The Summer I Learned I Didn't Have to Work Fast Food

By Quinn Harrington Founder & Chief Brand Concierge, Harrington Design Company

I was fifteen the first time I had a job. McDonald's, two miles from home, reached every shift by ten-speed bicycle down Kings Road, rain or not. I wore the visor. I worked the register and whatever else needed working. I came home smelling like a fry vat no matter how many times I washed my hands, and I want to be clear that I'm not knocking it — it was honest work, and it taught me how to show up on time and take an order under pressure, which turns out to matter more than I knew.

But at sixteen, I traded the visor for a whistle. Tan, fit, and young enough to think that whistle made me an authority on something, I was teaching swim lessons at the YMCA in Tampa, Florida for minimum wage, which in the '90s was not a figure worth defending in a court of law — but it beat the fry vat, and it meant I got to be outside instead of under fluorescent lights. Group lessons, twenty-minute rotations, a clipboard nobody read. The Y had a product. I was the labor inside it.

One afternoon, a mom sitting poolside asked me what swim lessons cost. Innocent question. She wasn't shopping around — she was just making conversation while her kid dog-paddled toward the wall.

"Fifty dollars a session," I told her.

She said that sounded about right. And I heard myself say the next sentence before I'd finished thinking it: "I'll teach both your kids at your house, in your pool, for fifty dollars an hour."

I didn't have a business plan. I didn't have a name for what I'd just done. I had a calculator in my head that had apparently been running longer than I knew, and it had just spit out a number that made her nod and made me a business owner.

The Brief

Here's what nobody tells you about your first brief: you don't write it. Somebody hands it to you sideways, disguised as a question at a pool.

The mom wasn't asking me to start a company. She was asking me a price. But underneath that question was the real one, the one she probably couldn't have articulated herself: who is actually going to pay attention to my kid?

At the Y, the answer was: whoever's on shift, for twenty minutes, in a lane with four other kids. Not because anyone there was careless — because that was the product. A slot. A session. A block of chlorinated time you could buy in bulk.

I didn't reposition anything on purpose. I just told her the truth about what I actually had to sell, which wasn't lessons. It was me — undivided, for an hour, in her own backyard, for her actual two kids by name.

Market Research

I didn't call it market research. I called it the whole rest of that summer, watching.

What I noticed, without ever writing it down, was that the parents weren't buying swim instruction. They were buying relief. A block of time where somebody else had eyes on their kid, where the kid was safe and busy and — this part mattered more than I understood at sixteen — liked. Genuinely, not performatively liked.

So the lessons became something closer to an hour of attention with a purpose attached. We played games. We blew bubbles until we were both laughing too hard to keep our faces in the water. We dove for the ring, over and over, because the tenth time was always funnier than the first.

I had a toddler that summer who wouldn't let go of the wall. Weeks of that — small fists, white knuckles, a mother watching from a lounge chair trying not to hover. Every lesson, the same line from me: "Go ahead, jump in the pool. I've got you." And then one afternoon he did it — jumped, floated, chin up, arms out, nothing under him but water and the fact that I'd said I had him, and meant it. That's the whole lesson, right there. Not the swimming. The letting go.

I had a ten-year-old that same summer who could already dog-paddle across the shallow end, cocky about it, uninterested in anything that looked like instruction. Back float was the thing he refused to do, because floating meant trusting the water instead of fighting it, and fighting it was working fine for him so far. It took most of July. When he finally lay back and stopped thrashing, I remember thinking: this is the same lesson as the toddler, just further along.Different kid, same fear, same water, same letting go.

Somewhere inside all of that, backstroke happened. Freestyle happened. A kid who'd been white-knuckling the wall in June was doing a flip turn by August, and neither of us had noticed it turn into a lesson.

I loved these kids. That's not incidental to the story — it's the whole engine of it. You cannot fake your way into a parent's backyard for a summer. They can tell in about four minutes whether you're there for the fifty dollars or for their kid. I was there for the fifty dollars and their kid, and it turned out those two things were not in conflict. They were the same offer.

Brand Positioning

I never undercut the Y. I charged more. A lot more, relative to what I was making on their clock.

I positioned around everything the Y's model couldn't give a family: one instructor, one pool, one kid's actual fears and actual pace, at the actual house where that kid actually lived. The Y was selling a session. I was selling a summer. The Y had a rate card. I had a relationship with a name and a face and a favorite pool game, times however many families would have me.

Looking back, I'd been branding since I could drive a car. Albeit from humble beginnings — a beach towel, a whistle, a hand-lettered flyer that said Learn to Swim in block letters, because that's exactly what it was and I didn't yet know you were supposed to dress that up. I didn't know the words "positioning" or "value-based pricing" or "differentiation." I just knew that a kid who could dive for a ring without panicking was worth more to his mother than twenty minutes in a lane with three strangers, and

I was the only one in Tampa that summer charging like I understood that.

Nobody taught me to charge what I was worth. A backyard full of ten-year-olds taught me, one backstroke at a time.

Here's the part I didn't see coming. I'm decades out of that backyard, and I still can't sit at a pool without doing the count — who's floating, who's fighting it, whose eyes just went somewhere they shouldn't. I'm the default lifeguard at every pool I've ever been a guest at. Nobody assigns me the job. I just never stopped scanning the water.

I think that's the same instinct I get paid for now, just aimed at brands instead of children. A brand that's white-knuckling the wall doesn't announce it. It looks fine from the lounge chair. You have to be watching for the fight in it — the tension in a positioning statement that's trying too hard, the client who talks about their competitors more than their customers — long before anyone in the room says the word "confused" out loud. Then you tell them the same thing I told a ten-year-old in July: stop fighting it. Trust the water. I've got you until you don't need me to.

That's not a metaphor I built for this article. It's just the job. I've been doing it since I was sixteen — I only changed pools.

Ask Amy.

Quinn Harrington

Quinn Harrington is the founder and Chief Brand Concierge at Harrington Design Company, a brand strategy and video production agency based in Jacksonville, Florida. For 30 years she's helped companies — from Fortune 500 to founder-led — figure out what they actually stand for, who they're actually talking to, and whether those two things are even in the same conversation.