After graduating from high school this past spring, Baxter Jennings decided to put his academic and athletic career on hold to pursue his passion of becoming an entrepreneur. With a burgeoning car detailing business, Surfside Mobile Detail, and a social media management side hustle, it’s safe to say that things are working out nicely for him so far.
“I just had this lingering entrepreneurial mindset that I just wanted to sort of take a few years to see what I can do with it,” Jennings said. “I’ve been doing business here and there, little side hustles. I loved the feeling I got from those and just wanted more.”
Jennings said he had been “a hustler” from a young age. Sure, he did the typical lemonade stand on the sidewalk, but Jennings said that he also got involved in reselling and flipping items.
A talented athlete, Jennings played soccer for his first three years of high school before making the varsity football team his senior year. Jennings has decided to forgo athletics for the time being and dedicate himself to the grind of becoming a businessman. He started his business shortly after graduating and began teaching himself about the stock market and how to invest.
He started his services by going around town and detailing cars of Marblehead residents at their houses. Jennings said he sometimes asks himself how he landed on the idea of car detailing, but said that there was a need, specifically for the at-home detailing that he provides, both in town and across the North Shore.
“I was trying to be creative with a niche that I was interested in, being meticulous and keeping things clean,” Jennings said. “The best way I thought about doing that was to just go to peoples houses and do it for them.”
Jennings didn’t stop there. In just a few months he has expanded his business down to the South Shore and even added a handful of clients who spend their Sundays playing football at Gillette Stadium.
Jennings currently works on the cars of five New England Patriots players, including special teamer and future Patriots Hall of Famer Matthew Slater and newly signed tight end Pharaoh Brown, who shouted Jennings out on his Instagram while he was working on his car.
“@surfside_mobile_detail came through got me right,” Brown wrote. “I love to see young entrepreneurs.”
On top of that, Jennings marketing agency involves managing companies’ social media and ads to generate more traffic on their websites. Jennings is used to having a jam-packed daily schedule as a student-athlete, and with taking a year off, he said he needed to find something that will fill that void.
Though he is enjoying the daily grind, he said that the path he chose isn’t for everybody. He said that it can get lonely with the majority of his friends away at school, but his drive and never-satisfied mentality keeps him going.
“I’m really just getting lost in the process and enjoying every moment of it,” Jennings said. “It is stressful, trying to add that pressure of being 18 and trying to live like you’re thirty. I don’t recommend it to anyone but it certainly fulfills everything that I’m trying to do.”
For now, Jennings is focused on the present. The young entrepreneur said that next summer he will evaluate his accomplishments and success over the past year to figure out what is next for his future. He added that he hopes to continue expanding the business and hire others to work with him.
“It’s hard, it’s lonely, but it teaches you so much about yourself that I don’t think I could have gotten from sports,” Jennings said. “I think I’m learning how I operate and what it takes to not even work hard, just work smarter.”