How To Create A More Agile Business For The Trump Era

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It’s no secret that President Donald Trump’s economic policies have made uncertainty the theme of business in 2025 so far. His chaotic approach to tariffs—announcing them as coming, delayed and then imposed, sometimes with just days’ notice, has set most businesses on edge.

Last month, financial health analytics company RapidRatings found that nearly seven in 10 supply chain professionals expect risks to escalate this year. Even before potential tariffs were looming, 81% of respondents said they had experienced supply chain disruptions in the last 24 months. Nearly a third of all of those disruptions cost more than $5 million, the survey found. A blog post from RapidRatings Executive Chair James Gellert brings the tariff threat into more acute focus. The post considers the possibility of a 25% tariff on China, Canada, Mexico and Germany, and finds it would significantly increase the risk faced by 25% of all public companies and 39% of all private companies.

The whiplash of Trump-era tariff threats makes these impacts more significant. Companies and countries don’t know if announced tariffs will stand and effective dates will continue. Last week, a new round of tariffs took effect on Tuesday—25% on all goods from Canada and Mexico, and an additional 10% on goods from China, adding up to 20%. On Wednesday, Trump decided to exempt Canadian and Mexican tariffs for U.S. automakers. On Thursday, Trump extended that monthlong pause on Canadian and Mexican tariffs to all goods covered by current trade agreements. But on Friday, he once again threatened tariffs on Canada—this time reciprocal tariffs on lumber and dairy products. This week promises more tariff headaches: 25% tariffs on all aluminum and steel imports go into effect on Wednesday.

Policies like this are wide-reaching and make planning difficult for companies. They’ve also sunk the stock market, with last week being the worst in six months. On a Fox News interview on Sunday, Trump downplayed the market drop but didn’t deny the policies could result in a recession, saying that there will be “a period of transition,” and in the end it will end “great for us.”

Figuring out what to do in the current situation is a huge challenge for businesses in many sectors. I talked to Leagh Turner, CEO of supply chain and transaction planning company Coupa, about how to get a plan together. An excerpt from our conversation is later in this newsletter.

ECONOMIC INDICATORS

More jobs were cut in February than any other month since July 2020, according to a report from career services firm Challenger, Gray& Christmas. Nationwide, there were roughly 172,000 job cuts last month. As far as February goes, last month’s cuts were the largest since 2009 during the midst of the Great Recession. More than a third of these cuts were in federal government positions, part of Elon Musk’s cost-slashing actions as part of the Department of Government Efficiency. These speedy and seemingly arbitrary and unfocused cuts have not just impacted federal government workers; CEOs of companies working with the federal government have started to talk about uncertainty caused by these cuts in their quarterly reports, the Washington Post reports.

But the government isn’t the only sector seeing deep cuts. Retail is also seeing them, with the Challenger, Gray & Christmas report showing 45,375 job cuts announced in the first two months of the year—an increase of 572% over the first two months of 2024, writes Forbes senior contributor Pamela Danziger.

According to Labor Department data released last week, the unemployment rate rose to 4.1% in February, though its timing doesn’t necessarily capture the full extent of government job cuts. However, the U.S. added just 151,000 non-farm jobs last month, the weakest February growth since 2019 and missing economists’ forecasts of 170,000 new jobs.

NOTABLE NEWS

Target reported soft earnings last week, with declines in net sales, gross margins and earnings, writes Forbes senior contributor Pamela Danziger. Compared with the same period last year, sales were down 3.1% and operating income dropped 21.3%. In its earnings report, Target warned of “meaningful year-over-year profit pressure” in the current quarter due to uncertainty—both among consumers and on tariffs. In an interview with CNBC last week, Target CEO Brian Cornell said that produce prices are likely to tick upwards within days of tariff enactment.

As its sales and stock price are slipping, Cornell and his senior executive team hosted a meeting last week to discuss a comeback strategy for the retailer, Danziger reported. The retailer is striving to get back to its “Tarzhay” image—a term coined decades ago when it was perceived to be a store that made the everyday elevated and upscale. Target plans to invest between $4 billion and $5 billion in its stores, supply chain and technology over the next five years, with the planned outcome of $15 billion in sales growth. The company plans to invest more in its Good & Gather and Favorite Day private label brands, continue to grow its beauty section, reduce lead times for its home and apparel merchandise, expand partnerships with popular clothing and accessories brands, and enhance omnichannel shopping with AI recommendations and optimized search results.

Aside from those investments, however, Target faces a distinct political challenge. In 2023, the retailer went all in on Pride Month-themed merchandise, a polarizing choice in some areas, which brought the store’s corporate reputation score down. Dialing back the merchandise assortment last year didn’t help matters much. As 2025 began and the Trump Administration began cracking down on diversity measures in the government, Target dialed down its diversity, equity and inclusion goals, sending its reputational score down again. The retailer was singled out as part of the February 28 People Union USA Economic Blackout—during which visits to physical stores were down 11% and app usage dropped 14%. A group of Black faith leaders is urging a 40-day boycott of the retailer to coincide with Lent.

