Unlocking Opportunity During Uncertainty
The leaders winning right now aren’t the ones who predicted every disruption.
They’re the ones who accepted that disruption was the new normal and built systems and mindsets that can repeatedly identify, assess and mitigate them.
What makes this moment genuinely difficult isn’t a single disruption. It’s that the underlying forces most businesses count on being stable, or at least slow-moving, are all shifting dramatically at the same time. Costs, currencies, trade policy, customer behavior: any one of these changes alone would be enough to derail a solid business. Right now, leaders are navigating all of them simultaneously:
Plastics costs are up nearly 20%. The Iran conflict has disrupted oil and gas flows through critical transit corridors, squeezing the petrochemical feedstocks that plastics depend on. Polyethylene, polypropylene, packaging resin; prices are moving fast and showing no signs of stabilizing. If you’re in manufacturing, consumer goods, or anywhere along that supply chain, higher costs are impacting COGS.
The Chinese Yuan is one of the only currencies strengthening against the dollar. While most Asian currencies are weakening under global pressure, the CNY has actually gained ground. That matters if you’re sourcing from China, because your landed costs are climbing even before tariffs enter the conversation.
Tariffs are a moving target. We’re looking at roughly 30% on most Chinese goods (and far higher on categories like EVs, solar, and steel), 18% on India, and 25% on countries doing business with Iran. The uncertainty itself is the problem: businesses are delaying decisions in hopes that tariffs will be reduced, or absorbing costs they didn’t account for.
Layer in shifting customer behavior, tightening credit conditions, and AI rewriting demand assumptions across entire categories, and you have an environment of volatility and uncertainty not experienced in decades. The leaders who recognize that are already thinking about how they need to run their businesses differently.
So how are the best leaders addressing these disruptions, and what systems and mindsets are they building to manage them on an ongoing basis?
1. Hedging raw material purchases. The use of options and hedging strategies is growing because raw material categories that were once predictably stable, like plastics, have become genuinely volatile. Forward contracts and options allow businesses to lock in pricing before the next shock hits, fixing input costs so they align with the fixed pricing already committed to in customer contracts.
2. Diversifying your supplier base. Single-source dependencies have become a liability. Companies that import need flexibility, not only to minimize tariff exposure but also to continuously chase the lowest material costs. This is particularly critical for value brands operating on thin margins, who have neither the cushion to absorb rising costs nor the ability to pass them on to consumers, a position made worse by retailers who are pushing for lower MSRPs while input costs keep rising.
3. Running scenario planning. At its core, scenario planning is about building the flexibility and agility to respond quickly when conditions change. That matters enormously right now, because responding to foundational disruptions to your business model is consuming an enormous amount of owner and CEO bandwidth. I hear it often: leaders feel they have no choice but to make pricing, sourcing, and supplier decisions their full-time focus until the problem is solved. And they’re right, because without the ability to deliver product at a viable price, there is no business. But the cost of that focus is significant. Day-to-day operations suffer when the person at the top is focused elsewhere. Scenario planning doesn’t eliminate that pressure, but it reduces the pressures by giving the leadership team pre-strategized responses, giving the owner/CEO the control to respond with focus AND keep the business growing.
4. Building a cash cushion. If you’re already in the middle of a crisis, building a cash cushion probably isn’t an option. But that’s the lesson. Businesses that entered this period of volatility with excess capital available have options. Going forward, the discipline of keeping liquidity won’t be a crisis response; it will be an operating principle that gives businesses the ability to gain share when the next disruption hits.
The one thing owners/CEOs can do right now is stop waiting for stability to return and start building their business as if it won’t. The leaders who come out of this period stronger won’t be the ones who survived the disruptions. They’ll be the ones who used them to build resilient systems and organizations that know how to adapt to change at lightning speed.
Marc Drucker
To learn more go to https://www.linkedin.com/in/marc-drucker/
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