My first OFFICIAL job was working at a small family owned pizza joint. I was freshly 16 and went in to get dinner for my family one night. I asked the owner (only the owner and his wife worked there) if they were hiring and he told me to come in the next day for training if I was interested!

I came in and quickly was making pizzas, he even had me delivering them by myself (pretty sure that's against the law for anyone under 18 to do that though)... Anyways, working there gave me a lot of experience in small businesses, which I've primarily worked in since! I wasn't the best pizza maker to grace the world, but I had a lot of fun. I was still a student athlete in high school at the time, so it was unfortunately short lived. I learned a lot of valuable lessons about business at a young age, all while getting some free za for my friends and I!

I am going to tweak this topic a bit and talk about the time I sold candy in high school.

I was on the tennis team all four years of high school and a big form of fundraising for players was selling candy. Every year, the school would give us a box of candy bags that sold for $1 each. And once we would sell through our box, we would then pick up another box until we reached our goal. Reaching my goal was never an issue and every year I always ended with credit in my “tennis account.”

Anyway, it was during my junior year that I realized that if I kept the candy box, instead of trashing it once I sold through all my candy, I could go to the store and buy candy lower than $1 and sell it for a profit.

For instance, I would go to the store and buy 3 chocolates for a $1 (back then, 3 for $1 was a sale that would regularly run at my local market store). I would fill my box with better candy than what my school would offer, which would give me more customers and an even faster turnaround. Looking back, I probably shouldn’t have taken advantage of the situation but hey, I was a teen in high school and it was just chocolate. If anyone has read "Delivering Happiness" by Tony Hsieh, I find that what I did in high school is similar to what Tony did with pizzas in college -- we both saw an opportunity and decided to jump on it.  

That’s my “first job" in a nutshell. I don’t know how much money exactly I made, but it was enough that I didn’t have to ask my parents for prom money.

​The first job I had was delivering the newspaper for the Sacramento Bee.   The papers had to be delivered on time every morning, regardless of the weather conditions. My goal was to make sure every customer was satisfied and had no complaints. The best part of the job was getting paid at the end of the month. To get paid, I had to go to all the customers' homes, talk to them, and collect the monthly dues. The majority of the customers appreciated the hard work and tipped generously. It was a challenging yet rewarding job that taught me many valuable life lessons at a young age.​​