Did You Know…I Was an Entrepreneur Before I Even Knew It!(Maybe You Are Too!)

I Was An Entrepreneur Girl Before I Even Knew It…😅

When I was in junior high, I had one goal: make money.

I didn’t want to rely on my parents for the things I wanted, and let’s be honest, my parents taught us resilience and made it pretty clear that if I wanted something beyond the basics, I should have to work for it like everyone else.

And I was ready!!

But there was one little problem…

Nobody hires 13-year-olds.

So, while my friends were waiting until they turned 16 to apply at the local ice cream shop, I decided to get creative. Babysitting. That was the ticket.

I had taken a CPR course through my town and figured I was officially qualified to keep kids alive (and maybe even entertained) for a few hours. So, I fired up the family computer—we’re talking old-school Microsoft Word with all the cheesy clip art you can imagine—and made some homemade flyers offering my babysitting services.

I marched through the neighborhood, placing those flyers on every door of every family I knew had young kids. I was already picturing my phone blowing up with calls from parents desperate to book me.

And then… crickets.

No calls. No jobs. No “OMG, we’ve been waiting for a babysitter like you!”

I was so tempted to give up. But then I thought, What if I just tried one more thing?

So, I grabbed the phone and cold-called every single neighbor I had left a flyer for. (Yes, cold-calling at 13! Who does that?!) There was one family I really had my eye on—they had the cutest little boy, and I knew they hired babysitters because I’d seen other girls there before.

I called them, crossed my fingers, and asked, “Hey! Just wondering if you saw the flyer I left about babysitting…”

A few weeks later, that mom hired me for my first real babysitting gig.

I was so nervous walking into that house, but I crushed it. And guess what? Word-of-mouth spread. I ended up with a steady stream of babysitting jobs.

Later, I did the same thing to get my first house-cleaning gigs in my grandparents’ neighborhood—more flyers, more cold calls, more yeses after a lot of nos. And by the time I was in high school, I was making more money than most of my friends.

Looking back, I realize those moments were my first taste of entrepreneurship. No one was going to hand me a babysitting job. I had to go out there, get creative, face the rejections, and keep going until someone said yes.

And isn’t that exactly what entrepreneurship is? We put out an offer, hope the phone rings, and when it doesn’t… we find another way. We follow up. We tweak. We stay persistent even when it feels like crickets.

So if you’re hearing crickets in your business right now, take a page out of 13-year-old me’s book: Keep going. Make the call. Send the follow-up. Try again. Because sometimes, that one extra effort turns into a babysitting empire…or the business you’ve always dreamed of building.

Have you ever had a moment like this? I’d love to hear it! Drop a comment below and let me know your first hustle story. 😊