By Ken Russell Jr.

Successful entrepreneurs are unique individuals with an affinity for risk-taking behavior that assists them in building their wealth. However, some of these very same traits can become a detriment to maintaining the assets they’ve created. There are three key characteristics that can often turn successful entrepreneurs into unsuccessful investors:

Control: Entrepreneurs, especially those who found their own companies, are known to be extremely controlling people. After all, they’re trying to bring their own vision to life and take the reins of numerous aspects of their business. Even if they employ others who assist them in running their company, the entrepreneur is the final arbiter of virtually every material business decision. 

When an entrepreneur is accustomed to being the decision maker on so many financial considerations involved in running a business, they’re often less willing to cede control of their investment decisions. They might also be overconfident in their own abilities, leading to the problems attendant in emotional investing.

Concentration: Doing one thing, and doing it extremely well, is frequently the key to entrepreneurial success in the United States. A concentrated focus on “owning” your business space is a proven path to growth.

While this focus is highly beneficial in running a business, it can lead to problems when entrepreneurs try to manage their own investment decisions. An entrepreneur may be an undisputed expert in the operations involved in providing a service or bringing a product to market, but that won’t often translate to an ability to navigate the complex issues involved in investing.

Use of Leverage: Entrepreneurs usually invest some of their own capital to start or expand a business, but they also tend to rely heavily on financial leverage. “Using someone else’s money” is an excellent way to increase the return on one’s own equity ownership in a business, as it preserves a founder’s personal capital, serves to spread some of the financial risk to either lenders or note holders, and supports the growth of the business.

Leverage can also strongly influence an entrepreneur’s approach toward investing, and it may be difficult to break this behavior later. They may be willing to favor a more conservative approach to avoid losing their own capital or the capital of their investors, but they may also favor a riskier approach when using borrowed money — a behavior which can carry over when investing personal assets.

From Entrepreneur to Investor

Now let’s say that a successful entrepreneur has reached the point where he or she is able to monetize their ownership in the business, perhaps through an outright sale or a significant distribution that transforms their illiquid investment into a fully liquid one. While this transaction can leave them with a sizable amount of capital, the characteristics noted above can significantly impede their ability to maintain or grow their assets.

For example, many years ago, my team and I visited with a nationally known businessman that had just sold his company for a significant amount of money. My team pitched him and his family on our investment process and a host of other wealth preservation services. His response was something along the lines of, “What you do sounds fabulous, but if you did that my sons would have nothing to do!”

He proceeded to trust his sons with the management of his wealth. Over the next decade, their poor decision making had cut the value of his portfolio in half. 

While it may take some time to accomplish, entrepreneurs can abandon the characteristics that made them successful in business when weighing their investment options. This will significantly increase the chances that they can sustain and grow their assets. Here are some tips on how to do so: 

Cede control and heed a financial advisor: Here’s the hard reality: while you may have been a professional business owner when you were running your company, you will be using an amateur advisor if you try to manage your liquid wealth by yourself. It’s akin to leaving the management of your company to an intern when you go on vacation. 

When you use a financial advisor, you’re still directing the strategic goals of the investment process. However, you’re ceding control of the day-to-day portfolio management process to professionals, who will be taking steps to ensure the sustainability of your money for decades.

Less concentration, more diversification: The business concentration that created your wealth in the first place will jeopardize it if you remain concentrated after you’ve acquired more liquidity. Sticking with what you know can be a form of risk mitigation when operating a business. Following this same strategy in public equity investing can be a fatal flaw.

Take steps to diversify your investments as soon as possible. For example, if you receive stock as part of the sale of your company, sell it as soon as your holding period requirements are met. If you’ve made your money in the private healthcare or services sector, don’t over-invest in the public side of those sectors when your wealth becomes liquid. 

Leverage your time, not your money: The use of borrowed money is an excellent return on investment optimizing strategy when running a business. But the continued use of margin debt in an equity portfolio is an unnecessary risk-taking behavior. 

To be sure, there may be occasional – and temporary – reasons to apply leverage to a portfolio if it involves optimizing the timing around tax deferrals or cost basis changes. But the continued use of leverage in an attempt to enhance portfolio returns – or fund one’s lifestyle – can have disastrous outcomes for your liquidity at the worst possible time. 

