At the end of January 2026, I opened a FedEx invoice and saw a number that didn’t make sense. A routine shipment of custom products from one of our overseas manufacturers had been hit with tariff charges that, a month earlier, didn’t exist.
I checked another invoice. Same thing. Then another. By the time I finished going through the stack, I realized this wasn’t an accounting error. It was the new normal.
In the first seven weeks of the year, my company paid roughly $40,000 in tariffs we hadn’t budgeted for. When I ran the projections for the full year, the number came out to approximately $450,000.
That’s not a rounding error. That’s the difference between growing and just surviving.
I didn’t create this problem. I can’t negotiate with it, outwork it, or innovate around it. But I still have to deal with it. And how I chose to deal with it turned out to be more important than the problem itself.
The Overnight Shift Nobody Prepared For
We import over a million dollars worth of custom products annually from manufacturers in China and India. For years, most of our shipments qualified for what’s called the de minimis exemption.
If a shipment was under $800 in declared value, it entered the country without triggering tariffs. That’s how small and mid-size importers like us operated. It wasn’t a loophole. It was the rule.
Then the rule changed. The de minimis exemption was eliminated. New tariff rates were applied across the board. Every single shipment now gets taxed based on its declared value.
For China alone, rates climbed as high as 150% before settling around 62%. India sits at 18%. There was no transition period. No phase-in. One month, our cost structure worked. The next month, it didn’t.
The hardest part wasn’t the money itself. It was the uncertainty. Rates kept changing. Policy announcements contradicted each other.
There’s a 150-day congressional review window that everyone in our industry is watching, but nobody knows what comes out the other side. You can’t plan around a number that might change next week.
The Decision That Defined Everything
When tariffs hit, the textbook move is to raise prices immediately. Pass the cost to your customers, protect your margins, move on. I didn’t do that.
It wasn’t because I’m generous. It was a calculated bet. We operate in a competitive market. Our customers have options. If I jacked up prices overnight while competitors held steady, even temporarily, I’d lose accounts I spent years building.
Some of those relationships go back to when I was making cold calls in 2013.
So we absorbed it. For months, we ate the difference between what our products cost to import and what we charged customers. Our margins shrank. Our cash reserves took hits we could feel.
Every week was a conversation about what we could afford and what we couldn’t.
Only recently have we adjusted prices, and even then, just enough to keep us afloat. Not enough to restore our old margins. Not enough to recoup what we already lost. Just enough to make sure the doors stay open and the orders keep shipping.
It’s been a daily balancing act between staying solvent and staying competitive. Neither side gives you much room to breathe.
What I Learned About Responding to Things You Can’t Control
The instinct when something like this hits is to react. Raise prices. Cut staff. Panic-email your accountant. Call your congressman. Do something, anything, to feel like you’re taking action.
I’ve learned that the first reaction is almost always wrong. Not because it’s irrational, but because it’s emotional. And emotional decisions made under financial pressure tend to create new problems faster than they solve the original one.
Here’s what actually helped:
First, I separated the things I could control from the things I couldn’t. I can’t change tariff policy. I can’t lobby effectively as a small business. I can’t time my imports around rate changes because our products are custom manufactured to order.
There’s no stockpiling strategy when every item is made for a specific customer.
What I could control was how I communicated with customers, how I adjusted pricing, how I managed cash flow week to week, and how I made operational decisions without full information. So that’s where I put my energy.
Second, I stopped waiting for clarity before making decisions. Clarity isn’t coming. The policy landscape changes faster than any business can adapt to it. If you wait until you have all the information, you’ll be waiting while your business bleeds out.
I made the best decisions I could with what I knew, accepted that some of them would be wrong, and stayed ready to adjust.
Third, I leaned into the relationships I’d built over the past decade. When customers asked why a quote looked different, I was honest with them. I told them what was happening, what it was costing us, and what we were doing about it.
Not one customer left because of that conversation.
Several told me they appreciated the transparency. A few even adjusted their own timelines to help us manage cash flow. Trust, it turns out, is a business asset that actually pays off when things get hard.