BIG MOVES

Following years of store closings, falling stock prices and challenges, Walgreens Boots Alliance is being taken private by private equity firm Sycamore Partners in a roughly $10 billion, writes Forbes senior contributor Bruce Japsen. The company’s Walgreens and Boots stores will continue to operate, the companies said.

Many of the company’s issues stemmed from its rollout of VillageMD clinics, a physician-staffed operator in which Walgreens had a controlling stake. A lack of patients for the clinics led to huge net losses. Japsen writes that VillageMD was the primary reason for losing over $8 billion in fiscal year 2024. The transaction is expected to close at the end of this year.

TOMORROW’S TRENDS

For Global Businesses, Long-Term Planning Can Alleviate Short-Term Pain

President Donald Trump’s trade policies and announcements about tariffs have been wreaking havoc worldwide among leaders in both governments and businesses. Companies are working to make the best decisions for their bottom lines, investors and consumers in an environment where conditions are quickly changing. I spoke with Leagh Turner, CEO of supply chain and transaction planning software platform Coupa, about how businesses can plan for tariff uncertainty, both now and in the future. Our conversation took place in early March when 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico—both now suspended for a month—first took effect.

This conversation has been edited for length, clarity and continuity. A longer version is available here.

What are new tariffs doing to companies?

Turner: Companies are going to have to change. Are people ready for nationalism versus globalism? Are they ready for trade to be increasingly based on proximity? New trade partnerships? Goods flowing in different ways and are they ready to optimize for that? If the market’s going to win, companies need to try and find a way to deal with those things quickly and to optimize.

How agile are companies? Are they thinking about these things? Do they have the technology to be able to do it? Are people in the right positions thinking about it? Is technology ready to be able to support this? The answer is: To varying degrees but by and large, yes.

It’s going to feel like a belt-tightening and a process reinforcement period. And that’s OK, because let’s be honest, If you’re a large global financial institution, you should be spending within appropriate limits. You should have guardrails in place that allow for people to do those things right in the day-to-day. That’s just good practice. It’ll give them more working capital, more cash in hand. It will allow them to be a little bit more resilient to these tariffs or changing policies and allow them to think about what they do next.

Once you get the basics, planning is super important. Who do or could I buy from? What would that do to the way that I flow goods into my company? What scenario of all the available scenarios is optional or optimal to me? What does it do to my P&L, and what choices do I make when those become constrained?

We’re not done; we’ve put up trade barriers between all countries and the Americas. But there will be a global reverberation. It’s going to be this really interesting elastic effect for a long period of time that people need to insulate themselves from. You get the basics. You drive up your working capital and cash on hand. You do some really good scenario planning. Technology can help you do that.

Here’s the awesome thing: The last time we had to go through anything of this order of magnitude, we didn’t have monster data stores and real access to clean data. AI is upon us and we should be leveraging it to help us make good decisions.

How should companies be planning for short-term versus long-term?

First, accept the reality: We’re just getting started.

The second is: Go grab the low-hanging fruit. Pressure is an opportunity to get better. If a business has been operating with loose controls and has been allowing creativity to be deployed against uncreative things, then stop.

We have this measure that we use in our business: the amount of spend that you have under management, meaning how much of your spending is controlled. One of the companies that I spoke to over the course of the last week has 3% of their global spending under control, which means that 97% of their spending is not controlled. It’s based on the person who’s doing the spending. In 2025, it precludes you from being agile and from being able to cope with the current circumstances. Once you face the truth that we’re just at the beginning, to get really disciplined.

Technology companies have a massive responsibility right now to say that which can be known is known. Instead of bearing down, look up. Scenario plan, leverage the mass deployment of AI to be able to make decisions that you could never have made absent that technology, and create a business that is far more agile than it was prior.

Let me say more optimistically that maybe this is just a correction. Maybe this is just an opportunity for everybody, like the great financial crisis, to get better for those who are really diligent and rigorous. And for the cream to rise to the top.

FACTS + COMMENTS

At an investor conference last week, streaming giant Netflix announced it would increase its spending on original content in 2025.

11%: Year-over-year increase in content spending, which adds up to a planned $18 billion

301 million: Netflix subscribers, as of its most recent earnings report

‘We do expect the benefits of the password-sharing crackdown to slow’: MoffettNathanson analysts wrote in a research note last week about Netflix, which led the company’s stock to drop more than 8%

STRATEGIES + ADVICE

One of the most effective ways to improve your company is putting your employees at the center. And the best way to do that is simple: Prioritizing their well-being.

Generative AI can bring positive results to your business in efficiency, creativity, employee satisfaction and consumer experience. But to make it work for you, you need to be able to scale it.

VIDEO

QUIZ

Waymo and Uber are launching robotaxis in a fourth U.S. city. Where is the newest place to catch a driverless ride?

A. Omaha, Nebraska

B. Cleveland, Ohio

C. Little Rock, Arkansas

D. Austin, Texas

See if you got it right here.