You’d be hard-pressed to find a better motto for Calvin and Hobbes than “there’s treasure everywhere.” Bill Watterson, the strip’s artist, thought it fit so well that he even used it as the title for one of the comic’s collections. The eponymous line is spoken when Calvin, after digging in the yard for hours and finding nothing more than rocks, a weird root and some grubs, happily shows off his bounty.

This same sense of optimism can and should guide your company’s forays into the world of Big Data.

Large-scale projects are popping up that are designed to cull billions of interactions and speak to the greater human experience. However, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a lot of value in smaller projects that you can do without a huge expenditure on infrastructure. With a small amount of FileMaker development, your business can begin getting valuable insights without needing to add an entirely new department to analyze it.

A recent article in Ad Age spoke to just how many insights can be yielded when you just start looking.

“There really is data everywhere that you can tap into right now that will help you understand how customers, suppliers and others view you, your company and your products,” writes author Jim Louderback.

Finding out more about your potential consumer base and how you can best serve them doesn’t have to be an endeavor that bankrupts you. Instead, you can grab a copy of FileMaker, roll up your sleeves and start digging in your own backyard. There could very well be buried treasure cleverly disguised as old rocks.