r/smallbusinessUS

I've been a one-person business for 3 years and I finally hit the wall. Too much to do, not enough time, and I keep pushing the growth stuff back because I'm buried in admin. And I know its time for me to hire a virtual assistant.

The problem is I've never done this before, I want to hear from people who actually went through it.

My specific needs are email management, scheduling, following up with leads, and some light research. I probably need 20-25 hours a week or maybe more soon.

Where do you find someone decent without going through a lot of applications?  

Last year in May 2025, tired of being free all the time and wasting time with friends, I thought I should do something. Something that has a scope in the next coming years.

Before that, I was a graphic designer but clearly it seemed that that field had no future.

So I shifted to AI automation & AI voice agents. It is not that easy for a person who knows nth about code, but I was locked in. Every single day, I was learning about it & practicing again & again.

Each time I came across a bug or error, I tried solving through claude or gpt but it didn't help so I continued trying to figure it out myself.

Now, it's been a whole year and the competition is too much. A job post posted less than a day ago, has alr 100 applicants. Everyone is an Automation Specialist or so called engineer now. Ig it's the trend maybe.

Maybe entrepreneurs out there are selling courses and made this a trend but I don't think an automation engineer is even a real role, so I thought maybe, pursuing my career in a different but real field like cloud engineering.

So I started learning python which is just the starting point, there's a lot more to learn. Wish be luck!

If anyone of you is in automation or AI related field, did you guys made some real money or are you guys from those who put fake experience and case studies in their portfolio just to look professional?

I’m the founder of a web design and digital marketing agency, and I’m considering niching down to serve US pest control companies exclusively.

The idea is to offer a productized “growth system” that combines a high-converting website, local SEO, CRM, automation, and reputation management into one subscription-based service.

The offer would include:

- Lead-generating website (15–20 pages)
- Google Business Profile optimization
- AI chatbot and notifications
- Reputation management dashboard
- Missed call text-back
- Automated follow-up
- Customer reactivation campaigns
- Unified inbox (SMS, email, social)
- Lead management CRM
- Analytics dashboard
- Mobile app
- Blog and keyword research

Pricing would be:

- $197/month (month-to-month)
- $497 for 3 months
- $997 for 6 months
- $1,800 for 12 months

The 12-month plan would also include advanced SEO, backlinks/directories, hosting, and 2–4 blog posts per month.

The core promise is simple:

More Calls. More Jobs. More Growth.

My goal is to build a highly systemized recurring-revenue business that could eventually be scaled and sold.

I’d love honest feedback from agency owners, SaaS founders, or anyone working in local lead generation.

1. Does this pricing feel too low, too high, or about right for the US market?
2. Would you position this as an agency, SaaS, or hybrid model?
3. Which package do you think would convert best?
4. What are the biggest risks or weaknesses you see?
5. If you were starting today, what would you do differently?

Thanks in advance for any insights.

The most profitable thing I did for my smallish home decor and furniture store was offer classes.

I did 2 things:

1. Offered a variety of topics from what I knew well like decorating, floral arrangements and holiday decor, to things I didn’t know well so I asked reps to come and talk about choosing a sofa (8 way, hand tied…) or choosing a rug (which they pre-ordered).

2. Other stores charged for the classes. I didn’t. I required a gift card purchase and they could use it to shop after the class (or whenever).

EVERY TIME, 90% of shoppers spent 3 to 4 times the gift card amount. Very few only spent the gift card amount while others spent $1k or more.

No matter the type of business, people want your expertise and they want something to do. Just make sure your classes lead to bigger purchases.

Things are pretty bad right and you need to try new things. Start now and OFFER CLASSES!

I have started working as a freelance to provide services of developing landing page according to brand language and I would love to work with people please dm me for my portfolio

My last project was mymentallyprepare

I've been a realtor here in the Houston area for going on 7 years. I do okay. Steady listings, repeat clients, decent referrals. Problem is every time I try to actually grow, I run face first into the same wall, which is that I'm already working 60 hours a week just to maintain what I have.

Marketing falls behind. CRM is a mess. I'm responding to leads at 11pm because I was showing houses all day. My husband says I'm a workaholic and honestly he's not wrong.

I know the answer is probably get help. But hiring a full agent assistant in Texas is expensive, and I'm not sure I'd give them enough work to justify it full time. Has anyone here in real estate or any client based business figured out a way to grow without burning yourself into the ground?

Open to anything. Books, frameworks, systems, hiring strategies. Just need to hear what worked for someone.

I often see businesses being categorized as “small businesses,” but what’s the actual criteria behind that? Is it based on annual revenue, number of employees, industry type, or something else? For example, if a company has 20–50 employees but decent revenue, does it still count as a small business?

Genuine question for people running export businesses here.

Has anyone actually tried automating their international buyer outreach? I have been going down this rabbit hole lately talking to trade businesses across different markets and the ones doing it seem to be reaching 4x or 5x more buyers monthly without adding any staff.

