Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
2024 Mid-Year Middle Market Indicator
500 Plays2 months ago
Join us for an insightful conversation with NCMM Managing Director, Doug Farren, as he discusses some of the key insights from the 2024 Mid-Year Middle Market Indicator.
Explore more from the most recent MMI here: https://www.middlemarketcenter.org/performance-data-on-the-middle-market
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to 'The Market That Moves America'
00:00:02
Speaker
Welcome to The Market That Moves America, a podcast from the National Center for the Middle Market. The center is the leading source of knowledge, leadership and innovative research on the middle market economy. Throughout our podcast, we will feature middle market leaders and stakeholders to hear their real world perspectives on trends and emerging issues.
00:00:22
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the mid-year middle market indicator update. My name is Doug Farron. I'm the managing director of the National Center for the Middle Market. located at the Ohio State University Fisher College of Business. Glad to be with you today to go over the data from our latest middle market indicator. um Let's talk about our agenda for the day for this session.
NCMM's Mission and Research Initiatives
00:00:49
Speaker
And usually our mid years are a little bit um less information than our year end. So my intent is to try to wrap this up in about 35 to 40 minutes.
00:01:01
Speaker
And then just as a quick reminder, any questions since the audience is all off camera and on mute, please submit those in to the Q and&A or chat. One of the two should be available on the web and our toolbar. So today I'll talk a little bit about the NCMM, the middle market and the MMI. For those of you who have been on these webinars before, you'll know all of this information, but My guess is we have some new people joining us today. I'll go through some of the latest data, particularly as we look around things like performance, confidence, investment planning, challenges, um, lots of information about mid-sized companies. Talk a little bit about the projections, what these companies are seeing over the next 12 months. And then we'll go a bit deeper into a few issues that are standing out right now.
00:01:58
Speaker
specifically around the economy, around workforce and talent, and the use and investment in
Defining the Middle Market
00:02:04
Speaker
technology. And then we'll wrap up. So the National Center for the Middle Market, as I said, we're located at the Ohio State University Fisher College of Business. We've been around since 2011. So we're actually approaching our 13th anniversary this October, which is great. um We have not changed our mission since we opened our doors. And that's really to help middle market companies grow and continue to be fundamental to the US economy as a whole. Uh, there are a lot of misconceptions about these businesses and our data is bent to uncover more information about these companies since so ah such a large majority of them are privately held.
00:02:50
Speaker
And we do that in a couple of different ways. Certainly we conduct research, including the middle market indicator. I believe this is our 41st wave, which represents the longest continually running study of the middle market by any organization in the country. We also do topical research studies. A few of our most recent reports that we've released in early June, we released a study in collaboration with Wells Fargo looking at diverse segments of ownership, specifically black and African-American owned middle market businesses. A little earlier in the spring, we also released a study on the global supply chain, which was a partnership with our Center for International Business Education and Research at Fisher College, partially funded by the US Department of Education. We conduct a number of different presentations across the country.
Economic Impact of the Middle Market
00:03:47
Speaker
I travel quite a bit.
00:03:49
Speaker
to different organizations, chambers of commerce, industry, trade groups, uh, and so forth. And we're also really excited about a new program that we've started with the Ohio, uh, chamber of commerce called the CEO forum, where we're taking middle market leaders through a series of person networking and experiential learning opportunities.
00:04:15
Speaker
Currently, our two key partners are Chubb and Visa. We work closely with those two teams to help drive the research platform as well as ah really distribute and share a lot of these insights. Again, our definition of the middle market, there are some variations to this, but we use a revenue-based definition of 10 million to a billion. At the time that we launch, about 200,000 businesses fit into that revenue definition It's constantly changing, uh, every day. And this also represents about a third of private sector GDP and employment. So it's the middle third of the economy. As I said, many of them are privately held, uh, close to 90% at this point. And just a significant driver of innovation jobs. I mean, pretty much she named it. Uh, we tend to think that these companies are pillars of their local communities.
00:05:13
Speaker
Uh, and they also, uh, tend to have big company problems with small company resources. And we'll, we'll talk about that in a little bit. So the middle marketing indicator, as they said, we've been doing this since April, 2012, we survey a thousand C-suite decision makers at mid-sized companies all across the country.
