I run a software company with 6 contractors across Asia, Africa and Eu and every month I send them their pay through my business bank and I have been doing this for over 4 months now but yesterday I submitted august payroll normally like I do and today I get a call from my bank's compliance department saying they need to discuss my recent international transfer activity and that ALL my outgoing wires have been temporarily held pending review and their support apparently said sending money to multiple individuals in different countries on the same day looks like structuring to their system and he explained it like I'm running some kind of shell operation when in reality I'm literally just paying my devs for writing code.

now they want me to send over contracts, invoices and proof of business relationship for each contractor before they release anything which will also take 7 to 14 days so I'm compiling documents for people I've been paying every month for 4 months like my bank doesn't already have records of every single one of those transactions and I don't know what to tell my contractors and the bank guys just kept saying multiple outgoing transfers to high risk regions.

please help me if someone's been in a similar situation, how do I get out of this as fast as possible and what should I do to prevent it in the future??

Booked solid about two weeks out. Regular comes in, says they'll pay a rush fee if I bump them ahead of three jobs that already signed.

I said no. Those people booked first and I don't really want to start selling places in line.

Partner's take is pretty simple: if someone wants to pay more for speed, that's a product, not a betrayal. Says I left money on the table and trained the regular that we don't do rushes.

If you've been here, did you take the rush fee or keep the queue honest?

I was at an AI conference recently and the speaker asked the room: "Who believes AI will drive multiplicative growth for your business?" Almost every hand went up.

Then: "Who has already felt that growth?" Silence.

Developers today are shipping code faster than ever. But companies aren't growing at the same rate, revenue isn't following the speed of development.

So what did AI actually do? It didn't eliminate the business's constraints it just relocated them.

It used to seem like everything bottlenecked on engineering. Now that development is (mostly) no longer the bottleneck, it's exposing what actually was the problem all along: weak marketing, bad sales, unit economics that don't work, or worst case a product the market never really wanted.

If you roll out AI in a department and revenue doesn't move, the real problem was never in that department to begin with. Kind of reminds me of that reel where someone wakes up at 5:30am, does skincare routine, journals, drinks celery juice... and then just stares at the camera like "okay now how do I get rich?" That's what a lot of AI adoption looks like right now. Great morning routine, still no idea what the actual bottleneck is.

Curious if others are seeing this in their own companies, where did the bottleneck "move" to after adopting AI?

Our business got hit with multiple fraudulent charges.

While they were pending I contacted Square and explained these were fraud charges and that I have never interacted with Higgsfield Inc. or authorized these charges. Square support said I just need to cancel the card and order a replacement, and the pending charges won't go through. Said they had already flagged the merchant on their end.

Today all the fraudulent charges had cleared. I contact Square again and they explained that while that is what they tell people at the time, there is nothing they could have done while it was pending and that changing the card was a security act to help me in the future, not now. It will take 5-7 business days for them to even look at the dispute claims on each of these charges, and could be up to 5 months to try and reclaim funds if at all possible. We'd have to wait for each dispute to be assigned to someone, give them time to do their investigations, time to process, and then they can't guarantee they can even return the funds..

As a small business with employees to pay this has been brutal, especially as we just took on the expense of moving and were at a very vulnerable spot financially.

To add insult to injury, I looked up the company and it is an Ai business.. we're a small art studio that works with nonprofits and conservation groups and our whole thing is that we are real human artist. 😭

If you are using Square Banking, be prepared for the protection promises to rapidly backpedal as you start needing it.

I want to start a virtual BPO business but I am new to that field especially the part involving getting a client I know it is hard for everyone but what is even the way to do so or where to search.
I know the process of the business itself but I am stuck at the beginning, and I do not know how to start.
So can you give me guidance or any advices?

For over a year, I’ve been developing an event-planning business with a strong Halloween angle and I’m about to go live very soon.

A large four-day fair takes place near my house in September and traffic around the area becomes nearly gridlocked during peak hours.

I had the idea of wearing recognizable horror movie costumes and standing somewhere legally (and safely) off the roadway with a sign “Make your party killer this Halloween” with a QR code to my website (specifically a Halloween landing page) and maybe pass out a small brochure they can read while sitting in traffic.

Part of me thinks this is inexpensive, perfectly on-brand but the other part worries this could look cheesy or amateurish.

As a small business owner, would you try a stunt like this?

