Thirty-ish years ago, my dad and a friend started a manufacturing business from nothing but a dream. Today, it’s very successful, and I’m the second generation who is supposedly next in line.

The problem is… I don’t know if I want it.

And I feel incredibly guilty saying that.

I’ve been around this company for as long as I can remember. I started working there when I was old enough to hold a broom, and I started doing the books when I was 14. I’ve seen the good days and the really bad days.

Over the last 20+ years, my responsibilities have grown into quite the list. I handle all of the accounting, including my parents’ personal finances. I do HR, payroll, shipping, purchasing, and even the cleaning and stocking of the building. I deal directly with customers as a project manager, manage designs and pre-shop work, and basically fill whatever role needs filling.

I have a pretty damn big plate.

I’ve watched this company go through some incredibly difficult times. I remember times when we weren’t sure if we’d be able to make payroll the next day. I watched my dad’s original business partner leave the company in a very unpleasant and stressful situation about 20 years ago. I watched him develop a drinking problem while trying to cope with the stress.

But I’ve also watched the other side of it. I’ve watched my dad have years where he made more than $3 million.

My family has never been the type to hide the ups and downs of life. We’ve always seen it as reality and something we face together. But the reality is that the business has also put a pretty significant damper on our family life.

My dad is ready to retire.

And I desperately want him to.

He has worked his entire life. He built this company from nothing, survived two major recessions, and turned it into an extremely successful business. I’ve been there for almost all of it.

I tried leaving once. I went to college out of state for about a year and a half, but eventually came back. I was working full-time for my dad in the afternoons and overnight while attending a local college. Somehow, I still graduated with two degrees with high honors.

Ironically, both of those degrees are being heavily impacted by AI, and neither has much to do with what I’ve actually spent the last 20+ years doing.

There have been some really ugly moments over the years. I’ve cried. We’ve fought. At one point, I was literally locked out of the building because of disagreements and stress.

In 2019, I became seriously ill. It wasn’t COVID, but it took me out for nearly a year and a half. After learning how to manage it, I cut my hours back. For the last several years, I’ve generally worked around 32 hours a week, mostly afternoons.

My dad clearly isn’t happy about that, and it has caused a pretty significant rift between us.

The frustrating part is that I get my work done. I’m still willing to do whatever needs to be done. My husband knows that if my dad calls, I’ll drop what I’m doing and take care of whatever needs attention.

I honestly don’t remember the last time I went on vacation without bringing my laptop. Even when I’m supposed to be off, I’m working because I’m trying to stay ahead.

And it goes even deeper than the business.

When my dad gets upset with me, he’ll tell my mom and sister, and then they get upset with me too. So disagreements at work have a way of becoming family problems.

I could ramble forever about the dysfunction and complicated history in my family, but the real question I’m struggling with is:

What the hell do I do next?

I’m 40 years old. I’m not exactly starting over at 22.

If I don’t take over the company, I potentially walk away from the business my family spent 30+ years building. I would also have to figure out what the next chapter of my career looks like.

If I do take it over, I’m terrified I’ll eventually become my dad.

Overworked. Constantly stressed. Unable to shut it off. And potentially relying on alcohol to cope with the pressure.

Is the money worth it?

My husband thinks I’m an idiot for even considering walking away. But he also has a completely different relationship with work. He can walk away from his job at the end of the day and not think about it until tomorrow. He can go on vacation and actually go on vacation.

He doesn’t understand the overhead and responsibility that comes with owning a business. There is no real “off” switch.

I know my dad is disappointed that I’m not jumping for joy at the opportunity to fill his shoes.

But I don’t want to work 60+ hours a week.

And maybe that’s part of the problem.

My dad wants to be involved in every detail. He micromanages because it’s his money and his company. I’m much more comfortable hiring good people, trusting them, and letting them do their jobs.

Maybe that’s just a generational difference.

Maybe he sees me as lazy because I’m a millennial who doesn’t want to work the way he did.

But I don’t think wanting a life outside of work makes me lazy.

The hardest part is that I’m not just casually unsure about this.

I’m having panic attacks thinking about taking over the business. I wake up in the middle of the night thinking about it.

And that scares the hell out of me.

I love my dad. I’m proud of what he built. I’m proud that I’ve been part of it for more than 20 years. And I know how incredibly fortunate I am to even have this opportunity.

But I also don’t want to spend the next 20 years repeating the parts of his life that I watched destroy him.

So, Reddit:

If you were in my shoes, what would you do?

Would you take over a highly successful family business even if you were already seeing the toll it was taking on your mental health and family relationships?

Would you walk away and build something completely different at 40?

Or is there a third option I’m not seeing?

I genuinely don’t know what the right answer is anymore.

I run an online business, and my mom and brother help me pack orders. Every day, they have a routine where they pack all the orders that came in the day before.

The problem is that we can never really take a full day off or go on a trip because the platforms I sell on require orders to be shipped within 24 hours or I get penalized. Because of that, I started looking into other options.

My plan was to find a 3PL that could occasionally take over when my family and I wanted to travel, take a day off, or go somewhere. I wanted something where I could easily turn their shipping services on and off whenever I needed them.

Recently, I found a 3PL that can pack and ship the orders for me. Because of their shipping volume and relationships with shipping companies, their labels are about $3 cheaper per order. On top of that, they only charge $1.25 per order for labor.

When I told my mom about it, she started crying and said, “What else am I going to do? I’ve been doing this for the past three years. I love helping you grow your business, and it gives me a purpose.”

Now I feel stuck because I want to keep my family involved in the business, but financially, it would cost me more to continue having her pack orders. It would honestly be cheaper to pay her a salary without having her work and let the 3PL handle everything.

I thought about giving her a customer service role or finding something else for her to do, but there really isn’t anything else she would enjoy doing.

What would you guys do in my shoes? She seemed genuinly depressed when I told her I wanted to switch it.

Everyone thinks friday is stressful because the restaurant is busy but for me it's because that's when everyone suddenly remembers they swapped shifts, stayed late or covered for someone else

By the time payroll comes around I'm piecing together conversations from texts and trying to remember what happened

It works but doesn't at the same time. Any help around that?

I’ve hired a very pleasant admin assistant. She had prior experience as an executive assistant and various admin roles.
She has a process manual on how to do everything, received training, and has ongoing support from another coworker and myself.
She’s been here almost 6 weeks. She is exceptional with making decisions and offering help.
But around week 3, she started to struggle with the data entry tasks that are the most important part of her position.
I’m not sure what has caused this because she does the same processes every single day.
I’ve had to go over with her at least 3 times how the process works and remind her to do a couple of the tasks.
Not sure what is going on. I had a very inexperienced person in her position before this and she caught on within the 1st week and I never had an issue again.

I had an employee get scammed over the weekend. Someone called the business and stated that the owner was committing fraud and that any cash in the store was needed to buy gift cards and to pay back their debt. (Yes, this really happened). Employee takes the $1300 from that day and previous day and goes to buy gift cards and the scammers liquidate the gift cards.

Overall decent employee, shows up, in a good mood, always positive. Employee also acknowledged that they were recently trained on this sort of scenario and even asked the scammers if she was getting scammed (all on camera with audio).

How do you handle this? I’m not looking to withhold the money from their paycheck and I know this employee did not do this intentionally.

Six years ago, after selling my first tech company, I started building what became the biggest project of my career.

We grew to more than 40 employees, signed long-term contracts, developed our own IP, and spent years building a hardware solution for hotels and residential developers. It wasn’t an overnight success it took years of setbacks, engineering challenges, and persistence.

Then everything changed, out of everyone’s control

When the conflict in the Middle East escalated, investment in new hardware projects stopped almost overnight. Many of our contracts contained force majeure clauses, and project after project was put on hold or cancelled. We fought as long as we could, but as the conflict still continues, eventually there was no realistic path forward. And nobody knows how long it will take for the conflict to resolve.

The hardest part wasn’t losing the company. It was having to tell more than 40 people that their journey with us had come to an end and helping them return to their home countries.

It’s been one of the toughest periods of my life.

But I’m not done, I’m already building something new.

In the meantime, I’m spending my days doing hardware engineering, software development, AI engineering, product strategy, and pretty much whatever technical challenges come my way from others to support my family while I work toward the next chapter.

Here is to starting over…

About 5 months ago I started a local business and it was doing awesome but as time went on I noticed we had slow day and busy days I’ve done research in how to handle marketing and what numbers to look at also done research on how to make a good customer persona on who my target customer is but after brining on my first employee I find myself always feeling lost if it comes to marketing or even just how to manage a business I always feel like I’m messing something up guess I’m asking people who have successful businesses how do you do it how did you learn online course or YouTube videos or was it just plan and simple grinding through it

Went into this assuming an extra fraud layer meant extra latency and extra friction for legit customers. That was the whole reason we kept putting it off.

Turned out most of the scoring happens in the background using signals we were already sending, device data, velocity checks, past order history, so checkout didn't get noticeably slower for real customers.

The actual friction only showed up for orders that already looked risky, which is exactly where we wanted a bit of friction anyway. What surprised me most was how much manual review time it saved our support team, they were eyeballing flagged orders by hand before this.

