the Tableau
community did a fantastic job of bringing people together virtually during the
COVID years, we were all so happy to hear that an in-person event would be back
in 2022. Kevin and I knew we wanted to present something so we got to work on brainstorming
ideas. Eventually, Kevin came up with How to Do Cool Stuff in Tableau.
The idea was that we’d share tips and tricks broken up into four different
sections. But the beauty of this title was that we could pretty much do
anything we wanted with it. Little did we know that this would become one of
the most popular sessions at the conference and we’d continue doing a new
version of How to Do Cool Stuff in Tableau at each of the following Tableau
Conferences.
Making It Fun
We don’t take ourselves too seriously
and we like to have fun on stage, so in addition to the tips and tricks, we
always try to include a fun story in our presentations. If you’ve seen us
present, you know that I’m typically the “straight man” to Kevin’s “funny man”
(don’t worry though—I’m always in on the joke and play an active part in
putting everything together). In 2019, Kevin introduced the UFC (Ultimate
Favorites Competition) where he put us head-to-head in a competition of who has
the most favorites on Tableau Public.
The Ultimate Favorites Competition
He conveniently chose Favorites
(which didn’t even exist when I started using Tableau Public) as opposed to Tableau
Public Views, Blog Views, Community Forums Points, or any of the other metrics
on which I would have destroyed him. But that’s a discussion for another time. 😉
And, in 2022, we went back to that
well, showing how things had changed since 2019 and over the COVID years, as
well as introducing the true UFC champion, Andy Kriebel.
Andy Kreibel, the Undisputed Ultimate Favorites Competition Champion
At TC23, just a couple weeks after we
joined Moxy Analytics, Kevin went all out, creating an animated
story—completely built in PowerPoint no less—of the now-infamous ham sandwich
story.
The Ham Sandwich
Story
And that story continued in 2024,
with Kevin building another PowerPoint-based animated story of our search to
find an elusive bramble cocktail and inadvertently being dosed with absinthe.
The Great Bramble Hunt Story
You have no idea how much time Kevin
puts into these animations. He claims to have spent over 400 hours on them! You
read that right—400 hours! I certainly appreciate all that effort, but let’s be
honest—those animations eat up a lot of our presentation. In 2024, it was so
long that I had to cut a bunch of fun Tableau tips. Luckily, Tableau had
invited us to do a live interview on Salesforce+ and asked if we’d like to
share some bonus tips as well. Since I had left so many tips on the cutting
room floor, we happily accepted that opportunity. But, during the interview, I
callously made fun of Kevin’s animation, calling it a “PowerPoint Puppet Show.”
Poor Kevin…he had spent 400 hours on this and I reduced those efforts down to
nothing but a “PowerPoint Puppet Show”. Needless to say, he was sad. But in
2025, Kevin would get his revenge…We’ll get to that in a moment.
The Keynote Stage
TC22 was the first post-COVID
in-person conference so attendance was significantly smaller than in 2019.
Tableau also made some changes to the format of the conference at that time,
moving to heavier use of “silent disco” presentations on in smaller spaces,
with a higher number of presentations. Ours was a popular session so they asked
us to present multiple times at TC22, TC23, and TC24 so that people could
attend. But something crazy happened—people started waiting in line almost an
hour before the sessions even started!!
We were so humbled by this. It just
seemed crazy that this many people would come to see two data nerds present
Tableau tips and tricks! It was so wild, but we also loved it. Kevin and I both
acknowledge that our “love languages” are “words of affirmation” so this kind
of positive feedback fuels us and makes us want to keep coming back, each time
providing the audience with better and better material as a huge thank you for
their support.
Fortunately, the long lines and
multiple presentations came to an end at TC25 when Tableau announced that we’d
be presenting a “Super Session” on the keynote stage.
Tableau’s announcement that we’d be on the Keynote stage.
I mean, wow. Even now, I’m struggling
to find the words to express how this made us feel. We were so thankful to all
the amazing people at Tableau—both past and present—who worked to make this a
reality. And we were so thankful to the amazing community who continue to come
year after year. This was a once in a lifetime honor and we wanted to do
everything in our power to make it our best session ever. We had already
compiled what we thought was our best total package of tips and tricks yet
(plus some bonus tips we hoped to share during another live interview), but we
needed something even more fun than the PowerPoint puppet shows of the past two
years…
I told you I’d come back to this, so
here we go…Kevin decided to lean into the whole puppet show thing and literally
do a puppet show. On stage. In front of over 5000 people. We joked that Tableau
would be regretting their decision to give us the keynote stage after they saw
what we had planned!!
The Real Puppet
Show
So embarrassing!! But, honestly, it
was so damn fun and we hope the audience—both in-person and watching
virtually—had as much fun as we did.
As we were waiting to go on stage, we
had a conversation with the stage manager. We asked her some questions and
learned that she did not work for Salesforce, but was part of a production
company who put on the event. Kevin asked her if this was the biggest event
she’d ever done before. She laughed and dryly said, “No, I ran the Super Bowl
halftime show last year.” Haha! Clearly, this was small potatoes for her, but
for us it was huge. We had spoken to about 2,000 people at TC19, but never
anywhere near the 5000+ we’d be seeing when we walked out. There were nerves,
of course, but more excitement than anything—we just wanted to get out there
and do our thing. We knew our content and were ready to deliver it. Then we
walked out on stage, the crowd cheered and those nerves turned into energy.
There’s just something about being in front of an audience who really wants to
hear what you’re there to say, who supports you, laughs at your jokes, and oohs
and ahs about nerdy Tableau tricks. It energizes you in a way that nothing else
does. The lights are bright so it’s hard to see past the first few rows of
people, but honestly, that’s all you need as those rows are filled with the
people you love—people you know are as excited to see you up there as you are
to be there. We cannot thank those people enough for being there, giving us
familiar faces to look at, and cheering us on. We always take a selfie when
we’re on stage and wish we could have gotten every single person in the photo,
but the room was a just a little too big this time around.
Selfie from our TC25 presentation (of course, taken with Ken’s phone).
What’s Next
So, what’s next in our story? Well,
we’re just going to keep doing the same things we’ve always done. We’re going
to keep writing free content on our blog, going to keep presenting at TUGs and
Tableau Conference (as long as they keep inviting us back), and as part of Moxy
Analytics, we’re going to continue to try to give our clients the best possible
services and products we can. Will we see another Keynote stage? Who knows. As
much as we loved the experience and are thrilled about the potential new business
it could bring us, it was never the goal. The most important thing has
always been and will always be helping others to do a better job
with their data—and that’s what we’re going to keep doing.
So, while we intend to keep doing
what we’ve always done, Kevin and I have been talking about trying one
new thing…something that has absolutely nothing to do with data or analytics.
We both recently read (actually, listened to) Nate Bargatze’s
autobiography, Big Dumb Eyes. He’s about the
same age as us and grew up in the same region of the United States (him in
Tennessee and us in Kentucky) and we found that we related to so many of his
stories and life experiences. It was almost like he was our long lost triplet (I’m
sure that statement will lead to a post on Keith’s blog soon enough). I
mean, he had a chapter called “I HATE ONIONS” and we couldn’t agree more!!
Anyway, his stories got us thinking about some of our own childhood stories of
growing up in the world before time (i.e. before the internet). So, if things
go to plan, we’ll probably start writing some of those stories and sharing them
here on our blog from time to time. If you’re only here for the Tableau stuff,
that’s fine—you can just skip these. But, if you decide to go on this journey
with us, we hope you’ll have fun—we know we will!
Ken Flerlage & Kevin Flerlage, June 10, 2025
No comments: