By Ryan Gunnigle

As a business owner, being resilient, willing, and able to adapt with urgency during challenging times has taught me great lessons about investing as we look ahead to a post-pandemic world.

Create Your Own Destiny

The power of creating your own destiny is important when investing. While there isn’t one perfect time to invest – you have to be prepared to take the risk for the reward. At my company, the fear of failure doesn’t let us miss an opportunity. Don’t let others pass you by while you wait for it to happen. Make it happen.

You can’t be scared to go against the grain when it comes to investment decisions. When we created our venture capital fund, we knew it was a long-term play. We’ve always had the vision to be more than a product company through expanding into areas and partnering with and investing in great like-minded companies. It was a stretch from our “core” business and some challenged us on why we’d make this move, but it was incredibly clear to me and part of our bigger play to be more. We want to be a holistic solution provider for families everywhere, and over the last several years, that is how we’ve made investment decisions.

Lean in with Like-Minded Partners

Having this ability to deliver on our customer's goals during the pandemic was and still is an invaluable resource that plays a direct hand in our team’s success and the company’s overall growth. We’re grounded in a simple, yet meaningful purpose to create tiny wins and bright futures for all families, and our business moves and investments follow this path. Moreover, we work hard to break down any barrier that prohibits us in any way from doing this.

Last year was a lesson-learning experience in which I discovered our financial partners did not share our same long-term vision or share our same perspective around mutual respect and support. A 20-year relationship was severed, which could have terribly devastated the business and crippled us from investing in growth. But, with the mindset to control our destiny, we made a major move.

We decided to work with capital partners that allow us to invest in growth versus traditional commercial banks. We are a growing company that has great momentum and opportunity so pivoting to a private capital structure and relationship has proved to be hugely beneficial as we continue to build cash to invest more back into the business and look at business expansion outside of our core.

Be At The Ready

Timing can be hard when faced with challenges outside of your control, but you can still control what and how you plan as you wait for the right time. Spend the waiting time planning ahead to ensure that all you have to do is pull the trigger when the opportunity is there. I encourage my team to always have 2-3 opportunities lined up at the ready if the first doesn’t work out to ensure we keep a lot of irons in the fire and are always on track to meet our goals and grow the business. We’re still going after what is best for the business. While the timeline maybe a little longer, we work hard to narrow the gaps and curve the loss.

Having this type of mentality when investing has allowed our business to quickly adapt over the years. The resiliency we have shown during the rough patches will surely help us when it comes to making investment decisions in the future.

Ryan Gunnigle is the Owner & CEO at Kids2, a global parenting company focused on helping new parents solve some of their biggest problems.