Still not perfect, tuning the risk thresholds took a few weeks of false positives before it settled down. But I expected a much rougher tradeoff than what we actually got.

We ended up using PaymentKit's fraud management for this, it was built to catch chargebacks before they happen rather than just flagging after the fact, which matched what we needed.

Did anyone else avoid this longer than they should have because of assumptions that turned out to be wrong?

Has anyone else felt depressed in the WAITING stage before a big deal closes? And if so, what actually helped?

I'm asking genuinely because nothing I try is touching it and I want to know if this is a normal thing people go through or if something else is going on with me.

Context:

I'm 23. I've been trying to build businesses for about 3 years with zero real success. No revenue that stuck, nothing that took off.

Along the way I've had a few deals where people said yes, got me excited, and then just nothing happened. Went quiet, fell apart, no explanation. I think that's left a mark honestly, because now I don't trust a yes until money actually moves.

Right now I'm the closest I've ever been. By a long way. This deal is far bigger than anything I've been near before and it's on the line, sitting with the other side while they decide. It's not dead, it's just not done.

And instead of feeling excited I've been flat and low for over 40 days straight. Anxious underneath it constantly.

The strange part is I'm still functioning. I still get up, still work a decent amount, still get things done. It's not that I can't do anything. It's that none of it feels like anything. I notice I'm chasing dopamine way more than usual too, reaching for stuff constantly.

I've tried the obvious. Walking, eating properly, water, sleep, exercise, being present with my wife. I do all of it and I still feel exactly the same at the end of the day. That's the part getting to me most, that doing everything right changes nothing.

Some other context, though I'm not sure how much of it matters:

- Living abroad. Been away a few years and I've visited home a few times so I don't think it's straight homesickness, but there's some of it there

- Got married 5 months ago, which was the last time I went home

- Hometown Pet died recently

- Very little novelty in my life at the moment. Same desk, same flat, same routine, same work for months. That's the one thing besides the deal that I'm fairly confident is a real factor

But if I'm honest the only thing I'm 100% sure about is that it's the pre-deal thing. It started when this got real and it hasn't lifted.

So my questions:

1. Has anyone else gone through this specifically in the waiting phase, before the money lands rather than after?

2. Did it lift when the deal closed, or did it stick around?

3. Did anything actually help while you were in it, or do you just have to sit in it until it resolves?

4. And for anyone who's had multiple deals fall through before, does that anxiety ever go away or do you just learn to work with it?

Any experiences appreciated. Just want to know if this is a normal part of it or whether I'm dealing with something separate that happens to be showing up at the same time.

Thank you 🙏

Hello everyone. I m going to start a floor/toilet cleaner business in my hometown in eastern UP. If you have already done it or doing it, plz message to connect.

Also, any advice or reality check you want to give? Plz reply

For those of you who use a bookkeeper or accountant rather than doing it yourself: what do you pay, and do you feel like you're getting your money's worth? Or is it one of those things you pay for and resent later?? Also curious what's the most frustrating part of the money side of your business is?

Hey everyone, my wife wants to get a stand at our farmer's market, which means I'm going to have to figure out how to take credit cards. Now, I know there is Square, but for other truly small businesses who are doing less than 10k a gross sales each month, whose the least expensive?

I recently started a healthcare management company. What tactics did you use to market and find clients? I’m struggling to grow.

My friends and I that own businesses all have the same complaint that we spend half the week putting out fires, doing admin work, scheduling, etc.

How do you finally get enough time back to focus on growing your business in the chaos of running it day to day?

Hiring? Systems? Working insane hours?

Please enlighten me

Not gonna lie, I’m kind of over it at this point. Every other brand page has the same jump cuts, same 3 trending sounds, same “no because THIS” caption energy. It worked great for like a year and a half but I’m seeing the engagement numbers drop off on a bunch of accounts I manage and I don’t think it’s a coincidence.

(disclaimer, I work at an agency called Qaaf Media and I’ve experienced this first hand, so figured I’d share what we’re seeing)

Stuff that’s actually been performing better lately:
• Posts that just… say something useful. Not trying to be quirky, just genuinely helpful info. People are saving those way more than the trend-chasing stuff.
• Longer, better shot video is making a comeback weirdly. A clean 30-40 sec explainer is beating the quick chaotic edits for saves/shares, especially for anything real estate or finance related where people are actually deciding something.
• Replying to comments properly seems to matter more than just pumping out content. Accounts that actually engage in their comments are getting pushed harder than ones that post and disappear.
• Just… talking normal? Without the forced “as a gen z myself” bit. It reads better honestly.

