Prep work

None of us can time markets exactly. Even if we could, what’s the use without a plan when we get there? This is the crux of the Eisenhower quote about planning being everything, even if they’re useless. Knowing directionality and intensity, with ideas of what then will go a long way. Markets go tight and loose regularly, whether via the long cycles or seasonal runs, so there should be no real surprises.

In 2021 I met with a brilliant small group in a regular check-in to discuss the market. We’d noticed the fever was at least breaking, most evident by falling pressures in the back half of the year. We had no idea when the bottom would eventually fall out, but the destination was inevitable, if not sooner than later. We then took to task asking what we’d do and how we’d react to the gradual or more abrupt changes ahead.

Over the next few months we’d build and log various levers to tune or override our intelligent systems as needed. Their job is to process everything already known better than anyone while it was mine to make calls about what we didn’t yet know. The result was no small part in bringing the highest EBITDA quarter in company history in 2022 as the market capitulated.

The lessons and humility following that period entrenched the idea about constant preparation, in keeping a developmental joust prepared for impact 6 to 12 months ahead. Once we all recognized the bottom was falling out, my next worry began about a soft and fiercely competitive doldrum period ahead.

Which gets into a mix of the technical and non-technical preparation before the seasonal runs or big turns in momentum. As cycles move from high to low, organizations on either side of the transportation transaction will also adjust. It’s usually a push/pull of volume and budget or profitability. All intelligent systems have to have one probabilistic goal.

If the system’s goal is to perpetually maximize the budget, or discover the lowest price, at certain junctures or phases this will become a liability versus a differentiator. Systems aside, for the last 2+ years, the mantra has been to get bottom dollar. How ready or experienced are the organic intelligences inside the org for a time when the word budget comes with a fill-in-the-blank over a brow beat?

Consensus has begun to build that short of mayhem, 2025 will be a brighter one for the beleaguered. Some say we’re already there while others wait on Q2 or later. The timing makes for jitters around awards set to start ahead.

Novices and the ill-prepared will find themselves swept up in another flurry of reactivity, whiffing, while the one’s who put in the practice know their strengths and weaknesses well enough to know where to take their shots.