This guest blog was written by Amanda Neely of Wealth Wisdom Financial.
Uncertainty has a way of sneaking up on you.
Sometimes it arrives quietly, as a gnawing sense that the ground beneath your business is shifting. Customers behave differently. Margins tighten. Technology advances faster than your comfort level. Other times, it arrives all at once, without warning, and changes everything overnight.
For my husband and me, uncertainty once arrived as water.
Years ago, we owned a small social enterprise café in Chicago. It was a community space first, a business second. We built around good coffee, ethical sourcing, and the belief that local business could be a force for connection and care. One afternoon, we were at the gym when urgent calls kept flooding in (pun intended). The roof was off for repairs, and a freak storm had just put several inches of water over everything.
There was no playbook for that moment. No economic forecast to consult. No shared headline to point to. Just a flooded cafe, damaged equipment, lost revenue, and a deep, sinking question: What now?
That experience taught me something that decades of financial training never could. As a socially conscious CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER® Professional, who now works with purpose-driven business owners, I see it again and again: Uncertainty doesn’t reveal whether a business is “smart enough” or “optimized enough.” It reveals what kind of relationship the owners have with responsibility, people, power, and PROFIT.
In other words, it reveals whether a business is being treated primarily as an asset or as a stewardship.
Today, many business owners associate uncertainty with macro forces: economic volatility, political instability, labor market shifts, artificial intelligence, consolidation by private equity and large corporations. These are shared uncertainties that dominate headlines and conference panels.
But every business owner also faces private uncertainty. These are the kind no one else sees: a key employee leaves unexpectedly, a health crisis hits the founder, a landlord sells the building, a fire, a flood, a lawsuit, a supply chain disruption
Some uncertainty is experienced together. Some of it is endured alone. What matters is not which kind you’re facing, but how you understand your role when certainty disappears.
When uncertainty rises, the dominant business narrative gets louder:
“Protect the downside.”
“Maximize efficiency.”
“Scale or sell.”
“Cut costs aggressively.”
“De-risk at all costs.”
These strategies are often framed as responsible leadership. And to be fair, some defensive action is appropriate in moments of real threat. But there’s an unexamined assumption underneath much of this advice: the primary job of a business is to extract as much value as possible, as quickly as possible, before conditions worsen.
Economist Milton Friedman famously argued that the sole social responsibility of business is to increase profits. While that idea has been challenged for decades (from stakeholder theory to conscious capitalism), it still quietly shapes how many leaders respond under pressure. When fear enters the room, extraction feels safe. Human considerations feel optional.
Yet research increasingly shows that this reflex backfires. Studies from Harvard Business School and MIT Sloan have demonstrated that companies prioritizing long-term stakeholder relationships (employees, customers, suppliers, and communities) tend to outperform purely shareholder-focused firms over time, especially during periods of volatility.
Still, in the moment of uncertainty, leaders feel the pull to become someone else. We harden, distance, trade trust for speed, and get weird with how we approach money. That tension is real. And it’s where stewardship enters the conversation.
Stewardship asks a different question than growth. Not: How much can this business produce? But: What has been entrusted to me, and how do I tend it well?
Small and mid-sized businesses are uniquely positioned to answer that question honestly. They are often privately owned, deeply relational, embedded in local communities, and built around craft, service, and continuity.
In my work as a financial planner, I’ve noticed something striking: many owners of values-driven businesses don’t actually struggle with decision-making in uncertainty. They struggle with permission. They feel they need permission to choose sufficiency over maximization, care over extraction, longevity over dominance.
Stewardship reframes leadership as a custodial role. You are not merely managing numbers; you are holding livelihoods, relationships, reputations, and futures. This isn’t sentimental. It’s structural.
When our café flooded, no spreadsheet could tell us what to do next.
We had insurance decisions to navigate, payroll obligations to honor, customers asking when we’d reopen, and our own exhaustion to manage. We also had something else: a community watching how we would respond.
Would we disappear quietly? Would we cut corners? Would we sacrifice our values to survive?
We didn’t get everything right. But we made decisions through a stewardship lens. We communicated transparently with staff and customers. We honored people before profits, even when it was uncomfortable. We asked not “What’s the fastest way out?” but “What’s the most integrity-aligned way through?”
That experience reshaped how I understand financial resilience. It’s not just liquidity or diversification (important as those are). It’s relational trust. And trust compounds.
Behind the scenes, we were pregnant the whole time this was happening and ended up selling the business as our family expanded. If we didn’t steward it as we did, I know we wouldn’t have been able to sell it and have the mission continue through the new owners to this day.
In periods of widespread uncertainty, highly optimized systems often prove brittle. They’re efficient, but inflexible. Fast, but disconnected.
Steward-led businesses behave differently. They adjust more quickly because decision-making is closer to the ground. They sense shifts earlier because they’re in real relationships with customers and employees. They maintain morale longer because people trust the leadership’s intent.
Sociologist Karl Polanyi wrote about the dangers of disembedding economic activity from social relationships. When business becomes abstracted from human consequence, instability increases. Stewardship keeps business embedded. That’s not weakness. It’s resilience.
Stewardship is not martyrdom. As a financial planner, I’m clear about this: businesses that cannot generate sustainable profit cannot sustain people, purpose, or promises. Profit is not the purpose, but it protects the purpose.
The distinction is between:
In uncertain times, regenerative profit allows businesses to continue employing people, absorb shocks without panic, and invest patiently rather than reactively. Choosing stewardship does not mean avoiding hard financial decisions. It means making them with clarity about why the business exists in the first place.
When uncertainty rises, most leaders don’t need more information. They need a way to re-orient.
Over the years, both as a business owner and as I work with purpose-driven leaders, I’ve noticed that steward-led decisions tend to pass through a different filter than optimization-driven ones.
Here’s a simple way to tell the difference.
Before finalizing a strategic decision in an uncertain season, pause and ask three grounding questions.
This isn’t a formula. It’s a posture. Adapt it to fit your uniqueness. Most importantly, remember that leaders who consistently return to these questions tend to build organizations that remain intact and profitable through uncertainty.
Uncertainty will not resolve itself. Markets will fluctuate. Technology will advance. Crises, both shared and solitary, will continue to arrive. The question is not whether your business will face uncertainty. It’s whether, when it does, you will lead as an extractor or as a steward.
Choosing stewardship is not passive. It is not nostalgic. And it is not naïve. It is a quiet, disciplined commitment to tend what has been entrusted to you, especially when the future refuses to cooperate.
In an age of uncertainty, that kind of leadership doesn’t just endure. It stabilizes entire communities.
References
Eccles, R. G., Ioannou, I., & Serafeim, G. (2014). “The Impact of Corporate Sustainability on Organizational Processes and Performance.” Harvard Business School.
Polanyi, K. (1944). The Great Transformation. Beacon Press.
Freeman, R. E. (1984). Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach.