The Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council released its Small Business Check Up on October 8. TechnoMetrica Marketplace Intelligence ran it online from September 11 to 19, 2026, with 516 owners of firms employing two to 99 people. Credibility interval: plus or minus 4.4 points. Read the survey release here.
The headline is good news. Eighty-one percent of owners are meeting or exceeding their financial expectations for 2026. Sixty-one percent say they are doing better than 2025. Eighty-eight percent describe the business as stable or growing. Thirty percent expect to add staff in the next six months.
Then there is the line that made me stop.
Energy moved from ninth to second
In February 2026, gas and energy costs ranked ninth on the list of owner concerns, at 11 percent. In September, they ranked second, at 29 percent. Inflation still holds the top spot at 39 percent.
Nothing moves seven places in eight months by accident. That cost line was background noise in the winter and is now the second thing on an owner’s mind.
Here is why it matters more than the ranking suggests. Most owners price annually and review utilities never. Rent you negotiate. Payroll you watch weekly. Business energy costs sit on autopay, and by the time anyone notices, you have absorbed three quarters of margin erosion without touching a price.
If you run anything with a kitchen, a shop floor, refrigeration, vehicles, or a server you own, pull twelve months of statements this week. Not to feel bad about it. To see whether your January pricing still covers your costs in October. It is a twenty-minute job, and most owners haven’t done it.
The second number: capital got harder
Lack of access to capital now constrains 54 percent of respondents. In February it was 43 percent. And the SBA just made buying a business more difficult.
Eleven points in eight months, at the same time as a majority reporting a decent year. That combination is worth naming, because the two facts pull in different directions and owners tend to only register the one in front of them. Revenue is fine. The line of credit you were counting on for the expansion is not.
Concern about an economic slowdown sits at 73 percent, with 34 percent very concerned. Concern about inflation is at 81 percent.
What a good year hides
This is the pattern I keep running into. A business is performing. The owner is relieved. But underneath the relief, two inputs—energy and credit—have both moved against them quietly, while the top line looked fine.
A good year is the easiest time to stop paying attention. It is also the only time you have the room to fix anything. Repricing when you are not is an emergency, and customers can tell the difference.
Three things worth doing before the end of the quarter. Reprice against your current input costs, not last January’s. Open the credit conversation now, while your numbers are the ones you want to show. Separate the costs you can control from the ones you cannot, because the energy line mostly sits in the second category, and the time you spend being angry about it is time you’re not spending on the first.
If the growth is real but the infrastructure under it has not kept up — the billing, the financial planning, the systems you chose when you were half this size — that is the work. A2Z Business Consulting does exactly that kind of structural cleanup, and it is usually cheaper than the year you lose doing it the hard way.
One more figure from the survey: 58 percent of these owners use AI agents regularly or occasionally, and only 16 percent think AI is eliminating more jobs than it creates. Main Street has made up its mind on that question faster than the commentary has.
For owners who want a second set of eyes on the quarter rather than a project, executive advisory is for that. Most of what I do there is ask about the lines nobody looked at.