Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from Matt Chesler – Deutsche Bank.
Matt Chesler – Deutsche Bank
You commented that you saw an impact in the third quarter and continuing into the fourth quarter. Can you give us some more commentary on the progression of the trends that you're seeing in your businesses as the months rolled out in the third quarter?
David Blythe
I think you can say that September 15, which is the day I believe that Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy and Bank of American announced that it had taken over Merrill Lynch, I think, was a [seminole] date in the quarter. I think from that date forward with some of our financial customers we saw very erratic volume on a going forward basis. With a lot of our retail customers, we saw increasing caution about their outlook for the fourth quarter.
This is relatively new. It's less than six weeks old so I don't think I can give you any progressive trends throughout the quarter other than we have seen volumes and events not roll out as anticipated as volumes declines.
Matt Chesler – Deutsche Bank
If you would just talk about your historical experience with the business. As you approach the fourth quarter, a typical fourth quarter, in generality is there a sense of how much of the revenue in a given quarter, particularly in the fourth quarter is what might be considered as known revenue and how much of the revenue base might be subject to project related work that comes and goes in any normal quarter and also as related to work you might expect to pick up as the quarter progresses.
David Blythe
I part of the problem is, what's the definition? We do a series of projects for our customers and we've been doing them for some of these customers for 20 years. For retailers as an example, our historical fourth quarter experience is that we end up with more money spent by retailers than we "have known" going into the fourth quarter. It's been a historical trend and it's based on the behavior of retailers to adjust their plan on a real time basis during the holidays.
We are certainly not seeing that as much this year. We're not seeing incremental retail dollars being spent yet, and we're already toward the end of October. So that is a change from what we've seen in the past. This is not about customers going away, and this is not about customers shutting down, but a lot of what we do is volume based, and volumes are down.
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