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A good friend of mine owns several well-established car dealerships. He once told me his approach to management was simple: his job was to open the funnels. Whenever a department fell behind, he would step in until its capacity caught up and began spilling work over to the next one. Then he would move on. Eventually every other department would overflow back onto the first, and the cycle would start again. His entire role, as he described it, was identifying and unblocking bo

My old boss used to tell me to focus on what we did best. What he meant was that we needed to go after customers who would buy the product we produced because we were the best at making it. At the time, I was working for a plastics compounding company. The plastics industry is dominated by huge players that move enormous volumes, global plastic production today exceeds 400 million metric tons per year, roughly 900 billion pounds.¹ So how could a small compounder be successful

It is now 2026, and the business environment remains sluggish at best. Are Trump-era tariffs to blame? Perhaps partially, but that’s only part of the story. By now, it is increasingly clear that tariffs are not a temporary measure. They have become a structural feature of U.S. economic policy. And with that permanence has come something markets value deeply: predictability. That predictability is beginning to influence behavior. U.S. manufacturing construction spending has su