In March 2026, the US Federal Reserve released its findings from the 2025 Small Business Credit Survey — 6,525 firms with 1–499 employees, surveyed between September and November 2025. One line in that report deserves more attention than it got: owner expectations for revenue and employment growth fell to their lowest level since 2020.

Here's the part that should stop you cold. Actual revenue, employment and profitability over the same period held fairly steady. Not booming, not collapsing — steady, and roughly where they've been sitting for a couple of years now.

The mood cratered. The numbers didn't. I coach SME and FMCG owners across 30-plus industries, and I want to draw your attention to what sits inside that gap, because it's where I see the most damage happen.

The Fed's report is careful, and it's worth being just as careful reading it. It isn't saying everything is fine. Revenue, employment and profitability remain below pre-pandemic levels, and for the second year running, slightly more firms reported revenue declines than increases. Debt is elevated — 38% of firms now carry more than $100,000 in debt. This is not a victory lap.

But it is a mixed, survivable picture — not the picture that six-year-low confidence would suggest. Owners are bracing for something considerably worse than what their own businesses are currently producing. That mismatch, between the emotional forecast and the actual result, is the story.

For FMCG owners specifically, the same survey adds a sharper data point. 48% of firms sourced inputs from abroad in 2024. Of those, 84% reported higher input costs. Most didn't panic-discount or panic-absorb: 76% passed some or all of the increase through to customers, and 60% absorbed a portion rather than the whole cost.

That's a measured, deliberate response to a real cost pressure — the opposite of a sentiment-driven reaction. It's owners doing the unglamorous work of working out exactly how much margin they can protect and exactly how much the customer relationship can absorb, then acting on that calculation. That's the instinct worth copying in every part of the business, not just pricing.

Here's what I see in first conversations with founders, over and over. An owner tells me things are "tight" or "uncertain" before we've looked at a single number. We open the profit and loss statement together, and it tells a calmer story than the one they walked in believing.

That gap between feeling and fact isn't harmless — it's where the worst decisions of the year get made. An owner who feels considerably worse than their numbers justify starts freezing hiring, pulling marketing spend, delaying the investment that would have kept the business growing. Not because the profit and loss statement told them to. Because the mood did.

Six months later, that decision has built its own evidence. Revenue has softened, because marketing stopped. The team is stretched, because hiring stopped. And now the owner points to the results and says, "See — I was right to be worried." They weren't right. They were early, and then their own caution made the fear true.

This is precisely the discipline the Simple-Growth System™ is built around. Not optimism, not pessimism — a structured, repeatable way of pulling the real numbers before a decision gets made, so the decision is answering to the business in front of you, not the news cycle in your head.

Do this before you make any spending, hiring or pricing decision this quarter: pull your last 90 days of actual revenue, gross margin and pipeline. Not last year's numbers, not a forecast, not a competitor's headline — your own current numbers, in front of you, on one page. Then ask the decision you're about to make: does this hold up against what's actually there, or only against how the quarter has felt?

Most owners are surprised by the answer. That surprise is the sentiment gap closing — and it's the cheapest, fastest correction available to any business this year.

Run your business on your numbers, not your nerves.

I work with SME and FMCG owners across 30-plus industries to build the systems that make growth decisions clear instead of anxious — the same approach behind the Simple-Growth System™. If this year has felt harder than your numbers say it should be, let's find out what your profit and loss statement actually says. Get in touch with Simple-Growth