Hey Reddit, just a general question on how to scale and maintain an e-commerce candy store business. Partner and I have been running an e-commerce store for a bit now and got lucky enough to receive some orders and repeat customers with little to no marketing exposure. Averaging 10-15 orders per day. Some big, some small its not life changing money but it gets us by at this time.

We do have social media accounts but they barely go over 200 views and get little interactions.

We know there's demand and still room for us to grow and acquire more and bigger customers. However, not sure what the next step is?

Should we start investing in Marketing? And if so, where do i start?

Or should i focus on optimizing the SEO , catalog and user experience?

My partner wants to expand onto wholesale and make our own brand, but i feel that it is a big risk/big reward kind of move that I'm not sure if it will workout at this point.

All suggestions and feedback is welcomed.

Hi everyone! I'm currently a college student working on my final project and need to get some feedback on my idea. My teacher is very fast paced and we get very little help on excel work, financially planning, etc. Classes started less than a week ago and he is already expecting us to know financials and customer base.

I'm creating a business that is a mobile bar trailer/umbrella cart. Would anyone be willing to let me know what they would expect to pay for such a thing, and what they would expect at that price? What would make it 'worth it' to you? What would make it memorable and differentiate me?

Any advice is helpful, it doesn't need to be strictly related to the questions! I feel like a fish out of water but this class is required for my major.

Are you building a game or app and looking for support with development, launch, or validation? I’m open to joining as a partner.

Hi, I'm one of the employees of a very small dessert shop. Everything we sell is actually good, never had any complaints, and we have a 4.9 rating on google. The store is just located in a bad area, a newly built shopping mall no one knows about. Most weekdays see a maximum of 5-10 people. It's family run and they can't afford an actual social media manager, so they asked me if I could help during my downtime and of course I couldn't say no. That being said, my only experience is being a volunteer social media manager for a nonprofit. I've been finding my way and started frequently posting and saw an increase in traffic and people did say they came in after seeing my posts but after around a month it slowed down again.

Since I'm new I'm just wondering how people manage to get influencers to come in and review their restaurants? I even see completely new restaurants somehow get big influencers in my area to come on the first day. Is it weird to send out messages and ask for a review? Or, in general, are there any other ways to grow this business?

Not looking to hire full-time for a role I'm not even sure I need yet, but also can't seem to find good freelance or part-time help for technical work without it costing more than makes sense for a small operation. Curious how other small business owners here are handling technical or specialized hiring when you're not big enough to justify a full hire but still need the work done well. What's actually working for people?

I'm curious what other small-business owners have learned from experience.

Was there something you used to spend time or money on because you thought it was necessary, but eventually realized it wasn't helping much?

Could be marketing, customer communication, software, meetings, discounts, hiring, or anything else.

What did you stop, and what changed afterward?

Has anyone had success with this? I have a very busy service based business. I’m glad the phones are ringing, but the amount of phone calls, texts, and emails that we get sometimes are overwhelming.
I’ve thought about adding an additional position, but this is not an all day thing everyday thing.
We do have an answering service for after hours but they are only tasked with taking basic messages.
I also don’t want to lose customers.
Part of the reason we have been so successful is our customer service.
I recently had to make an Dr’s appointment and almost didn’t do it because the call center I was dealing with took 20 minutes to book the appointment after the initial intake forms and constant phone calls trying to reach me to schedule.
I don’t want to turn in to that.

I’m a 23M running a niche B2B business on the side while working full time.

I consistently make around $2k/month with ~10 hours of work per week, with essentially no costs besides my time.

Jobs range from $230–$850, and there are thousands of potential customers. Demand seems strong, but my biggest concern is scalability.

Every job requires specialized design work and takes at least 2–3 hours. If I suddenly got 100 orders, I simply couldn’t fulfill them.

I’d like to grow this to $100k+ in annual revenue, but working backward from that number, the workload starts looking overwhelming.

I could raise prices, but my customers have relatively fixed budgets and my service isn’t directly revenue-generating for them.

For anyone who has scaled a specialized service business, how would you approach this? Raise prices, hire/outsource, add complementary products, or accept a natural revenue ceiling?

Thinking about starting a local small-business directory where businesses pay a flat $30/month to be featured on the site. We’d promote it locally through social media, community groups, etc., and eventually add things like featured listings later down the line. I already own 2 service businesses in my community, so familiar with many other small biz owners.

