The quarter is drawing to a close and I don’t know about you, but it’s certainly been interesting.
Here at Taskmaster Enterprises we’ve had a lot of trouble planning – markets are so choppy that things can be way up one week, and way down the next.
The last month has been better…but my team and I are still a little struggling to get a really solid feel for the market.
So I’m going to do something about it – I’m embarking on my quarterly market intelligence-gathering session.
It’s pretty simply really. I call our 10 biggest customers and get a feel for where they are at. I choose the one who seems to have the most to say and I arrange to meet them for lunch.
Then I do the same with our suppliers – 10 calls, one lunch.
Mostly, I am trying to find out what they are seeing in the market, where they are investing (or not investing) and the sort of levels of activity they are anticipating.
This isn’t about hard and fast data of past performance. It’s about getting a gut feel for where the market is heading.
Get it done – today!
Andrew Sadauskas is a former journalist at SmartCompany and a former editor of TechCompany.
