How to be a Hustler: A&K Animal Services

My babysitter Abby was five years my senior and lived down the street from me. Her younger brother Ethan was in my grade, and the three of us were such close neighborhood friends that it felt a little bit like my best friend was in charge when my parents went out for dinner or golfing together – except it was a best friend who knew how to work the stove, a feat that may as well have involved differential equations and space travel for an 8-year-old.

Abby wore red ribbons in her hair, used perfume from a store in the mall that sold purses resembling racy female bustiers, and subscribed to Seventeen Magazine – in short, I worshiped her.

My mom loved her, too. “She’s just such a go-getter,” my mom would gush, “Always scheming up some way to make an extra dollar.”

The dynamic of being friends with your babysitter was a blessing in retrospect, and she was around a lot – often when my parents were home.

Abby was constantly involving me in her entrepreneurial schemes, the most notable of which was A&K Animal Services – our dog-walking and cat-sitting business we enacted with a collective age of barely 20 years between us. We made signs using Word Art block letters and packing-taped them to mailboxes, stop signs, and other flat, immobile surfaces in our subdivision. I would be shocked if our revenue ever outpaced the expenses we racked up in color ink cartridges.

Shockingly, we actually had a decent little business.

Before I was 10, I was “employed” by Abby and an active strategist in our constantly evolving business plans. Some of our business plans involved hitting up investors for capital, like the time we pitched my parents on why I need a trampoline. We prepared a Powerpoint slide deck and a handout and presented our key arguments around the dining room table over hot bowls of Kraft Mac & Cheese.

I never got the trampoline, but I can see now how formative Abby’s influence was in my earliest understandings of how to spend your free time (read: hustling).

We did the stuff other little girls did, like make clothes for dolls, choreograph dances, and play Guitar Hero, but most of my distinct memories with Abby involve selling something, persuading someone, or otherwise constructing a strategic plan.

Many times throughout my young adult life, I remembered the way my mom’s face rearranged itself in a mix of awe and disbelief as she described Abby’s absolute hustle. Such a go-getter. I wanted to be that, too.

In some ways, I think – 15 years later – I’m still trying to be.

Today, Abby runs a successful event-planning business in Cincinnati. She hired me (at the age of 24) to write the copy for her website and encouraged me to put together a formal invoice and consider how much I wanted to be paid for freelance work. And despite the fact that her business ventures are now legitimate and backed with capital outside of the crisp twenties my parents would give her, I’m struck by just how little things change.