How I survived a $450,000 problem I didn’t create

At the end of January 2026, I opened my FedEx invoice and saw a number that didn’t make sense. A regular shipment of custom products from one of our overseas manufacturers was subject to tariff charges that did not exist a month ago.

I checked another invoice. Same thing. Then another. When I finished looking at the stack, I realized it wasn’t an accounting error. It was the new normal.

In the first seven weeks of the year, my company paid about $40,000 in rates that we didn’t budget for. When I did the projections for the entire year, that number was about $450,000.

This is not a rounding error. It’s the difference between growth and survival.

I did not create this problem. I can’t negotiate it, implement 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.

No one was prepared for the night shift

We import over a million dollars worth of custom products annually from manufacturers in China and India. Over the years, most of our shipments have qualified for the so-called de minimis exemption.

If the shipment had a declared value of less than $800, it entered the country without triggering tariffs. This is how small and medium importers like us worked. It was not a vacuum. That was the rule.

Then the rule changed. The de minimis exemption has been abolished. The new tariff rates were widely applied. Each shipment is now taxed based on its declared value.

Rates for China alone rose by 150% to settle at around 62%. India occupies 18%. There was no transition period. No phase input. One month, our cost structure worked. It didn’t happen the next month.

The most difficult thing was not the money itself. It was an uncertainty. Prices fluctuated. The policy announcements were contradictory.

There is a 150-day congressional review window that everyone in our industry is watching, but no one knows what comes out the other side. You can’t plan around a number that might change next week.

The decision that determined everything

When rates fall, the textbook move is to immediately raise prices. Pass the costs on to your customers, protect your margins, move on. I didn’t do that.

It wasn’t because of my generosity. It was a calculated bet. We operate in a competitive market. Our customers have options. If I were to raise prices overnight, I’d lose the accounts I’d spent years building, even if the competition was temporarily stable.

Some of these relationships date back to 2013 when they made cold calls.

So we mastered it. For months, we ate the difference between the cost of importing our products and what we received from customers. Our borders have shrunk. Our cash reserves took a hit that we could feel.

Every week there was a discussion about what we could do and what we couldn’t do.

We recently changed our prices and still have enough to keep us going. Not enough to restore our old borders. Not enough to make up for what we lost. Just enough to make sure the doors stay open and orders are shipped.

It was a daily balancing act between staying solvent and being competitive. Neither side is given much room to breathe.

Here’s what I learned about responding to things you can’t control

Instinct reacts when something like this hits. Increase prices. Cutting staff. Panic – email your accountant. Call your Congressman. Do something to feel like you’re moving.

I’ve learned that the first reaction is almost always the wrong one. It’s not because of his irrationality, but because of his feelings. And emotional decisions made under financial pressure create new problems faster than solving the original problem.

Here’s what actually helped:

First, I separated the things I could control from the things I couldn’t. I cannot change the tariff policy. I cannot lobby effectively as a small business. I cannot calculate the import time based on the rate change because our products are made to order.

There is no backup strategy when each product is made for a specific customer.

What I could control was how I interacted with customers, how I adjusted my prices, how I managed my cash flow from week to week, and how I made operational decisions without complete information. So I do my best.

Second, I stopped waiting for clarity before making a decision. Clarity is not coming. The political landscape is changing faster than any business can adapt to it. If you wait until you have all the information, you will wait until your business is out of business.

I made the best decisions I knew, accepted that some of them would be wrong, and was willing to change.

Third, I leaned on the relationships I had built over the past decade. I was honest with clients when they asked why the quote looked different. I told them what was going on, what it was costing us, and what we were doing about it.

Not a single customer left because of that conversation.

Some have told me they appreciate the transparency. Some have also changed their timelines to help manage cash flow. Trust, it turns out, is a business asset that pays off when the going gets tough.