Kit Huffman did not look like a future agency founder when her side hustle began. During a college gap year in 2020, she worked full-time at a ski resort in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, while writing casual LinkedIn posts on the side for coaches and solo business owners.

According to a first-hand account published on Business Insider by Huffman, by summer, that writing income had grown just enough for her to move out of employee housing and into her 2005 Subaru Forester, turning a scrappy freelance side gig into her main source of income.

From Ski Resort Job To Writing Gig

Huffman spent that year living out of her car, working from borrowed Wi-Fi and figuring things out as she went. Then a UK agency emailed her with a ghostwriting project for the CEO of a large global bank. The assignment paid $1,000 a month for four LinkedIn posts, and she grabbed it even though, by her own telling, she was a dyslexic 22-year-old without a college degree who had to Google what "ghostwriter" meant.

That is where the side hustle got interesting. She was not just writing posts. She was, in her words, "cosplaying CEOs" by stepping into the voice of senior executives, learning how they thought, how they talked and how they saw their industries. That work gave her something close to a fast-forward button into the business world she had always wanted to join.

Embodying CEOs Became The Career

When Huffman returned to college, she kept ghostwriting between classes and took outside writing courses because she knew school alone would not build the career she wanted.

Five years after that first break, she graduated, sold the Subaru, moved to New York City and eventually launched Seneca, an agency that helps executives, founders and investors build their personal brands across social media, newsletters and articles.