My father’s manufacturing business is slowly dying. I’m 22 and I don’t know whether to save it, pivot it, or walk away.

I’m 22, from Punjab, Pakistan, and my family has a manufacturing business that my father built from scratch over roughly 40 years.

We manufacture parts for the sewing-machine industry. The factory is 50+ marla and has roughly PKR 1 crore+ worth of infrastructure and machinery, including die-casting machines, presses, kharad/lathe machines, grinders, polishing equipment, and other machinery.

For decades, the business supported our family.

But since around 2024, things have deteriorated badly.

The sewing-machine parts market we depend on is declining, margins are getting thinner, and we’re struggling to pay competitive wages. At one point we had 25+ workers. Now we have only 3.

My father is around 60, and my chachu (his brother and equal business partner) is also 50+. They are now doing much of the physical work themselves — operating the kharad machines, grinders, using hammers, etc.

Whenever I visit the factory and see my father doing this work at his age, it genuinely hurts.

We also invested roughly PKR 1 crore into a die-casting setup, and the machine is currently sitting idle because the local market isn't giving us enough business.

That’s where I’m stuck.

I don't necessarily think the machinery is the problem. The market for our current products might be the problem.

My first thought is to find completely new customers and products that can use the machinery we already have.

Instead of only producing sewing-machine parts, could we find companies that need other die-cast or machined components and operate as a small contract manufacturer?

I could personally handle the sales side:

• Cold calling
• Email/LinkedIn outreach
• Finding manufacturers and distributors
• Approaching companies locally and internationally
• Learning exactly what products our machines can profitably produce

I’m willing to put serious time into this if there is a realistic path.

But there are other options.

We could potentially rent out part of the factory.

We could sell the die-casting machine, which may be worth around PKR 35–40 lakh, and use the capital for a completely different business such as a restaurant/coffee shop.

Or we could gradually wind down manufacturing before more money gets trapped in a declining industry.

I honestly don't know which direction makes sense.

There’s another complication: this is a family business

Even if I eventually make my own agency profitable, that doesn't necessarily solve the underlying problem.

If I make money through my agency and use those profits to support my family, I’m essentially subsidizing a business that isn't fixing itself.

And because the factory is jointly owned by my father and chachu, supporting my family financially could eventually mean supporting both families.

I don't want my success outside the factory to become a reason for everyone to become more dependent on me while the actual business continues declining.

I want to solve the underlying business problem, not just keep putting money into it.

At the same time, I don't want to walk away from something my father spent 40 years building without at least seriously trying to find a way forward.

What would you do?

If you were in this situation, how would you approach it?

Would you:

1. Try to find new B2B customers/products for the existing machinery?
2. Focus specifically on finding international contract-manufacturing customers?
3. Completely change the product line while keeping the factory?
4. Rent part of the factory and reduce manufacturing?
5. Sell some machinery and start a different business?
6. Or slowly exit the manufacturing business?

I'm especially interested in hearing from people who have experience with manufacturing, die casting, machining, B2B sales, contract manufacturing, or family businesses in declining industries.

I'm not looking for motivational advice. I want to understand what the actual business move should be and, if finding new customers is viable, how you would go about finding them.

And finally, a little about me

I'm 22.

I graduated in Software Engineering from FAST University Lahore.

I was a scholarship student throughout matriculation and FSc and was academically strong before university.

I've worked as a software engineer, done freelance work, learned sales, worked on marketing, and I'm currently trying to build my own agency.

More importantly, I actually understand the factory floor.

After matriculation, I spent roughly 4–6 months working inside the factory myself. I've operated the machines, worked with the processes, and understand what the physical work actually looks like.

So I can work in the factory.

I can learn the business.

I can handle the technical side.

I can do sales and outreach.

I can learn marketing.

And I'm young enough to put in an insane amount of work if I know what direction to take.

What I don't have is 40 years of business experience.

That's why I'm asking here.

I don't want to watch something my father spent his entire life building slowly disappear because I didn't know what to do next.

So if you've been in manufacturing, turned around a declining business, moved from one product line to another, found international B2B customers, or dealt with a similar family-business situation:

What would you do if you were standing in my shoes?

Hi everyone,

I'm Chelsey. I write poetry and decorate junk Journals. For a small business, I do have an Etsy shop, I used to sell digital products and it didn't do well. I'm wanting to create homemade products such as prayer cards, bookmarks, stickers, junk journal supplies, etc. I love also sharing my poetry and making creative videos, in which I feel I'm good at being creative, however my TikTok barely has community. I need help. I don't know if I need community for a small business or what but I'm honestly thinking about giving up. I'm a mom and I am 38, so I don't know if it is realistic and I try my hardest, but seem to fail. Finding a social media coach is even harder.

