Since early March, when the current administration’s tariffs were first set to hit, I have been working on a blog that addresses their impact and offers some best practices from industry experts on how to deal with them, with comments from manufacturers, integrators, and business leaders. When that initial set of tariffs was paused for a month, along with a shift in percentages for certain countries, I paused the blog, too, and continued to reach out to channel pros for insights.
After a few rewrites, I was going to go live with it in April, right after “Liberation Day,” but that, too, resulted in a quickly fluctuating news that any article published would be out of date within hours. So, after another rewrite, it remains in drafts…
Related: Navigating Tariffs – A Survival Guide for Custom Integrators
There is no doubt that tariffs will have an effect on our businesses — integrator, manufacturer, distributor, and consultant alike. Our clients will also be feeling it both as consumers and, just as likely, in their professional lives as well. We are all in it together, and the constant changes are making it difficult to formulate a plan of action.
However, we have published quite a few stories lately about how to deal with any uncertainty in business, which handles the current tariff conundrum and so much more.
For example, Livewire’s Henry Clifford covered uncertainty in a recent blog, and advised using this time as an opportunity to work closer with your vendors. “While we can’t control tariffs, we can continue to communicate with our vendors as manufacturing costs escalate,” he said. “Relationships are key here, as well as being more important to fewer partners. Having greater buying power with individual suppliers or buying-group membership alignment will lead to more creative thinking on the vendor side as higher order minimums might yield free freight, longer payment terms, volume incentive rebates (VIR), or demo product credit.”
To legally protect yourself with clients, in a CEDIA-sponsored webinar on tariffs, Laura Siegel Rabinowitz, a lawyer with the firm Greenberg Traurig, advised, “You have to do a risk analysis in terms of the product, then look at your purchase agreements to see if there are provisions that cover who bears the tariff responsibility and what happens if it changes after the production date. Certainly, for new agreements, it’s important to add language to protect yourself [when] the price that was calculated when the agreement was negotiated is not the actual price of the product because duties and tariffs are determined at the date of entry.”
Related: Thriving Through Uncertainty
Other advice I heard repeated includes the importance of keeping customers in the loop. Whatever changes in pricing occur, they need to be revealed to the client in a timely manner, which, as evidenced by my forever out-of-date unpublished blog, will be challenging, but no less vital.
While there are plenty of alarming headlines filling up our newsfeeds, it is important to focus on the things that we can control — having a solid purchase agreement, pre-ordering where possible and collaborating with vendors, and effective communication with clients.
There is no telling how long the current headwinds will last, but this industry has faced many before — including supply chain disasters only a few short years ago — and we have emerged successfully.
By working together with our strong network, which includes associations, buying groups, vendor partners, and internal teams, we can do it again.
