I own two businesses in the north metro. One is an insurance agency in Coon Rapids. The other, Savvital, helps small businesses hire virtual professionals overseas. Between the two, I’ve hired hundreds of people. I can tell you from experience: Hiring in Minnesota has never been harder.
The numbers back that up. Minnesota’s labor force participation rate has dropped seven months in a row, according to the state’s Department of Employment and Economic Development. The state’s own analysis says aging explains more than 96% of our missing workforce growth since 2019. Between 2019 and 2024, Minnesota added fewer than 25,000 workers total. That’s a rounding error for a state of 5.8 million people.
Meanwhile, nearly half of small-business owners who tried to hire this summer said they found few or no qualified applicants, according to the National Federation of Independent Business’ August jobs report. Every owner I know has the same story. You post a job, you wait, you interview, you make an offer, and then the person ghosts you. Or you hire someone at a wage you can barely afford and lose them in six months.
So what do you do? Most owners do the busy work themselves. Nights. Weekends. Data entry, follow-up emails, scheduling, bookkeeping, chasing paperwork. That’s not growth. That’s survival.
I want to make the case for something a lot of people are afraid to say out loud: hiring overseas help is a pro-American move.
Here’s why. Every small business has two kinds of work. There’s the work that touches your customers and builds your reputation, and there’s the work that just has to get done. Insurance is a good example. Servicing a policy, processing certificates, updating records, entering data into the system: it’s necessary, but nobody in Coon Rapids is going to pay more for it. A trained virtual professional in Pakistan or the Philippines can do that work well, reliably, and at a fraction of the cost.
What happens next is the part people miss. When the busy work is handled, the owner has money and time again. In my agency, that money doesn’t go into my pocket. It goes into raising pay for our local staff and hiring more of the people who sit across the table from Minnesota families. We can pay better because the back office isn’t eating our margin. We grow faster because our people are selling and serving instead of filing.
I’ve watched clients go through the same shift. A two-person office adds a virtual assistant, and within a year the owner is hiring a local salesperson she couldn’t afford before. That is not jobs leaving Minnesota. That is jobs being created in Minnesota because the owner finally had room to breathe.
I’m not suggesting anyone replace their front-line people. I’m suggesting that the front-line people are exactly who we should be investing in, and offshoring the busy work is how a small business can afford to.
Big companies figured this out decades ago. It’s time small-business owners had the same option, without apology.
The workers aren’t coming. The retirements are. Minnesota’s small businesses can either shrink to fit the labor pool, or they can get creative about what work really needs to be done here. I know which one I’d rather see.
Troy Thompson is the owner of Pinnacle Insurance Agency of Minnesota in Coon Rapids and co-founder of Savvital. He lives in Ham Lake.