If last year taught us anything, it’s that uncertainty isn’t an occasional disruption. It’s the new baseline.
Government shutdowns. Tariffs. Interest rate swings. Global conflicts. Remote work amplifying competitive pressure from overseas service providers.
And we hear how business owners react every day — they’re reluctant to hire, invest, or expand. Not because they don’t see opportunity, but because the downside risk feels harder to quantify or predict.
So, the question for 2026 is this: how do we position ourselves to succeed, safeguard what we’ve already built, while facing the uncertainty of the future?
Sources of Uncertainty
Last year was a whirlwind, and every headline felt like a turning point.
Tariffs threw a wrench into the economy. Global conflicts disrupted supply chains and energy markets. Federal grants were halted or clawed back, upending the nonprofit world overnight. Inflation cooled, but its cumulative impact is still a downward pressure on consumer spending, forcing companies to be creative to remain competitive.
What’s different today isn’t just the number of variables, but how quickly sentiment shifts. A single announcement can push customers to delay spending, lenders to tighten standards, or investors to reconsider their plans.
As one of our sales leaders sees it, economic forces are more pronounced than they were 15 or 20 years ago. The economy is more interconnected than ever, and small disruptions influence business outcomes (and perceived outcomes) faster than ever.
As a result? Decision-making stalls.
The Freeze Response (And Why It’s So Common)
When uncertainty hits, many businesses default to safety.
- Delaying hiring
- Pausing capital investments
- Pushing big decisions to “next quarter”
It can be prudent to pull back at the right moment. Still. Constantly dealing with uncertainty is exhausting. And while owners know they should be building for the future, it feels risky to make a move when assumptions may have to change on a dime.
But what if there was a better way?
What if you knew exactly where your finances stood, how much pressure you could withstand, and went to bed confident in your decision-making?
It’s possible.
The Remedy: Think Like a CFO
If you want to plan for an uncertain future, forecasts, projections, and long-term thinking is the way to go.
CFOs aren’t focused on the present moment, as a bookkeeper might be. Nor are we focused on recent quarters or years, like a tax accountant is.
Rather, we focus on the future.
What happens a year from now, or three years from now, if this happens? If we do this? How do we position ourselves in the best light for lenders or investors? And how do we plan for growth while protecting ourselves from downside risk?
The Difficulty of Long-Term Planning
Forecasting is a lot easier in theory than in practice.
We wrote about the theory behind how to do financial forecasting. The basic framework is probably pretty familiar:
- Start with your current cash balance.
- Build a budget, accounting for all anticipated expenses and revenue, and predict the next month’s cash balance.
- Project that prediction as many months into the future as you can.
- Inform your decision-making with conservative and optimistic what-if scenarios.
- Update the prediction as time passes and actual data comes in.
Most business owners understand this intellectually. So the problem isn’t the concept, but execution.
Putting pen to paper, or rather a keyboard to a spreadsheet, in a way that accounts for everything is challenging on its own. And that’s before the uncertainty of planning six, twelve, or eighteen months in advance enters the picture. Budgets don’t have three or four neat categories. Expenses can come from a dozen line items. Revenue doesn’t always arrive on time or in full. Vendor costs fluctuate. And marketing spend (and ROI) rarely follows a smooth curve.
Luckily, long-term financial planning is something you can learn (or get help with).
Accounting as a Tool, Not a Task
Many companies treat accounting as a check box on a to-do list. Close the books. Send the reports. File the tax return. Move on.
That approach keeps business compliant, but doesn’t help leadership make decisions.
Companies that navigate uncertainty best use their financials as a planning tool. They ask questions like: What happens if revenue dips next quarter? How much flexibility do we really have? What choices do we have if a customer pays late, or a lender tightens terms?
This is where forecasting and scenario planning come into play, but also where confusion around financial roles can appear.
An Essential Ingredient: Clear Month-End Closes
We discover this all the time during consultations with prospective clients: the difference between CFO work and accounting at large isn’t very well understood.
Before you’re ready for CFO thinking and long-term planning, the day-to-day details need to be on hand and easily accessible.
- If your head is in the present, organizing the books, categorizing expenses, sending invoices, preparing for tax season, and checking bank balances at the end of the month, that’s not CFO work. It’s bookkeeping or accounting work.
- If you’re thinking about the future — a year or more in advance, typically — developing what-if scenarios, and planning on involving third-party lenders or investors, that’s CFO-level thinking.
Regardless of where you are in your business journey, we can help.
Preparing for the Unknown: Without the Guesswork
There’s no single “perfect” forecast. But there are ranges, base cases, pessimistic plans, and upside scenarios.
Planning for uncertainty doesn’t mean having a crystal ball. Rather, it’s about acknowledging multiple futures are possible, and making sure they don’t catch you off guard by deciding, in advance, what actions to take.
Cash is a central focus. Profitability matters of course, but cash determines whether a business can weather delays, downturns, or unexpected shocks. Forecasts can uncover issues early, while there’s still time to respond calmly instead of reactively.
And that’s perhaps the most important benefit of long-term thinking: planning removes emotion from moments when emotions are running high.
Rather than mulling how every new headline might impact your business, you can define triggers in advance, and have a plan of action prepared for multiple probable scenarios.
Your Next Step
If you’re curious to learn hear CFOs think, from an actual CFO, we encourage you to attend our upcoming webinar: Inside the CFO’s Playbook: Metrics That Matter.
It’s the third in our four-part series, scheduled for January 22nd at 2pm Eastern, and designed to help business owners zero in on the KPIs that matter, anticipate problems before they become disasters, and read their numbers with the confidence of a tenured financial professional.
Even if you’re here after that date has passed, you can still use the sign-up link to access the replay.
