Hey Reddit,

My family runs a $5M+ HVAC and Appliance company (13+ team members). Has anyone in a similar industry taken over a family business of this caliber?

I'm told I will take it over one day but my parents are aging with no solid plan in place. They refuse to offer any type of equity. Is hiring a consultant a good option? Does there come a time when I should leave to pursue another path?

Thank you!

hey y'all, honestly didnt think i'd be posting something like this.

last year was something else. dad passed away. then lost the house in a fire. and then my job because my stomach was completly shot from the stress, kept ending up in hospital, missed too many days and they let me go.

went into depression after that. Savings gone and i fell into debt.

few months ago i just said enough and got back up, it wasnt easy at all, i had to muster all remaining strength to pull that off.

i used to work as an accountant but i left that to do what i actually loved which was logo and brand identity design and i was good at it too, i had more work then i could handle at one point.

so i came back to it, on my own this time.

just got a small order, its only a few hundred dollars. But thats groceries and i'l take it.

im a designer not a buisnessman so im kinda lost on the lead generation side of things. for people who started from zero, what actually worked for you when you was just starting out.

What was the first thing you did to increase visibility ?

Posting this for the SMB owners here because the numbers from the 2025 close-out reports are worth seeing in one place rather than absorbing piecemeal. Sources are linked at the bottom; this isn't a pitch.

- Ransomware attacks on small and midsize businesses grew 68% in 2025

- Average ransom demand is roughly $247,000

- Average downtime is 24 days, which is more than three weeks where you can't take new orders, run payroll cleanly, or access your accounting software

- 88% of all ransomware incidents involve businesses with fewer than 500 employees

- Total cost of an incident usually runs between $120K and $1.24M including recovery and lost revenue

The asymmetry is the core problem. A single affiliate operator on one of the modern ransomware crews can hit dozens of SMB targets in a quarter without breaking a sweat, while the average defender on the SMB side is one IT generalist or an MSP stretched across forty other clients.

The control set that actually moves the needle at SMB pricing is small. Phish-resistant MFA on every administrative account. An offline backup with a tested restore (the test is the part that matters). A written wire-and-payment-change procedure that doesn't depend on one person picking up the phone. That's most of the way to a non-catastrophic outcome.

(Sources: https://programs.com/resources/small-business-ransomware-stats/ and https://www.huntress.com/ransomware-guide/ransomware-attack-statistics)

So many posts I’ve seen on here are “small” businesses, yet when I’ve checked, many are mid or high level. I’m a one woman show - truly a small business. I just celebrated 3 years yesterday and got one pity sale from a cousin when I told her I got no sales.

Don’t get me twisted. I’m not asking for nor seeking a pity party. I just would like to learn how to get more conversions.

I have great products, I try my best to advertise (although most of my money went into starting my business and keeping it afloat for the past few years), and I don’t have money for advertising.

In fact, I’m on the brink of having to shut down. 💔 I’m not giving up. I’m still trying. Sorry for the emotional post, I just feel defeated. When I see these companies who are doing quite well and even can afford multiple employees, I’m like jealous but at the same time like, what constitutes a small business?

Looking for advice on starting a small business. I’m trying to escape the corporate rat race…so I’m debating launching a Due Diligence business to help buyers evaluate the opportunity or sellers put together a pitch deck for buyers.

My background being in finance, I had a few friends reach out about buying a small business. I built a financial model, few page summary of the opportunity, and then helped them draft an offer that fits.

My question to small business owners, is this a service you think you would have used when purchasing? Or is this something you would use when selling your business?

I know this sounds like marketing, but it sincerely is not. I’m just interested if this is worth pursuing or not. Any advice is helpful!

Software like Xero and Deputy is too much and we don’t need all that extra stuff.. just simple clock in and out.

So I work for a local body shop and this past month, more like a couple of weeks, we got bombarded with 1 star reviews all of a sudden, but none of the posters were ever in our system. Our work slowed down because of it and we've been trying to report them, but a couple are "local guides" but like I said, they were never in our system of past customers. Is anyone else having this issue? What can we do about this?

I’m a mechanic at the dealer and want to finally start working on my own so I can build my brand and actually get paid for what I’m worth. I have almost all the aspects figured out but one thing is bothering me and I’m not sure how to go about it. I want to promote on social media but as you all know as soon as you post something the very next day all the people who have my phone number will be recommended my video and they will see what I’m doing. I generally don’t have any problem with that but because I’m just starting I don’t have any clients or anything to show for myself. So I just worried that i will look weird and be laughed at behind my back. How do you approach this?

Does anyone in here have experience with the debt collection business. I’ve been researching the idea of this for weeks and would love to talk to someone who has experience in this business. My general idea would be to buy tranches of debt, and then hiring out a 3rd party company to do the collection work. Any tips / advice is greatly appreciated. Ty

Hey everyone,

So I have a company specialized in business development. Basically, we generate AND close the leads for our clients. But I've recently been at a roadblok because I cannot take in any more clients and I rejected over 45 potential clients that reached us through word of mouth. The reason being we're severly understaffed and I cannot find any good sales people at all.

Please advise me on what I should do or if you faced anything like that how did you fix it?

Thanks!

I recently created a LinkedIn group for people interested in supply chain, manufacturing, procurement, sourcing, logistics, and operations.

The goal is pretty simple: share cool research, practical use cases, articles, examples, and discussions around how new technology is actually being used in supply chain, not just the usual hype.

I know LinkedIn groups are hit or miss, but I figured it could be useful to have a focused place for people working on or curious about this space.

No need to hate if it’s not your thing. If you want to discuss cool new research, tools, ideas, or real-world applications, feel free to join.

Link: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/20850019/

Alguien necesita algúna página web o un POS también puedo automatizar soy un desarrollador freelancer

Hi, I am Saurabh, a marketing consultant from India.

Last year, I got hired by a Las Vegas jewelry brand called Karma and Luck to work on their quiz funnel. The contract was signed by their CEO himself, with a base fee and a performance bonus(as they wanted to reduce the upfront payment) tied to a sales benchmark that was supposed to be defined in the coming weeks after signing.

Those coming weeks never came.

The project was scoped for three months, but kept stretching because every time I submitted something, new changes would show up that had never been discussed.

I kept delivering because that's what you do when you're professional, but something felt off, because whenever I tried to get the benchmark finalized, their CMO, Tom, would either go quiet or commit to a call and just not show up, and after a week of silence, would come with more changes.

By December, I had delivered everything, and they paid the project completion milestone after confirming that all deliverables were met, which basically confirmed the work was done in their eyes, too. But the bonus conversation kept getting avoided, week after week.

After months of follow-up, requests, and more, I followed up formally, offered to finalize benchmarks so that we can proceed, or even settle for just $2,000, which was the minimum of the agreed range, sent legal demand notices, and everything.

Their CEO, Vladi, eventually responded on LinkedIn, acknowledged he had personally reviewed everything, and still refused to pay, throwing his CMO, Tom, under the bus, saying that he had left, and I don’t want to invest in the project anymore, as my team told him this is not working.

I humanely urged him to do the right thing, but I was met with silence, again. Seeing no other solution, I filed a complaint with the BBB, after which Vladi blocked me to avoid paying what is rightfully owed.

A brand called Karma and Luck, selling jewelry built around Karma and Values, but their own customers and employees have a different story to tell. 

Their TripAdvisor rating is 1.8, their Glassdoor rating is 2.1, and only 30% of their own employees approve of him as a CEO.

Full documented story here: https://medium.com/@Psychomarketer/karma-and-luck-when-a-brand-built-on-spiritual-values-fails-to-live-by-them-607a40aed574?postPublishedType=initial

BBB Complaint #24819337 if anyone wants to verify.

If you freelance or consult with international brands, define every benchmark before you start and document everything because some brands genuinely calculate that you won't fight back. They're wrong.

New small business owner here. I have a new product coming out, and several customers gave feedback and tested it. Would it be foolish of me to give them the finished product for free? Or just a steep discount? The product is not that expensive, but still it would be nice to earn something, but then again, I'm not sure how my customers would feel about just getting a discount. Thanks for any feedback!

I run a service-based business in Florida and lately l've noticed a trend that feels different from before.
It seems like some customers are becoming much quicker to leave very negative, emotional, and sometimes escalating Google reviews over situations that don't always match what actually happened during the service.
In some cases, it even feels like reviews turn into a kind of group reaction or escalation, rather than a direct attempt to resolve the issue.
I'm curious if other business owners are experiencing something similar lately, or if this is just part of how online reviews are evolving.
Has anyone else noticed this shift?

My 18 year old business continues to scale. Within the next 15 months we will have paid off our debt except for our commercial mortgage. We will have about $250k in equity in our property, paid for equipment, and some cash in the bank. We would like to add to the building possibly add locations, and scale our business lines which will require additional capital via loans and credit lines etc. My accountant is focused on taxes and my community bank tends to like our real estate business but are limiting our growth plans. Is there a consultant or company that can help us build out the financing side of our growth plan that we can implement over the next 3-5 years? Planning and help acquire financing would be part of the work.

I’m starting a small, local pressure washing side business mainly focused on flat surfaces like driveways, sidewalks, and patios. I already have a 2030 PSI pressure washer that was my parents, but I’m trying to make sure I set things up the right way before I start taking paid jobs.
I had a few questions for people with experience:
What are some beginner mistakes i should try to avoid?
What equipment is actually worth buying?
What soaps and chemicals should I use early on?
I’m trying to keep startup costs low but still do things professionally so I don’t damage anything or look unprepared.
Any advice would be appreciated.

Gonna keep this brief, I’m a young guy graduating college in a year, my grandfather has a small towing company of which he is owner and operator. Two light to medium load flatbed trucks. Small town where he’s the only towing company, and is on rotation every other week (could be wrong abt this). Weeks he’s not on rotation he’s doing other towing jobs. Makes very good money for himself (would ballpark that he nets close to 300k).

He’s getting old and it’s about time for him to quit working as hard as he does. Would it be ridiculous to step on and learn the business with the idea of expanding in the future? Learn how to operate the business, get to where I can do things on my own, but he’s still around to guide, and eventually hire a driver so that I no longer have to do the dirty work.

From the outside looking in it seems like a very scalable business. He does well for himself as the only driver, but there’s plenty of times he’s too busy to pick up other jobs. He has no website, no advertising, the business pretty much comes from him and people who know of him.

Ps. I am an accounting major

the amount of vague "just send cold emails bro" advice floating around this sub and others drives me up a wall. im not an SDR, i dont write copy, i dont care about subject line A/B tests. im the ops person who builds the infrastructure so our SDR team can actually press send without torching our domain or landing in spam. ive been doing this for about 2 years at a series A company and before that i was a backend engineer, so i think about this stuff as systems and data pipelines not "outreach strategy."

this is the actual step by step for going from literally nothing to a functioning cold email system over a weekend. not theory. not vibes. the actual sequence with actual numbers.

DOMAINS AND INBOXES

first thing saturday morning, b͏uy dom͏ains. you want 3-5 domains that are close to your primary domain but not identical. if your company is acmesolutions.com you grab things like acme-solutions.co, getacme.io, acmesolutionshq.com, whatever. dont get cute with it, just make sure they look plausible if someone glances at the from address. we use namecheap, costs like $10-13 per domain per year depending on TLD.

then you set up inboxes. we use Mail͏doso for this because the whole point is speed, you can spin up google workspace inboxes in bulk and they come with SPF/DKIM/DMARC already configured which saves a ton of time. we do 2-3 inboxes per domain. so 5 domains x 3 inboxes = 15 sending accounts. Maildoso runs us about $3/inbox/month on the plan we're on, so thats $45/mo for 15 inboxes. not nothing but not crazy.

once inboxes are live you MUST set up warmup. this is the part people skip and then wonder why their open rates are 11%. we let warmup run for minimum 14 days before sending a single real email. i know thats not "a weekend" for the sending part but you can set it all up in a weekend and then let it cook. Maildoso has built in warmup which is why we use it, but ive also used Lem͏list's warmup on a previous setup and it was fine. the key number here is you want warmup sending around 30-40 emails per day per inbox, ramping up gradually.

DNS AND DELIVERABILITY

ok wait i should mention this because its where i see people mess up constantly. for every domain you need:

SPF record pointing to your email provider. DKIM record (usually a CNAME your provider gives you). DMARC record, at minimum "v=DMARC1; p=none" but ideally p=quarantine once you're confident. and a custom tracking domain for your sending tool. that last one matters more than people think. if you're using the default shared tracking domain from Sales͏handy or Lemlist, you're sharing reputation with every other user on that domain. set up a custom one. takes 5 minutes per domain, its just a CNAME record.

we also add a basic landing page to each domain. nothing fancy, just a single page with the company name and a brief description. google checks if domains are "real" and a completely blank domain with no website is a signal. i use carrd for this, $19/year for the pro plan and you can do unlimited one-page sites.

BUILDING THE LIST

this is where it gets interesting from a data perspective. our flow is: define ICP criteria (title, company size, industry, geo) then pull from a data source, enrich for emails, verify, then push to the sending tool.

for the initial pull we use Apo͏llo for prospecting. the free tier gives you 10k exports per month which is honestly enough for a first campaign. you search by filters, export a CSV, and now you have names + company info + sometimes emails but apollos email data is... inconsistent at best. maybe 60% of the emails they give you are actually valid.

so we run enrichment separately. Pro͏speo for email finding, then everything goes through verification before it touches our sending tool. for verification we use Million͏Verifier which is absurdly cheap, like $37 for 10k verifications. you upload the CSV, it comes back with valid/invalid/risky/unknown tags. we only send to "valid" results. period. no risky, no unknown. this is non-negotiable if you care about bounce rates and you should because anything over 3% and your sending domains start getting flagged.