Mid-Year Report Insights
00:05:32
Speaker
We do that in partnership with a market research firm called RTI based in Connecticut.
00:05:38
Speaker
They help us access these leaders. Um, we take them through a self-directed online survey, which takes about 15 minutes and it's de-identified. So we don't know who those respondents are, nor do they know that the survey is coming from the NCMM. And that data is also weighted to the U S business census by revenue size, by industry and by geography. ah So because of that, because of the large,
00:06:05
Speaker
size of a thousand responses. We can do a lot with this data. We tend to cut it up, organize it in different ways, look at it by industry, look at it by geography, so on and so forth. So with that, I'm going to go through the new information that we have from this year's or this mid-year, which I didn't mention. We collected this data in the first three weeks of June and then the center released its mid-year report on July the 24th.
00:06:35
Speaker
So relatively hot off the press updates on the performance of the middle market. So all in all, middle market is is on fire and it has been quite honestly for the last couple of years. This is the first question in the survey. It's a very qualitative question. But as you can see, we ask these executives, just tell us how you feel about your company performance versus one year ago.
00:07:05
Speaker
And pretty consistently, ah excuse me, over the last three years, people are feeling pretty good about where their companies are at right now. Very few are saying performance is deteriorate deteriorated. Um, the average you know amount of companies have, has been hovered around mid 60% saying that they've improved. We've been well above that now for three years, prolonged recovery coming out of the pandemic, certainly, but.
00:07:34
Speaker
These companies have been very resilient since we started looking at them 13 years ago, and they continue to prove that. But as we know, there'll be some headwinds that we're going to discuss. This is our dashboard slide, it really kind of summarizes many of the key performance indicators that we track along the middle market indicator. So you start first with revenue growth, close to 13% top line growth, very strong, some inflationary impacts in there, but Again, it's been consistent for a number of surveys now. The projection over the next 12 months is about close to 9% at 8.8%. We also compare to the S and&P 500, which is essentially flat 0.2% revenue growth. Next, we look at employment 10.3% in the last year. Very strong hiring going on across a number of sectors within the middle market. We'll take a peek at that.
00:08:29
Speaker
And then over the coming 12 months, nine and a half percent employment growth projected. Compare that to small and large business. We do that through a proxy data that skits released by ADP and small business grew at about half a percent and large business at about two and a half percent in the same time period. Capital investment planning, we ask.
00:08:52
Speaker
what these companies would do with an extra dollar if they had it. 63% are telling us they're going to invest it back in their company. And we'll take a look at where that's going. And then finally, from a confidence level at the global national and local levels, which are the three we measure, confidence remains really high and ah in a consistent pattern with what we've seen in multiple waves of the middle market indicator. This gives you a better sense of the trend data since we started.
00:09:23
Speaker
A lot of information here. We used to actually conduct this survey on a quarterly basis for about the first seven years.
Sector Performance Overview
00:09:32
Speaker
We found, one, that the data didn't change all that much in a three-month time span. And there was also you know quite a bit of information to to put out into the into the general public. So in 2019, we made the decision to go semiannual. And I think that cadence has worked well for us.
00:09:49
Speaker
But you can see, you know, the middle market was doing fairly well, um, throughout most of the decade of the, you know, 2011 through up to 2019. Of course, the bottom fell out for everybody in 2020. But since that time, there's been this really robust rebound that, uh, we have yet to see kind of a return to quote unquote the norm. Um, these companies are doing great. They're, they're growing, they're hiring people and they continue to expand. So,
00:10:17
Speaker
Again, the message and the story come out of the middle market as of right now is full steam ahead.
Challenges Facing Middle Market
00:10:24
Speaker
If we double click down into this revenue growth trend, um again, I've kind of boxed here, you know, the the red line being the US middle market. We've seen, you know, pretty much now six, this will be six waves that close to 12% or higher now approaching 13% top line revenue growth. And you can see the, you know, the step step pattern of the S and P has been ah not quite as robust. In fact, close to flat over the last two surveys and the last two data sets that we've accessed. Historically, this revenue growth average has been about nine and a half percent. So you can see where several percentage points above that historical average over the last three years.
