A new global survey of senior executives found something worth sitting with: 88% of business leaders are confident their company will grow in 2026 — the highest reading since 2019. Read the same research one line further and a different story appears. 74% are concerned about cybersecurity risk, 73% about economic uncertainty, 70% about inflation, and 70% about trade flow disruption. Meanwhile, 42% of these same confident leaders are still planning in short, static six-to-24-month cycles, and only 12% run anything close to continuous, rolling planning. I coach SME and FMCG owners across 30+ industries, and this is the exact gap that walks through my door every week — confidence that hasn't been matched by a system built to keep up with it.

> 88% of business leaders are more confident about growth than at any point since 2019. At the same time, 74% are worried about cybersecurity, 73% about economic uncertainty, and 70% about inflation and trade disruption — yet only 12% plan on a continuous, rolling basis. Most are still running a once-a-year plan against a risk list that can change monthly.

HLB's 2026 Survey of Business Leaders, which gathers responses from senior executives at mid-market companies across 45+ countries every fourth quarter, found confidence at its highest level since 2019, with 53% of leaders also expecting the global economy itself to improve. But the same leaders ranked cybersecurity (74%), economic uncertainty (73%), inflation (70%), trade flow disruption (70%) and geopolitical risk (68%) as live concerns for the year ahead. On the planning side, only 12% of businesses run continuous or rolling planning, 42% work in short six-to-24-month cycles, and just 13% plan beyond five years. Separately, 35% of leaders name digital and AI capability an organisational weakness, even though 55% plan to introduce new technology this year.

It's tempting to read 88% confidence as good news and stop there. It isn't the whole picture. Confidence is a snapshot — a leader's best guess, taken on the day the survey closed, about how the year will go. Planning cadence is the mechanism that either keeps that guess current or lets it quietly go stale while the leader keeps acting on it anyway. A business with high confidence and a once-a-year plan isn't well-prepared. It's optimistic and unmonitored — a very different thing, and one that only gets exposed the moment any one of those five risk categories actually lands.

An annual plan assumes the assumptions underneath it will roughly hold for twelve months. That assumption was shaky even in calmer years. Against 74% cybersecurity concern, 70% inflation concern and 70% trade disruption concern — all of which can shift in weeks, not years — a plan reviewed once in January is answering questions that have already changed by March. The leaders in this survey aren't wrong to be worried about these risks. They're simply managing them with a planning tool built for a far steadier world than the one they're describing.

Fixing this doesn't mean throwing out the annual plan — it means putting a shorter, disciplined cycle underneath it. Every 90 days, the plan gets tested against three things that actually move: cash position, operational capacity, and the risk landscape specific to that business, not the generic list in a global survey. What changed. What that changes about the next quarter's targets. What needs to happen in the next 30 days as a result. It's a fraction of the effort of the annual strategy day, run four times a year instead of once — and it's the difference between a plan that describes last January and one that's still true in September.

FMCG owners live closer to these risk categories than almost anyone in the survey. A tariff change moves input costs inside a single ordering cycle. A supplier disruption shows up on the shelf within weeks, not quarters. A single cybersecurity incident on a point-of-sale or logistics system can stop trading outright. An annual plan has no mechanism to respond to any of that before the damage is done. A rolling 90-day review does — because it's built to catch exactly this kind of change on a schedule short enough to still matter.

This is the core of what I build with every SME and FMCG owner inside the Simple-Growth System™ — not a bigger annual plan, but a rolling structure that forces the numbers, the capacity, and the risk list to be checked against reality every quarter, with real accountability for what happens next. The owners who come through this process aren't necessarily more confident than the leaders in this survey. They're simply confident about something that's been checked in the last 90 days, not the last twelve months.

If your growth plan hasn't been tested against what's actually changed since January, confidence is the only thing holding it up.

Talk to Kevin D'Ambros-Smith about building a rolling planning system through the Simple-Growth System™. Visit simple-growth.com to get started.