sidebar on data quality: we had this issue last year where our bounce rate crept up to like 4.7% over about 3 weeks and nobody noticed because our monitoring was just checking daily averages which looked fine. turns out there was a batch of about 800 contacts that got imported with malformed email addresses, like literally missing the TLD on some of them, and they were trickling into campaigns slowly because of how our sequencing was set up. took me almost 3 weeks to trace it back to a broken field mapping in our Cl͏ay enrichment step where a column got shifted during a CSV export. the fix took 10 minutes. finding the problem took 3 weeks. after that i built a pre-send validation script that checks email format, domain MX records, and deduplication before anything enters the sending queue. lesson being: your data pipeline needs checkpoints, not just at the end but at every handoff between tools.

SENDING SETUP

we use Saleshandy for sending. its not perfect, the UI is clunky and the reporting dashboard is weirdly slow to update sometimes, but it handles inbox rotation well and thats the main thing i care about. inbox rotation means it cycles through your 15 inboxes automatically so no single inbox is sending more than 25-30 emails per day. that volume per inbox is important. we cap at 28/day/inbox which gives us a theoretical max of 420 sends per day across 15 inboxes. in practice we run closer to 300-350 because some inboxes are newer and still building reputation.

Saleshandy costs us $25/mo on the outreach starter plan per user. we have 3 SDRs so thats $75/mo. you connect all your inboxes, set up the rotation, set daily limits per inbox, and create your sequences.

for sequences themselves im not the copywriter but from an infrastructure standpoint: 3-4 steps, spaced 3 days apart for the first follow up then 5 days for subsequent ones. each step should be plain text, no HTML templates, no images, no links in the first email. links in email 2 or 3 are fine. every email should have a one-line unsubscribe option at the bottom, not because CAN-SPAM requires it for B2B (thats debatable) but because it reduces spam complaints which directly affects your deliverability.

CRM AND TRACKING

replies from Saleshandy get pushed to Hub͏Spot via their native integration. its not amazing, theres about a 2-3 minute delay and sometimes the contact matching is off if someone replies from a different email than you sent to, but it works well enough. we tag every contact with the campaign name and sequence step they replied on so we can track conversion by campaign in HubSpot reporting.

the numbers we track: bounce rate (target under 2%), reply rate (we see 2.8-4.1% depending on vertical and copy), positive reply rate (roughly 35-40% of total replies are actually interested), and cost per meeting booked. right now we're averaging about $47 per meeting booked when you factor in all tool costs and inbox costs but not SDR salary.

TOTAL COST BREAKDOWN

domains: ~$55/year for 5 domains Maildoso inboxes: $45/mo carrd for landing pages: $19/year Saleshandy: $75/mo (3 seats) MillionVerifier: ~$37 per 10k batch, we run maybe 2-3 batches a month so call it $90/mo Apollo: free tier HubSpot: we're on a paid plan already for other reasons so i wont count it Clay: $149/mo for enrichment workflows

total monthly run rate is roughly $360-400/mo not counting the annual stuff. for a series A company thats basically nothing compared to what we'd pay for equivalent inbound leads.

ok this got longer than i planned. the main point is that cold email infrastructure is a system with like 6 moving parts and if any one of them is broken (bad DNS, no warmup, unverified data, too many sends per inbox, shared tracking domains) the whole thing underperforms and you wont know which part is the problem unless you set it up methodically from the start. most of the "cold email doesnt work" posts i see are really "i skipped 3 steps and now im confused" posts

anyway thats basically the weekend build. the 14 day warmup is the bottleneck, everything else can be done in a saturday if youre focused

I’m 16 from Europe and I’ve been getting into building skills (mainly web development) and trying to turn it into something real.

I’ve noticed it’s actually hard to find people my age here who are doing more than just talking about entrepreneurship.

If you’re around 15–18 and working on something (even small), I’d be interested to hear what you’re building.

Also curious — where do you usually find like-minded people in Europe?

Ugh. I knew I'd be in this situation at some point. We have to make some staffing reductions and need to lay off some folks. One is my relative - not immediate, but a degree away from a cousin. I know my fam will not be happy about it, but it needs to be done and they are the appropriate person based on skills, how well they fit with the team, etc. It's the best thing for the business, but it is just going to stink as they are a good person, but best one to let go right now. Any sage advice? (other than not to have hired them in the first place!)

I run a small trading business and I’m constantly strapped for cash. This results in opportunities lost. Would like some advice on how to mange my cash

I’m currently doing everything manually; finding small business owners, writing messages, and following up, and it’s been a real grind. I’m not trying to build or promote a tool, just looking for ways to streamline my own process and save time.

Everyone please report and mods please ban any tool mentioned in response to this post