When Kristin Morrison was in her mid-20s, she had no idea what she wanted to do with her life. It was the mid-1990s. She had no career and no direction. She was living in Tiburon, Calif., just over the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco, taking classes and trying to figure things out.
Then one day she went for a walk, and everything changed.
“When I talk about it, I get chills,” she says now.
On that hike she met a woman walking two dogs. The woman wore a T-shirt that advertised a dog-walking business. “It wasn’t a thing, like it is now,” she says. “I thought, ‘Can people get paid for this?’ ”
Morrison introduced herself. The two got to talking. The woman hired her. Three months later Morrison had started her own business, Woof! Pet Sitting Service. “I just realized this is what I should be doing,” she says. “I loved to walk, and I love animals. … To be able to combine the two was mind-blowing to me.”
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By 2013, when she sold the business for an amount she says she can’t reveal, it had more than 30 employees and had generated “millions of dollars in revenues,” Morrison says. By then she had been working just three days a week for more than a decade. Her income broke the $100,000 barrier in the early 2000s, and from there “it went up and up and up,” she says. According to the U.S. Census, the average person in Morrison’s Marin County, Calif., made $44,000 in 2001 and $72,000 today.
-Morrison now runs a business advising others on building pet-sitting and pet-walking businesses, and continues to make “a six-figure income,” she says. It is, aptly, called “The Six-Figure Pet Business Academy.”[2]
Many people dream of working for themselves. Many, of course, dream of making money doing something they love. Many also dream of working three days a week. Morrison managed to do all of that.
-How did she do it? The turning point, she says, came in the early 2000s. Even though the company had been up and running for years and was growing successfully, she was still working seven days a week and often 12 to 14 hours a day. It’s a tale familiar to many or most small-business owners. “I woke up one day and realized, ‘I have no life,’ ” she recalls.
She made a drastic change. She slashed her involvement in the day-to-day minutiae of the business so she could focus on the big picture, dealing with clients and key matters like hiring the right employees. “I thought, ‘My business is growing, I need to grow, too. I need to be the captain of the ship, on deck, instead of being in the belly of the ship,’ ”...