Success is harder won in 2026. Why that's good news.

By Jordan Owen, head of Merchant, Business Banking

I grew up surrounded by small business resiliency. My parents are small business owners, and they’re some of the most resilient people I know. My colleague, Ken Haag, recently wrote about the importance of small business ownership in his take on community outreach. But resilience doesn’t always translate into momentum, especially when the conditions for success keep shifting. This year, they have.

The U.S. Bank 2026 Small Business Perspectives report puts a number on something I've been hearing anecdotally for months: 87% of owners still call their business successful, but that's down nine points from 2025. Fewer say they've grown. Fewer say they're feeling extremely successful. And yet, more than 90% are still planning to take action to grow in the next 12 months.

The combination of softer sentiment paired with sustained ambition tells us that owners are recalibrating.

Amplified pressure means a greater emphasis on discipline

Economic uncertainty is driving the soft sentiment, topping the list of stressors at 90%, with inflation and material costs close behind at 88%. According to the Federal Reserve's Small Business Credit Survey,* 75% of small and medium businesses cite rising costs as their main financial challenge, while 51% struggle with uneven cash flow.

None of this is shocking to anyone running a business right now. What's notable is how owners are responding to it. Owners have lived through several years of compounding pressure, and they've adjusted their expectations accordingly. Success in 2026 doesn't look like the growth some experienced in 2025. It looks like protecting margin, tightening operations and making fewer, smarter bets.

What we’re seeing is a maturing of how small businesses think about growth, and it's exactly the kind of environment where the right tools and the right partners start to matter more.

Tool adoption has moved from hype to strategy

According to the survey, solution adoption in 2025 increased for tools that support smoother business operations and payments. That's a positive shift towards focusing on overall business health instead of one-off deployments.

In my view, the businesses that will separate themselves in the next few years aren't the ones adopting the most tools to drive growth. They're the ones choosing the right solutions and holding them accountable to real outcomes – whether that's hours saved on data analysis, sharper marketing execution or smoother day-to-day operations.

Predictability and value aren’t boring anymore

Where business owners get those tools matters more, now. Having a steady, helpful finance partner is key. If there's one finding that should reshape how businesses think about their financial partnerships, it's that 92% of owners now prefer bill pay tools with predictable, consistent fees and 78% say fees directly determine which payment method they use.

Owners are clearly telling us that unpredictability has become its own kind of cost. In a year when nearly every external factor feels harder to forecast, owners are compensating by demanding more certainty from the parts of their business they can control: payment processing, bill pay and cash flow tools.

I think this is the most underappreciated insight in the whole report. Owners aren't purely fee-averse. The majority (83%) say they're willing to pay some fees in exchange for convenience. What they're rejecting is surprise.

A payments partner that delivers consistent, transparent costs is worth more to a stressed operator right now than one that's marginally cheaper but harder to predict. This is where I'd push every small business owner to ask a sharper question of their financial tools. It’s time to shift from "what does this cost me today," to "how confidently can I forecast what this will cost me in six months?" In this environment, the answer to that question carries more weight than it used to.

What this means for the future

Small business owners are still growing, but they're doing it with more discipline than they've had to show in recent years. They're adopting technology, holding it to a higher bar and prioritizing operational predictability as a hedge against uncertainty.

I don’t read these survey results as pessimism. We see that 91% of owners still plan to take at least one concrete growth action this year, including hiring staff, investing capital, launching a new product or expanding geographically. The appetite for growth is still there, but owners are applying more rigor to every decision along the way.

The businesses that come out ahead this year are likely to be the ones that build the most resilient operational foundation – one where technology adoption is intentional, where cash flow tools are predictable, and where every dollar spent has a clear, measurable return. It’s a different standard for success than aggressive growth, and, in some ways, it's a higher one – one that payments and banking partners need to be prepared to meet.

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