Issue #008 | Move Forward Every Week
Helping people discover practical opportunities in a rapidly changing world.
This week’s numbers didn’t come from a tech company with something to sell — they came straight from small business owners, describing their own year in their own words. Reading through them felt less like a trend report and more like hearing a friend talk honestly about how they’re actually doing. Here’s what stood out, and what to do with it.
Trend to Watch: Small Businesses Are Holding Steady, But Inflation Worries Are Climbing Fast
A new October 2026 Small Business Check Up Survey from the Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council, based on responses from 516 small business owners, found that 81% are meeting or exceeding their 2026 financial expectations and 88% describe their business as stable or growing. That’s the steady part. The climbing part: 81% are now concerned about inflation over the next twelve months, up from 73% back in February, and 54% say a lack of access to capital is holding back their growth — up sharply from 43% just eight months ago. Put those two numbers together and you get this year’s real story: most small businesses are doing fine right now, but they’re doing it with less room to maneuver than they had at the start of the year, and more of them are starting to feel it.
Opportunity of the Week: Find the Capital You Already Have
When more than half of small business owners say access to capital is holding them back, the instinct is to go looking for a loan or a line of credit — which usually means weeks of paperwork and a rate that reflects how nervous lenders are right now, not how solid the business actually is. Before that, look inside the business itself for cash that’s already there but tied up: unpaid invoices sitting past 60 days, slow-moving inventory nobody’s discounted to move, supplier payment terms that haven’t been renegotiated in years. Offer a short “trapped cash” review — go through the receivables aging report, the inventory list, and the payment terms with the three biggest suppliers, and build a 30-day plan to free up what’s stuck. For a lot of businesses, that’s real working capital sitting in a filing cabinet, not a bank.
Tool of the Week: Relay
If tax money, profit, and payroll are all sitting in one checking account next to the cash you use to pay vendors, it’s only a matter of time before a surprise bill eats into money that was never actually yours to spend. Relay is a free business banking platform built around keeping those pots separate. Open named sub-accounts for taxes, profit, and payroll, then set an auto-transfer rule that caps how much sits in your main checking account — anything above that cap sweeps automatically into savings the moment it comes in. It’s the infrastructure behind the Profit First method, and it means the money for next quarter’s tax bill is already somewhere else by the time a price increase shows up on your statement.
Money Move: Nobody’s Auditing the Invoices Already Being Paid
Not every price increase this year arrived with a polite letter — a lot of it got buried in line items on invoices businesses are already paying without a second look: a shipping surcharge that quietly doubled, a software plan that auto-upgraded to a pricier tier, a contracted rate that crept up past what the contract actually says. Invoice errors and silent overcharges show up more than most owners assume, and almost nobody goes back to check once a bill is on autopay. Offer an “invoice audit”: pull six months of a client’s vendor bills, check them against the actual contracts and rate sheets, and flag every overcharge worth disputing. It’s not glamorous, but recovering money that was already overpaid is an easier sell than almost any other service out there — and with costs rising nearly everywhere, there’s more of it to find than usual.
Resource Corner: The Great Money Reset
The Great Money Reset by Jill Schlesinger lays out ten steps for making the big financial decisions — starting a business, renegotiating a rate, deciding what to do with a windfall or a setback — on purpose instead of by default. It’s a good match for a year like this one: when the ground keeps shifting under a business, the owners who do well aren’t the ones waiting for stability to come back. They’re the ones who make a deliberate call anyway, with whatever they know right now.
Forward Momentum
- Pull your receivables aging report this week and call the oldest unpaid invoice yourself — don’t wait for the standard reminder email to do it for you.
- Open a free Relay account (or check if your current bank can do the same) and set up one sub-account just for taxes before your next deposit lands.
- Pick your biggest recurring vendor bill and check the actual line items against what you signed up for — you may find the increase already happened.
Final Thought
The headline this week could have been “small businesses are worried about money.” The more useful headline is that most of them are still doing fine — they’re just running with less slack than before. Slack is the thing worth rebuilding on purpose, before a shock shows up and you’re looking for it in a hurry.
See you next week.
— Ron, Northbound Weekly
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