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"The cheap import did not die of one cause. It was repriced, line by line, while the invoice still looked familiar." Core point — Since 1 January 2026, the EU's CBAM (Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism) is in its definitive phase: importers of steel, aluminium, cement, fertilisers, electricity and hydrogen file verified annual declarations and surrender certificates priced off the EU ETS. The 2026 cash cost is small by design; the trajectory is not. Combined with the tariff s

"A budget is a plan. By July it is a museum. The only question that matters at the half-year is not 'where are we against plan' but 'knowing what we know now, would we still place the same bets'." Key takeaway − Listed companies publish half-year results this month because the market forces them to look in the mirror. Private mid-market companies have no analyst call, so most boards turn the H1 review into variance theatre: explain the gaps, adjust the forecast, reaffirm the

"The minister is right about the disease. He is wrong about the organ. The management company is not the leak in the welfare state. It is the pressure gauge that shows where the leak is." Key takeaway - The government wants to crack down on management companies because they cost the welfare state money. Partly true, and the fake ones deserve everything coming to them. But for real businesses trying to hire real talent, the management company solves problems nothing else in Be

"Europe's competitiveness gap is not a policy gap. It is a discipline gap. Brussels controls maybe 15% of the levers. Boards control the rest." Key takeaway - The conversation about European competitiveness is dominated by the diagnostic class - McKinsey, Bruegel, Draghi - who can describe the problem but cannot prescribe operator action. The structural gap between European mid-market companies and their US and Asian peers reduces to eight specific governance design choices.

Key takeaway — Most SME risk registers protect nothing because they are designed as compliance artefacts, not as decision instruments. Real protection comes from three named techniques run as three sessions a year — a pre-mortem, a decision matrix, a quarterly drill — and from a CEO who treats risk as a decision problem rather than a documentation problem. AI tools like Claude turn what used to be a €30–50k consulting project into an afternoon. The architecture stays the oper

Most European distributors did not redesign their supply chains after 2024. They absorbed the shocks, rerouted what had to be rerouted, paid the freight bills, and went back to the operating model they had in 2019. The shocks were treated as weather. The weather passed. The structure underneath did not change. This is the operating risk that almost no Belgian mid-market distributor I speak with currently prices accurately. The 2024 shocks were not weather. They were the syste

Field Notes — A permanent reference for the CEO who has read every priority framework and still finds the team working on too many things There are at least a dozen well-known priority frameworks in circulation. Eisenhower's matrix. OKRs. RICE. OGSM. Hoshin Kanri. The 4DX disciplines of execution. ICE scoring. MoSCoW. Each gets adopted by an ambitious management team. Each gets quietly discarded eighteen months later. And the company's underlying prioritization problem - the

Most mid-market businesses do not stall between €5M and €20M because the strategy is wrong, the market is wrong, or the capital is missing. They stall because the structure that took them to €5M cannot carry them to €20M, and the founder-CEO who built that structure is the last person in the building to see it. This is the first entry in the Field Notes series - operator-level observations from inside the Belgian mid-market, written for the audience that actually has to live