Uncertain times

A friend of mine is an analyst for an investment bank. In normal circumstances he’d feed a company’s data into his excel spreadsheets and, because his spreadsheets are much more clever than mine, they tell him whether to make a buy, hold or sell call on a particular stock.

Of course ‘normal’ circumstances are hard to come by, so my friend usually has to combine what his spreadsheets tell him with a bit of good old-fashioned market savvy to come up with the answer.

At the moment even this is insufficient: by his own admission, his decisions might as well be made by me and some tea leaves. Circumstances have so far departed from the norm, that my guess is literally as good as his. Uncertainty rules.

Unfortunately for my friend, my tea leaves and I are not available very much at the moment. Most of my time is spent talking with buyers of consultancy about their view of the market - and suddenly that information is in demand by consulting firms, too. Clearly what I don’t do is to pass information directly from one to the other, but even general impressions from a client perspective are hugely valuable. Although a downturn is bad news for consultants, it is something they can mitigate against, by planning well, whereas uncertainty is a killer.

There's an important lesson in this for clients: if you’re in a position to offer any degree of certainty to your consulting suppliers (early visibility of projects, efficient utilisation of consultants) then you’re offering them what they want more than anything else at the moment – and might get a good deal as a result.

As for my friend; well, certainty looks a little harder to come by for him at the moment. Last time I checked, even my tea leaves were scratching their heads and mumbling about the good old days.