Business Lessons Learned from Babysitting
For me, learning to run my own business was childs play - literally.
I never thought about it this way until recently, but I’ve been an entrepreneur almost all my life — ever since I put my first sign up advertising my babysitting services at the dance studio where I took lessons. I was 11 years old — legally old enough to babysit under Colorado law, but just barely.
I went on to babysit my way through middle school, high school, and college, not to mention the years I took off between high school and college. I still didn’t think of it as a business, but it was actually my first taste of things like marketing, determining rates, and establishing a professional reputation.
I learned the hard way to always act professional. I remember one babysitting job, when I was just 18, where the mother quite generously told me I could invite friends over, sit in their hot tub (they had a lovely sunken 2 person hot tub in a special room that they added on to the house), use her tanning bed, etc. But the one time I did invite someone over — my boyfriend — I got a lecture about asking them first. So apparently they didn’t really mean to be that generous — they just wanted to feel that generous.
I think that was also my first lesson that clients don’t always say what they mean. For instance, in my current business as a freelance writer, I’ve had clients ask for one thing, and then freak out and say they wanted something completely different. Or say that they don’t care when I get the finished product to them, and then harass me on a daily or even an hourly basis about when their project will be done.
In some ways, running your own business is always a moving target — the rules are always changing, and your perception of what it means to be a small business owner is always being refined and redefined. In other ways, I’m very glad for those early years I spent babysitting, because they taught me some important basic lessons that have shaped who I am as an entrepreneur.
Comments
Leave a Reply