“I don’t know what you do.”

Somewhat to my surprise, a person responded to one of our periodic outreach mails with “I don’t know what you do.”  I confess I don’t always understand the question, and suspect that at least sometimes neither does the person who asks it.

Entrepreneurs are doers and their thinking is often tacit, evidenced in a pattern of action, so you can make allowances for a native suspicion of “mere theory.”  Doubly so when it comes attached to some form of expertise, finance and economics in our case.  Tom Sr. covers the problem of experts and their views at greater length in his podcast, and the entrepreneur’s suspicion is well-justified.

The problem with experts is, their outsized accomplishments/knowledge in one arena easily leads them to think they have outsized qualifications in others.  Hubris creeps in.  Their expertise does not extend completely, or at all, over the individual firm, particularly an innovative one.

But back to that question…we combine financial, economic, and operations data to help people formulate forecasts.  That’s “what.”  “Why” or “how” get fairly involved, but is there really a question about the value of forecasting?

Actually there is, and I’ve heard it enough in my career.  We’re already doing it, it can’t be done, business is static and repeat and it doesn’t need to be done.  Right. 

In truth, forecasting is an exercise that mostly seems to not matter, except when it does, it really matters, and if it’s not been an established habit, playing catch-up in a crisis doesn’t have great odds for success.

Maybe the truth of it is, it’s like life insurance.  Mostly boring, and we’d rather not think about the payout,  It’s not quite as morbid as that, and the positive parts I’ll talk about in the next post.