Industry Expertise | August 2025 Building business resilience in the face of uncertainty

Leaders of environmental services companies share these concerns, despite the industry’s recession-proof attributes relative to many other sectors. Uncertainty heightens stress on owners and CFOs and harbors several risks that can impact companies’ operations and strategic planning. These include:

• Inflation risk: Higher costs can pinch profits and affect capital expansion plans.
• Supply chain disruption risk: Changing tariffs and trade agreements may reset supply chains, potentially hampering production or increasing costs—a major risk for companies operating under fixed contracts.
• Sales risk: Swings in consumer confidence, demand, and spending can squeeze company revenue.

Questions about what’s next can have a significant dampening effect on business—and on leaders’ willingness to take risks. But there’s an upside to uncertainty, too: It often drives innovation, creates openings by disrupting the competitive landscape, and offers new possibilities for markets, products, or acquisition targets that can lead to growth.

Readying an organization for uncertainty can lead to renewed focus and discipline. A lean organization that has been tuned for efficiency can better endure a variety of business scenarios—no matter how the economy turns. Pervasive unpredictability with the added pressure of increased inflationary, supply chain, and sales risks can spur the intense strategic focus needed to rethink your approach in everything from process improvements to new verticals, leading to enhanced profitability that can make your business stronger.

While proactively mitigating specific risks should be a top priority and improving your general business fitness enables you to better compete and thrive in all kinds of conditions, you’ll also want to identify the opportunities that often arise from economic volatility. These four strategies can help.

Proactively evaluate partner relationships and contract terms. Scrutiny now can surface new opportunities, protect your margins against volatility, and may also reveal hidden vulnerabilities that could lead to disruptions later.

• Assess the risk of disruption with key suppliers, partners, or business services providers.
• Solicit competitive bids, rethink the terms of current agreements, and evaluate new relationships—by preparing for a disruption, you may discover better options.
• Evaluate the consequences of economic upheaval. How would cost increases due to shortages or inflation impact your profit margin? What can you do to insulate your business against that threat? Think about price increases in line with movement in the Waste CPI^{Disclosure 3} to cover your increased expenses.

Bolster your workforce now to help your business stay resilient and adaptable in the face of disruption. By improving productivity and positioning your organization as a destination for top talent, you’ll be better equipped to respond to challenges and seize new opportunities.

• Improve workforce productivity before you must.
  • Evaluate processes to identify unnecessary steps and inefficiencies, while eliminating organizational layers and redundant functions.
  • Invest in efficiency-enhancing technologies, including both capital equipment and knowledge systems, particularly AI applications.
  • Implement incentives to reward team and individual productivity gains.
• Attract and retain top performers who can deliver the flexibility and skill you need in turbulent times, by cultivating a supportive, high-performance work environment.
  • Prioritize employee growth and professional development.
  • Ensure a competitive pay and benefit structure.

As tariffs reshape many international markets, U.S.-based businesses become more attractive and may have price and just-in-time delivery speed advantages. Capturing that potential growth becomes a question of how to weigh additional investment in increasing product volume against the risk that tariffs could change again in the future.

• Focus on M&A as a driver for expansion—uncertainty favors acquiring businesses that are scaled and have a proven ability to deliver financial results. Vertical integration can offer favorable opportunities to improve margins and gain greater control over your disposal assets.
• Consider expanding into new domestic partnerships – With tariffs and market disruption, domestic suppliers could replace imported sources.