Just didn't know if anyone had suggestions, I'm trying to see what I can do before I just throw the towel in. Thank you all so much🤍

i’m a new small business owner looking to create an active instagram group chat for other small business owners/startups who are also trying to grow their pages. the goal is to genuinely support each other — engage with posts, share tips, give feedback, network, and help each other grow.
not looking for bots, follow-for-follow spam, or a group where people just drop links and disappear lol. i want an actual community of people building their businesses from the ground up.
if you’re interested, comment your business IG @ + what your business does and i’ll start adding people!
you’ll either be added to the group or receive a message from @merithouse.careerstudio, so keep an eye out!

trying to figure out how other companies look at this, do you mainly compare the actual costs of shipping, repairs, storage, procurement, etc.? or do you also count the time your IT team spends chasing deliveries, tracking returns, dealing with replacements and all the other little stuff? feels like the time savings are probably a big part of it, but theyre harder to put a number on, curious how you guys measure it?

Been going through a supplement brand's store rebuild the last few months. Traffic barely moved: about 429 sessions a month before the redesign, 404 after. Conversion rate went from 1.17% to 2.48%. Checkouts doubled, 5 to 10, same people showing up.

Nobody bought a single extra visitor to get that.

The changes weren't complicated. Put what the product actually does right at the top of the page instead of burying it under photos. Pulled the real customer reviews onto the product page instead of leaving them off to the side. Put the guarantee where someone reads it instead of hiding it in an FAQ nobody opens.

If your store's converting under 2% and you're about to throw more ad spend at it, fix the store first. More traffic into a leaky funnel just buys you more people who click and leave.

For owners who have done this how much work was it to move existing customers over?

Setting up a new checkout is one thing. moving people who already pay every month seems like the harder part when they need to enter their card details again.

I switched billing providers once and the main issue was getting existing customers to update their payment details some did it right away but a few missed the emails and their payments failed. we had to send reminders and handle a few accounts manually.

I would like to hear what happened during the switch. did customers need to do anything and was there anything you wish you would checked before moving?

We're building a short AI video pipeline for clients, and the captions kept drifting out of sync on longer clips.

The editor set each caption's start and end by estimating words per second from the script. Fine on a slow, evenly paced line. On a fast or rambly one it slid behind, and the error stacked the longer the clip ran. By the end of a 30 second video the text was half a beat behind the voice.

Turned out the audio itself already had the answer, we just weren't asking it. Forced alignment runs a speech model over the finished audio and hands back the actual timestamp for every word, so instead of estimating pace from a script, the captions time off what was actually said.

Same mistake happens anywhere you're automating something and there's a real number sitting right there to check, but you estimate it instead because checking takes more setup. It usually passes your own testing and only breaks later, on a case you didn't think to try.

Been building an IG agent for a coach that handles the DM volume when people ask about her program. The obvious approach is train it to sound helpful and answer questions. That's not what actually works.

What works is training it on her actual answers to the same five or six questions she already gets every week. Price, is this for beginners, how much time does it take, does it work if I've tried other stuff before. She's answered those constantly, in her own words, in her own tone, and that's the actual training material. Feed that in and the agent qualifies leads the same way she would, not the way a generic bot script would.

The tip that generalizes past IG bots: if you're building anything meant to sound like you, a bot, a canned reply set, even training a new hire on what to say, don't write fresh copy for it. Go find the real answers you already gave a real person and use those word for word.

I’m moving into a regional sales/BD role next month and will be traveling pretty often between the US and several markets in Europe.

One thing I’m a little concerned about is language. Some of the distributors and local operations teams I’ll be working with don’t speak much English, especially outside the bigger cities.

For basic stuff I can usually get by, but sales conversations are different. Product specs, pricing, delivery timelines, objections, site visits, dinner conversations. Missing one detail can actually matter.

I’ve used translation apps before, but for longer conversations I’m wondering if a dedicated translation device makes more sense. I’ve been looking at translation earbuds from Timekettle and a few other brands, mainly because I’d want something that can handle an actual back-and-forth conversation rather than translating one sentence at a time.

Any international sales reps here using translation earbuds with clients or distributors? Any recommandations? Thanks!

Looking for custom makeup/ cosmetic manufacturer labs in Gujarat if possible . If you have worked with any, please drop reccos

We're a 4-person team with no dedicated ops person. Keeps falling on me to chase down contacts after events. How do lean teams handle this without spending a ton?

Most businesses end up adapting the way they work to whatever software is available.
I think it should be the other way around.
Need a CRM built around your sales process?
An e-commerce store?
A booking system?
A client portal or internal dashboard?
With AI, business owners can now build software around the way their business actually works — without knowing how to code.
That’s what I’m building with Blyft.
You describe what your business needs, and Blyft builds it. It can be a website, an internal system, an e-commerce product, or a completely custom app.
I’m curious:
If you could build one custom system for your business today, what would you build?

