Often as I work with small businesses, I find they assume their market is unchanging and static. They are so tightly focused on trading in their market that they miss the trends in the market around them: they can count their sales, they can describe their customers, they know their competitors but they are blind to the big picture.

Once I have got them to agree that market trends might impact their business health, I write these four headings on a piece of paper to capture what they know about their environment:

1. Changes in Society
What social changes are happening? What demographic changes affect your business? What migration effects have you noticed in your neighbourhood? Are your customers getting older or younger? Do particular age strata, racial groups or cultural clusters buy more or less of your products or services?

2. Technology Changes
Which new techniques might use costly inputs more efficiently? How could difficult or wasteful processes be avoided using technology? What current products are being displaced? What technology changes are happening to products that are similar to your own?

3. Movements in the Economy
Which groups have more or less money? How are prices moving? How are supply and demand interacting? What barriers to market entry are increasing or reducing? What are exports and imports doing to your prices?

4. Politics and Government Actions
What might your governments do to pass laws, assert policies, change taxes and provide subsidies? (repeating this question at local, regional, state, national and multi-state levels.) How will changes elsewhere impact your business? What are law-makers doing? What opportunities do you expect? What threats do you fear? What conflicts might impact your supply lines?

Being aware of trends enables you to exploit change
All these questions will stir up what you already know about your market and how it is changing: now assemble the jigsaw pieces into the whole picture.

If you and your business partners schedule 40 minutes every month to discuss your answers, you can start to develop products and services that lead your market, you will begin to anticipate what your customers want tomorrow and your business will cope better with what the outside world throws at you.

The clients who I coach find that building news awareness into their monthly business routines enables them to move before their competitors, getting the best opportunities to turn a profit.