If I Started Investing in 2026, This is What I'd Do

Knowing my audience here on my YouTube channel, I know that a lot of people are probably here because they want to learn not just about the business side of things, but ultimately this is about how do we go about making some more money. And being a 20-year veteran now in running businesses, I've learned quite a lot about investments and how to make money and various things like that. So I'm going to share some of my thoughts on what I would do if I was starting all over again from scratch and having to make some investments in 2025. This is what I would do. I think we are bombarded at the moment on Instagram and social media generally by all of these crypto bros and people who are selling properties and flipping property and stuff like that, and they're trading on the stock market and telling us that we can all get rich and buy Lamborghinis and fly in private jets and things like that. And I don't want to burst your bubble or anything, but quite frankly, most of that is complete bunkum. It's bullshit, and it's as simple as that. Get-rich-quick schemes really only seem to benefit one person, and that is the person who sits at the top of the pyramid, whatever the scheme is that you're about to invest in and hopefully get rich. And I guess that's what a lot of investment mindset comes down to for most people, is how much risk can I tolerate? How quickly do I want to get my money back and make a return on this? And if we are risk-averse, i.e., we take lots of risks, you know, you probably would be aligning yourself almost on the verge of like gambling if you're going to get into like crypto or CBD or property or any of those sorts of things. I've seen over the last 20 years there are these fads which come and go, and most of them are focused around, you know, 20% gains, 10% gains, and all this sort of stuff. And the people— if you look at some of the richest people in the world, how they've managed to create their wealth is actually in a very boring way. It's very slow, very low rates of return, but Most importantly, they are regular rates of return which are relatively low in risk. And the thing I always say as well is like, if you're going to spend your money on anything, why would you buy something that you don't fully understand? And I see people going into like crypto and day trading and stuff like that, and they have literally zero knowledge about that subject matter. They kind of watched a video or two on YouTube and then they think that they can do it themselves, and off they go, and lo and behold, they lose their money. You might as well just be setting fire to that money or going down to your local bookmakers and placing a bet on horse number 1 and hoping that it in. And yeah, every now and then these things do work out, but I think there's a much smarter way to invest your money, save your money, and various things like that, especially as a business owner heading into 2025. There is a lot of opportunity out there. Now, one of the things which I hear the most from business owners is, I have a cash flow problem. I've said this before time and time again, businesses don't have a cash flow problem. No business does, because money flows in, it flows straight back out again. Actually, the 2 problems which you have as a business owner is making more money and then understanding how to keep that money and make that money work for you better. And I think the greatest challenges as a small business owner, it's something ridiculous like 75% of small businesses below the national income average, especially here in the UK, which makes me believe that a majority of small business owners are literally living hand to mouth. Every penny that they earn in their business is going into their house to pay a mortgage, pay rent, put food on the table and things like that. And I get it. We've gotta survive. You've gotta earn a living. You've gotta look after your kids. I totally understand, and put a roof over everybody's head. It creates that safety and security that you want, that you're told about growing up, and that everybody wants to aspire to have. Most people want to aspire to have, I shouldn't say everyone. But the challenge with that is there's no savings there for a rainy day. There's nothing to, you know, businesses go through cycles, regular peaks and troughs, and if you go into a trough, you're gonna have no reserves there or money, or maybe if your tax bill is more than you thought it might be. So there's no real planning or forethought which goes into many small business owners when it comes to planning the money within their business. And it also means that there's no real application of patience within the business either. It's like it's all about I need to make some money so I can pay for this. I need to make some money so I can pay for this. It's very, very much based on a scarcity mindset. And in my view, in order to start to create wealth, there are just a few really basic small habits that you can practice on a daily or weekly basis to start to generate this investor mindset, which is so important when growing a business and creating more wealth and prosperity for you and your family. A really example of this is one of my good friends, a guy called Des Hamilton. We met probably about 2 and a half years ago. I got really intrigued by this challenge which he was doing where he was taking £200 and turning it— and had an intention within 2 years to turn it into £100,000. And you may think, God, it blows my mind that that's even possible, something like that. And depends on where you are in your business journey, but Des worked in public sector and he was very much like fed up with it, and so he wanted to create this side hustle. And there are so many lessons that we can actually unpack within this journey that Dez went on. The first one is that you can start with something really small. There are no other things that you can invest in, literally nothing, like a business, and get hundreds of thousands or millions back in terms of returns. If you can deliver a high-value product or service to a multitude of people, you can make money from it, and that doesn't have to cost you anything. So Dez started out with just £200. Now, he was doing Amazon FBA, which is basically arbitrage, buying products from shops and then selling them on Amazon. I don't know a lot about it, not going to make any judgment. Dez has made it a massive success. I think there's a lot of FBA bros out there as well at the moment, so just be cautious about if you're going to invest in somebody. If I were you, I'd probably go and speak to Dez. I will share a link somewhere in the description below, but because he's actually been there and done it and he's documented the whole process, and he's a legit, like, just a down-to-earth, like, nice guy as well. So he arbitrage over the course of this 2 years. As he made some money and he grew his personal brand, he then monetized that by getting content sponsorships and partnerships and various other things. He had brought in some affiliate income, so he started to create multiple revenue streams. So not only did he start small, but he had this really clear goal that he wanted to achieve over the course of 2 years. He also, as he— as and when he could afford it, he started to introduce other products and revenue streams into his business. I think there's about 7 different revenue streams which he's got now. So it was never just going to be based on the Amazon FBA work. Actually, a majority of his money now comes in through sponsorships, for example. So what that does is over time that reduces down the risk. So if one side of Des's business isn't going quite so well, he can rely on another aspect of his business, either selling courses or sponsorships or things like that, which will make up the income when one of them dips, and so forth. So starting to think about how you can bring multiple streams of income into your business is a really wise, shrewd move to do. Having just one product or service that you're selling, or not— not having like the opposite of that, having infinite products or services that to all sorts of different people also has the same impact. You can't make as much money when you're all things to all people. You do have to be a specialist in something and get known for that, but from there you can then start to diversify. So having those multiple streams of income is one of the best investments you can make in yourself and into your business. The next step is probably then figuring out, well, so this is how we're going to make some more money, but how are we going to stop the flow of money coming out? I see a lot of business owners who The moment they make some money, because they've been so used to living with a certain element of scarcity throughout their— not just in their business but through their entire life, they get very enamored by success. Oh, we're making some more money here, we've kept some cash. Now what we'll do is we'll go and invest that, we'll go and buy a marketing program, or we'll go and spend that money on something else. And so it's like easy come, easy go, and then they spend the money. The challenge though is that not everything you spend your money on generates a return on investment for your business. I've experienced that. So I'm not suggesting you don't spend that money, but if you are going to spend a big chunk of your cash that you've got sat there, if you've made some money, be really skeptical about where it is that you're spending that money and who it is that you're spending it with. Unfortunately, in the online world, there are lots of people who are ready to take your money and then don't necessarily deliver on value. So just the one word I would use is be skeptical. The money you've made, protect it at all costs, because if you've got cash, you can then put it to work for you. And that's something I'm going to be talking about a little bit later on in this video. But protect your cash, be skeptical. So now we're making a bit more money on the front end, but also what we're doing is we're not going to spend as much as we were before. We're going to live within our means. So as our business revenue grows, we're actually generating more profit and cash within our business that we can then look to invest in more passive ways. I don't really like that term because no, there is no truly passive income. You've always got to have active income that comes before passive income. But there are some ways that you can start to generate small amounts of passive income within your business, provided you're protecting this pot of cash, your rainy day fund, once you've made a bit of extra money. And now again, this is something which Des did. So him and his partner were working through the 2 years of their challenge, so that kind of paid for their cost of living. And so they were able to— every single bit of money which they got, they were able to reinvest that back into the business, buy more products which they could then sell and make more profit from. And, and um, leverage that to accumulate that £100K. Now the thing is, most people, if you're just solely running a business and you don't have a second income stream through a job or something like that, you will be drawing some of that profit out in order to pay for your rent, put food on your table, look after your kids, and things like that. But what we want to do is gradually over time, we want to eke out the gap between the money that's coming in and the money which is going out. So we want to make a bit more money and save a bit more money and live within our means, and that gives us that capital which we can then look to make some more passive investments further down the line. Saving is a really important part of this. I've talked about this within a business sense, like protecting that money, but there's also another side of this which is about if you don't have big chunks of money coming in that you can't then save these big lumps of capital to reinvest, but you are earning money regularly through your business, you need to start thinking about how you can create positive, abundant mindset sort of habits. One of the simplest ones is saving some money. Get into the habit of saving money regularly. So every week, set aside £20 or £50 or £100. Just set aside some money on a regular basis. Ring-fence it. Protect it with your life. I don't care what goes wrong in your business or in your life, that money gets protected. Because look at it, think about it this way. Imagine if in 2 or 3 years you've managed to save up 6 months' worth of your typical sort of income in your business or in your job through a side hustle, and something goes wrong— maybe your partner gets ill, or you have to stop work through an injury, or just something happens— imagine having the benefit of knowing that you've got 6 months worth of money that you can live off if nothing else comes in. And during that 6 months, you can then regroup and make a plan, but at least you've got that money there. And I think this is like one of the things— so one, you can get a really good feeling out of getting into habit of saving. But as you see that accumulate, it just gives you extra security. One of the most wonderful things, especially as a business owner, is when you have a certain amount of security sat in a bank earning you interest— and I'll come back to that a bit later on— and, and you can see that accumulating, it makes you less needy. It means that you don't have to go out like hunting for clients day in and day out. You don't have to spend all of your days on social media and doing marketing activities and things like that. You can just breathe. Having, having savings gives you so many, so much reassurance and so many emotional benefits, intangible benefits, because you just don't feel quite so desperate. And there's been times, several times in my 20 years where my back's been really against the wall financially and I've been desperate for money, quite frankly. And it makes you behave in weird ways, like you do stuff you wouldn't ordinarily do. And actually that repels clients. It doesn't like draw the clients into you. So getting into the positive habits around savings and then watching that money accumulate and seeing how it impacts your mindset is massively important. And actually, one of my mentors, a guy called Andrew Priestley, who's written some fantastic books about money, he introduced me to this concept of walking around with your day rate in your pocket. So go down to the bank and withdraw your day rate. If it's £400, go and take 8 £50 notes out and carry it around in your purse or your wallet for a month. And I did this exercise, and it was really weird. Over the course of that 30 days, my mindset around money completely changed. It actually desensitized me to having lots of money, and so it became normal for me to have money. Now, I drew it— the reason I drew it out in £50 notes is because I knew that if I took out smaller denominations, I would probably take £10 here or £20 there or £5 there and spend it. But I don't know why, but I love £50 notes and carrying them around. I don't carry many of them around anymore. I did it for this exercise, but it made me keep them. It made me— because they're rare and you don't see them very often. So I was like, oh, I want to hang on to these. So there was just that extra little thing which made it increase the friction in me spending that money. But by the end of the 30 days, I was like, this is brilliant. Like, I'm— I feel so much more comfortable having large amounts of money around with me. And believe it or not, back then when I did this exercise, £400 in my wallet was like a large sum of money. And I know for many of you it probably will be. But again, you don't have to draw out your day rate. I do this exercise with a lot of clients. They say, look, just go and take a £50 note out of the bank, or whatever your highest— $100 bill, or whatever your highest denomination is, and put it in your wallet. It's really interesting because from the first 15 days or something, I was walking around thinking, what if I get mugged? And I live like in the sleepy old Cotswolds where muggings are pretty rare. And I'm also— I think I could be— I'm quite handy. I could probably look after myself. So I kind of had this fear around something that really highly— it would be really unfortunate if somebody mugged me, right? They would have to know that I had that money on me for a start. You know, it's all these weird things which