Perhaps, instead of sounding off on Bill Belichick’s play-calling or offering his opinion on Barry Bonds’ chances at the Hall of Fame, Doug Hoogervorst was destined for business intelligence all along.

He performed his first BI function at the age of 12, helping his father organize sales reports. Breaking down data by dealer, model, order date, ship date – yep, it all started in bucolic New England in the early 1980s.

“I did all that on a Commodore 64,” Doug says.

Now, he’s the commodore of a growing fleet at Business Impact, which he founded in 2005. So what if he didn’t become the next Bob Costas or Tony Kornheiser?

That’s the path he wanted to take, from his early days dictating play-by-play of his own high school team’s games to his work at the Worldwide Leader in Sports.

At the University of North Carolina, Doug co-hosted a sports call-in show on the campus radio station. He wrote columns unsolicited for the student newspaper, and he’d share his theories on sports with anyone who would listen.

Doug worked a summer as an intern at ESPN, which at that point had no Classic or Deportes or dot-com attached; it was just a solitary cable channel in Bristol, Connecticut. Doug started the video highlight library there, and he sometimes played pickup basketball with the on-air talent.

Doug thought he had enough talent to try out for the junior-varsity basketball team at UNC. He impressed the coach with his work ethic; the coach impressed Doug by knowing that Hoogervorst was Dutch and not German.

But a memorable name did not carry with it a memorable game, spurring Doug to write a first-person article about the experience of getting cut. His theme: Never confuse hustle with talent.

Reminded of that lesson these days, Doug says, with typical self-deprecation, “And that is why I keep hustling.”

That same need for speed is evident in Doug’s vision for Business Impact. He saw an opening in the world of business intelligence, and it’s why Business Impact is helping a growing list of customers get better, faster results from their numbers.

“We extend faster, we deliver more thoroughly, we help people understand their data,” Doug says. “We say we’ll do it in a week, and we’ll do it in a week.”

When he worked as a sports writer at the Winston-Salem Journal, Doug recognized a need for speed in creating a program that would automatically update football standings based on scores of each Friday’s games. The tape library at ESPN was his baby, because he saw the need for organization.

Doug also learned about editing video that summer, and he created a montage of sports moments set to one of his favorite songs of the era, De La Soul’s “3 is the Magic Number.”

Now, three is a different sort of magic number. Doug’s philosophy is based on his “Triangle Principle.” (Contrary to popular opinion, Doug had this three-sided theory in his head long before Phil Jackson came up with an offense for Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant). Spend 10 minutes talking business with Doug, and you’ll probably hear, at least once, to remember the Triangle: know the business, know the data, know the tools to work with the data.

On the first day of business school, a question about Wendy’s chili hooked him. Of course, he knew neither the business nor the data nor the tools, but he learned quickly. Get Doug to tell you about Wendy’s chili sometime. Chances are you’ll like what you hear, about that and about what Business Impact can do for you.