00:11:12
Speaker
And the good thing is growth remains steady for a large majority of the businesses. This isn't being driven by a group of outliers or a very small percentage of high flyers since we are reporting out in averages. This is the trend of what's been going on since 2019. If you focus on the far right column, you can see that for 82% of our respondents, their revenue has in fact increased. And for close to 60% of them, it's gone up 10% or more. So that is really strong, robust growth.
00:11:44
Speaker
up single digits in terms of revenue decreases. We're at.
00:11:53
Speaker
um The signals that we're seeing and the performance is being reported ah is indicative of a very strong middle market as a whole. We start to look at this by industry. There's really a handful of sectors that we track through the MMI business services, manufacturing, retail trade,
00:12:13
Speaker
construction, financial services, health care. We have kind of a catch all called other. We also do some special tracking for our partners where we look at technology companies. For instance, we can also cut the data and look at it by international companies that have revenue ah from customers overseas versus just only domestic number of different ways. But I'll focus attention on really the three industries that have been growing revenue the fastest since last summer.
00:12:43
Speaker
And that would be construction at just over 18%, financial services at about 16 and a half percent and healthcare at about 14 and a half percent. But the thing is all of these industries are, um, in the double digits, right? So even manufacturing at 11.2%, maybe below the total middle market average, uh, but still is, uh, strong versus historic numbers. And then on the right hand, you can see some of the projections there as well.
00:13:12
Speaker
Um, where construction and financial services are protect projecting to remain in double digit growth over the coming 12 months and services pretty close to 10% growth as well.
00:13:28
Speaker
As far as expansionary activity over the last year, it's kind of continued to decline. We saw, um, in 2023, so one year ago, um,
00:13:41
Speaker
activity for things like introducing a new product or service had peaked at close to 60% of the companies, followed by expansion into new domestic markets. And that has been on somewhat of a downward slide over the last year. Certainly when you think about some of the geopolitical issues that are going on, you think about the high interest rates, you think about inflation, that is cooling, but impacting ah you certain industries in different ways. Now we're in on an election year. There are a lot of variables being thrown into the pot that creates uncertainty. And so there's been ah some pullback, but you know certainly for many years, ah when we launched the MMI, borrowing a dollar was close to free and that continued for many years. And so we saw a lot of investment back into these companies and in some sense,
00:14:35
Speaker
ah that has been impacted by the higher rates. ah But we also know that there's all different types of creative financing that these companies can access as well. Let's double click on to the employment a bit too. So again, kind of a similar pat pattern here. We can see in the boxed area, we've got the middle market employment growth. You know, it's hovering around anywhere between 10 to 11% over the last three years, which is again, very strong.
00:15:05
Speaker
versus a historical average 13 year average of 7.7. So again, you look at the other two lines here, which represents small and large business per ADPs reporting that they publish every month. And it is consistently beating both of those two categories of businesses. So middle market is growing. They need people, they need more skilled people. And that's something we're going to talk about here momentarily.
00:15:36
Speaker
Kind of same thing here. Growth remains you know fairly constant. A majority of the companies are increasing their workforces. Over 40% are you know a hiring 10% or more or growing their workforce by 10% or more since last year. Very few are laying off. I mean, 10% or so has been pretty much the average over the last four to five waves of the MMI. So um again, the problem has been finding people, finding people that will consistently and work, that have the right skills, that ah basically want to come and work for these companies. So um the challenge has been around finding and retaining the right people. And then a similar look at the industries. Again, you're no surprise that many of the industries that are growing the fastest are also hiring the fastest. So we see,
00:16:33
Speaker
financial services and construction, which were two of the high growing industries. But also in this case, manufacturing is hiring at 14 and a half percent, which represents the highest industry sector growth across the middle market. From a projection
Investment and Future Plans
00:16:48
Speaker
standpoint, manufacturing and financial services are are projecting a really strong year ahead as our business services. Those are companies like accounting firms, law firms and B2B type organizations.