were going on sort of psychologically. So withdraw that money, put it in your pocket, and see how you feel about it. Get that £50 note or $100 bill out every now and then and make love to it. Like, make friends with it. Like, you know, look at it, touch it, see how it makes you feel. Because getting comfortable with money is a major part about becoming better as an investor. It doesn't matter whether that's an investor in your business or making financial investments. You've got to like money. You have to make friends with it, and you have to make it work for you. That's the most important thing. part around this. So once you've made some money, what do you actually do with it? And I stumbled across this as a little bit of a happy accident, and probably I'm, you know, I don't mind being a little bit transparent here because I felt a bit dumb. But equally, if I don't make mistakes and then share them with you, the viewer, you're not going to learn from my dumb mistakes, and hopefully it will benefit you. And anyway, so because of what's happened with the economy recently, obviously interest rates have started to track back up. Now, one of the things which I do is I'm quite OCD about my accounts. I regularly, literally daily, I'll log into Xero and I'll have a look at how much VAT do I owe, what's my PAYE and National Insurance contributions, my tax liability, how much corporation tax do I owe for last year, and also am I accumulating this year if my accounts aren't finished yet. So I— how much VAT have I collected as well. So I had all of these, this, these pockets of money, which is what they teach you in Profit First, but it wasn't doing anything for me. It was just sat in a cash account not earning any interest. And it probably took me the best part of nine months before I was like, my God, interest rates are like five percent now. Why am I not like at least putting this in a in an interest savings account? So I did. So that money is now neatly tucked away, earning me some interest. It's completely passive. Yes, there are investment vehicles out there which could probably make me more money, earn me more interest. But I I've really come to realize my level of risk is low. I don't like putting you know wasting money. I don't like spending on money on things. which I don't understand or know a lot enough about to make a wise investment. So for me, just having that money earn some interest, I actually really love it because the account I have it with, literally you can see the interest accruing on it on a daily basis. And so I don't know, it's, it's making somewhere in the order of about £150 to £200 a month now, which, you know, is free money. I'm not doing anything for that. Yeah, okay, I know there's going to be some economists perhaps watching this going, well, Robin, inflation is at 2%. Your interest rate's 4% or whatever it is, so your only net benefit is like 2%. Well, to be fair, before it was earning me -2%, so I'm happy that it's now positive. And I'm starting to get a little bit braver with some of the investments which I'm making. So I have a side business which, because of my web design and SEO background, we do domain renovation services. So we buy a domain, we build a website on it and renovate it, we build up its domain authority and flip it and sell it on. So I'm now able to take some of a small amount of that money depending on how much I, you know, risk I feel that I, I am willing to tolerate. And we invest some of that money into digital assets which we then will be looking to monetize further down the line and grow over a period of time. And also some of those digital assets which we're buying are actually earning us an income back into the business as it stands at the moment. Now it's very active income, so I have a small team of people who are nurturing and building those, those sites and, and and managing them. However, I don't have to do that work. So whilst it's active in terms of its earnings, I don't have to do a lot for it. So it's passive to me, which again, that's another way, interesting way of looking at it. If you have a product or service that you can sell that somebody else can deliver, you can in effect create a passive income business for yourself. Now, there will be some time which is required for you to kind of be there managing the people within that business and doing the tax returns and various things like that. However, if it's far less than working 40 hours a week, I think any, any time that you can save and win back for yourself is probably the best saving or investment that you can possibly make in 2025. So I'm looking at finding really creative ways that I can make my money work better for me. I can buy back people's time so that I can then get a little bit of my life back and do some more interesting things in 2025. Investing for me isn't about just the process of making money. It's also about generating freedom for yourself, time for yourself, being able to create memories with your families and things like that. And if you take nothing else from this particular video, I hope that you kind Just take that little thing that maybe if you worked for 2 or 3 years to start to buy yourself a bit of freedom with some savings and making some investments and earning a bit of passive income, or being able to make some shrewd investments around things that you understand so that you can buy back some time freedom. I think every single one of you would probably agree that's the best investment you could possibly make in yourself.