Resilience When Cash Is Tight

The 2026 Growth Playbook: Building a Resilient Business When Cash is Tight

The industrialist Charles Schwab once said, “The best place to succeed is where you are with what you’ve got.”

As we look toward the economic landscape of 2026, those words have never been more relevant. According to the Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC), the upcoming business environment will remain highly volatile. With the impending renegotiation of CUSMA, evolving tariffs, a weak Canadian dollar, and rising salaries, businesses are facing immense cost pressures.

Profitability is now the central challenge for companies. When cash is tight, you cannot afford massive, disruptive overhauls or bloated software budgets. Instead, you must focus on strategic growth by doing more with what you already have. The BDC recommends finding these growth opportunities through a “Build, Partner, or Buy” approach.

Regardless of which path you choose, a streamlined, customer-centric digital ecosystem is the foundation you need to execute that strategy successfully. Here is your playbook for turning economic uncertainty into a competitive edge.

The “Build” Strategy: Optimizing Your Existing Business

If you choose to grow organically, the BDC suggests optimizing your business through “Market Penetration” (selling more to existing customers) and “Market Development” (finding new customer segments). To do either effectively, you must eliminate data silos.

You cannot cross-sell or upsell to existing clients if your sales and support teams are trapped using disconnected systems. This is where the Attract, Nurture, Transact framework becomes critical.

• By optimizing the Nurture pillar with a centralized CRM like HubSpot, Salesforce or Pipedrive, you ensure that costly leads never slip through the cracks, enabling your team to squeeze more revenue from your existing marketing efforts.

• For Market Development, leveraging an agile CMS (like WordPress) empowers your internal team to quickly test new campaigns without relying on expensive external developers, keeping you fast and flexible.

The “Partner” or “Buy” Strategy: Integrating for Growth

The BDC notes that SMEs that buy a business earn four times the profits of those that grow organically. Partnering or acquiring allows businesses to rapidly enter new markets, gain new capabilities, and acquire talent.

However, acquiring a competitor often results in a complex software stack, filled with duplicate platforms and underutilized SaaS subscriptions. If you are scaling through acquisition, it is crucial to immediately map the newly combined Customer Journey. By evaluating the combined technology stack, you can eliminate software duplication, integrate overlapping tools, and ensure the expanded company realizes the financial benefits of the merger without frustrating your newly combined staff.

Fixing the Cost Crisis by Removing Friction

With the BDC forecasting continued cost pressures from trade shifts and rising salaries, businesses must look internally to protect their margins. To offset these costs, you must identify and remove “friction”—the manual data entry, broken communication loops, and operational waste hiding in your current processes.

You can systematically tackle this friction using the RICE technique:

• Reach: How many customers will benefit from this fix?

• Impact: How much will they benefit?

• Confidence: How sure are we about these numbers?

• Effort: How much work will it take to fix it?

By filtering your technology opportunities through RICE, you ensure your team focuses strictly on high-impact, low-effort improvements. This eliminates wasteful spending and targets the exact inefficiencies that are draining your cash flow.

Preparing for the Boom in Business Transitions

The BDC reports that a massive wave of business transitions is coming: 1 in 5 entrepreneurs plan to close, transfer, or sell their business in the next five years.

If you are one of the 20% planning to exit, remember that buyers invest in reliable systems, not just “founder’s intuition”. A buyer wants a business with a clean CRM, documented digital workflows, and high staff engagement with software. Achieving “Digital Maturity” ensures your business is a highly valuable and easily transferable asset, maximizing your return on the lifelong commitment of entrepreneurship.

The Bottom Line

While you cannot control macroeconomic factors such as tariffs or geopolitical tensions, you can control your internal operations. By adopting a customer-centric approach to your technology, you can successfully navigate this volatility and protect your profitability.

Start where you are with what you’ve got. If your digital ecosystem is leaking cash or frustrating your teams, let’s start with a Customer Journey Map or a Software Engagement Check-Up to identify exactly where you can optimize for the road ahead.