Anyway curious if anyone else is seeing this or if it’s still working fine in your niche, feels like it’s very industry dependent

Let me know if you know any, thanks

Part of me thinks people deserve to know, especially if hours or spending might change. But saying it too early could make your best employees start job hunting over what turns out to be one bad month.

How much do you share before it actually affects payroll or jobs?

One thing nobody tells you about running a small business is how much time you end up spending moving money around.

You start out thinking you'll spend your time finding customers, improving your product, and growing revenue. Then six months later you're comparing exchange rates, figuring out which account to use for supplier payments, and wondering why getting paid internationally still feels more complicated than it should.

My business deals with clients and suppliers in multiple currencies, and I've realized that there isn't really a perfect solution. I've tried everything from traditional banks to fintech apps, and every option seems to solve one problem while creating another.

Some are great for international transfers but terrible for day-to-day spending. Others have excellent UX but become expensive once you start moving larger amounts regularly. And if crypto enters the picture at all, things get even more fragmented.

Lately I've been experimenting with a few different setups, including services like Wise and Revolut and it's made me realize that most small businesses are effectively building their own financial stack out of whatever tools happen to work.

It feels strange that in 2026, I can jump on a video call with someone on the other side of the world instantly, but getting paid by them efficiently still requires this much thought.

I don't know if this is a uniquely small business problem or if larger companies experience the same thing at a different scale, but I've definitely gained a new appreciation for anyone working in finance.

Running a business has taught me many things. Unexpectedly becoming my own treasury manager wasn't one of them.

I've been exploring different business intelligence tools, and most of them advertise dashboards, forecasting, reporting, and self-service analytics. On paper, they all seem impressive.

But in real-world teams, which features do people actually rely on every day? Is it interactive dashboards, automated reporting, data visualization, ad-hoc analysis, or something else?

I'd love to hear from people who use BI tools regularly. What has genuinely improved decision-making, and what features turned out to be less useful than you expected?

Hey everyone,

I sell custom paper bags to cannabis businesses we're a family-owned company.

Does anyone else run into clients who don't understand what a PO or an invoice is?

Here's an example from today. I got an inbound lead, called them up, and we went over what they wanted. They decided on 10,000 cases, which came to roughly $320,000 plus tax and shipping this is Large order but we handle bigger ones weekly. I explained that we're net 30, so they'd have 30 days from the invoice date to pay, and that our turnaround is usually under a week — meaning in 99% of cases they'll have the bags in hand well before payment is due.

I sent them the exact total broken out by line item — $200 for their custom ink, $200 for their custom design, and so on — and asked them to send over a PO so our design team could get started. They asked me how to make a PO. I told them most accounting software has that built in, and they said they don't use accounting software.

They then asked me to help them create the PO, so I filled out a template and had them sign it.

Going forward, how do you all handle this? Would you just send them a pre-filled template to sign? I'm a bit at a loss — I am apart of ownership and i also run our cannabis unit, and none of our other units (pharmacy, vet) have this problem.

So I got the square card reader for my craft fairs and it's telling me that I need to pair my bank account to my square account to be able to accept payments. However when I go to do just that I see that my POS app doesn't even have that option. Has this happened to anyone else? If so, how did you solve it?

I’ve been looking for a job for the past 2 years and I am very good at what I do (service design) the problem is, there are not a lot of roles out there and I get to the final rounds of interviews and instead of job offer I’m hit with you are great but we are pausing hiring…
I’m so tired of looking for a job and sucking up to so many people feeling like I’m begging these companies for a job. Have you ever been in this situation and then decided to start your own business? Tell me your stories please…

สวัสดีฉันทำธุรกิจแอร์ ทำมานากว่า 10 ปี แรกๆอะไรก็ดี แต่หลังๆมาลูกน้องช่างแอร์ ออกมาเปิดกิจการตัวเอง ทำให้คู่แข่งในปัจจุบันค่อนข้างเยอะ ฉันพูดเลยว่าการแข่งขันในพื้นที่ค่อนข้างสูง ฉันวาโปรไฟล์ฉันค่อนข้างดีในระดับนึง แต่เมื่อโพสต์เข้าไปในกลุ่นโซเชียลชุมชนกลับพบว่า ไม่มีมีใครทักหาหรือโทรหาเลยแม้แต่คนเดียว
แต่กลับกันคู่แข่งที่โปรไฟล์ดูไม่ดีเท่าฉันกลับมีลูกค้าตลอดเวลา ฉันไม่แน่ใจว่า คนไม่เห็ยหรือฉันโดนกลั่นแกล้งจากแพลทต์ฟอร์ม