Standing at the edge of freezing water, every instinct screaming at you not to dive in.

That's where you are right now as an SME leader in January 2026.

The headlines are relentless: zombie apocalypse, 350,000 job losses forecast, business confidence at three-year lows, the triple whammy of interest rates, energy costs, and minimum wage increases supposedly finishing off UK businesses.

Your competitors are frozen at that edge, waiting for the water to warm up.
But here's the truth:

The first thirty seconds will be agony. Your body will scream at you to get out.

But if you stay in, grit your teeth, and breathe through it - the shock becomes clarity. The pain becomes power. The fear becomes competitive advantage.

You're an SME leader carrying responsibility through the hardest economic environment in a generation. That's not a burden - that's a badge of honour.

Whilst zombie firms collapse around you (businesses that survived on cheap credit and crossed fingers), you're battle-tested, still standing, and staring at the biggest competitive opportunity in twenty years.

Crisis brings gifts that prosperity never delivers: opportunity, clarity, humility, and authenticity.

2026 is the year that discipline beats drift. That strategic investment beats paralysis. That rapid adaptation beats waiting for conditions to improve.

Your competitors are frozen at the edge. And you're diving in. LFG!

Stop reading the obituaries and start writing your comeback.

For 12 years I ran a manufacturing business in the West Country. And for most of those 12 years, I was embarrassed to be called an SME.

Small felt weak. Medium felt middling. Unless you were scaling towards empire-building, you weren't playing the game properly.

I fell for the lie completely. Even after exiting, I found myself talking to one of the biggest US banks about working for them. Because part of me still believed that's where real success lived.

It's December 9th. You know you should have done something about this weeks ago. You haven't.

That familiar tightness is starting. Revenue is softening. A few customers are already paying slower. You're watching the bank balance more closely than usual. And somewhere in the back of your mind, you're wondering if this December will be like last December.

It will be. Unless you do something different in the next two weeks.

You know you're performing. The work version of yourself that speaks in careful, corporate language, stripped of anything that might be considered unprofessional or too revealing. The version that holds back in meetings, maintains appropriate distance, never lets anyone see what's actually going on beneath the surface. You tell yourself this is just how professional life works, that everyone does it, that the compromises are temporary and the rewards will come eventually. Meanwhile you're medicating the disquiet with Netflix binges, weekend drinking, scrolling through social media at 2am, buying things you don't need to feel briefly like you're getting somewhere. You confuse these moments of escape with happiness, distraction with contentment, and the whole time you're being dragged further out of alignment with who you actually are until the distance between your core self and the person you're pretending to be becomes unsustainable.

Leaders need strong egos. Without ego, nothing gets done.

I saw this argument on LinkedIn last week and it's right about growth and catastrophically wrong about crisis.

The terrifying bit is that you don't get to choose which battlefield you're on when the market shifts underneath you. The leadership operating system that drives extraordinary results during growth becomes actively dangerous during crisis. And if you've built your entire identity on ego-driven motivation, you can't switch operating systems when the environment changes.

For months, I have been introducing myself differently depending on who I was talking to.

To business advisors and leaders: "I do business turnaround - cultural transformation and operational restructuring for £2-20m companies."

To people asking about Harshlight: "I'm working on AI's social impact - specifically the workforce displacement crisis nobody's preparing for."

To friends asking about my volunteer training: "I'm learning how to provide emotional support to people in crisis."

Three completely different things. Except it's just dawned on me that they weren't. They aren't.

Community isn't dying. I just didn't know what it looks like.

I found it yesterday in an uninspiring conference room in Bath, surrounded by accountants drinking terrible coffee.

When Allison Herbert, CEO of Bath BID, talked about Bath winning Britain in Bloom, her face lit up with genuine delight that people had come together to do something that mattered. Not corporate pride. Actual joy.

My friend Kathryn leaned over and said "I love all the badass women in here that run this city." She wasn't wrong.

For months I've been operating under this assumption that community and genuine human connection are dying, that places like Bath are just beautiful museums whilst the real action happens elsewhere in louder, shinier cities. I'd been looking for dynamism in all the wrong places.

Last week I wrote about the rationality myth - how we lie to ourselves and refuse to confront brutal truths even when they're staring us in the face.

But there's a second barrier that's even more insidious: even when we finally accept reality, emotion dominates us and stops us acting.

I discovered this in the most unexpected way.

We think of ourselves as rational beings.

We assess situations objectively, weigh the facts, and make logical decisions based on truth. That's the story we tell ourselves, anyway.

But I've learnt something from 12 years of living through business crisis, from coaching people through job transitions, and from my Samaritans training: we're terrible at this. Almost universally, appallingly bad at it.

Not because we're stupid. But because we lie to ourselves..

It's March 2018, and we're trackside at Oulton Park. Tom Canning is about to become the youngest driver in British GT history. At 16 years and 35 days old, he's preparing to strap into a 400 brake horsepower monster.

Nerves are high. The field is stacked with McLaren, Ferrari, and Aston Martin works drivers. Tom has one season of Junior Ginetta car racing behind him. In his eyes, these are men. He is still just a boy.

In my inbox this morning landed a 100CEOs newsletter from Steven Bartlett. The top 5 answers from CEOs across the world when asked, "What's the one thing you wish CEOs talked about more openly?"

Someone asked me a great question on my business turnaround introduction video: "What are the amber and red flags that you'd suggest companies pay attention to, and use as a trigger to speak with you?"

It got me thinking about the pattern I see repeatedly - and why I approach business turnaround differently than most.