Assess the market
Before you can react to any market conditions in an effort to improve your company’s recovery, you need to find out what your customers are dealing with.
At PricewaterhouseCoopers, Kalenka and his leadership team conduct environmental assessments of the markets they serve. Much of the information comes directly from clients.
“One of the things that we’ve been doing with a lot of our clients is an enterprise risk management assessment,” Kalenka says. “It’s actually more along the lines of assessing strategic opportunities and challenges. Clearly, every company wants to grow and do so in a way that avoids large operational and strategic risks. So it’s really understanding the competitors and what they’re doing in the same market conditions.
“Essentially, it’s envisioning the next multiple steps of chess moves on a chess board and planning to succeed around that. It’s really a strategic vision that needs to be assessed for what could go wrong. You have to assess things like market conditions and supply chain issues, then plan accordingly.”
The assessments are ongoing and continually updated based on how the markets of clients fluctuate. The assessments are dictated from the top levels of Kalenka’s team, but associates throughout the organization are given opportunities to provide ideas and advice.
“It’s a top-down approach, but there is a lot of input on the assessment,” Kalenka says. “We get a lot of that input from working directly with our clients and understanding what their strategic plans look like. We assess those, and if we see large opportunities on the horizon that our clients are pursuing, we structure it so that we can be in a position to help them execute.
“It’s really gathering intelligence from the clients we serve and hearing what their expectations are for the future as well as our own economic analysis and making sure that we’re in sync before we make those investments.”
But no matter how you do it, whether you construct a formal plan for gathering information from clients and customers or start out by informally gathering information through casual interactions, the bottom line is you need to stay close to the markets you serve in order to gauge the needs of your customers and begin to read how they’re recovering from the recession.
“Ultimately, the most valuable piece of intelligence is really talking with your customers, understanding what their plans and pain points are, if any,” Kalenka says.