Dreaming of ditching your corporate digs to start the business you’ve always wanted? Meet 3 entrepreneurs who did it.

By Geoff Williams

In many ways, it’s a glorious life. You’re compensated enough that you can afford the two-story house with the white picket fence, or maybe one of those McMansions with a four-car garage. In any case, you live in a nice neighborhood, your kids go to a good school, and you’re working for a respected company. Your parents brag about you to their friends. You could be doing worse.

Yet for some of you, there’s that nagging feeling that things could be better, too. You travel too much. You’re working impossibly long hours and meeting impossibly short deadlines, and you know that if someday things get rough for your company, they will persevere, even if they have to cut costs and sacrifice—even if they have to sacrifice, well, you.

Or maybe the problem is simply this: You want to be in charge. Your parents, spouse and kids may be proud of you, but your expectations of yourself are higher. You envisioned a life of something more than being, say, one of six vice presidents in the department of corporate business development.

There are a lot of reasons executives leave a business to start one of their own, from career burnout, to wanting to own a company and run it better, to having the desire to make a difference in the world. You can sort it out with your therapist later. What matters right now is that if you’ve been dreaming of starting your own business, you hop out of bed and get started. In hopes of providing a wake-up call, we caught up with three entrepreneurs who used to be executives, living the glorious life, but who still felt something was lacking.

Happy Household
Don Hakes, 41, likes having a roof over his family’s heads. It was the worry of not having one that gave him pause whenever he considered starting a business. Why should he take such a risk? After all, he was a senior business manager at Merrill Lynch, and what’s more, he enjoyed it. “One of the best things about the job was the mystique of being a managing director of a major, first-class Wall Street organization,” admits Hakes. “It was the pinnacle of business life.”

But with success comes responsibility, and in a weird way, with failure comes even more. “As the economy tightened in the early part of the decade, a lot of people were laid off,” says Hakes, “and as people lost their jobs, everyone’s responsibilities broadened. If you showed you could handle those responsibilities, they gave you more.”

For Hakes, that resulted in a lot of travel, which had its own rewards—he was often traveling first-class and staying at places like the Ritz Carlton. The downside, however, was that he was often away for four or five days at a time, away from his wife and four young children. After a while, he began to realize that while he was providing the home, the provider was nowhere to be seen. It had to stop.

So in November 2004, he made his intentions known to the top brass at Merrill Lynch, and in July 2005, he purchased and took over the operations of Jersey Partners LLC, which owns the East Rutherford Roofing Company, the Jersey Roofing company, Jersey Gutters and Jersey Metals.

Hakes didn’t consider building a startup—not for a second. “I’m not a gambler. If your personality is not [into] gambling, and you have kids, the best thing to do is find a financially stable business you can manage with-out kidding yourself,” advises Hakes, who even took on a partner, Galen Edie, 43, who had experience in construction, to ensure that he wasn’t getting in over his head.

What Hakes did, of course, was still a gamble since there’s no guarantee that a successful business will stay that way after you buy it. But he certainly lessened the odds of failure—his projections for 2006 are $7 million in revenue—and he’s still reaping the benefits of being his own boss.

He says that he had a lot of independence at Merrill Lynch, but it only went so far. “You’re given a box to play with at Merrill, but anything that goes outside the box requires committee approval first, so it’s a slow process. But running your own business and having absolute authority—and being able to make a quick decision and knowing you have to live with it, if it’s a good or poor decision—is very freeing. Every hour, you feel like you’re making a difference.”

And Hakes certainly is making a difference to his family. He sees his wife and children more than ever. “I used to be out the door in the mornings before they saw me, and when I got home, it was late. Now I’m home at dinner every night. The lifestyle is a big issue.”

Grape Expectations
Amy Hoffman had air-cabin fatigue. She had a glamorous, interesting job working for a computer trade publication, and be-cause she was traveling all the time, her life was never the same two days in a row. But after a while, the allure of traveling can get old, and worse, Hoffman realized that her life outside work was lacking. “I’d come home on Friday nights and spend the weekends doing laundry,” recalls Hoffman, 45. She and her husband, who she was seeing less and less, had recently purchased a beautiful home, in which Hoffman rarely was able to spend time. And suddenly, one Sunday in April, she realized she wanted out of her six-figure-income job.

“My husband and I had purchased some land with grapes, and we were fixing a trellis, and I had this revelation. I thought, ‘I’m having such a good time. I want a job where I’m outside.’” Amy told her spouse, and instead of laughing at her, he looked thoughtful and said, “You know what, why don’t we start growing grapes?”

