Read the money before you pick the offer

It is December, and you are in the truck outside a job site with a legal pad on the dash. The page says NEXT YEAR across the top. Three columns: what we sell now, what to add, what to drop. The middle column is the problem. It holds three friends’ opinions, a webinar’s worth of trends, and a guess about what your town “needs.”

You spent twenty years running training for a unit in uniform, and you built a nine-person firm that delivers safety and certification courses in your county. You know how to plan. You do not yet know what to plan for, and a national trend report does not help, because your customers live in one town.

So I start with where the money is going. It is rarely hidden. The announcements run every morning in the business journal, in contract awards, in the county agenda packet, in funding news. Few owners look, and then they call the market mysterious.

How do I find out what my town will pay for next year?

Watch where money is landing and ask what demand it came to fulfill. When I read a money story, I read three properties.

The first is the vector. Money goes from someone to someone. An institution is the headline, and a person signs it out and a person receives it. Keep digging until you have names. They are often a few searches away.

The second is the volume. How much. A number.

The third is the velocity. How fast it moves, and this one matters more than owners expect.

Here are two events from a county east of Houston. The hospital district passes a bond for a new tower, about two hundred forty million dollars, disbursed over six years. In the same month, the state announces a three million dollar workforce credentials grant that has to be spent in sixty days. Both are real money. Both are landing in your county. They are not the same opportunity.

The bond feeds patient businesses that can win a place in a long procurement chain. The contractor, the subs, the inspectors, and eventually hundreds of new employees who all need credentials, onboarding and safety training. You can start building relationships in the supply chain now and deliver in year two. The grant feeds whoever is standing in position when it opens. If you have the curriculum, the approvals and a relationship with the agency on day one, you win it. If you start on day thirty, you are reading about the winners.

Same dollars. Different game.

Why do I read it like a panel of instruments?

A pilot flying a cross-country reads three numbers all the time: the heading, the fuel on board, and the groundspeed. The heading says where the airplane is going. The fuel says how much there is. The groundspeed says how soon it arrives, and it decides whether a stop is needed. Two airplanes with the same fuel and the same heading land at very different times.

Vector, volume and velocity are the same three numbers for money. The vector is the heading, the volume is the quantity, and the velocity is the groundspeed. The bond and the grant had similar volume and a different groundspeed, which is why they asked for different moves from a nine-person training firm.

Who can tell me where the money is heading?

Your commercial banker and the investment community are the weather people. Pilots get a briefing before a long flight, and you can get one too. When your banker invites you to dinner, go, and ask where the market is going. They will tell you which plant did not come and who is about to be let go, well before it is announced.

Commercial real estate brokers have the longest vision in a region. If they bought a piece of land, they know why they bought it and when the county road is coming through. Spend a little time with them every month.

Then read for the clock. A company three miles down the road brings in a team on an eighteen-month contract, and they are spending. That is real demand with a window. Tune into it and you can serve it. Hire twenty people for it and you have built permanent overhead on temporary money.

I grew up near an Air Force base that ran about thirty thousand students through a training school, and the town drank from it. Then the base closed and nothing replaced it. So after “who is spending,” ask “for how long, and what comes after.” The answer can be nothing, and it is better to hear that from a log than from a foreclosure.

The bridge

The order is read first, pick second. Most owners pick the offer and then look for money to carry it. Where the money lands tells you which gap is open, and the gap tells you what to sell.

The tool is a log, and it is free to use: vector, volume, velocity. Once a week, same day, thirty minutes, for eight weeks. After eight weeks you will have a picture of your market that most firms like yours have not seen. Most of them could. They have not looked.

It also changes how you take things. When a rival lands a contract you did not see coming, the vector was announced weeks earlier. When your market goes quiet, the velocity of its money changed, and that was announced too. None of it is aimed at you, and nearly all of it is legible.

The move for this week

Block thirty minutes on a day you can repeat next week. Open your metro business journal, one national financial outlet, and your county’s latest agenda packet.

Find three capital events: a contract, a grant, a bond, an expansion. For each one, write five lines.

Who it comes from and who receives it, with names where you can find them. The amount. The period over which it disburses. One sentence on what demand this money is here to fulfill. And your intercept point, the place along that flow where you, your people or your service could stand.

Put a next action beside the best intercept. Do the same thing next week. By the end of eight weeks, the middle column of your legal pad will fill itself in.