From 'I don't know what to do' to 41 families in 12 weeks

Where she was

Macy built her agency herself, one family at a time, the way these businesses get built. Within a year or so she was ready to let it go. As she put it to a mutual friend, “I don’t know what to do.”

That is the part worth sitting with. It was not that the work had dried up. Families in Houston still needed nannies, and they were still typing her name into their phones. She was losing them somewhere between finding her and reaching her, and from where she was standing it just looked like the business was ending.

Before June, not one family reached out to her on their own. Every family she worked with, she had gone and found herself.

What was actually broken

The path in.

A parent hiring a nanny is not browsing. They are usually in a hurry, and they are about to trust a stranger with their children. If a form is slow, they leave. If something about it feels off, they leave and they do not come back. A site for this business has to be fast and has to feel safe, at the same time, to someone who is already anxious.

That is a harder brief than it sounds, and it is the whole job.

What we built

• A two-step way to ask for a nanny. The first step asks only what actually matters, when they need care and what kind. Everything else can wait until she has their name.
• Somewhere for every enquiry to live, so no family can quietly disappear into an inbox.
• An alert the moment someone writes, so she can answer while the parent is still thinking about it.
• A new name on the door. The agency became Houston Nannies, with a new logo and a new home at houston-nannies.com. Anyone who still types the old address lands in the right place.
• A partner page for local businesses that offer her families a perk. Each partner links back to her site, and those local links are how a small agency gets found.
• An editor she runs herself. She adds and updates partner pages from her browser, with no code and no waiting on me. That is usually hard on a site built this way.
• And a site built to be read by Google and the AI assistants, so that when a parent asks ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity where to find a nanny in Houston, there is something accurate for it to tell them.

It went live on June 2, 2026.

What happened

Over the twelve weeks from June 26 to September 21:

• 41 new families reached out through the site.
• 2 of those families have become placements so far, and a few more are still in talks.
• 10 of them arrived after asking an AI assistant, going by how enquiries are recorded on the site. That is close to one in four.
• Of the 30 who said when they needed someone, 19 needed them straight away. These were not people planning ahead. They needed help now.
• 37 nannies applied to work with her through the site, and about half of them said they had five or more years of experience.
• She has interviewed about 10 of the nannies, and one placement came entirely through the site: the family and the nanny both found her there.
• Her Google profile went from 143 views a month to 341.
• Her phone rang about as often as it always had. That is the number I keep coming back to, because it means the growth did not come from somewhere else. It came through the site.

And she is still in business.

Why this one stayed with me

Most agency sites treat a nanny enquiry like any other lead. It is not. The person filling it in is nervous, and the form is the first thing telling them whether this agency is careful. It had to feel quick and safe before it had to do anything clever.

The other thing was where these families are starting from. Close to a quarter of them now begin by asking an AI assistant rather than typing into a search box. That is a real change in how parents look for care, and most agency sites are not built to be read that way yet.

But the part I think about is simpler than any of that. She was going to close. She did not.

In her words

It wasn’t looking like my business had the potential to become my full-time job or income source. If I were still consistently getting leads, even if they weren’t closing, it might have been different but I had too long of a dry spell without leads/clients. I now have frequent client consultations and nanny interviews, in addition to the time I spend recruiting and vetting. I recently transitioned from working 40 hours at my hourly job to 28.

Macy, owner of Houston Nannies