Geopolitical Risk
A hardware store owner in a small town checks a supplier invoice in July. Fittings are up nine percent since spring. She’s never shipped anything overseas. She’s never read a tariff schedule. And she just became a data point in three separate reports on world events and small business, published within the last year and a half.
Three different reports, published over that stretch, all say the same thing in different ways: world events are hitting small businesses harder than big ones, and small businesses have less room to take the hit.
This isn’t just about companies that do business overseas. If you buy inventory from a regional supplier, price out a job months in advance, or bill clients in an industry where prices swing a lot, you’re exposed too. World events don’t need you to cross a border. They just need to touch your costs. And that reaches almost everyone eventually.
Small Businesses Are the Most Worried, By a Wide Margin
Sentry, an insurance company, surveyed 625 business owners and executives in August 2026. At companies with 10 to 49 employees, 90% said they’re more worried about their future than they were at the start of the year. That’s a big jump, 21 points. At companies with over 1,000 employees, only 69% said the same thing. That’s a real gap.
In the same survey, small business owners were asked a harder question: are you unsure your business will even survive? 90% said yes. And 65% said they’ve already been hurt by world events, not worried they might be, actually hurt. 95% said they’re struggling just to keep up (Sentry Insurance, 2026).
This Isn’t New. It’s Been Building Since 2009
Here’s a fair question: maybe 2026 is just a rough year, and it’ll pass. A separate report from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation, published back in the spring of 2025, says otherwise. They looked at what big companies have been telling investors for years, and found that mentions of geopolitical risk have more than doubled since 2019, and quadrupled since 2009. This isn’t a one-time spike. It’s been climbing for over a decade, across every industry, not just companies that do business overseas (U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation, 2025).
So 2026 isn’t an outlier. It’s the newest, sharpest point on a trend that’s been building for a long time, and one that was already documented before this year’s events even happened.
So Why Is 2026 Different?
A third report, from the investment firm BlackRock, points to what’s actually driving things right now: conflict in the Middle East, tech competition between the U.S. and China, and ongoing trade tension. All three are happening at once, and BlackRock says this is pushing governments and companies to care more about security and stability than about doing things the cheapest way (BlackRock Investment Institute, 2026).
Put the three together and you get a clear picture: real, active events are driving things right now, on top of a trend that’s been building for years, and it’s landing hardest on the businesses with the least room to absorb it.
Why Smaller Businesses Feel It Worse
A big company can shift its budget around, spread risk across dozens of suppliers, or eat a bad quarter without the whole business being at risk. A ten-person company running on tight margins usually can’t do that. The same problem hits harder when you don’t have much room to absorb it. That’s the whole story, in one sentence.
What To Actually Do About It
Four simple things, based on all three reports:
- Figure out which of your costs are actually tied to trade or supply chain issues: imported materials, freight, anything tied to one region or one shipping route.
- Check on those specific costs more often, like every quarter instead of once a year. It costs you almost nothing and catches problems early, and it’s exactly what 70% of surveyed executives say they’re already doing (Sentry Insurance, 2026).
- Have one real backup plan for your biggest point of exposure: a second supplier, a price you’ll raise if costs jump, a cash cushion with an actual number attached to it. You’d be in good company: 61% of surveyed executives say they’re already building backup plans like this one (Sentry Insurance, 2026).
- Check in on this on a set schedule, not just when it’s already in the news. Reacting late is exactly what’s wearing people out right now.
Bottom Line
This isn’t bad luck. Three separate reports, from three different places, all point the same direction: small businesses are carrying more of this weight, with less room to carry it, and it’s been building for years, not just this one. You don’t need a Fortune 500 budget to close that gap. You need to check on this stuff on a regular schedule instead of only when it’s already a problem.
Please note: The observations and insights in this post are general in nature. The Muninn Group shares general analysis and observations in this Insights section. Specific strategic recommendations for your business require a direct engagement where your particular situation, market, competitive position, and financial reality can be assessed properly. Your first consultation is always free. The Muninn Group will not hand you a deck full of buzzwords.
