Last week I wrote something that came out harder than I meant it to. I said if you did business with the US and hadn't spent the last eighteen months working to cut that reliance, you'd failed your business and everyone in it. I still believe the substance of it. Concentration risk is real, and most of us who'd tell a client to diversify have some version of the same blind spot sitting in our own numbers. I've had that blind spot myself, more than once, and it's an easier thing to preach than to fix.
There's a second truth I didn't leave room for, though, and it deserves its own post instead of a caveat tacked onto the last one. Sometimes you plan well. Sometimes you execute on that plan, on time, with real conviction, and it still isn't enough. A supplier you've worked with for a decade closes a plant with three weeks notice. A customer who has bought from you every quarter for years freezes their spending because their own customers just did the same thing to them. A number that made your model work at 8am doesn't work by the time you check it again after lunch. None of that is a planning failure. It's just what it looks like when something bigger than your business moves and you happen to be standing in the way of it.
Owners like to believe that if we just work hard enough, plan carefully enough, diversify wisely enough, we get to keep the outcome in our own hands. Most of the time that's true, or true enough that believing it keeps us moving forward. This isn't one of those times for everyone. Some businesses right now are doing everything right and still watching the ground move under them, and the honest thing to say to those owners isn't a framework or a percentage to calculate by end of day. It's that the business is what it is right now, and it either finds a way through this or it doesn't. No amount of strategy changes that for everyone, every time, and pretending otherwise is its own kind of dishonesty.
I've run a business through a stretch where forces well outside the building decided how the next quarter was going to go, and there's a specific kind of exhaustion in that, different from the ordinary kind. It isn't the tiredness of working hard. It's the tiredness of not being able to fix the thing that's actually hurting you, no matter how many hours you put in. If you're an owner living through that right now, I'm not going to pretend I know exactly what you're facing, because every situation is its own. I do know what that particular kind of tired feels like, and I know it's not a sign you did something wrong.
So today isn't a lesson. It's a request.
A friend sent me a video this week of small businesses along the border, the kind that sell to Americans crossing over or depend on parts and materials crossing the other way, talking about what these tariffs are doing to them in plain, unrehearsed terms. Not talking points, not a press release. Real people standing in their own shops describing what it's like to watch a year of planning get overtaken by a decision they had no part in and no warning of. It's worth ten minutes: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/-p_pzkFz5yY. I watched it twice.
Businesses like the ones in that video are the backbone of this country. Not the banks, not the equity firms, not the giant corporations with a balance sheet built to absorb a bad quarter and barely notice it happened. It's the shop on the corner, the manufacturer with forty employees, the family business three generations in that everyone in town has a story about. Thousands of businesses just like them make up more of the Canadian economy than the headlines usually credit, and a lot of them are having the hardest year of their existence through no fault of their own, run by people who did the work and are still getting hit anyway.
Chances are you already know one of them, even if you haven't put the two together yet. The client of yours whose orders slowed for no reason you could see. The supplier who quietly stopped answering as fast as they used to. The person at your kid's hockey game whose business card you have in a drawer somewhere, who used to talk about growth and lately just seems tired. Most of the businesses carrying this aren't the ones making the news. They're the ones already in your life, absorbing it quietly because that's what owners do, and most of them will not ask you for anything even when they need it.
I don't have a five-point plan for that, and I'd be suspicious of anyone who claimed they did. What I have is the same thing every one of us has: a choice about where we spend, this week and the next few months, while this works itself out at a level none of us control. Buy from the Canadian business instead of the cheaper import when you can afford the difference. Choose the local supplier over the American one when the quality and price are close enough that it isn't really a sacrifice. Ask your existing vendors whether there's a Canadian alternative before you assume there isn't one. Tell an owner you're thinking of them, or leave a review, or just show up, because most of the ones I know are carrying this quietly and could use knowing someone noticed. None of that fixes a trade policy or moves a tariff schedule. All of it keeps a payroll running one more month for someone who's earned the chance to get through this.
I'll add one thing that's mine to offer rather than yours to do. If you're running a Canadian business that these tariffs have actually hit, and you're trying to work out what to do about it, reach out. Through LinkedIn or through robertsongroup.ca both work. I can't promise you an answer, because nobody has a clean one for this right now. What I can do is listen, walk through what you're actually facing with you, and help you find the next couple of steps instead of staring at all of it at once, hoping it resolves itself. No charge, for as long as I have the capacity to keep saying yes to that.
We built the businesses we're proud of one decision at a time, mostly decisions inside our control. This is a week to remember they don't stand alone, and that the businesses around us are worth showing up for even when there's nothing in it for us beyond having done it. None of us gets through the years that test us without someone choosing to notice. This week, be that for somebody else.