How do we hit our 2026 targets?
This June I had the privilege of working with leaders from institutional organizations, healthcare, agribusiness, technology startups, institutional and financial services around one common topic:
Leading in Uncertain Times.
Different worlds, one shared pressure.
Costs were climbing | energy, inputs, overheads, everything. And almost every question I got back was about the top line: how do we grow sales, how do we hit our targets?
The plans were ambitious. But for many sales weren't landing where they hoped, and margins were quietly thinning underneath.
Here's the real tension. Everyone set their 2026 targets at the start of the year. Then the ground moved: a border closure, an energy-cost spike,... The target is still the target. But the cost of reaching it has changed underneath everyone's feet.
So the question becomes the harder one:
Would you raise your prices -and if so, by how much- knowing your customers are feeling the same squeeze you are?
The Framework | The Power of One
When margins tighten, the instinct is to fix everything at once: cut here, chase there, push everywhere. It feels productive. It rarely moves the needle.
The leaders who pull ahead find their one lever.
The Power of One is a simple, almost uncomfortable idea from Scaling Up: model what a 1% change in each of seven financial levers does to your profit and your cash. The seven fall into two groups:
Levers that lift profit | Price · Volume · Direct costs · Overheads. A 1% price rise is often the single most powerful lever and the one leaders are most afraid to touch.
Levers that free cash | Receivables · Inventory · Payables. These are measured in days, not percent. Shorten that cash-conversion cycle enough and your growth starts funding itself, with no bank in sight.
In the room this quarter, almost everyone assumed price was the lever. For most, it wasn't. Once they ran the numbers, the biggest gain sat somewhere they'd stopped looking: receivables, inventory, or a cost they'd quietly accepted for years.
Same seven levers, completely different answers depending on the business.
That's the shift: stop pushing on all seven. Find your one.
