It’s hard to believe we’re already almost halfway through 2022. With the calendar turned to June, leaders of distribution firms are all wondering what the second half of the year holds in store for business conditions.

MDM CEO Tom Gale and Indian River Consulting Managing Partner Mike Marks discussed the current and 6-month economic picture for distributors in a lively discussion last week, in which Marks emphasized that ambiguity is clouding the picture for most business leaders who are looking for guidance going forward.

“There’s a ton of information out there, and a bunch of it is conflicting,” Marks said before relating the current situation to the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“If you listened to media and watched TV, you were convinced you were going to die,” he quipped. “You had a bunch of talking heads repeating what other talking heads said, and the people who did well were the ones who actually went back to the source data. People have to find their own way forward.”

Marks went on to say a lot of the economic doom-and-gloom “noise” will fade away as distributors find their way forward.

“People survive recessions all the time. We’ve gone through huge ones recently,” Marks said, referring to the pandemic-induced impacts from 2020’s economic shutdowns and the 2008-2009 Great Recession. “It’s not the end of the world or anything. Things are just hard.”

Listen to Mike and Tom’s discussion in the embedded audio player above.

This topic of economic discussion was also addressed at-length in MDM’s 2022 Mid-Year Economic Update free webcast that aired June 2 and is now available to watch on-demand here.