For mid-market organisations, resilience is now increasingly being defined by how effectively capital is used to strengthen competitiveness, improve agility and prepare their businesses for what’s next. The days of assessing health and wealth by how much cash has been preserved has become obsolete in a new age where C-suite leaders need to accept rising geopolitical tensions, economic uncertainty and fluctuations in market confidence as the norm.
Our mid-year C-suite insights show continued boosts to investment, but the number of organisations doing so has fallen from 69% reported at the start of 2026 to 62% six months on. This reflects a more cautious approach as leaders grapple with inflation, energy costs and geopolitical instability. However, selective is not the same as defensive.
At the start of the year, mid-market organisations also continued to demonstrate strong growth ambitions, with 45% expecting revenue growth of more than 10% and a further 43% expecting some level of growth. This places them much closer to large enterprises than smaller businesses in terms of expansion plans and confidence in future performance.
The challenge for these organisations is becoming increasingly nuanced. While leaders remain committed to growth and transformation, investment decisions are receiving greater scrutiny as external pressures intensify. The debate is no longer whether to invest, but where investment will have the greatest strategic impact.
A changing definition of resilience
For much of the past five years, resilience was closely associated with caution. Businesses built cash reserves, delayed major investments and prioritised liquidity in response to the pandemic, inflation, geopolitical instability and supply chain disruption.
Many of those pressures remain and, in some cases, have intensified. Rather than responding by preserving more capital, however, many leaders are adapting their approach. Increasingly, resilience is being built through investments that improve operational visibility, strengthen decision-making and enable organisations to respond more quickly to changing (and challenging) market conditions.
Cash remains an important part of the resilience equation. But in an environment where disruption has become a constant, leaders increasingly recognise that maintaining flexibility and adaptability requires more than simply strengthening the balance sheet.
Investing where competitiveness depends on it
The strongest signal from C-suite leaders in mid-market organisations is their continued investment in areas clearly viewed as critical to future competitiveness. We can see 80% of companies in this segment already have a dedicated technology transformation strategy, almost matching the 82% recorded among large multi-billion-dollar businesses.
Similarly, 57% of mid-market organisations investing in AI allocate between 11% and 20% of their budget to the technology – a higher proportion than both larger and smaller organisations.
Pierre Zapp, Partner of Forvis Mazars Group based in Germany and Co-lead of mid-market, believes this reflects a broader shift in investment priorities:
