Bauchgefühl mit Daten

A CFO I met recently is a part of a 70-person machinery company. He told me straight up: "We make our market analysis on gut feeling. We don't work with data yet."

I wasn't surprised.

I'd have been if he told me they backed everything with data.

What I hear instead from people running these companies:

• "That market feels big, we should look at it."
• "Nobody's really serving this use case, that could be us."
• "A competitor moved into Poland, maybe we should be there too."

And that instinct is usually a good one.

It comes from decades of experience and more often than not it's pointing somewhere real.

The problem was never the gut feeling.

It was acting on it without knowing what the data would say, and believing that finding out would take forever.

In his mind, validating a hunch meant a strategy project: a consultant starting at 20,000 francs, Googling around for three months, handing back a slide deck.

So the gut feeling just sat there, unconfirmed for a year, sometimes acted on and sometimes quietly dropped.

Instead of a four-month project, he briefed me and 72 hours later had the full map of where it made sense to go and where it didn't.

The goal was never to replace his intuition.

Combine it with data, and that gut feeling becomes something you can build on instead of something you defend.

In the first week, you know which markets are worth looking at.

Within a month, you have the full competitive picture, who's already there, and a real plan for each one.

That's the difference. A gut feeling backed by something you can act on.