In late January 2026, I opened a FedEx invoice and saw an unreasonable number. Custom shipments of custom products from our overseas manufacturers incurred a tax levy that was not available a month ago.
I checked another bill. Same thing. Then another. When I finished crossing the stack, I realized that this was not an accounting error. It’s new commonplace.
During the first seven weeks of this year, my company paid about $ 40,000 in taxes, which we did not have the budget for. When I ran the full year forecast, that amount came out to about $ 450,000.
That is not a rounding mistake. That’s the difference between growing up and just surviving.
I did not create this problem. I can not negotiate with it, run it or innovate around it. But I still have to deal with it. And the way I chose to deal with it turned out to be more important than the problem itself.
Night shift No one prepared for
We import custom products worth over one million dollars every year from manufacturers in China and India. For many years, most of our shipments qualified for the so-called de minimis exemption.
If shipping costs less than $ 800 at the declared price, it enters the country duty free. That’s how small and medium-sized importers like us work. It is not a gap. It is a rule.
Then the rules changed. The de minimis exemption is waived. The new tax rate is applied across the board. Each shipment is now taxed based on its declared price.
For China alone, the rate rose as high as 150% before settlement to about 62%. India has 18%. There is no transition period. No stage. One month our cost structure works. Next month it did not.
The hardest part is not the money itself. It is uncertain. Prices have continued to fluctuate. Policy announcements contradict each other.
There is a 150-day parliamentary review window that everyone in our industry is watching, but no one knows what comes from the other side. You can not plan around numbers that may change next week.
Decisions that set everything
When the tax increases, the price of textbooks is increased immediately. Send the cost to your customers, protect your margins going forward. I did not do that.
It is not because I am kind. It’s a calculated bet. We operate in a competitive market. Our customers have a choice. If I go up in price overnight while competitors stabilize, even temporarily, I will lose the account I spent years building.
Some contacts go back to when I made a cold call in 2013.
So we absorb it. For months we have eaten the difference between the price of our imported products and what we charge our customers. Our margins are down. Our cash reserves have received as much interest as we could have felt.
Every week is a conversation about what we can have and what we can not.
Only recently have we adjusted the price and even then it was enough to keep us going. Not enough to restore our old margins. Not enough to get back what we already lost. It is enough to make sure that the door is still open and the order continues to ship.
It is a daily act of balancing between solvent retention and continuing competition. Both sides do not give you much space to breathe.
What I learned about responding to things you can not control.
Instinct when something like this touches is reactive. Raise the price. Cut staff. Panic – Send an email to your accountant. Call your MP. Do whatever it takes to feel like you are in action.
I realized that the first reaction was always wrong. Not because it is irrational, but because it is emotional. And emotional decisions made under financial pressure tend to create new problems faster than solving old ones.
Here’s what really helped:
First, I separated what I could control from what I could not do. I can not change the tax policy. I can not do effective persuasion as a small business. I can not schedule my imports around interest rate changes because our products are made to order.
There is no stock strategy when every item is created for a specific customer.
What I can control is how I interact with customers, how I adjust prices, how I manage my cash flow from week to week, and how I make operational decisions without complete information. That’s where I put my energy.
Second, I stop waiting for clarity before making a decision. Clarity does not come. The policy aspect changes faster than any business can adapt to it. If you wait until you have all the information, you will wait while your business flows out.
I made the best decision I could make with what I knew, accepting that some of them would be wrong and still ready to correct.
Third, I have relied on the relationships I have built over the past decade. When customers ask why quotes look different, I am honest with them. I told them what was happening, what it was costing us and what we were doing about it.
Not a single customer left because of that conversation.
Many people have told me that they appreciate transparency. Some have even adjusted their schedules to help us manage our cash flow. Trust It turns out to be a business asset that can really pay off when things get tough.
