I got my first job when I was 10—not at a lemonade stand or raking leaves, but babysitting. I started watching younger children for the neighbors and family friends in the fifth grade, taking on evening and weekend jobs that eventually turned into full summer days. By the time I was a teenager, I’d basically built my own small business: multiple families, recurring schedules, and a reputation I worked hard to maintain. At the time, babysitting just felt like a way to earn some money and independence. But looking back, it gave me the foundation for corporate leadership.
Problem Solving
The first lesson I learned was ownership because it wasn’t the kind of job where I could escalate a problem to a manager. If a child got hurt or something went wrong, I needed to take responsibility and handle it myself. This was before smartphones, so I couldn’t send a quick text to a parent or ask Google or ChatGPT for quick resolutions. I had to stay calm and solve the problem on the spot.Â
That experience gave me an early understanding of what accountability looks like. When you’re responsible for other people, you can’t wait for someone else to step in—you need to take ownership of the outcome. Now, decades later, that’s still one of the qualities I value most in the people I hire and work with at Minted. The best teammates don’t immediately look around for someone else to fix a problem; they’ll step forward and figure it out on their own.Â
Culture Counts
My days babysitting also taught me how much culture matters. Over the years, I worked with so many different families. On paper, the job was always the same: keep the kids safe, fed, and entertained. But every family was different. Some felt easy even on the most chaotic days. And then others were draining, regardless of how manageable the work itself was. The difference was never the kids; it was that I wasn’t as compatible with that family.
Every family has its own values, and when those values aligned with my own, the work felt so natural. But when they didn’t, the disconnect was hard to ignore. That’s something I think about constantly as a CEO. A leader could bring together a team of talented people and still have an environment that feels exhausting. What makes a company truly work isn’t what looks good on a resume—it’s shared values. When people agree on what matters, hard problems become challenges to solve together, not ideological battles. Culture is often talked about as a perk or office design, but in reality, it’s much simpler and much deeper than that. Culture is shared expectations, trust, and an understanding of the type of team you want to be.
Investing in yourself
The third lesson was much more personal: Taking care of oneself makes one better at taking care of others. One of the families I babysat for had a weekly bowling league. Every week, no matter how busy life became, they carved out time for themselves and each other. As an adult—and now the parent of two daughters—I understand this completely. Because investing in myself isn’t indulgent, it’s what allows me to sustain the energy, patience, and perspective that other people—my family, my coworkers—depend on.
Today, my daughters are 12 and 7. I feel the same instinct many parents do: protect them, intervene, and smooth over every challenge before it touches them. But I also remember what it felt like to be 10 years old and trusted with real responsibility, and discovering I was so much more capable than I realized at the time. Babysitting didn’t just teach me how to work. It taught me how to lead, build trust, and take on responsibility before I felt fully ready. And I still carry all those lessons not just in my role as a CEO, but in my personal life as a mother.Â
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