By: Natalie Johnson
By the time economic reports confirm that demand has changed, businesses may already be reacting to conditions that have been unfolding for weeks or months. For Micah Swick, President and Chief Operating Officer at Bernards Furniture Group, the better approach is to watch the signals closest to the customer and build an organization flexible enough to adjust without waiting for perfect certainty.
“The news, the government reports, they’re always 30 to 60 days behind,” Swick says. Instead, he looks to major e-commerce partners whose national reach and ability to generate consumer demand can provide an early read on where the market is heading.
The Fastest Signals Come From the Customer
For Swick, the most useful market indicators are often found in changes to order fulfillment and order requests from large e-commerce retailers. These businesses operate at national scale and have sophisticated visibility into consumer behavior, making their performance less vulnerable to the individual factors that can distort results at a single brick-and-mortar location.
“When shifts begin to happen with those accounts, especially on a national level, then we know that we need to be paying attention to it,” Swick says. Seasonal trends can provide a baseline, but meaningful deviations from that baseline are harder to anticipate. Businesses need to recognize when a trusted signal has moved beyond normal seasonality and respond accordingly.
When the Fundamentals Change, Strategy Has To Follow
Bernards Furniture Group saw one of its most consequential shifts when the economics of low-price, highly promotional furniture began to deteriorate. Logistics disruption, higher shipping costs, rising product costs, and raw material inflation changed the value equation for budget-oriented products.
“There were times when freight was going to cost more than the actual product just to get it from point A to point B,” Swick says. When landed cost fundamentally alters the economics of a category, maintaining the old operating model can become more dangerous than changing it.
Decisive Leadership Does Not Require Perfect Preparation
Organizations cannot always prepare for change before it arrives, and fast-moving disruptions create an uncomfortable leadership reality. “There isn’t always time to get things ready in your company before you make a change,” Swick says. “You can’t be prepared for everything.”
The shift away from Bernards Furniture Group’s historically promotional model was not immediately popular internally. The company had spent years operating that way, and changing direction challenged assumptions that had become deeply embedded in the organization.
Swick’s approach was to communicate transparently and give leaders the context needed to understand why the business was changing. “Leaders have to move with decisiveness and confidence even when it takes time for some of their team members or maybe a lot of them to get on board,” he says. That balance of decisiveness and communication is central to turnaround leadership. Consensus can be valuable, but waiting for universal agreement can be costly when market fundamentals are moving quickly.
Look Beyond the Industry for the Next Signal
Swick also looks outside furniture for clues about what may be coming next. Banking, the stock market, other retail categories, and developments in AI all form part of his broader view of the economy. “It’s important not to be too focused on ‘your’ or ‘our’ industry,” he says. Businesses are affected by forces far beyond their immediate competitive set, from consumer confidence and investment trends to technological change.
The underlying strategy is less about predicting the future perfectly than developing the ability to recognize change early enough to act. Whether the issue is tariff volatility, logistics disruption, inventory reduction, or operational modernization, companies that continually monitor the signals around them can create more room to respond. For Swick, moving first does not mean acting recklessly. It means having the discipline to recognize when the fundamentals have changed, make the necessary decision, and bring the organization along with it.
Micah Swick shares more about his approach to turnaround leadership on his LinkedIn profile and on the Micah Swick official website.
