How To Invest Wisely As A Smaller Business Owner

Everything in life is an investment. It’s not always nice to think through those terms, but it is. Even something as primal as planting potato seeds in the ground is a hopeful investment, that with just the right attention and water these root vegetables can grow and provide a hearty meal later on down the line.

As such, learning to invest as a small business owner is important. That’s not to say you’re going to be throwing your company capital into the stock market, but investing into your idea, your people, and your presence really does matter.

But if we were to focus on the investment in materials, inventory, stock and even commercial direction, it’s important to make sure we’re doing this the right way too. For instance, a Japanese seafood restaurant renown in the area (and competing in an already tough market), will very much care about the processes, prices, and practices of how they engage with a local fish market every morning.

For this reason, we can learn some lessons from that article. In this post, we’ll discuss how to invest wisely as a smaller business owner, with principles that can apply no matter what your preference could be:

Use The Right Platform

Think about what you need from the platform. Sometimes, that question answers itself. You may just want the best possible ETH block explorer to increase your holdings and check prices. But depending on what you’re buying and when you may need to use a niche platform with specific features. For our purposes some platforms cater to small businesses, offering lower fees and more straightforward interfaces. Online brokers like Fidelity and Charles Schwab have user-friendly tools that won’t need a full finance degree to really get to grips with, and that can feel like a nice change of pace for those getting started..

Ultimately, it’s virtues and principles you’re looking for, such as platforms with clear fee structures, decent customer support, and educational resources. Low latencies and reliable uptime are important too, especially if you’re competing for bids. Some even offer trial accounts where you can practice without risking real money and that in itself can help you understand how the systems work.

Find A Trustworthy Broker

A good broker is like a reliable business partner, no matter what they’re buying for you. That’s because the purchase is arguably the smallest element of what they do on a daily basis, as they also track markets and offer insights and guidance. To use our example from above, a buyer of fish from the market may have in-roads into the system to know contacts who will provide them with first pick of the prawns that morning, always ensuring their represented restaurant is given the best possible ingredients for the service that day.

These relationships can be fruitful over the years so it’s best to start strong and invest in this approach. We’d recommend that you take time to look for brokers with solid reputations, transparent fee structures as is appropriate, and experience working with small businesses like yours. If they work off commission, a consisten figure is important. 

Also, just to be safe, check their credentials, read reviews from other business owners, and don’t be afraid to ask detailed questions about their process. If they’re a pro they might be cagey and just let the results speak for themselves, but of course, appropriate vetting is important too. This is an investment in itself, that allows you to make further investments from that point on.

Keep An Eye On Prices & Trends

It’s very important to keep an eye on the prices and trends that affect those prices worldwide. For example, during the pandemic the price of lumber skyrocketed and that meant that many trade outfits or construction firms tried to stockpile as much as they could until the shortage was replenished, which it seems to have done now for the most part.

However, it’s also true that energy costs, raw materials, the value of manufacturing, and refinement, all of this can differ depending on the goals you have set. It may take some time to achieve this, but keeping an open mind and your eyes wide can do more good than bad because you’ll begin to gain a sense of when the best buying seasonal patterns are.

Of course, you don’t have to do this yourself, as platforms can often showcase the tracked fluctuations of price differences as time goes on. In addition, keeping an eye on such prices and trends can help you avoid panic buying or making poorer decisions.

Learn From Your Competition

It’s smart to watch how other businesses in your sector manage their investments and resources. This doesn’t mean copying them exactly but understanding their strategies. Some businesses are more transparent than you might expect, which means they even share insights through annual reports, conference presentations, or industry publications – they might showcase why their construction outfit purchases a certain amount of glass each year, or how they invest in fuel for their logistics network and distribute it over their refueling centers to keep the show on the road twenty-four hours a day. 

That’s why trade journals and local business networks can be goldmines of practical information and are considered a great method of understanding the practices surrounding you. So we’d recommend finding some in your industry! Look at the investments being made and try to determine the contextual forces at play that helped those decisions along. It can only educate, and that’s usually a great thing.

Remain Agile & Lean

Now, the most successful small businesses treat investment like a flexible strategy, not a rigid rulebook that you must adhere to at all costs, and that’s the mistake you can easily make if one or two investment approaches seem to work.

Being agile means being ready to pivot when opportunities or challenges arise. In other words, don’t lock all your resources into one approach or your eggs in one basket. Maintain some financial flexibility that lets you respond quickly to market changes. This might mean keeping a cash reserve, avoiding long-term contracts that limit your options, or developing multiple revenue streams that funnel directly into such investments so you don’t risk your main operating capital.

With this advice, we hope you can more easily invest wisely as a small business owner.