The instinct when the world is on fire is to stand still.

As the conflict in the Middle East continues, oil prices are surging, shipping lanes are choked and markets are reassessing the rate path as renewed inflation pressure complicates central bank decisions.

Every headline is telling business owners that now is not the time to make big decisions. But standing still has a cost. Most owners never calculate it. And for those with a two-to-three-year exit horizon, that cost could be significant.

The sovereign capability lesson: What it means for your business

The conflict has exposed something uncomfortable about how nations are structured. Governments across the world have been forced to confront how dependent they are on global supply chains for things they cannot do without, such as energy, fertilizers and industrial chemicals.

The war did not create those vulnerabilities. It revealed them. The consequences are already moving through the global economy.

Commodity inputs like urea, a key fertilizer used by grain farmers, naphtha used in plastics manufacturing and methanol found in everything from paint to disinfectant, have experienced significant price spikes.

European manufacturers are drawing down aluminum stockpiles amid fears that Gulf supply disruptions could result in shortages within months.

Asian manufacturers reliant on just-in-time delivery of semiconductors and components are watching shipments stall. The World Trade Organization has forecast global merchandise trade growth slowing to 1.9 percent in 2026 from 4.6 percent in 2025 if energy prices remain elevated.

There is a direct parallel for business owners. The national conversation about sovereign capability is really a conversation about dependency. How reliant are we on others for things we cannot do without? What happens when the supply stops? How long can we last?

Every business owner should be asking the same questions about their own operation. Who are your top three customers? If you lost one tomorrow, what happens to your revenue? Who are your key suppliers and do you have alternatives? Are your input costs exposed to global commodity prices or currency movements you cannot control?

If the COVID-19 pandemic taught us anything, it is that scenario planning should be a standing item on every business owner’s strategic agenda.

Most owners who were blindsided in 2020 were not running bad businesses. The conditions had simply not forced them to stress-test their assumptions.

The war is another reminder that those tests should not wait for a crisis to arrive. The owners who treat this moment as a prompt to understand and reduce their exposure will not only build a more resilient business, but they will build a more valuable one.

The freeze is understandable – and also dangerous

When uncertainty spikes, the psychological response is to wait. Owners tell themselves they will revisit the exit conversation once things settle down – once the conflict is resolved and the right path becomes clearer.

The problem is that markets do not wait. And neither do buyers.

During the pandemic, buyer activity in the lower- to mid-market did not disappear. In many segments it increased, private equity diversified, corporates acquired rather than built and capital moved out of volatile public markets and into private businesses. The same dynamics are playing out today.

What the numbers are actually saying

Strip away the headlines, and the picture is more nuanced than the noise suggests.

Global mergers and acquisitions (M&A) value rose 40 percent in 2025 to an estimated US$4.9 trillion according to Bain and Company, with deal volumes up just seven percent.

That gap between value growth and volume growth tells the real story. According to Deloitte’s ‘2026 M&A Trends Survey’ of 1,500 United States corporate and private equity leaders, just 20 very large transactions drove one-third of total American deal value in 2025 alone, a pattern consistent with what Bain observed across global markets, where headline value growth was heavily concentrated in a small number of outsized deals.

Strip those out and a different, more interesting picture emerges, particularly for mid-market owners. The concentration of activity at the top end of the market has left the mid-market less crowded, better supplied with motivated buyers and increasingly attractive to sophisticated acquirers who cannot compete for mega assets.

More than 80 percent of dealmakers surveyed by Deloitte expect to transact a greater volume of deals in 2026 than in 2025.

The buyer-seller valuation gap is closing, with sellers moving away from 2021 peak valuations and buyers returning with genuine strategic intent.

Why buyers are not waiting either

Private equity funds globally are sitting on approximately US$2.2 trillion in uncommitted capital, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence analysis of Preqin data, and many funds raised during the 2021 to 2022 vintage years are approaching the end of their investment windows. They have a structural, contractual obligation to deploy that capital.

The question is not whether they will buy. It is what they will buy. Increasingly the answer is not one large company. It is a portfolio of smaller ones.

One of the most prevalent strategies among private equity firms right now is buy-and-build. A fund acquires one solid platform business and then systematically acquires smaller bolt-on businesses to rapidly scale revenue, capability and market reach.

For owners of smaller businesses who assumed they were too small to attract serious buyer interest, this changes the equation. You may not be the platform. But you could be exactly the bolt-on a well-capitalized acquirer is actively hunting for right now.

Strategic buyers are in the market for similar reasons. According to PwC’s ‘29th Global CEO Survey’, based on responses from 4,454 CEOs across 95 countries, 42 percent of CEOs globally have already begun competing in new sectors.

Among those planning major acquisitions, 44 percent expect to invest outside their current industry. Specialist businesses with a clear niche and a loyal customer base are attracting serious attention from buyers who would rather acquire capability than try to build it from scratch.

A third buyer pool is growing fast and is often overlooked: the corporate refugee. Across major economies senior executives including general managers, directors and divisional heads are stepping away from the corporate ladder and acquiring established businesses to run as their own.

Using redundancy payouts, stock options or pooled investor capital through what is known as a search fund, they arrive well-resourced, financially literate and highly motivated.

Stanford’s research confirms this ecosystem is growing rapidly, with 94 traditional search funds formed in 2023 alone. These buyers are not looking for the next tech startup. They want established, profitable businesses with recurring revenue, clear systems and a management structure that does not collapse when the founder steps back.

Across all three buyer types, one thing is consistent: they are not expecting perfection. Sophisticated buyers understand that external events create temporary disruption. They know how to distinguish between a business with a structural problem and a business caught in an event beyond its control.

What they are looking for is transparency. A business that can clearly document what the disruption has cost, tracked with a line item in the financials, gives a buyer what they need to normalize the impact and assess true underlying performance. Messy numbers with no context just look like underperformance.

Buyers are not looking for perfect businesses. They are looking for prepared, honest, well-documented ones.

The succession wave no-one is talking about

Something important is getting lost in the geopolitical noise. Most mid-market deals globally are not driven by macro conditions. They are driven by personal ones.

In the United States alone, Baby Boomers own roughly 40 percent of private businesses. The pattern is mirrored across the United Kingdom, Europe, Canada and Australia, where a generation of founders built businesses through the 1980s and 1990s and are now approaching the exit. McKinsey estimates that more than one million viable sale candidates will face ownership transitions by 2035, representing up to US$5 trillion in enterprise value.

Research from the Exit Planning Institute found that only 13 percent of all business owners have a formal exit plan. The vast majority are unprepared, which creates both risk and opportunity depending on which side of the transaction you sit on.

This generation of owners cannot wait indefinitely for conditions to improve, for central banks to cut rates or for conflict in the Middle East to resolve. They have businesses to transition and lives to move forward with. Life does not pause for geopolitics. And neither do the buyers actively looking for quality assets to acquire.

The window does not announce itself

Business owners need to be clear on their exit plans and start driving their agenda – reduce your dependencies, clean up your financials and build a clear story about how your business performs under pressure, not just in good times.

The world is uncertain. It may stay uncertain for some time. But buyers are active with record capital to deploy, the mid-market is less crowded than the headlines suggest, and the valuation gap between buyers and sellers has rarely been narrower.

If you have been thinking about your exit and waiting for the right moment to start preparing, this is it.

Opinions expressed by The CEO Magazine contributors are their own.