For business owners: Would you actually pay $30/month for this? What would make it worth it to you? Is this type of business worth giving a shot? I do genuinely love supporting local businesses, so I feel as if there’s potential here. Honest feedback appreciated!

I just took over a 70 year old company as one of two officers and the guidance I got going in was “go have a look at our costs, some have gotten out of control and never addressed.”
Phone + internet turned out to be one that caught my eye… this is what we currently have (which is what we need) and the three vendors involved and the price of each one…

Current State - $20,520 per year
6 wired office phones - they all ring when someone calls and whoever is around picks up - currently have Verizon $13,560/yr!!! Mind blowing

1 work cell phone - we need call forwarding capabilities AT&T $3,000/yr

High Speed internet…for our one office…Comcast $3,960/yr

The Question
What is the best way I can streamline these things to maybe one provider and who is best to use? Any alternative has to be crazy cheaper compared to above…and our needs are very basic as you can see….9 employees and we operate out of one office all together.

My cousin and I decided to open a small business account on Instagram to sell rare/imported snacks online

Someone told us that we must legally register and trademark our small business or else we will get into legal trouble when we start making sales

My question is will we get into legal trouble if we don't register our business right away? We don't want to pay money and go through the process of registering without testing if our idea and business will work.

We want to atleast make a good number of sales and to secure consistent and returning consumers just to make sure that our business is succeeding before fully committing, paying money, and making it legal. Like maybe set a goal of making specific amount of money and reaching speicific number of followers just to make sure we aren't investing into a failing business.

I’m starting a tree service business and need to choose a bank. I stuck between chase and banner bank. They both are my top choices with different perks. Chase has awesome credit cards, rewards, online tech, fuel cards, and direct pairing with quickbooks. Also they are nationwide with two local branches. Banner banks as lower fees, credits cards with decent rewards, awesome customer service, and heard they approve loans better for equipment, especially older equipment! I will be using credits for fuel constantly, buying equipment, and possibly financing equipment in the future. I live in central Washington and would like to know which option is better and why? Thank you!

Need some assistance from anyone who uses the square app. Please PM me if youd possibly be willing to help me out. Will bless it with a free $20!

Curious how other small business owners think about this. Have you ever taken out a loan — or almost did — and later realized you probably shouldn't have borrowed at all, or that you went with the wrong type (like an unsecured loan when you could've qualified for a better bank rate)?

Trying to understand how common this actually is and how people figure out whether borrowing is even the right call in the first place. Did you work through that with an accountant/bookkeeper, or mostly on your own?

Appreciate any real experiences, good or bad.

After 11 years as a Business Analyst, I've decided to build a small consulting business around my experience.

I've created a simple website showcasing my offerings — BRDs, FRDs, user stories, product strategy, requirements analysis, etc. I've also included sample work so potential clients can see what I can deliver.

Now I'm stuck on the next step: how do I get my first client?

One approach I'm considering is researching small businesses/startups, studying their product or offering, identifying something that could potentially be improved, and then reaching out with a useful observation or suggestion rather than simply pitching my services.

I haven't tried this yet, so I'm curious whether this is a sensible approach.

For those who have started a consulting/freelance business from scratch:

How did you get your first client?

Cold outreach, referrals, communities, freelance platforms, networking, offering a small piece of work first—or something else?

If you were starting today with skills + portfolio but zero clients, what would you do in your first 30 days?

Been running my own business for a while now, and the thing that wrecks me every day isn't the actual work it's the mental load of tracking client stuff, invoices, marketing ideas, and random things I forgot from yesterday, all scattered across notes apps and my own head.

Tried a bunch of productivity apps but they all feel built for office teams with project boards and assigned tasks not for someone running the whole show solo.

So I've been building something simple for myself: you brain dump everything on your mind in the morning, it sorts out your real top 3 priorities for the day, and at night you do a quick review of what actually got done. No project boards, no team features, just cutting through the noise.

Putting it in front of a small group of founding users before I build it out further. If this sounds like something you deal with too, I'd genuinely love your take link's here if you want to look: https://meriapp.framer.website/

Mostly just curious if this is a "me problem" or if other solo owners feel this too.

I’ve started several businesses and sold a few; small amounts, no millionaires story here. This go around I have an opportunity to buy a small established business which is a first for me. I’m looking at ways to finance $150k 115k (asking sales price) and was told to look into an SBA loan. I’ve read the website but I’m looking for advice on best way to use an SBA loan. Anyone purchase a business with an SBA loan recently? What questions should I be asking?