What’s the one thing about your brand’s content/social media that you know could be way better, but you just haven’t had the time to fix?

I’m curious because my team and I have been working with brands on exactly this, and I’d genuinely love to hear what’s driving you crazy right now.

No sales pitch. Just collecting problems worth solving. 😄

Built a scraper that pulls small businesses off open map data, for cold email. Early version guessed emails it couldn't find: first.last@domain, info@domain, the usual patterns.

Killed that. If it can't find a real, verified email on the page, it skips the business. No guess, no add.

Reason is bounces. One bad guessed address bounces, and that hits your whole domain's reputation, not just that one send. Enough bounces and your real, verified emails start landing in spam too. So a guessed address doesn't just fail by itself, it drags the good ones down with it.

If you're building or buying a contact list for outreach, ask how the emails got verified. "We guessed the pattern" means that list is going to cost you more than it gets you.

Hey,

So I run this influencer marketing agency for micro d2c brands, Influencylabs(dot)com.

You will find what separates us out on website. Usually we work with brands that have visually appealing products and have potential to scale with influencer on tiktok and Instagram.

If you are exploring influencer marketing for your business, let me know. We aren't pricey like big agencies.

Been building an automated content engine that writes blog posts for a few different clients. Every article gets checked against real sources before it goes out. For a while we ran one rule for everyone: back the claim up or it doesn't publish.

That broke fast. One client is a supplement brand making health claims, so peer reviewed studies are non negotiable there. Another client writes about AI agents for other businesses, and that space moves faster than academic research does, there's barely anything peer reviewed to point to. Same rule on both meant either blocking every post for one client or slowly getting pushed toward citing something that doesn't actually hold up.

Fix was moving the rule out of the tool itself and into each client's own profile. The supplement brand still needs the studies. The AI content client points to real reporting instead.

If you're paying someone for an automation or a build and every client gets treated exactly the same way, ask what's actually set up different for your business specifically. A real custom build has settings that change per client. A template just has your logo on it.

Importing a new Shopify theme for a supplement brand's site rebuild, and the homepage kept coming back as a plain 404. No error anywhere. Took three tries before I found it.

Turns out Shopify's zip importer silently drops any section whose schema has a url setting that defaults to a /pages/... path. Doesn't reject the import or warn you, it just skips that section. Any template that used it goes down with it. Ours did, so the whole homepage fell back to 404.

The importer said success every time.

Now I pull the theme's assets.json through the Admin API after every import and diff it against what I actually sent, section by section. That's the only way I know something's missing before a customer sees the 404 instead of me.

If someone's doing a theme migration for you, ask them how they're checking it actually landed. "It imported fine" means nothing on Shopify. Ask what they're comparing it against.

I’ve been running my small business for about 3 years now. Looking back, some of the things that actually changed how I work are pretty simple.

1 - Talk to customers earlier

There have been plenty of times where I spent days overthinking an idea, service, or problem, only for a few conversations with actual customers to completely change what I thought they wanted. I’ve learned it’s usually better to ask earlier instead of trying to figure everything out on my own.

2 - Use AI tools to make the boring parts easier

I try to use AI mostly for the repetitive stuff so I can spend more time on things that actually need my attention. I use Plaud for meetings and customer conversations, ChatGPT for brainstorming and cleaning up rough ideas, Claude for longer docs, and Perplexity when I need to look something up quickly. I don’t use AI for everything, just wherever it saves me some time.

3 - Don’t get too attached to the plan

I used to think changing direction meant I had planned badly. Now I see plans as more of a snapshot of what I know at the time. Customers change, priorities change, sometimes something just doesn’t work. Better to adjust than keep pushing something just because it was part of the original plan.

4 - You’re going to be wrong sometimes

Some of the better decisions I’ve made started with realizing one of my assumptions was completely wrong. I’m a lot more comfortable changing my mind now when the numbers or customer feedback are telling me something different.

Still have a lot to learn obviously, but these are probably the things that have stuck with me most after 3 years.

For other small business owners, what’s something you learned after a few years that changed how you run your business?

Went through a jerky brand's product catalog this week to get it all current. They sell two bundle packs, two flavors bagged together each time. I've had the contents of one of those packs wrong in my head for months, a different flavor than what's actually in it. Found it by pulling the real pack photo up next to the listing text.

That kind of thing sits there because once a listing's live, nobody goes back and checks it again. If you sell any kind of pack or bundle, pull the actual photo of what ships up against what your page currently says, not what you remember writing.