Stay ahead of the curve
Change is a fact of life in business, andthe only way you’re going to be able to stayon the basics of drilling down on your company’s core competencies is to make sureyou’re going to understand what in themarket is going to affect your company inthe coming months and years.
Whitley received some firsthand experience with that in the late ’90s when customer demand was shifting from importsteel to domestic.
“At that point, the majority of Ranger’sinventory was made up of mostly an importorigin, and there had been a continual trendby customers to demand more steel manufactured in the United States,” Whitley says.“We charted this, plotted this and realized thetrend was becoming more cumbersome tobuy large quantities of imported steel, so weshifted our focus to buying a majority ofdomestic steel. Today, 95 percent of ourinventory is made in America.
“If we had just continued to stock 100percent import, we would have lost a significant portion of our customer base.”
The key to reacting to market changes isto not waste time. If your research says themarket is shifting, prepare to shift alongwith it — or even beforehand, if possible.
“If you meet and react to these changesearly on, you’re more able to maintain control of your business,” he says. “New eventsare going to happen constantly. That’s justthe nature of business. In Ranger’s business, that’s been our blueprint. When theseevents do happen, we look to see howthese events might interact with or compromise our blueprint. Then we relate tohow we’re going to change to that. We’revery careful.”
Keeping ahead of market trends requireskeeping up on the latest industry news viathe media outlets that serve your industry,but your knowledge base shouldn’t beginand end with trade journals, newspapers orwhat you see on television. You need eyesand ears on the ground.
Representatives of Ranger Steel cultivateand maintain relationships with customersand vendors both in the U.S. and abroad.The representatives in the field stay in frequent contact with their superiors, whichallows information to well up within theorganization, giving Whitley and his management team a view of where the marketsthey serve might head in the near future.
“Staying ahead of the curve on purchasing requires our purchasing department to,at times, look nine to 12 months in advanceon buying commitments,” Whitley says.“You have to have a lot of exposure whenyou’re looking that far down the roadbecause the market can make changes upor down in a certain time period.
“We spend a lot of time nurturing partners,the people who make steel, and we try towork with them and communicate withthem very closely through face-to-facemeetings where we exchange frank andhonest market information about what isgoing on in the steel industry. We have beenable to nurture a reliable group of vendors,both domestic and foreign, that we continueto depend on for our product line.”