00:17:04
Speaker
And then confidence um You know, we can see here that The local economy always is the highest it's the area that these companies Operate in they are pillars of their local communities and really kind of know those areas So that's why it's it's always um You know pretty obvious when we see these numbers that the local confidence will be the highest followed by national and then global. These are all up slightly since our last survey in December of 2023. They've ticked up a little bit as things have started to prove with some of the macroeconomic conditions.
00:17:51
Speaker
Investment plans. So you we've been watching this one closely because this has been lagging a lot of the performance that we've seen out of these companies. You've seen the growth rates. um And a lot of the trend this is the the long term trend around capital investment. So you can see that you know that break kind of pre 2020 where you know sixty five seventy percent of the companies were pretty much consistently investing back into their companies and then that really some of the effects of the pandemic slowed down some of that investment.
00:18:26
Speaker
And then we had all these other issues kind of pile into that. So we've seen this lagging investment planning across the middle market. But the last three waves gives it gives us a little bit of hope that that has started to pick up a bit. And of course, you know, we'll see what happens. I'm not an economist, but read a lot about what's going on. So you you hear things like potential rate cuts later this year. We also have the election coming up. So there are going to be factors that that influence what companies are going to be thinking about for next year.
00:18:58
Speaker
And then where are they putting that money? So we think about the chart on the left. Um, it is the leading, um, destination for a lot of this capital at one in five firms saying that they're going to invest into certain tech platforms to help their business followed by plant equipment and people, the savers, uh, 40%, you know, are saying they're going to just hold onto to some cash. The other 60 would save it for some type of investment, maybe an acquisition.
00:19:28
Speaker
or maybe something else in the future that they're looking to do, maybe, you know, building a a new facility or a warehouse or buying equipment or something like that. So now we think about future expansion planning a little bit different than the chart I showed earlier. This is what companies are telling us they're going to do in the next 12 months. So again, we've got this, these factors that are lingering out there creating some uncertainty.
00:19:55
Speaker
But that being said, and in the top line there, that red line and introducing new products and services kind of key to driving growth, organic growth for these companies. That is over 60%. We've also got expanding into new markets at about 56%. You see different options that these companies are citing. Equity investment, adding new plant and equipment, taking on debt,
00:20:21
Speaker
there's a number of activities that these companies are thinking about as they think about how to grow their companies into the future. But there are challenges ahead. So if we kind of bucket these into large categories, we're hearing things around core business issues, which are, again, how do I maintain that revenue? How do I ensure my customers stay with me? How do I deal with implementing technology and and all those challenges? And then the economy in and of itself is a large issue.
00:20:50
Speaker
So we'll look at these a little bit closer.
00:20:57
Speaker
So we have asked these companies to kind of tell
Major Concerns and Workforce Challenges
00:21:03
Speaker
us about what are the things that keep them up at night. So, you know, we historically used to ask things like, what are your top three internal challenges? What are your top three external challenges? But this kind of tearing of open ended answers, so to speak,
00:21:21
Speaker
gives us, I think much better insight into what are on the minds of these middle market executives. So if you think about this list of the top tier mentioned, they're really listed in order of significance. So inflation still sitting on the minds of a lot of these companies, the cost of doing business, rising wages and salaries, uh, closely followed by employee retention and talent. I mentioned this earlier.
00:21:50
Speaker
finding and retaining the right people. How do you train them and upscale them in ways that match some of the investments that are being made in technology? So all critical issues, a lot of uncertainty is going on. We have two global wars, right? I've been going on for one for two years, one for approaching a year now. So, um, to the degree that companies participate in the international markets that can have an impact.
00:22:19
Speaker
interest rates, cash flow, technology, how are they thinking about AI? We'll talk about that here at the end, cybersecurity risks, so on and so forth. And then just again, day to day operations. Um, some of the top emerging risks, again, very similar to the list I just showed. So no surprise inflation and talent shortage, the potential for a recession,
00:22:47
Speaker
supply chain disruptions, as we've seen over the last couple of years. These are all um kind of emerging as the top risk that companies think about when they're running their organization. So um not much has changed over the last year and a half. These have remained pretty consistent in terms of their ranking. Climate change is something that we is new that we asked about in this survey.