Curious if anyone here has experimented with this or if most people are still doing it manually over WhatsApp and email.

Genuinely want to understand how people are handling this at scale.

I run a small online side hustle and one thing I struggled with was keeping customers engaged after the first interaction. Social media posts would do okay for a day, then everything died off.

I started experimenting with community-style platforms where customers could actually interact instead of just seeing posts, and it surprisingly helped with repeat engagement and referrals.

The biggest difference was having everything in one place instead of relying only on Facebook pages or email lists.

I think there’s a real gap here. Every solopreneur I talk to says the same thing: I know I need to be posting on social media but Meta Business Suite is overwhelming.
Too many buttons, too many features, too much noise. They end up not posting at all because the friction is too high.

The solution feels simple. Build something that strips all that away. One clean interface. Custom AI trained on your business so it knows your voice, your brand, your images. You tell it what you want to post about and it handles everything. Writes like you, generates the images, schedules it, even automates campaigns across platforms.

No learning curve. No fighting with dashboards. Just post consistently without the headache.

I think solopreneurs would actually use something like this.

One thing I’ve noticed talking to small business owners is that most business assessments feel extremely subjective.

A lot of them basically boil down to:
“How do you FEEL about sales?”
“How confident are you in operations?”
“Rate your systems 1–10.”

But operational problems usually show up in more concrete ways:
- inconsistent lead follow-up
- owner bottlenecks
- weak visibility into numbers
- no process consistency
- revenue concentration risk
- undocumented workflows
- reactive decision-making

I’ve been experimenting with a more structured “business stability snapshot” approach focused on operational signals instead of motivational-style scoring.

Curious from actual owners/operators here:

What makes a business diagnostic feel useful vs useless to you?

What would make you trust the output of something like that?

I need to rant and i’m sorry if I am saying things that are 1000% obvious and basic but i’ve been trying on and off for the past 2 years. I have 9+ years in software development. I’ve seen investors give millions to dog shit ideas that make absolutely no sense. And yet when I try to come up with an idea, it’s crickets from my entire network and from any users besides viewing the page.

I’m from US, upstate NY. I have tried since 4 years ago to open my own consultation agency for clients who want to build/maintain SaaS projects. Maybe it’s my portfolio but I couldn’t get many. And it came to people asking for free work or just couldn’t afford it anymore.

Then I was trying to look for these angel investors/investors to try and build a real business but asked for capital upfront to start it. Can’t find 1 for the past 2 years.

Then I started building my own ideas, creating landing pages for free for small businesses (to try and get them as a client), cursor with diagrams, gps delivery tracker, agentic ai workflow systems, and a couple others. Never getting traction, never getting any real users or interest from the people i’ve shown it to.

And then it starts running into “I need to get paid. I need a job.” I am unemployed for the past 8 months. I’m down to my last couple dollars in my bank account. I have bills. I have debts.

Am I wrong or is it just null point anymore to keep trying? The world has changed for the worse the past 5 years. The economy is sinking, people are not able to find paying jobs in their fields, billionaires getting richer, poor getting way poorer. I just feel like it’s pointless, unless someone comes up to you and says “build this idea and in 1 month you’ll make $XMRR” it’s not even comprehensible to getting your own business/idea on it’s feet.

And don’t get me started on the new amounts of scams from job posting (data/video collecting and fake links), offshore workers trying to get your info to use illegally. I’ve applied to probably 1500+ jobs this year alone, 2 interviews and was ghosted. No one is hiring.

Tips? Advice? Is finding paying Software jobs/clients dead? Is trying to start a business right now 9999x harder than it was 5 years ago?

I want to know among ads, referrals , social media, Google business profile, BNI group ,customer care, location . The top 2 that brings in the most clients

Or has automation taken over completely?

Hey everyone,

I’m curious what small business owners here think about hiring virtual assistants.

For those of you who have outsourced to VAs (especially from Philippines or Latin America), how has it actually gone?

What tasks did you hand off first?

How much do you pay per hour?

Which platforms worked best for finding reliable people?
Any major red flags or tips for training and managing them?

Would really appreciate honest experiences from US small business owners. Good, bad, or ugly.
Thanks!

So been a while since I was solving my dad's business problem, fixing his back office system (Invoices, Payrolls, HR) using agents that are simple chat-to-do work, no fancy complicated tool box, just get outcomes. It just automates, so thinking if I could turn my dad's problem into a real startup. It's been working for my dad, but I don't know

You can log in to our portal, ask if you need to calculate payroll, and it will do it. Then you can schedule it in less than 3 minutes.
So the result was that my dad used to spend like 2 hours every month doing payroll, now it takes about 2 minutes. It does similarly for taxes, employee management ,etc.

Not promoting. Just a question: would you pay or not?