You are closing out the year with no finance team telling you what’s coming. No one is building you a slide deck about 2027. That job falls to you, in whatever time is left after the actual work gets done.
So let’s keep this short and useful. Three decisions worth making now, not in January when the pressure is already on.
Where will next year’s work actually come from
You need to name your sources of work before you need them, not after a slow quarter forces the question.
Most solo owners I talk to can list their current clients or customers without hesitating. Fewer can say where the next ten come from. That gap is the thing to close before 2027, not during it.
This doesn’t mean a marketing plan with a budget behind it. It means writing down, honestly, which of your current channels are still working and which ones you’re running out of habit. Referrals from two years ago. A directory listing nobody clicks. A social account you update because you feel you should.
Keep what’s producing. Mark the rest as something to look at harder in the new year.
What should I stop doing before 2027
You should stop doing the task that takes the most hours relative to what it earns you, and you likely already know what that is.
Every solo operator carries at least one job that made sense when the business was smaller or when a tool didn’t exist yet. Reconciling invoices by hand. Writing the same email from scratch every time. Managing a process that a template or a piece of software now handles faster.
Statistics Canada’s second quarter release, published 11 June 2026, found that AI adoption among Canadian businesses tripled to 19.2 percent, up from 6.1 percent two years earlier. That is a real shift in how much of this work is now routine to hand off, not a prediction about the future.
If you’ve been meaning to look at where automation fits into your own workload, my piece on automation for solo operators walks through where it tends to save the most time with the least setup.
Pick one task. Not five. The one that drains the most hours for the least return. Decide now that 2027 is the year you stop doing it yourself.
What’s the one capability worth learning for 2027
Learn how trade exposure touches your business, even if you don’t import or export directly.
The CFIB reported on 10 September 2026 that 53,112 Canadian businesses are directly hit by tariffs right now, broken down as 13,160 exporters and 45,414 importers. If you buy supplies, packaging, or inventory from outside Canada, or sell into a market that’s adjusted its tariffs this year, you are closer to that number than you might think.
You don’t need to become a trade policy expert. You need enough working knowledge to ask your suppliers the right questions and to notice early if your costs are about to move. That is a capability, not a budget line. It costs you time to learn, not money to buy.
If tariffs have already touched your supply chain, my article on cross-border cost pressure goes into more detail on where small businesses are getting squeezed first.
What is the CFIB actually asking for, and has it happened
No. The CFIB has put forward a set of relief measures, and as of this writing none of them are law.
These are proposals: a cap tied to tariff exposure, a lower small business tax rate, and a higher deduction threshold. They are asks the CFIB has made on behalf of small business owners, not changes that have taken effect.
I’m repeating that because it matters. Plans built around a tax change that hasn’t happened yet are plans built on sand. Watch for movement on these, but build your 2027 numbers as if they stay exactly as they are today.
A twenty-minute exercise to do this week
Here is a way to turn the three questions above into something concrete before you close your laptop today.
- Open a blank note or a sheet of paper. Write today’s date at the top.
- List every source of work or sales you’ve had in the last six months. Mark each one as growing, steady, or fading.
- Circle the one task you do every week that you dislike most and that doesn’t need your specific judgment to complete.
- Write one sentence on how tariffs or import costs, even indirectly, touch what you sell or what you buy.
- Fold the paper. Put it somewhere you’ll see it again in January.
That’s the whole exercise. No spreadsheet, no forecasting software. Just an honest accounting of where you stand before the year turns.
What this doesn’t cover
This piece isn’t a tax guide and it isn’t a hiring plan. It doesn’t tell you which software to buy or which supplier to switch to. Those decisions depend on your specific business in ways a general post can’t responsibly answer. What it does is name the three questions worth sitting with before 2027 arrives, so you’re not answering them for the first time under pressure.
What’s the one task on your list that you already know should have stopped a year ago?
