Finding your rhythm: SME supply chain footwork when the rules keep changing

In boxing, there is an old adage claiming to explain almost every knockout: You don’t lose to the punch; you lose because your feet were in the wrong place to absorb it. Looking back at a chaotic spring and summer of 2025, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) took an unprecedented barrage of punches. In a matter of months, the U.S. administration released over 70 announcements proclaiming, imposing, pausing, or changing tariffs. For supply chain managers, the rules of global trade weren't just shifting; they were being rewritten one “Truth” at a time. If tariffs are no longer dominating the conversation, it’s not because they have disappeared. It is because brighter, bigger supply chain fires consume all the oxygen in the room, and uncertainty only continues to grow.

When Fortune 500 heavyweights face a regulatory or market shock, they can raise their gloves in high guard and mostly absorb the blow. With market leverage, they can stand their ground, strong-arming their suppliers into suffering the new costs. SMEs, however, are the light- and welterweights of the global economy. They do not have the mass to stand and block. As one SME leader we interviewed last year bluntly summarized:

“We are a very, very small business; we have no sway. We get the letters: ‘Hey, you’re getting a 15% tariff increase on your bearings.’ We can’t negotiate, we don’t have the clout.”

Muhammad Ali didn't beat George Foreman by out-punching him; he won through superior movement and the Rope-a-Dope. The 2025 SCMR article “Rumble in the Supply Chain: Knocking out the Barriers to True SC Costing” highlights several cues that supply chain managers can take from Ali the Great. Here, we focus on one of them: When you don’t have the clout to dictate terms, survival comes down to your footwork.

The last five years have ushered in an era of “permacrisis,” where volatility has shifted from a rare risk to a structural baseline. Based on over 40 in-depth interviews with SMEs and trade experts throughout 2025, we found that the companies navigating this permanent turbulence effectively did not simply collaborate “more.” They laid the groundwork for collaboration. They could not count on anyone to “conduct” the chaos and lacked the clout to command their networks into alignment. Instead, they engaged in what we call supply chain choreography: the routines, trust, visibility, and shared rhythm that allow independent partners to move together when the rules keep changing. Here is how the most resilient mid-market companies improved their footwork through technical discipline and purposeful transparency.

Technical footwork and the safety net

When the tariffs first hit, the default posture for many SMEs was decision paralysis. Firms were caught flat-footed, freezing as they tried to parse the legal ambiguity of origin rules and the retaliatory risks. But agility requires movement, and movement requires a safety net. The most agile SMEs treated their supply chains the way performance troupes like Cirque du Soleil (see SCMR 2020, “Thriving on the Supply Chain Highwire”) treat a live show: they built environments where their teams can take calculated risks without fear of a fatal fall. Their safety net was not an elaborate supply chain control tower or a full-time compliance team; it was a set of practical routines. Rather than treating customs compliance as a rigid, back-office task, they took the initiative to bring the internal team together with brokers, suppliers, and logistics partners to proactively revisit Harmonized Tariff Schedule (HTS) engineering, recalculate landed costs, and explore tools such as bonded warehouses. Further, they used basic agile scenario planning, usually in Excel, to rehearse responses before disruptions fully landed. While companies we spoke with, like most SMEs, lacked access to fancy simulation tools, full-time data analysts, or HTS consultants, their deliberate groundwork to build trust, establish decision routines, develop shared language, and build partner readiness gave them the flexibility to adapt the footwork, and enabled them to make the most of the data they could get a handle on, which took them most of the way.

This agility extended to their pricing. Rather than burying tariff costs into “stealthy” list-price hikes, a move that destroys customer trust, the best performers decoupled their invoices. They separated the base price, tariff surcharge, and freight into distinct line items. By treating the tariff as a highly visible pass-through cost, they proved to their customers they weren’t price-gouging. It was a technical pivot to protect their margins while preserving trust.

Purposeful transparency and the value proposition

For decades, the buzzword in academia and industry has been “collaboration,” but collaboration is an outcome, not a method. You cannot just command two companies to collaborate; you have to create the conditions that make collaboration possible. One key barrier to these conditions is psychological. Many supply chain leaders resist sharing information because once information leaves the firm, it may be misread, misused, or weaponized. Like any relationship, supply chain partnerships require some vulnerability. If neither side is willing to reveal constraints or pressure points, the relationship remains transactional. Yet leaders are right to be cautious. Transparency can feel like losing control, handing over IP, or giving a ruthless negotiator ammunition.

To overcome this, the SMEs that thrived last year practiced what we call “purposeful transparency.” This doesn’t mean leaving the company vault unlocked and the window open. It means making a strategic, calculated choice to share specific operational realities, such as severe margin compression, long manufacturing lead times, or shifting demand forecasts, to jointly address a chokepoint. Crucially, these exemplars didn’t wait until they were desperate to share this information. Instead of approaching partners with a crisis plea, they initiated conversations centered on a shared value proposition. They demonstrated competence by saying, “Here is a mutual challenge, and here is how sharing this data helps us both win.” One mechanical manufacturing CEO captured the profound ROI of this approach:

“We have had two suppliers in Italy and Germany, [who] said, ‘We’re going to cut your price to help out’ because they value the relationship. We treat suppliers like customers, we’re not the ones that go beating on the supplier.”

When you replace the reflexive secrecy with purposeful transparency, you give trusted partners enough context to stop acting like distant vendors or adversaries. In the best cases, partners act as safety nets: drop-shipping to alternative assembly plants, adjusting payment terms to preserve working capital, or helping absorb temporary shocks because they understand the problem and value the relationship. This is the payoff of treating relationships as partnerships rather than transactions.

Setting the stage to finding your rhythm

The post-2025 operational landscape has cemented a hard truth: you cannot orchestrate an ecosystem you lack visibility into and control over. The traditional supply chain model, in which companies seek to flexibly fulfill customers’ requests while “running” their upstream supply chain as rigidly as possible, doesn’t work for SMEs in permacrisis, who have no visibility, leverage, or resources to command partners into alignment. If collaboration is the desired outcome, imposing mandates will only heighten resistance. Forced collaboration is an oxymoron. If coordination aligns activities and collaboration creates joint problem-solving, choreography is the groundwork that makes both possible when no single firm has enough power or visibility to command the system. Supply chain choreography is about creating the awareness, the shared rhythm, and the environmental trust required for independent entities to move together without colliding. It is about laying down the footwork drills in rehearsal so that when a supplier goes bankrupt, a tariff doubles, or a canal runs dry, your network instinctively knows how to pivot. Survival in a permacrisis requires having learned to move together with partners on highly unpredictable stages. It requires purposeful transparency, discarding rigid blueprints, and learning to dance with disruption.

Do these ideas resonate with you? Or do you think they are just academic idealism that would never work in practice? We want to hear your story and take on how to achieve collaboration in the supply chain in practice. Please contact us to share your insights. We will treat your data in complete confidence and use it only in an anonymized, aggregated form. We look forward to hearing your collaboration failure or success story. To submit your story, please out this form.

About the authors

Dr. Sebastian Brockhaus is an assistant professor in the Operations and Supply Chain Management Department and the Graduate Program Director of the Master of Business Administration (MBA) at Cleveland State University’s Monte Ahuja College of Business. He can be reached at [email protected].

Alina Marculetiu is an assistant professor of management & marketing at Youngstown State University. She can be reached at [email protected].

SC
MR