Be a David in the time of Goliaths
When I wrote about taking advantage of volatility two weeks ago, I did not imagine just how quickly the roller coaster would take off. It feels like 2026 might be a year unlike any we have lived through. It is usually a fool’s errand to predict what your business will look like five years down the road, but right now it is hard to imagine what the landscape will look like even a month out.
Uncertainty does something strange to otherwise rational people. Customers hesitate. Vendors tighten terms. Good employees start scanning the horizon. Leaders who are usually decisive begin to second guess themselves because every decision feels like it carries twice the usual risk. Everything has an asterisk attached to it.
America’s small businesses are not built to withstand extended uncertainty. Most of us operate on thin margins and limited slack. We are built for motion, not for whiplash. That is exactly why leaders need to do something that will feel counterintuitive.
Now is the time to go all in on lean, flexible, easy to pivot strategies. Lean does not mean cheap. It means less waste and faster feedback. It means fewer bets that require you to be right six months from now, and more bets that let you learn what is true in the next few weeks. Flexibility does not mean indecision. It means building your work so it can bend without breaking.
If you have projects that you have allocated six months to, break them into smaller pieces that still produce something usable. Not “progress,” something real. A process that reduces errors. A trimmed offering that is easier for customers to say yes to right now. If a project cannot produce a tangible improvement in thirty days, it is probably too big for this moment, or too vague, or both.
This is also the moment to check on the relationships that usually sit quietly in the background. The vendor who always delivers. The referral partner you have not talked to in months. The long term customer who never complains but might be quietly rethinking spending. Do not wait until you need a favor to remember the relationship exists. A simple call that says, “How are you doing, what are you seeing, and how can we stay ahead of this together?” will do more for your resilience than another late night of spreadsheet work.
Most importantly, the communities you exist in need to be shored up and affirmed. When times get uncertain, it is tempting to narrow your focus until all you can see is your own ledger. I understand that instinct. But small business depends on trust, reputation, and customers believing you will still be there next month. In an environment like this, community is not a soft value. It is a hard asset.
The future will require leaders who lead with vision, but now more than ever, leaders also need compassion and a focus on the whole community, not just their own walls. Compassion is not charity. It is clarity about what people can actually carry right now. It is choosing fewer priorities instead of pretending you can do everything. It is taking care of the relationships that will outlast whatever this year brings.
As we all tighten our belts, it is tempting to circle the wagons. The problem is that circling the wagons also blocks your view. The only way through a season like this is together. We come out stronger if we lean on each other for ideas, help each other adapt, and create new pathways forward. Along with this will come new markets, new partnerships, and new visions for what life can look like.
There will be companies large enough to weather this storm with little change, but this newsletter is not for them. Their playbook is built on scale and buffers. Yours is built on speed, trust, and the ability to make decisions without asking ten people for permission. Make sure you are not looking at Goliath to learn how to be David.
If you are feeling the pressure right now, you are not alone. The goal is not to predict the future. The goal is to build a business that can respond to it. Shorten the distance between decision and feedback. Turn long projects into small wins. Strengthen the relationships that make you resilient. Invest in your community, because your community is what will carry you through.
- Dylan
New Year, who dis?
Every January, we do the same strange little ritual. We call it a “fresh start” and pretend the calendar is magical. It isn’t, but that doesn’t mean the rollover can’t be valuable.
Look, it doesn’t look like 2026 is going to be the stable year we haven’t had for a decade, so let’s not fool ourselves. There will be volatility and risk aplenty, but any good trader will tell you that with volatility also comes opportunity.
Next year will be filled with risk, sure. But if there is no way to avoid the risk, what exactly is the benefit of thinking and acting conservatively? What the new year is actually good for is inspection that leads to action.
Call it placebo, call it the budget cycle, but the new year is perfect for setting aside some time to work ON the business, not just IN the business. Start finding new processes, systems, and organizational paradigms. Don’t go looking for a magic fix but commit to trying new ways of thinking and executing.
As I’ve discussed before, what usually slows us down isn’t a dramatic failure. It’s a pattern, a “this is just how we do it” that slowly hardens into a wall. You’re busy. You’re trying to keep customers happy, keep payroll clean, keep the wheels from falling off. You don’t wake up thinking, “Today I’d like to accidentally repeat last year’s mistakes.” You just do what worked last time. Until it doesn’t. The duct tape works until the load is too heavy.
What did you normalize last year that you shouldn’t keep?
Not what went wrong once. What went wrong repeatedly and got excused?
If you only do one thing this week: name three patterns you can’t afford to carry into the new year.
Put this on your calendar. Actually do it. No perfect setting required. Have a meeting with your leadership, board, counselors all and examine the failure points.
Look for the quiet drains: rework, repeat calls, duplicate approvals, constant “quick questions,” meetings that could’ve been messages, messages that should’ve been decisions. Were there recurring customer complaints? Did someone fail to realize that a task was their job … repeatedly?
If something keeps resurfacing, it’s not a one-off. It’s a system.
Address the things you avoided because they felt annoying, political, or “not urgent”. Be honest. This is usually the thing that quietly taxes everything else.
Now that you have the list comes the hard part. Commit to trying one thing. You don’t have to build Rome in a day, but it is imperative that you don’t avoid changing anything just so you don’t rock the boat. You won’t get it all right all the time, but that’s ok, because the old way wasn’t working.
A quick warning though, because the new year can make people reckless.
Don’t launch a new system or process just to avoid a hard conversation.
If the real issue is someone is in the wrong seat, a team that is afraid to tell the truth, or leadership keeps changing priorities midstream, then no productivity hack will save you.
- Dylan