Pursue Your Passion

Everyone has a dream job. Isn't it time you land yours?

By Mary Beth Franklin, Senior Editor

From Kiplinger's Personal Finance magazine, December 2005

John Gowdy acquired the skills for his dream job in a most unusual place: on the beach, playing in the sand with his three children. By profession, Gowdy is a fire captain in Atlantic City. By choice, he is a world-renowned sand sculptor.

After building castles at the Jersey Shore, Gowdy graduated to national and international competitions, winning contests in Canada, Italy, France and all around the U.S. Ten years ago, he launched a side business, creating custom sculptures for casinos, convention centers, water parks and weddings -- with an occasional all-expenses-paid trip to a Club Med in the Caribbean. The tools of his trade include several tons of sand (and dump trucks to transport it), shovels, masonry equipment, cake-decorating utensils and palette knives.

Gowdy's most memorable job was a White House commission that sent him to the beaches of Normandy last year to create a sand-sculpture memo-rial with artists from other Allied nations for the 60th anniversary of D-Day. Gowdy built life-size replicas of soldiers in a landing craft, plus a solitary infantryman crawling on the beach, with his rifle pointed forward. As waves slowly eroded the soldier, some spectators wept -- the kind of crowd reaction that Gowdy treasures. "Mine is a mixture of fine art and performance art," he says.

Sometimes he has more work than he can handle, and sometimes none at all. "Financially, I'm not setting the world on fire," he admits. But the extra income -- which occasionally approaches his $80,000 annual firefighter's salary -- helped send his three children to college. Now eligible for retirement and a pension, Gowdy, 48, is considering turning his full attention to the sand-sculpture business, which he believes will become more lucrative once he can devote more time and energy to it.

While Gowdy stumbled into his dream job, Susan McCabe spent five years planning every step of her exit strategy from a corporate marketing position. "As good as the job was, I knew I wasn't following my true passion," says McCabe, 40, who lives in Carlsbad, Cal.

McCabe combined her love of cooking and her sales background to come up with a job that filled what she saw as an unmet need: preparing nutritious, home-cooked meals for people too busy to do it themselves -- "like I used to be," she says. She traveled extensively for her former job managing a national sales team, so she put her long hours on airplanes to good use, reading cookbooks and creating menus.

McCabe also focused on financing her business. Before she left her old job, she learned that if she rolled her retirement savings into an individual 401(k) plan, rather than an IRA, she could borrow up to $50,000 to bank-roll the new venture.

McCabe launched her Daily Dish personal-chef service in 2004. She charges $450 to $500 to shop and prepare 20 individual meals at a time in a client's kitchen -- enough to serve a family of four for a week, a couple for two weeks or an individual for about three weeks. She has already matched her six-figure corporate salary, and she's fully booked and looking to expand by hiring others who share her passion.

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