00:23:16
Speaker
ah Close to half of the companies are saying that they're extremely or very concerned about the impact of climate change on their companies. 16% extremely, 32% very concerned. What are those concerns in terms of the specific things that would disrupt them? Weather, supply chain interruption, pollution, working conditions, ESG, you could see some of these things on the list. but Really, it's a lot of the extreme weather that we continue to see across the country in different areas. And then supply chain disruptions can certainly, you know, basically knock an entire operation out of business for for an extended period of time. So it's thinking about how to deal with those. We have seen a pretty significant decline in the amount of supply chain disruptions since 2021, which is a good thing.
00:24:10
Speaker
But again, it's it's a concern for a lot of these companies as it relates to climate. And then in terms of overall disruptions, about you know six out of 10 in these companies have said they've been disrupted in the last two years. And that has mainly been around areas that involve cyber and data protection. So with the introduction of all these new systems, and whether it's collecting customer data or internal data, that all needs to be protected from potential breaches,
00:24:41
Speaker
from potential hijacking, ransomware, all these types of things. So I think I may have mentioned this in a prior webinar. We've done some work previously, particularly when we were partners with Cisco looking at cybersecurity in the middle market. And unfortunately, our observations have been that a lot of middle market companies don't consider themselves as targets. They view it as a mainly a large company issue.
00:25:07
Speaker
But in fact, middle market companies are prime targets simply because they may not have put as much protection or as robust protection around their own data security. And another finding that we had out of that work was that a lot of these businesses don't even realize they've been breached until eight to 10 months after the breach has occurred.
AI Adoption and Technological Progress
00:25:29
Speaker
So certainly an issue to to consider then strategic disruptions, operational disruptions and so forth.
00:25:37
Speaker
I mentioned that supply chain disruptions in the prior six months kind of continues to flip level out from a high in 2022 of a 55%. Yeah. That's when we were seeing container ships, you know, sitting outside of ports and empty shelves in the stores and a lot of the ripple effect of shutdowns and things that occurred in the early days of the pandemic. Those have started to iron themselves out somewhat.
00:26:07
Speaker
And now we're seeing about a third of the companies saying they've been impacted in some way, shape, or form by supply chain disruptions. In fact, I was with a group of CEOs recently who had suppliers located in both the Middle East and Eastern Europe, and they were feeling the effects of the wars that are going on. So having to think about different sources of supply, different countries, which then has a ripple effect into increased costs and potential lead time. So, um,
00:26:38
Speaker
Definitely an issue for the middle market. They're not immune from supply chain disruption.
00:26:46
Speaker
Finding employees with the right skills, a lingering challenge as well. Again, you can see kind of the historical data presented here over the last six waves. Right now we're looking at 46% of middle market companies saying that they are challenged by finding the people with the right skills, 92%, almost all of these companies face some degree of challenge. Um, but about half of them say this is a real big issue for them. And so that creates the issue of building, developing your own internal training, just a lot of of things that play here. And we talk about the workforce, let alone retaining these people, right? It's, it's one thing to, to have,
00:27:35
Speaker
career fairs or big job fair events, hire a bunch of people, but then how do you keep them at your company? It's something that the middle market struggles with pretty consistently. And so once you've invested a lot of money into training these people, you want to make sure that they, that they stick around and can grow and benefit from the growth of the company. Digital skills in particular remain a ah big issue. Um, so, you know, we think about this information here at the top,
00:28:03
Speaker
Does your company have a digital skills gap? 45% are telling us, yes, they do. And 63, so about two thirds percent, it's two thirds of the company's 63% say that it is significant or substantial to the point that it affects or slows down company growth or creates areas for improvement.
Resources and Future Engagements
00:28:28
Speaker
So again, this is only going to become a larger issue.
00:28:31
Speaker
as more and more technology comes on board that is scaled appropriately for the use within the middle market. Um, you think about things like PRP systems. Um, you think about things like CRM systems, you think about things like cloud. I mean, these are all areas that the center has looked at previously and they've all started to become more, um, tailored to the needs of the middle market. And so we're just going to see more and more digitization, uh, into the future.