It wasn’t as out there as it may sound. Amy and her husband, David, live in wine country—the Finger Lakes region of New York. If they had been a state over, say, in Ohio, or in the rural Amish portions of Pennsylvania, it might not have made sense, but they knew tourists were already in the area. If they grew grapes, the tourists would come.

Of course, it takes time to build a winery, or any business. Amy made her decision quickly—three weeks later, in April 2001, she quit her job—but she and David, 65, the owner of a tax accounting business, considered their new vocation carefully. In May 2002, they planted their first vineyards. In July, they began building their tasting room. In October 2002, Rooster Hill Vineyards had its first crush. In between, they learned everything they could about winemaking—partly by discussing their new venture with their competitors.

Not all rivals would be helpful, but neighboring winery owners were. “They were very helpful in coaching [us on] what kind of equipment to buy, for instance,” says Amy. “The one thing we constantly heard from them, in fact, was, ‘You better make good wine.’ They didn’t want a bad product coming out of the area—they wanted to elevate the reputation of the region.”

Arguably, they have. Rooster Hill Vineyards, which has two full-time staffers and about 15 part-timers, is projected to bring in more than half a million in revenue in 2006, and the boutique winery is producing some 3,800 cases a year.

And now Amy doesn’t have to travel the country—instead, she lets the country and the rest of the world come to her. “We’ve had people here from South Africa, from China. It’s amazing. Before Christmas, we had three people in one group from Israel, Poland and Russia, and they were friends. I’ve never seen anything like that, but then wine is kind of an international drink. People know what it is and understand it.”

People can also understand why Hoffman is relishing her new life. “Every day is different,” she says. “I hate routine. I despise it, and depending on my mood and what needs to be done, I might spend one day cleaning wine tanks and another talking to customers.” But best of all might be the wardrobe, says Amy, who never has to mull over her clothing options for that next meeting: “I throw on jeans and work boots. I love it.”

All Work, All Play
J.B. Schneider, 36, left his job because he hated what he was becoming: a man quietly carrying a burden that was slowly but surely making him a less happy, rather grumpy husband and father.

It was, as far as executive jobs go, a good one, working in marketing for OnStar. He was paid well, lived in an affluent neighborhood in Detroit, and even had a short commute. But as the company grew—it currently has 4 million subscribers—it naturally lost some of its entrepreneurial spirit, at least from Schneider’s point of view.

“I lost some of the autonomy, and the inability to get things done quickly became more and more frustrating,” says Schneider. “When things are so structured, you no longer have the kind of day-to-day excitement we had at the beginning.”

When Schneider’s wife or children asked him about his day, he never wanted to talk about it. To do that would be to relive the day, and once was bad enough. One day, Schneider’s wife, Michele, got to the bottom of things. When Schneider admitted he was sticking with the job so he could provide for the family, she said: “That’s not what’s important to me and the kids. What’s important to us is that you enjoy what you do. What’s important is that you set a good example and be a role model, and you can’t do that if you’re coming home miserable every day.”

Schneider took his wife’s words to heart. They sold their house and moved their family—two preschoolers and all—from Detroit to Boston, using the profits and their savings to put Schneider through graduate school at Babson College. The plan was to have a functioning business by the time he graduated. What that business would be, he had no clue.

Schneider ultimately decided to team up with a classmate, Antonio Turco-Rivas, to create a brand of furniture for the playroom market. After returning from his house one day, Turco-Rivas mentioned to Schneider that playrooms were often a mess and that there was no functional, attractive furniture for kids and grown-ups. Playrooms, at least to adults, generally become eyesores.

Schneider loved the idea of playroom furniture that also appeals to adults. It seemed like the perfect marriage between his work and his family. Not only was it something he could enjoy talking about to his family, but his kids could be the product testers. Schneider and Turco-Rivas named their brand P’kolino, inspired by the Italian word piccolino (“little one”). They hired the Rhode Island School of Design to design their furniture, and their business launched in January 2006 in a big way. It was featured on ABC’s Extreme Makeover: Home Edition and HGTV’s I Want That! Along the way, they won several business competitions, including one that gave them $20,000 worth of office space and another that forked over $10,000 to help fund the business. P’kolino has 2006 sales projections of $3 million.

Until then, Schneider is looking at his credit history and heaving deep sighs. “We have the benefit of a lot of financial credit to fall back on, which we’ve taken full advantage of, so paying the bills has really just been a matter of stomaching more and more debt,” says Schneider, who with his business partner has invested more than $60,000 from just their savings accounts. “I came into this with zero debt, [but now] I’ve completely reversed my financial position, with the goal of being in a better place five years from now."

In a way, the goal has already been achieved. Schneider has never been happier.

Geoff Williams is a writer in Loveland, Ohio.