GROWTH STRATEGIES

4x6/Getty Images

More companies may be able to call themselves small businesses if the Small Business Administration goes forward with plans to overhaul its size standards. And it could open up opportunities for finance leaders and owners of smaller companies who want to grow, but stay under the threshold for special government contracting opportunities.

In August, the SBA proposed a revision to its company size standards to “better reflect current industry structures, market conditions, and competitiveness,” and published its methodology for developing those standards.

The methodology consolidated almost 1,000 industry-specific standards into 338.

The overhaul to the size standards, if it goes through, would increase the number of businesses that could call themselves “small” by roughly 114,541, including more than 37,000 companies that held $71 billion in government contracts in 2025. It could have a big impact on eligibility for US government contract set-asides and SBA loans.

The SBA’s contracting programs help both the government and small business, according to Matt Swartz, an M&A partner at law firm Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman. The government gets access to “more nimble and specialized businesses” while small companies can compete for contracts in a separate category, “rather than a small company with focused expertise always eclipsed by the marketing resources of the giants,” he told CFO Brew via email. 

The changes in SBA size standards could create “a new category of buyers.”—LB

      

Sponsored By PwC

Have you been tempted to hire a psychic ahead of the midterm elections? We don’t blame you. The elections could have a huge ripple effect on the business landscape, especially when it comes to tax policy, trade, and supply chains.

In our recent article with PwC, we explore how leaders can prepare for uncertainty in these key areas. We dig into everything from tariff volatility to tax strategy to domestic production and reshoring.

Each tactic and strategy focuses on helping businesses become more agile, adaptable, and flexible in the areas it’s needed most.

Take a look at the strategies to see which ones you can apply to your business.

INTERNAL AUDIT

Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Spare a thought for the internal auditor. A 2024 global survey by the Internal Audit Foundation found that half of the 6,500 respondents (78% of whom were employed as internal auditors) thought the greatest challenge to the profession was “being misunderstood or undervalued.” And 48% said internal auditors were stereotyped as the corporate “police.”

Now the New York Stock Exchange wants to give its newly listed companies more time to set up an internal audit function.

This summer, the NYSE filed a proposal with the SEC to extend the transition period for newly public companies to establish an internal audit function. The exchange wants to give companies five years to do so, instead of the current one year. The SEC’s comment period for the NYSE proposal ended Sept. 8.

Count Richard Chambers, the former president and CEO of the Institute of Internal Auditors and former national practice leader in internal audit advisory services at PwC, among those strongly opposing the idea.

Chambers believes a five-year grace period is too long. “Those are the years in which companies don’t have mature controls, mature risk management,” he told CFO Brew. “They’re building and forging the infrastructure to be successful long term. Now suddenly you’re not going to have the internal audit function? That seems like an unnecessary level of risk to take.”

Boards will have to take management’s word about the company’s status.—LB

      

AI ECONOMICS

Morning Brew, Inc., Photos: Getty Images

Apparently, building the future is expensive—so much so that Big Tech wants someone else to help pay for it.

Amazon is reportedly considering putting about $8 billion worth of Nvidia Grace Blackwell chips into a special-purpose vehicle funded by outside investors, then leasing the chips right back. The vehicle would raise debt and could sell investors an equity stake of up to 10%, giving Amazon a more asset-light way to keep feeding AWS’s appetite for computing power.

Passing the bill. Why bother, you ask? Amazon expects to spend a whopping $220 billion on capex this year, much of it to expand AWS and AI infrastructure, up from an earlier forecast of $200 billion. But even Big Tech’s deep pockets have limits, and bringing in outside capital lets companies keep building without footing the entire bill themselves.

Amazon’s proposed deal is part of a broader shift in who finances the AI boom. The five largest AI hyperscalers are expected to spend more than $800 billion this year and $1.2 trillion next year, according to Goldman Sachs, and they’ll take any opportunity to offload those expenses.

Brew Markets asks, will AI infrastructure spending eventually earn enough to justify the investment?—HC

      

Sponsored By Hyphenate

Where point solutions break. Each tool in your stack handles a task. But when the rules only live in people’s heads and the work spans across systems, AI agents don’t have the context needed to finish the job. We teamed up with Hyphenate to explore how autonomous finance connects the pieces. Read on.

market forces

Francis Scialabba

Today’s top finance reads

Stat: 72. That’s the number of S&P 500 companies that issued positive EPS guidance for Q3—a record for a single quarter—out of the 116 that provided quarterly forecasts, according to FactSet data. (Seeking Alpha)

Quote: “I even think that the hyperscalers that spend hundreds of billions on the development of their large language models, they don’t really know what is going to be the ROI. They have maybe some assumptions and some hypothesis, but the whole point is, you don’t want to fall behind.”—Booking Holdings CFO Ewout Steenbergen, on the guessing game companies are playing with AI spending (Fortune)

Read: Oh, and guess what’s becoming “impossible” to budget? Hint: Rhymes with Bay-Eye. (The Wall Street Journal)

^{*A message from our sponsor.}

Jobs

Skip the noise and cut to the jobs that matter. CollabWORK curates openings from top employers and shares them directly in trusted spaces like CFO Brew—click here to see the full list for readers like you.