Works Cited
BlackRock Investment Institute. (2026, August). Geopolitical risk dashboard. https://www.blackrock.com/corporate/insights/blackrock-investment-institute/interactive-charts/geopolitical-risk-dashboard
Sentry Insurance. (2026, August 4). Business uncertainty up sharply as economic headwinds reshape C-suite decision-making. PR Newswire. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/business-uncertainty-up-sharply-as-economic-headwinds-reshape-c-suite-decision-making-302842395.html
U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation. (2025, April 22). Geopolitical shift: Corporate America’s growing focus on global risk. https://www.uschamberfoundation.org/emerging-issues/geopolitical-shift
Geopolitical Risk
A hardware store owner in a town of eleven thousand people checks a supplier invoice in July and finds galvanized fittings up nine percent since spring. She has never shipped a product overseas, negotiated with a foreign government, or read a tariff schedule in her life. She is, nonetheless, a data point in three independent research reports on geopolitical risk, and not a marginal one.
Three independent bodies of evidence, an acute midyear survey, a decade-plus longitudinal trend, and a real-time institutional risk index, converge on a single conclusion: geopolitical exposure is no longer a variable confined to multinational balance sheets, and the businesses least equipped to absorb it are experiencing it most acutely.
This is not a story about firms with international supply chains. It is a story about ordinary commercial relationships. A single-location retailer sourcing inventory from a regional distributor, a contractor pricing materials months ahead of a job, a consultancy billing clients in a currency-sensitive industry: each shares the same exposure. Cost and confidence shocks that originate in trade policy and geopolitical instability propagate through ordinary supply chains and pricing sheets, irrespective of whether the business itself ever transacts across a border.
I. The Acute Signal
Sentry Insurance’s 2026 C-Suite Stress Index: Midyear Report, based on a Wakefield Research survey of 625 U.S. executives at businesses with at least 10 employees, published August 4, 2026, documents the sharpest divergence by firm size the survey has recorded. Among executives at companies with 10 to 49 employees, 90% report greater concern about their business’s future than at the start of 2026, a 21 percentage point increase. Among executives at companies exceeding 1,000 employees, the comparable figure is 69%. A separate item in the same instrument asked small business leaders directly whether they were uncertain their business would survive; 90% indicated they were. Sixty-five percent reported having already experienced negative impacts from geopolitical events, not anticipated impacts, realized ones, and 95% reported difficulty keeping pace with the rate at which external risks are evolving (Sentry Insurance, 2026).
II. The Longitudinal Baseline
Isolated survey data invites a natural objection: perhaps 2026 is simply an unusually volatile year, and the finding will not persist. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation’s companion research, Geopolitical Shift: Corporate America’s Growing Focus on Global Risk, published in April 2025, addresses this directly. The Foundation’s analysis of Fortune 250 financial disclosures and earnings calls finds that references to geopolitical risk have more than doubled since 2019 and increased fourfold since 2009, with the methodology explicitly controlling for time-bound events such as the COVID-19 pandemic to isolate an underlying structural shift rather than a crisis-driven spike. The shift spans all sectors of the economy, not exclusively multinational or technology firms (U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation, 2025).
This reframes the acute 2026 finding considerably. The Sentry data does not describe a single anomalous year. It describes the most recent, and most severe, data point on a trend line that corporate America has been tracking in its own financial disclosures for over a decade, and that the Chamber Foundation had already documented well before this year’s acute divergence emerged. What has changed in 2026 is not that geopolitical risk exists. It is that its rate of acceleration has outpaced the planning tools most businesses, particularly smaller ones, currently use to manage it.
III. The Proximate Driver
BlackRock’s Geopolitical Risk Dashboard, updated August 2026, provides the market-facing complement to the two survey-based sources above. BlackRock’s assessment attributes accelerating fragmentation to three concurrent forces: conflict in the Middle East, U.S.-China technology competition, and broader trade tensions, each of which BlackRock identifies as actively exposing vulnerabilities in the global economy and prompting governments and firms to prioritize security, resilience, and sovereignty over cost efficiency in infrastructure and supply chain decisions (BlackRock Investment Institute, 2026).
Taken together, the three sources describe a coherent causal structure rather than three unrelated data points: a proximate driver (active conflict and technology competition, per BlackRock) operating against a longitudinal backdrop of rising corporate attention to geopolitical risk since 2009 (per the Chamber Foundation), producing an acute divergence in executive sentiment that falls disproportionately on smaller firms (per Sentry).
IV. The Capacity Asymmetry
The mechanism behind the size-based divergence is structural rather than psychological. A large enterprise can typically reallocate budget, renegotiate terms across a diversified supplier base, or absorb a quarter of compressed margin without threatening the business’s continuity. A ten-person firm operating on thinner margins and a narrower supplier base frequently cannot, which is precisely why an identical external shock registers as existential concern for one and manageable friction for the other. Brett Hoopingarner, National Sales Director at Sentry, frames this explicitly as a capacity question rather than a resilience deficit: smaller businesses are not managing risk less capably, they simply have less structural slack to absorb it (Sentry Insurance, 2026).
V. Implications for Planning
Four steps follow directly from the evidentiary structure above:
- Identify which cost-structure line items carry direct exposure to trade policy or supply chain disruption: imported materials, freight, any input tied to a specific region or chokepoint. This inventory step is consistent with practices already reported by the 70% of surveyed executives who have shortened their planning horizons in response to 2026 conditions.
- Reassess exposed line items on a shortened, fixed cycle rather than folding them into an annual review. A quarterly reassessment of a volatile input costs little and captures shifts an annual cadence would miss entirely, particularly given BlackRock’s finding that the underlying drivers are active and evolving in real time, not static.
- Document one contingency for the single largest point of exposure identified in step one: an alternate supplier, a pricing-adjustment trigger, or a defined cash-reserve threshold. Sentry’s finding that 61% of executives are building additional contingencies suggests this has become standard planning practice rather than an exceptional measure.
- Treat this assessment as a standing, scheduled item rather than a reactive one. The 95% of small business executives who report struggling to keep pace with external risk are, definitionally, responding to events rather than anticipating them.
VI. The Bottom Line
The convergence of acute survey data, a decade-long disclosure trend, and a real-time institutional risk assessment does not support the conclusion that small businesses are simply experiencing a difficult year. It supports the conclusion that they are structurally exposed to a macro environment that has been intensifying since at least 2009, accelerating sharply in 2026, and landing hardest on the firms with the least capacity to absorb it. Closing that gap does not require the balance sheet of a large enterprise. It requires treating geopolitical and trade exposure as a standing element of planning, reviewed on a fixed schedule, rather than a background condition addressed only once it becomes unavoidable.
Please note: The observations and insights in this post are general in nature. The Muninn Group shares general analysis and observations in this Insights section. Specific strategic recommendations for your business require a direct engagement where your particular situation, market, competitive position, and financial reality can be assessed properly. Your first consultation is always free. The Muninn Group will not hand you a deck full of buzzwords.
Works Cited
BlackRock Investment Institute. (2026, August). Geopolitical risk dashboard. https://www.blackrock.com/corporate/insights/blackrock-investment-institute/interactive-charts/geopolitical-risk-dashboard
Sentry Insurance. (2026, August 4). Business uncertainty up sharply as economic headwinds reshape C-suite decision-making. PR Newswire. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/business-uncertainty-up-sharply-as-economic-headwinds-reshape-c-suite-decision-making-302842395.html
U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation. (2025, April 22). Geopolitical shift: Corporate America’s growing focus on global risk. https://www.uschamberfoundation.org/emerging-issues/geopolitical-shift