This is John Batser. Conversation with colleague Gene Marks has been much on the road about small business prospects in 26. Very good. And why? Gene takes on tariffs. He takes on expectations. He takes on global news and says positive. Here's Gene to explain. Small business, 26. Much more of this tonight.

You know, and certainly enough, there's been a few surveys that came out in December, the National Federation of Independent Business. It's a monthly survey of their economic trends.

FI serve, which, you know, basically makes the clover, you the Clover point of sales system.

So they've got like thousands and thousands of retail stores around.

They've got access to revenue from all these retail stores.

Comerica Bank, Intuit, the maker of QuickBooks came out with their numbers.

And by the way, a lot of these surveys are now coming out.

They're not just surveys.

They're companies that have data from their small businesses that are using their like into it as data from its QuickBooks users.

So I really pay more attention to that rather than just people answering questions on a form.

But really across the board, small businesses, you know, all had a decent December holiday sales are up

about four and a half percent according to a number of different reports and and and many of them

are optimistic heading into I mean the grand majority of them are optimistic heading into 2026.

I mean we have a lot of other you you know, you know, challenging stuff going on

in the world. I get that. But, you know, one of the things that it's not is if you're running

a business, and this is despite the threat of tariffs and the threat of, you know, continued

inflation. And I'll tell you the reason why, no business owner that I know sees the threat of tariffs being so significant that they can't navigate their way around it.