If you had £1000 to spend at the start of your business, what would you have spent the money on?

[Youcantflosstomonkeywrench]

I appreciate that this is a tiny amount to some, but this means I have to spend it all the more wisely.

If you're established now, looking back what was worth spending money on, what was not and what do you wish you had spent on?

Luckily, and due to being on more of the impoverished scale, I don't need to spend money on a mentor or coach (grabbing THAT opportunity with both hands).

Any ideas and thoughts would be helpful!

MacBook.

I think it depends what the business is. I've got a business offering a service to business customers. But the competition is fierce. I can't undercut the big business' offering the same, so I decided to go down the, better & classier route, rather than the cheapest.

I spent cash at the beginning getting decent uniforms for the staff & buying the best quality stationery that I could afford. Also decent marketing materials (again, the best quality I could afford).

I also set up a cloud telephony system, which would automatically forward from the land line to my mobile, simply because my customers expect to be phoning a landline & not a mobile.

I'll have an online shop to start with, so I won't need uniforms but I will need marketing and tech. Then tools to do the work that I'm putting out, all 3 seem crucial really. If I have a proper workspace then I can put things together more efficiently.

Depends on your business.

Personally, as an accountant, I wish I'd spent more on a decent printer, scanner, and software - for £1,000 I could have been far more productive in the early months with a decent set up. What I did in reality was think I could "make do" with a crappy inkjet printer and flat bed scanner and free software. That meant tasks which now take just a few minutes with a decent set up could take an hour or more. Such a lot of wasted time that I could have put to far better use.

Best few hundred spent by a client was a couple who had a particular hobby but realised that it was badly served by the mainstream stores with little choice in store. They researched and found a couple of "niche" manufacturers/suppliers, so they spent (I think) £500 on a couple of large orders and set up their own ebay shop to sell them. They sold well, so they reinvested the sales proceeds in more stock, and just carried on reinvesting and growing the product range for several months. Then they created their own website (one of the cheap providers) and continued building their product range for a couple of years. Then they taught themselves website creation and made their own "proper" e-commerce website which also continued to grow as they also researched and taught themselves SEO etc. After about 5 years, they had a e-commerce business with a turnover of £1.5million and profit of £750k per year. All based on a relatively small sum to buy/sell stock which they just constantly reinvested and grew.

A website would be top of my list even if it is a one page site done well.
You then have a "go to" place for people to reach out to you - point them to all your social media pages (and products e.g. amazon/ebay if appropriate for your business).
A small website shouldnt cost much so you will have a lot left over to build on your foundation.

Thank you for your comments. I probably do need to spend a bit more time thinking about a website, I did have a go on the Go Daddy site and quite easily had fairly respectable website (a free trial that came when buying a domain name).

That's an inspiring story kazzyhoward! Life changing for the couple. I had thought about spending money on things that would enable me to work much faster so I'm glad I'm not barking up the wrong tree with that idea. Years ago I did a few months working in a factory, I hated it but the emphasis on keeping a process absolutely streamlined has stayed with me ever since!