The screen didn’t flicker. The number just changed. One minute, the cost-per-unit for the ceramic mugs was a comfortable $4.19. The next, after a refresh that was pure muscle memory, it was $9.49. There was no warning, no email, no slow creep. It was a digital guillotine. A single line item, freight from the Port of Yantian, had been rewritten by someone thousands of miles away who had no idea a small e-commerce business in Ohio even existed.

For a moment, all you can do is stare. It feels like a glitch, a typo in the matrix. You want to call someone, but who? The supplier? The shipping agent? The President? It’s a strange, modern paralysis, this sensation of being powerfully and intimately affected by an event you can only read about in headlines. Your business plan, that beautiful spreadsheet full of projections and five-year goals, suddenly feels like a child’s drawing taped to the refrigerator-charming, optimistic, and utterly irrelevant in the face of reality.

The Myth of Local Isolation

I’ll admit, I used to believe that following geopolitical news as a small business owner was a high-minded form of procrastination. It felt more productive than scrolling through social media, sure, but it wasn’t real work. Real work was negotiating with suppliers, optimizing ad spend, and packing boxes until your back screamed. Worrying about a naval blockade in a strait I couldn’t pronounce felt like cosplaying as the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. It was an abstraction. And I was dead wrong. I held that belief right up until the point a minor trade dispute over processed leather-of all things-cost me $49,000 in a single quarter because the specialty cowhide for our handcrafted wallets was suddenly classified as a ‘strategic asset’ by a country I’d only ever associated with vacation photos.

It felt like I had pushed on a door that was clearly marked ‘PULL’. The information was right there, but I moved with my own momentum, my own assumptions about how the world works, and walked straight into the unmoving frame. The world had sent a signal, and I’d completely misinterpreted it.

This is the new cost of doing business. It’s an invisible line item that lives between customs duties and marketing expenses: the Geopolitical Risk Tax. It’s a tax paid not in dollars directly, but in sleepless nights, frantic phone calls, and the slow, grinding realization that your supply chain isn’t a chain at all. It’s a web, delicate and shimmering, with single points of failure that look like obscure port cities and distant factories.

Become the Foley Artist of Your Supply Chain

To really see it, you have to think like Adrian J.-C. Adrian is a foley artist. He creates the sounds of reality for movies. The crisp snap of a celery stalk isn’t celery in his world; it’s the sound of a bone breaking. The gentle crinkle of a plastic grocery bag is the rustle of autumn leaves. His entire job is to perceive the world not as a whole, but as a collection of discreet, manipulable components. He hears a punch not as a ‘punch’, but as the thud of a frozen chicken hitting a leather couch combined with the wet slap of a damp towel. He deconstructs the world to rebuild it.

Most of us look at our products the way an audience watches a movie. We see the final, assembled thing. The coffee mug. The wallet. The wireless speaker. We don’t see the Kazakhstani mine where the lithium was dug, the Vietnamese factory where the plastic casing was molded, or the 19 separate customs checkpoints the capacitor passed through on its journey. We just see the finished product, delivered on a pallet, ready for sale.

Adrian wouldn’t make that mistake. He would pick up your product and he would listen. He would ask: What is the sound of this plastic? Is it brittle, like it came from a region with lower quality controls? What is the hum of this circuit board? Does it have the specific frequency of a component that’s only made in one factory in Taiwan? He would deconstruct its reality. This is the skill we now need. We need to become the foley artists of our own supply chains. We need to stop seeing the final product and start perceiving the hundreds of individual ‘sounds’ that create it.

But how do you do that? You don’t have a foley studio with thousands of props. You have a laptop and a gnawing sense of anxiety. You start by challenging your assumptions. Your supplier in Shenzhen says they source all their materials locally. Do they? Or are they importing a key component from a neighboring country currently experiencing massive political unrest? Answering that used to be impossible, a black box of global trade you just had to trust. But the data is there, if you know where to look. Peeling back the layers of your own supply chain, or even your competitors’, often begins with a deep dive into the raw, unglamorous data of what’s actually moving across borders. Publicly available customs records can reveal the true origin of parts you thought you had a handle on, exposing dependencies you never knew existed. It’s the business equivalent of Adrian discovering that the sound of a dragon’s roar is actually a recording of a sea lion’s yawn, pitched down and distorted. The reality is often not what the script says.

The Hidden Layers of Your Supply Chain

I made this mistake with a line of outdoor gear. We used a specific type of water-resistant nylon, prized for its durability. Our supplier assured us it was woven in a facility just outside their city. For 19 months, it was. Then, a new tariff was announced. Our costs jumped 39%. We couldn’t figure it out. The supplier swore up and down they hadn’t changed a thing. It took us two months of frantic digging to discover the truth: the chemical coating that gave the nylon its water-resistant property, a tiny fraction of the final product, was being imported by our supplier’s supplier from the very country targeted by the new tariffs. Two layers deep, our supply chain had a secret. A secret that cost us nearly an entire season’s profit.

We were listening to the movie, not the individual sounds. We heard ‘nylon’ but we didn’t hear the chemical coating, the polymer pellets, the specialized weaving machinery that was itself imported from Germany. Each of those was a point of failure, a potential geopolitical snag.

Cultivate Adrian-like Paranoia

So no, don’t become a cable news addict. Don’t build spreadsheets tracking the approval ratings of foreign leaders. That’s just another form of pushing on the door marked ‘PULL’. It’s mistaking noise for signal. Instead, cultivate a healthy, Adrian-like paranoia. Pick up your best-selling product. Put it on your desk. Stare at it. Don’t just see what it is. See where it’s been. Deconstruct it. Map its journey not as a line from A to B, but as a sprawling, interconnected network of dependencies. Each of those connections is a thread, and any one of them can be pulled by a faceless bureaucrat or a distant conflict, unraveling the whole thing right there on your P&L statement.