When the ground shifts, check your footing before you run
The US announced new tariffs on Brazilian imports this week while simultaneously expanding the exemptions list. Both things are true at once, and that combination is the part worth paying attention to. If you source anything from Brazil, or from suppliers who do, your cost structure may have moved. If you are in a category that landed on the exemptions list, your competitors just got a different playing field than they had yesterday. Neither outcome is final. The exemptions list has changed before and will change again. What a steady owner does right now is not scramble to reprice or renegotiate. It is pull out the supplier list, identify the two or three relationships where a shift in tariff status would actually hurt, and make one phone call this week to find out where things stand. That is the difference between responding to the terrain and reacting to the headline.
Mike Michalowicz spent years watching businesses die with revenue on the books and no cash in the account. The owners were not lazy or unintelligent. They were solving the wrong problem at the wrong level. What he built in *Fix This Next* is a hierarchy: sales sits at the base, then profit, then order, then impact, then legacy. Each level depends on the one below it being solid enough to stand on. The tariff news this week will send some owners straight to repositioning, marketing pivots, or pricing strategy conversations. Those are real conversations. But if your cash position is fragile right now, a repositioning conversation is the wrong order of operations. You cannot fix a messaging problem when you cannot make the next payroll run. Find the actual broken level first. Solve there. Then move up. Michalowicz's work is worth an hour of your time: [Fix This Next, Mike Michalowicz](https://mikemichalowicz.com).
Learn from someone who's done it: W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne — What is Blue Ocean Strategy?