I’ve been in this industry long enough to witness unforeseen market events in 1987, 1998, 2000, 2007, and 2020. These events generated countless margin calls which decimated investor portfolios. 

An unleveraged portfolio has the ability to wait out equity market downturns. A nervous lender does not afford a leveraged portfolio the luxury of time.

To learn more about how a financial advisor can help you invest the wealth you’ve created through your business, contact Grey Ledge Advisors at 203-453-9075.

By Brant Walker

Like most processes, investment decisions moved more slowly in the pre-Internet days. When I started my investment management career nearly 40 years ago, a bank or analyst would send you a report through the mail — a multi-day process in itself — and you’d spend a day processing it before making your choices.

Today, anyone trying to invest on their own is being bombarded by information from all sides. Between 24-hour news networks, business news websites, social media chatter, and the ability to track a stock’s performance literally minute-by-minute, it can be difficult to choose how to proceed.

This noisy environment has only heightened the emotional aspects of investing. There has been extensive research into “behavioral finance,” or how human psychology affects investment decisions — often negatively. By better understanding this concept, you can put more trust into unbiased indicators, building your portfolio based on impartial information rather than gut feeling.

How emotions affect investment decisions

Many emotions come into play when you invest your money. You may be anxious about meeting your financial goals, excited to see your portfolio grow in value, eager to find investments that will produce a huge return on investment, nervous about market downturns, or depressed when an investment decision turns out to be a poor one.

Emotion-driven decisions can occur at any time. Some examples include:

However, emotion has the biggest impact on the market during periods of prominent gains or losses. During a strong market, people are more likely to underestimate risk, be overconfident in their own abilities, and chase after popular investments. During market downturns, people are more likely to panic and sell off investments in an effort to limit losses.

There are also several cognitive biases that affect investment decisions. One of the most common is confirmation bias, where people only consider evidence that supports their investment decisions and ignore other data, such as warning signs that a stock might be overvalued. 

Anchoring bias is also a common factor that influences investment decisions. This occurs when you measure the performance of an investment on some irrelevant point of reference, like the price of a stock when you purchased it or a stock’s previous peak value. 

Greed and fear

Greed and fear are the most powerful emotions affecting investment decisions. Greed spurs people to pursue higher gains by making riskier decisions, taking chances on speculative stocks, and pursuing short-term gains. Fear is the dominant option during bear markets or more volatile conditions, causing people to favor lower risk investments with smaller yields.

Concerns about losing your hard-earned money are a particularly potent factor in behavioral finance, leading to something called loss aversion bias. This occurs when a person gives priority to minimizing losses on their investments instead of actively pursuing gains. 

Loss aversion bias can lead to considerably different investment decisions. Since people tend to be more risk-averse when faced with a positive income, they might sell a well-performing stock too early out of fear that its value might go down. Conversely, they may also engage in riskier behavior in an effort to avoid losing money, such as doubling down on a declining investment in hopes that it will recover.

Optimism and pessimism

Market trends drive the broader emotions of optimism and pessimism, which also tend to cause people to make buying or selling decisions at the exact opposite of the optimal time. When the market is on the upswing and stock values are rising, people are optimistic and more willing to buy. When values are declining, people are more pessimistic, less willing to buy, and more willing to sell the stocks they have in an effort to avoid losses.

You might notice that these decisions directly contradict the classic “buy low, sell high” investment strategy.

Two recent market downturns show how a pessimistic outlook can impact your investments. Tumbling stocks during the Great Recession drove investors to pull their money from the market, only for stock values to grow steadily over the next several years during the economic recovery. There was a similar response when the stock market cratered at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, with stock values recovering even faster.

Once more, without feeling

When investing your money, you should always take the time to research your options and avoid quick decisions. While monitoring the performance of your investments is important, tune out the noise and do periodic check-ups instead of frequent adjustments; this can help you retain focus on a long-term strategy instead of responding to short-term trends.

Other strategies to take the emotion out of investing include:

Working with an investment advisor will also help you avoid emotions when investing. This professional will provide you with unbiased recommendations and help you determine your goals and strategies.