It landed on Jacob Belk’s doorstep almost a decade ago, totally out of the blue.
A package. It showed up at Belk’s California home bearing a Wisconsin postmark and an air of mystery. Since Belk hadn’t ordered anything online, he opened the box gingerly, unsure what delights or disappointments might be lurking inside.
“It was several packages of cheese curds,” Belk recalls, laughing at the memory, “along with a really nice note from Todd.”
‘Todd’ is Todd Tomalak, a principal in the building products advisory at Zonda who’s based in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Belk also works at Zonda, as a vice president in that same advisory.
But 10 years ago, when the curds-by-courier mystery was unfolding, Belk and Tomalak were working together at a different firm. At Tomalak’s request, Belk took on a project he now describes as “a doozy. It was really, really tough, and, in order to complete it, I had to put in a lot of hours working late at night.”
Belk burned gallons of midnight oil, finished the thing, then promptly forgot about it. But Tomalak didn’t.
“Todd is the kind of person that goes that extra mile,” says Belk. “He really appreciates the human element of work. He’s the type of person to take time out of his day and FedEx a package of delicious cheese curds from Wisconsin to Northern California, just as a thank you and a recognition for the work that I put in.”
Tomalak is a renowned forecaster in the building products industry, a role that’s drenched in data. Yet that “human element,” as Belk puts it, may be what truly sets Tomalak’s work apart.
Nuances Beyond the Numbers
Tomalak crunches myriad data to forecast future trends such as demand, prices, and spending in the building products sector. The Chicago Federal Reserve has lauded him as the most accurate forecaster in his category—11 times. His findings are regularly cited by media outlets like The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and CNBC. Tomalak’s value as a forecaster goes beyond his prescient, uncanny accuracy, however.
“What I aspire to do is produce the most thoughtful, nuanced building products forecast and overall analysis in the industry. I try to ask really good questions and then try to find clever ways to answer those questions in the data that we have,” he says.
Producing a thoughtful, nuanced forecast means going deeper than the data. Tomalak relentlessly strives for context, clarity, and relevant, actionable insights for Zonda’s clients, says Matt Samson, a vice president in Zonda’s building product advisory based near Boston.
“Todd will say ‘here’s why this matters’ or ‘here’s why we’re talking about this.’ He starts with this very broad creativity and brings it down to a very practical level of ‘here’s the two things you should take away and think about.’ And it’s very powerful,” says Samson.
Creativity? In building products forecasting? Tomalak comes by it honestly.
Renaissance Man
Tomalak is a pianist who studied music in college before switching majors to mathematics. After graduating with a math degree he later earned a master's degree in business administration. He’s an avid woodworker. Referencing jazz greats Miles Davis and Bill Evans as well as the movie The Princess Bride, he also shows he is a bit of a Renaissance man whose diverse interests inevitably seep into the forecasting process.
“Todd will bring in academic journals. He’ll quote pop culture. He talks about Columbia Record and Tape Club and the way people listen to music. One of his citations the other day was from an Alanis Morissette song. He has this really interesting way to link it all to what’s happening in the building industry, and it’s the furthest thing from dry,” says Samson.
For Tomalak, storytelling is just as important as facts and figures. On LinkedIn, he recently shared a page from an 1899 academic journal, marveling at its “great writing.” His last building product forecast featured newspaper ads from the 1920s and a photo from the May 1985 edition of Better Homes and Gardens. It’s clear that when Tomalak formulates his outlook for the future, he sees value in what we might learn from looking back at history.
“Most forecasters learn about some sort of technical tool and apply it to the fastest and easiest data they can get,” says Tomalak. “But a lot of cycles that happened in the past, that aren’t captured in the recent data, might be really important for us to understand.”
He points to the last few years of steep, quick rate hikes as an example. While some analysts compare this trend with similar Fed moves in the 1970s and '80s, Tomalak casts his gaze all the way back to the 1920s. He points out similarities between the 2020s and the Roaring '20s: a giant economic recovery (post-pandemic today, post-World War I in the 1920s), an underbuilding trend, product shortages, labor shortages, and massive leaps in technology.
“It would be foolish for us to ignore that [history] just because it wasn’t conveniently in the data that all of us want to start grabbing up because it’s fast and easy,” he says.
Oh, the Humanity
Tomalak is ranked 407th among flipper pinball players in the state of Wisconsin. He explains the ranking as completely accidental: The North American pinball championships just happened to take place less than 2 miles from his house in Green Bay, and his son really, really wanted to go.
“I have no talent in pinball, but I have enthusiasm and I like being with my son,” says Tomalak, who’s also the proud father of a daughter.
Tomalak brings the same sense of adventure and openness to forecasting.
“I love the constant discovery and curiosity of things. When our team stumbles across something that’s a surprise—even if we have to change our forecast, even if we change our view—that’s a win,” he says.
Yes, the most accurate of forecasters is OK with things not always turning out exactly as predicted. It’s because he sees data as one part of the puzzle, not the whole thing.
“I think the mistake that most forecasters, analysts, and a lot of economists make is they’re so quick to substitute models for knowledge,” he says. “Models are not knowledge. They’re just a diagnostic tool for us to test and quantify what we believe is true in the universe, and then prove or disprove what we know.”
There’s one thing Zonda and its clients know for sure, though. There are no other forecasters out there like Todd Tomalak, deliverer of sound, reliable economic forecasts and, sometimes, surprise appreciation parcels filled with Wisconsin’s finest cheese curds.
