While today’s economy is far from ideal for small businesses, the truth is it likely never has been.

Uncertainty has been part of capitalism, and small businesses are often the ones most exposed to changing conditions.

Uncertainty Is Small Business Context, Not Exceptional to 2026

The news that Austin’s oldest continuously operated family business is closing after 141 years brings a wave of disappointment and nostalgia, but also reveals broader socioeconomic frustrations from other business owners and the market.

But is it that the economy in 2026 is harsher than anything they have faced before?

A candy business that survives for nearly a century and a half has dealt with sugar rations during two world wars, the Great Depression, the 2008 financial crash, and a global pandemic that shuttered 41 percent of small and medium sized enterprises worldwide.

These are the macro-economic shocks we recognize as historic crises.

If Lammes Candies maintained an archive, it would likely tell a story of surviving these cycles. Importantly, the business also endured 140 years of a different kind of pressure, the micro-perspective of regular uncertainty. While macro-crises like government shifts or global collapses are impactful, for the self-employed, smaller business, more frequent events cause just as much instability.

Researchers in strategic management define a crisis as “an unexpected event that significantly threatens individuals, business organizations, and the economy.” For those in business for themselves, these unexpected events are not exceptional or macro; they are the very texture of every operating week. This longevity reveals a story of resilience built on constant adaptation, flexibility, and an openness to new markets.

Some Micro and Human, Yet Crucial Sources of Uncertainty For Small Business

In my conversations with business owners and how they cope with the difficult moments through time, all sorts of challenges arise.

Almost every day, a key employee falls ill. Or the landlord raises the rent, or property prices are rising so rapidly that rent becomes the biggest financial concern for the self-employed.

Perhaps a giant in the industry moves into the neighborhood. A new regulation reshapes the fee structure of an entire industry.

A law firm in the 1970s faced the introduction of a new Smith Corona typewriter and, later, the fax machine. The coming of Excel or the idea of having to integrate marketing in daily operations for accounting firms were important moments of uncertainty. They could be equivalent to today’s integration of artificial intelligence into client services.

That’s what uncertainty is - you just never know.

Businesses remember the panic over what the Y2K millennium bug would mean for the technology and business databases and information. As Jay Hutto , of James Moore & Co. says,

“I remember James Moore being very concerned and all of our clients were concerned and it kind of happened without really much of an event. So it was fear without the reality in 2000.”

The rapid digital transformation we have experienced since the 2000s has fundamentally destabilized the traditional media landscape, for example. For veteran public relations experts and journalists, this volatility has transitioned from a series of market shifts into a permanent state of high-stakes adaptation. As the owners of Twins Minds Media observed, the agility previously required from journalists to be everywhere, it is constantly needed now to adapt to constantly changing formats and channels of communications.

The human element of employee relations introduces another central source of micro-uncertainty.

While managing expected absences due to illness is routine, a dramatic event involving personnel can shake the business. As the owner of MiApá , a successful Cuban restaurant in northern Florida, shared, when two young staff members were involved in an accident, the emotional ripple effect impacted everyone in the company.

For immigrant entrepreneurs, additional layers of uncertainty apply: the arduous process of translating credentials and expertise into a new regulatory and cultural system. Consider the experience of entrepreneur and engineer Grasiella Bolivia, now owner of an Ideal Siding franchise, who faced the recurring challenge of revalidating her degrees or forgoing her formal education entirely each time she relocated.

Many immigrant founders must navigate the necessity of a total restart . Most small business immigrant entrepreneurs, who frequently face the abrupt closure of established enterprises in their home country only to begin anew in a foreign market.

Resilience Is A Practice, Not A Trait

For these entrepreneurs, resilience is not just about growth; it is about the high-stakes navigation of a new country’s business landscape from the ground up.

The research literature on small business resilience offers a concept that deserves wider adoption among entrepreneurs: resilience understood not as a personality trait but as an organizational capacity—a firm’s ability to cope with and absorb disturbances, recover from shocks, and adapt to disruptions.

It is at the intersection of three capabilities: facing reality without flinching, making sense of adversity rather than simply enduring it, and deploying ingenuity with whatever resources are at hand.

A Piece Of Humbolt Advice: Survey Yourself

Knowing that micro-uncertainty is always present, it is important to regularly and honestly assess how your business feels, what has changed, and what those changes might mean.

This is something any owner can apply internally . Most small businesses do not retain data about their own history. They do not track, even informally, how they responded to past disruptions, which adaptations worked, or what the emotional and financial cost of each transition was. This is a missed opportunity. A business that can look back at its own record of navigating difficulty has a resource that no external consultant can replicate: evidence of its own capacity to survive.

Writing a few lines each day: what happened, what worried you, what you tried, and what you would do differently, creates a kind of institutional memory that most small firms lack entirely.

One of the paradoxes of small business life is that the very constraints that make it precarious—limited staff, thin margins, concentrated decision-making—also make it adaptable.

A small business can change direction in a week; a corporation takes years.

As a small business owner, you are likely more experienced in navigating uncertainty than you realize.

The legacy of Lammes Candies is not a cautionary tale; it is one of the most successful business narratives in American history. Uncertainty was a constant, yet the business endured for generations.

What would be extremely helpful for business ventures to come is to know how all adversities and challenges were understood and overcome.