Underpay Yourself
Labor costs are always an issue. Pay too little and you don't get enough employees. Pay too much and you can't make a profit. A great answer is to work at your own stall for very little pay. Perhaps 1/1/1 for Basic/Skilled/Expert labor. That way, you get to tap in to all of your own labor, but pay next to nothing for it!
Just forget about the fact that you can make over 1,000 PoE per day on your own labor, working elsewhere. Absolutely do not track the loss of 1,000 PoE each day as a loss against your net gain. Your profit margins will soar because of your incredibly low labor costs. This is a very useful technique to distort your actual gains and should be used all the time.
Move Small Quantities
Nearly every shoppe owner has to deal with the joy of moving commodities. Sooner or later, someone will actually expect you to "make" something for them or they won't pay you. It's total nonsense, but that seems to be the way some people think. When that time comes, you'll have to hop onto your trusty ship and go pick up the commodities and bring them back to your shoppe. I'd suggest using a sloop - for everything. The small cargo size is somewhat of a hindrance, but the ease of which they can be sailed by yourself makes up for that and then some. Moving wood? No worries - only 7 trips with your trusty sloop will carry as much as one trip with those clunky merchant brigs. And those 7 trips are so easily done that it just doesn't make any sense to do it any other way. It's certainly not worth asking for a bit of help from a good mate to move one of those big ugly beasts.
And, whatever you do, don't bother to track the cost of the rum used on those voyages as costs against your shoppe. After all, it's just a bit of rum and it would make your profits look worse. No reason to include it. No reason, at all. Moving in bulk might save you a bit on rum but, pfft - it's only a bit of rum!
Never Plan Ahead
Some people get so tied up with how commodity prices fluctuate over time. Personally, I think they're all well on their way to getting coronary diseases. There's just no reason to fret over things like that. When you need a commodity, go buy it! You can try finding somewhere to bid on the item and save yourself a bit of PoE, but don't overlook an opportunity to purchase something dockside. Nothing like instant, overpriced, gratification!
Don't bother trying to build up a surplus of commodities when their prices are low. It's just too much headache and it requires you to have too much money tied up in your inventory. Those times that everyone worries that commodity prices are too high? I don't believe they exist.
Bid Fees, Bid Shmees
Okay, so despite my recommendation to purchase things dockside, you've decided to try to save a few PoE by bidding on commodities and then waiting an excrutiatingly long time for that bid ticket to fill. Fine. I can't save everyone.
When you bid on something, there's a bid fee attached. It's such a rip-off. You know who gets that PoE? No one! It just vanishes! Stupid Three Rings. Nonetheless, it's such a minor amount compared to what you're paying for the commodities that there's no reason to track that as a cost. Sure, that bid fee could be thousands of PoE, but, if it is, you're paying so much more than that for the commodities, itself, that it just seems insignificant.
Don't bother tracking it as an expense. It'll only make your profit numbers look worse. Save your energy for pillaging.
Booch Your Order Prices
In most industries, such as distilling or iron mongering, you sell virtually everything dockside (except swords, I suppose). As such, you really don't need to worry about properly setting your order prices. No one will come along and order your goods at far below market value and then sell them off to make a profit on their own. It just doesn't happen. Seriously. People are too paranoid.
Ignore Rent
You ever notice how once a week, some invisible tax collector comes by and takes PoE out of your coffers? If he doesn't find the PoE lying around, he cuts the power! What a total jerk! There's nothing that can be done about this guy. He's just too wily. I've had pirates try to hunt him down. I've hired the mates of El Pollo Diablo to get after him. I've even tried ninja assassins. He can't be stopped!
As such, best to just ignore him. Just forget about the PoE he takes. It's better to just let him take it and ignore the lost PoE than to spend hundreds of thousands of PoE on good-for-nothing skellies that can't catch a stupid invisible tax collector. As you can't do anything about it, don't bother to track rent as an expense. If you do, it'll make your profit numbers look worse than everyone else's because everyone else ignores it. Trust me - they do.
Conclusion
Those are some great ways to grind your stall into the ground. There are others out there, but this help you get started. See you on the high seas, pillaging to keep your stall running!
