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Discuss the strategic importance of forecasting at your organization (or in one with which you are familiar). Provide two examples of ways that forecasting could improve organizational processes or strategic decisions. Support your rationale with evidence from the readings or external research.

Forecasting allows the business to make informed decisions creating goals for future deal flow necessities, budgeting, and sales forecasting at the company I currently work for. We cannot make up arbitrary numbers for any of these decisions. We use our own statistical data to formulate and analyze all areas of the business, when data is available. Our firm uses both qualitative and quantitative data. On the qualitative side, we utilize market reports and expert driven data to determine where in the market our investment products may be best suited. For instance, there are various channels for investments including wire houses, banks, broker-dealers, RIAs, Family Offices and Endowments. Using qualitative data, we eliminated wire houses, broker-dealers and banks from our targeted markets as our investment strategy did not fit their investment criteria. From the quantitative side, we use previous sales figures to determine and forecast sales for future quarters in each division or market that we are focused on. This information is helpful as we can determine how many properties, we need to underwrite each quarter to fully invest monies received. We also can extrapolate how much of a marketing budget to spend on each market segment. The pandemic and previous recessions have shown to be problematic for our business and forecasting as these ”black swan events” are difficult to account for, as we saw lower than expected demand for 2020. We are however able to look at the 2008 recession and its recovery to provide some guidance in our forecasting for 2021.

Beattie, A. (2020) Business Forecasting: Understanding the basics. Investopedia. Retrieved from: https://www.investopedia.com/articles/financial-theory/11/basics-business-forcasting.asp