00:29:01
Speaker
And so it's how does the workforce keep up with that is a question that these companies are going to have to answer.
00:29:13
Speaker
ah Wages. So, you know, maybe curious about kind of overall wage growth in the middle market. um Close to 70% of the companies have increased wages in the last year. That average rate, if you take it across all these companies, about 5.6%.
00:29:32
Speaker
very small fraction of companies have decreased wages. So again, as we think about the impact of inflation, cost of living adjustments, really honestly, just remaining competitive, uh, in this battle for talent and battle to keep people, uh, wages have had to increase accordingly. And we've seen that pretty consistently, you know, about five and a half to almost 6% over the last two and a half years.
00:29:58
Speaker
So if you are a middle market business owner, you may be dealing with this. And, um, again, in, you know, the war for talent, it's one of the things that's necessary when you think about how to keep your best people, which leads to kind of our last area around digitization and AI. Um, we, we really want to know how these companies are thinking about their technology roadmap. So over the last couple of years,
00:30:24
Speaker
kind of post pandemic, we've seen a steady increase in the number of companies that say they have a technology roadmap. So actually thinking about this a little bit more strategically than just, you know, chasing the shiny new toy, so to speak. So 53% say they have a roadmap now. How robust is that? How formal is it? How implementable? I mean, there are a lot of questions around this, but on the surface,
00:30:53
Speaker
At least there is some degree of planning that is going in to how to implement technology. Now the resources, the time, the cost, the distraction, potentially those are all other separate issues for ah the leadership team to deal with goals. No surprise. Productivity remains at the top of the list, followed pretty closely by cost savings, improve customer experience, experience saving time.
00:31:21
Speaker
creating competitive advantage and and creating more efficient and happy employees. that Those are the primary advantages of what these companies are looking to get out of digital. And as we think about the challenge around finding the right people, in some cases, you know we we look to technology to potentially replace um some of the tasks that are You know, primarily repetitive, maybe mundane. A lot of people don't really necessarily want to do or like to do. Those are great areas where technology can step in and kind of create that efficiency. Barriers, as I mentioned earlier, right? Middle market companies are oftentimes resource constrained. Leadership time. People. Budget.
00:32:15
Speaker
Expertise, right? Small departments, whether it's IT, HR, finance. So this is a really consistent theme. Particularly as we think about the lower end of the middle market, you know, companies under 55, 50, even $75 million dollars tend to deal with this a lot more than some of the lot you know at the larger end of the middle market. Cost, lack of resources, time, management support,
00:32:43
Speaker
Again, all barriers that could impact a digital strategy. AI, ah still a hot topic. A lot of questions are here out there around this. We have been tracking now for a year and a half. It's been a slow journey of adoption for the middle market. We've only gone up to about 13% of the companies saying that they are using AI actively in their companies right now. That being said, the chart at the bottom is ah is a bit interesting.
00:33:13
Speaker
20% of business services firms say that they're already using AI. So think about chat bots, customer service related functions. Um, even looking at data analytics, a lot of more uses perhaps in that industry, which is why we're seeing a higher adoption and earlier adoption. And then to no surprise, ah again, at the larger end of the middle market, we think about a hundred million and above revenue companies.
00:33:41
Speaker
30% are actively testing, 15% are already using AI. So a bit higher adoption at the upper end of the market. Most companies have had a great experience with it. Over 80% say it's been positive, um how they've used AI, where they're using AI, data analytics, automating, again, like I said, routine, mundane tasks, doing some machine learning applications,
00:34:08
Speaker
language processing, more chat GPT, like AI, generative AI. um and For about a quarter of the companies, they tell us all of this. like We are doing a number of different things with AI. That CEO group that I mentioned earlier, you know they had some interesting comments around and kind of wanting to kind of see where trends go. Again, one said like every month they try to think of a new area where they could test it,
00:34:38
Speaker
and They create a list of, again, what are the most repeatable things that nobody really likes to do? Let's start there. Let's go after those opportunities. So um having a roadmap on these things can be really helpful.
