Hector Gutierrez became an overnight celebrity on the University of Alabama campus after he was thrust into the spotlight earlier this year with an embarrassing email faux pas.
While applying to his school’s honor society, he mistakenly sent a letter of recommendation from a business school professor to a university mailing list with thousands of recipients.
“I started getting phone calls and text messages saying, ‘Why are you emailing me? Why are you emailing me?'” Gutierrez told me wealth. “My Outlook started exploding.”
While he initially found himself cringing at the mistake, the exposure proved to be a boon to his small business. It turned him into a social media star, earned him a meeting with the university president and landed him a feature in the school newspaper — all of which thrust his small business into the spotlight.
Gutierrez, 18, started Hec’s Pet Sitting about three years ago. Instead of working a traditional teen job at the local Publix supermarket, he wanted to start his own business. The company he started in high school in South Florida has grown into a registered LLC with 10 part-time employees and annual revenue of more than $10,000.
“I started by just posting flyers around my neighborhood that said local pet sitters,” he said. “I was lucky enough that someone trusted me and I did a good job taking care of their dogs, and then it started to expand, and then it came to a point where I needed to hire people.”
Now in his first year studying business management at Alabama, Gutierrez’s unexpected fame has opened new doors for him — including potential clients in his college town. Business revenue also helps offset the more than $50,000 in annual enrollment costs he faced as an out-of-state student. But balancing a growing company with a full course load is no small feat, and he’s not the only one trying.
As traditional routes to work become increasingly unreliable, more and more young workers are redefining what work looks like and starting work earlier than ever.
A 2023 survey of U.S. students aged 16 to 25 by Samsung and Morning Consult found that 50% of respondents had aspirations to start a business. Likewise, an Intuit survey found that nearly two-thirds of 18- to 35-year-olds have started or plan to start part-time.
Meanwhile, the job market doesn’t offer many guarantees. Three out of five college graduates are pessimistic about their career prospects, according to a Handshake survey.
Jacob Stone Humphries, a business lecturer at the University of Alabama who wrote a letter of recommendation for Gutierrez, said it boils down to a generation facing deep uncertainty.
