What Zaps Business isn’t Supply Chains or Rate Cuts — It’s About Predictability

After 20 years spent building, fixing, and scaling companies, I’ve learned the hardest thing to manufacture isn’t growth — it’s predictability, Scott Cannon, CEO of BigRentz, wrote in an essay for Fortune.

Tariff shifts, supply chain shocks, and labor shortages are now structural features of the global economy.

I’ve led a global logistics company through a turnaround that tripled revenue and ended in acquisition by UPS. I’ve overseen the transformation of a construction equipment rental marketplace into a vertically integrated, AI-powered procurement platform that’s helping reshape how the massive jobsite economy runs.

Across those experiences, from private-equity boardrooms to field operations, the same thing has been true: The real arms race hasn’t been over artificial intelligence, interest rates, or supply chains — it’s been over stability.

Executives have described turbulent markets with the acronym VUCA — volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity. VUCA is not a concept — it’s reality. Tariff shifts, supply chain shocks, and labor shortages are now structural features of the global economy.

In a high-volatility, low-growth world (US GDP is projected to hover under 2%), leaders who win are the ones who can engineer predictability inside that chaos — building systems that perform regardless of what the Fed or the market does next.

Regardless of sector or company size, 25-basis-point rate cuts typically don’t matter if the price of raw inputs swings wildly.

That’s the situation construction firms have faced for years. Since 2020, input prices have risen nearly 40%. In just the first quarter of 2025, they climbed at a 9.7% annualized rate.

Fewer than 2% of contractors expect profit margins to increase in the next six months.

This is the burden of unpredictability. Without stable input costs, even healthy pipelines become unstable under margin pressure. Rate cuts provide confidence at the edges — but predictability keeps projects profitable.