00:34:54
Speaker
Functions have remained pretty consistent um from a from a year ago. You think about things like analyzing data, it's gone up a little bit, improving efficiencies, customer service, collecting data. And in the future,
00:35:08
Speaker
you know We're going to see um a little bit more around customer service, around collecting data, around using it to drive innovation, using it a bit in the supply chain. So certainly plans to use AI going forward. But like I said, with this comes a lot of questions. There are you know issues around privacy, security, ethical considerations. What is it going to do to my current workforce?
00:35:36
Speaker
How do I integrate this into my existing platforms, education and training of people who are using the AI? So this is really just a, again, roll up of a lot of the open ended responses that we received about risks that are out there. So to summarize, like I said, the middle market's humming along. We're seeing consistent revenue and employment growth. We're seeing a rebound in,
00:36:06
Speaker
investment planning over the next 12 months, we're going to see some expansion. And I think that will be impacted by what happens in the next six months in particular, the challenges remain kind of some of the elements of the macro economy, dealing with a very fluid workforce and uncertainty really, as it relates to the election, the wars, the lingering inflation.
00:36:33
Speaker
But AI is a tool that I think a lot of people are talking about, but as we saw in the data here, the adoption remains a little bit slow. These aren't fast movers when it comes to adopting something new like an AI, but it's answering those questions of how does this best help my company, which is going to be different by the industry that you're in, but by the size company that you're in and by the issues that you're looking to address with AI. So,
00:37:02
Speaker
lots of experts out there who have tips and practical advice. ah If you're a middle market company and you want to think about how to start your AI journey, a lot of information out there to pick through and kind of create that plan. Last thing I want to talk about is our NCMM membership. So we launched this about two years ago. We have eight members currently. It's really designed for middle market companies. So a lot of our partners,
00:37:33
Speaker
our large service providers, even going back to our Genesis with GE capital and then moving in with some of our other partners like SunTrust Bank and Cisco and now Chubb and Visa. But we really want to design an avenue for maybe smaller companies in the middle market who directly want to work with the center. Some of the benefits include things like getting more behind the scenes access to some of this MMI data, getting specific and NCMM programming,
00:38:03
Speaker
access to our Fisher and OSU students and more. So if this is of interest, I would encourage anyone to go to middlemarketcenter dot.org. There is a tab at the top of the menu bar, work with us. You could submit ah an inquiry and someone from our team will get back to you to collect more information and kind of talk about the process. It is a $10,000 annual um contribution to the center.
00:38:31
Speaker
We are part of the university. So as part of the university foundation, there are some benefits to making that contribution, but we're not necessarily allowed to provide any tax guidance or advice. So I'll put in that as a disclaimer, but we'd love to grow this group. I mean, it's great getting our current members together on a quarterly basis for open houses. We talk about issues that they're facing and they get to talk to each other, share some information. And then again, benefit from a lot of the,
00:39:01
Speaker
the data that the center collects. So with that, I'm going to wrap up um the mid-year webinar. Our site, middlemarketcenter dot.org is where you can go to find the report itself. A lot of this historical data we have out there. i So I would invite you to access all those tools tools as well. We will continue fielding questions as they come in. If we don't get to your questions immediately,
00:39:31
Speaker
We'll try to respond to those after the webinar. And we're looking forward to do a great rest of this year. We'll have students coming back to campus here in a couple of weeks, get the fall semester started at the university. And then we've got some really exciting projects that we've got teed up at the center, including one with a group at called AON, who's helping us look at some of the growth factors and how middle market companies prepare for growth as they think about risk management and human capital. We're really excited about that one. And of course, our next middle market indicator will be collecting that data in December and then releasing the report toward the end of January, 2025, which then will mark close to 13 full, well, yeah, almost 14 full years of data on the US middle market. So appreciate your time, appreciate your support. And if you have any other questions,
00:40:30
Speaker
you know post this event, please don't hesitate to reach out to us. I hope you enjoy the rest of the summer and we'll talk to you again soon. Thanks. Thank you for listening to The Market That Moves America. Never miss a new episode by subscribing anywhere podcasts can be found. You can also subscribe to our email newsletter at middlemarketcenter dot.org.