Successful entrepreneurs explain how they turned their favorite hobbies into a good living.

by Barbara Benham
June 2006

Warren Brown may be the patron saint of hobbyists-turned-entrepreneurs. The Ivy League-educated former government attorney-he used to investigate Medicare cases for possible fraud-started baking cakes for pleasure back in the late 1990s.

Brown had enjoyed cooking growing up and during college, but he wasn’t bitten by the baking bug until he was almost 30. His first attempt, an ambitious vanilla cake with blueberry filling, was less than scrumptious. His second, a yellow butter cake with lemon curd filling, wowed guests at a friend’s dinner party. “I can still see the look in their eyes,” he told the Washington Post in 2001. “It hooked me.”

Inspired by their response, he started baking with abandon, but still just for the fun of it: cakes, always cakes, and then cookies and pastries. Then one day, a friend commissioned a cake and offered to pay for it. The offer turned out to be the active ingredient that transformed Warren Brown’s cake baking from a hobby into a business, albeit a fledgling one.

In the beginning, Brown’s cake business was part-time. He would bake after work, often long into the night; first in his apartment in Washington, D.C., then in rented kitchen space. He wouldn’t quit his day job, with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, for several years. He opened his first bakery, CakeLove, in 2002.

A full-blown business, once a hobby, was born. No one keeps reliable statistics, but it’s safe to say that thousands of hobbyists start their own businesses every year. From the knitting maven who opens up a yarn shop to the artful amateur photographer who launches a portrait studio, from the innovative gardener who starts a landscaping business to the jeweler who begins selling her work online, hobbyists are taking the commercial plunge in droves.

In many respects, it’s a great fit: A labor of love, done for fun and recreation, expands until it makes sense to build a business around the hobby. The outcome can be spectacular. But for every Mrs. Fields and Martha Stewart, Rick Steves and Steve Jobs, there are no doubt hundreds, even thousands, who tried and threw in the towel-and even more who never even considered turning their hobby into a business.

But getting started is part of the thrill. Gladys Edmunds, author of There’s No Business Like Your Own Business: Six Practical Steps for Entrepreneurial Success, observes that while hobbies are second nature to many people, turning them into an enterprise is not. “We start hobbies because that is what we do,” notes Edmunds, who also writes the weekly “Entrepreneurial Tightrope” column for USAToday. “A life is not well-rounded if it does not have a leisure activity. Whatever you do for your leisure activity, you do because that’s what you consider it to be. You don’t consider it a stepping stone to an enterprise. You’re just having a good time.”

A common thread among those who make the leap is encouragement by friends and family, followed by a catalytic offer to compensate. Such was the trajectory of Robert Rex, managing partner of Deerfield Ranch, a boutique winery in Sonoma Valley, Calif. He started making wine as a hobby during his undergraduate years at Berkeley back in the early 1970s. “I was already a wine geek,” Rex explains. When his then girlfriend, now wife, P.J., went to select a good bottle of wine as a gift for Rex, the storeowner suggested she buy him a winemaking kit instead.

“That got me started,” recalls Rex. While the kit didn’t make good wine the first go-round, he was hooked. The next year, using grapes from Lodi, Calif., Rex made a barrel of zinfandel that won Best Wine at the California State Fair. At the time, Rex was managing a cigar shop, which he eventually purchased and ran for a stretch.

Winemaking remained a relatively private avocation until his friends started discovering what he was doing. “They wanted some of it, so I started giving it away, then I started charging for it,” Rex relays. “That makes you a bootlegger, not a hobbyist.”

In 1980, he sold off his tobacco business, thinking he’d start winemaking in Berkeley, but the Berkeley Town Council wouldn’t grant a permit. He sat around frustrated until people suggested that he and his wife move to the country. “We hit the road looking for land,” Rex recalls. In 1982, they purchased Deerfield Ranch. Built in the 1940s and once used as a retreat, the horse farm became a winery under Rex’s leadership. He’s been running it, along with his wife and several partners, ever since. They started at 500 cases a year and now produce about 7,000, with ambitions to expand to 45,000 cases a year.

Once hobbyists go into business, they face the same challenges that all entrepreneurs do, with a steep learning curve for tax and accounting rules and, if the business takes off, management decisions. “It’s almost like hunting or farming,” notes Edmunds. “You learn it by doing it. I don’t care how you got your business started.” A recurring theme among the newly initiated, as well as a few veterans, is burnout. People who start a business from a hobby can be particularly susceptible, given they started out doing something they love.

Warren Brown, the baker, went to the emergency room to be treated for exhaustion after he started out in 2000. This was before he quit his government job, so he was working incredibly long hours, many of them on his feet. Today, his business is bigger and, even though he sits down more as his business grows, he’s busier than ever. He opened a café in 2003 across the street from his bakery, as well as a second bakery just outside D.C. in Silver Spring, Md., last fall. On top of that, he’s writing a book, CakeLove, under contract from Wiley & Sons, and doing a weekly TV show, Sugar Rush, on the Food Network.

Brown credits what he calls his “amazing” team-he employs more than 50 people at any given time-for helping him avoid a repeat of the exhaustion episode, as well as listening much more closely to his body. He says he doesn’t have great stretches of leisure time right now and doesn’t mind that, but he works out and reads biographies to unwind.

Not every hobbyist-turned-entrepreneur is susceptible to burnout or vacation avoidance. Paul Dry, founder and president of Paul Dry Books, spoke by phone for this article while vacationing in New Mexico. That’s not to say that Dry, a former stock options trader, doesn’t work hard while he follows his bliss, running the small Philadelphia-based publishing company he started in 2000.

A self-described slow reader, Dry got off to a trudging start with the written word. But as he got older, his appreciation for books began to blossom. Early favorites include Shakespeare and Wordsworth, and he joined book groups back in the 1980s, before the activity became trendy. Since reading is a less tangible hobby than many, Dry’s venture did not begin at the suggestion of others: It came from within. Before he started his firm, he did his homework and attended the prestigious Stanford Publishing Seminar in 1998.
Since launching the press, he’s published six to eight books a year, a mix of new titles and reprints. Some reprints have been in the public domain, some have not. Dry has discovered that it’s difficult to sell books and get attention for a book among its likely readers. “It’s like the oil business,” he opines. “You hope to hit a gusher.” Still, he loves what he does.

Columnist Edmunds says she hears stories and meets hobbyists who’ve started businesses all the time. At a relative’s funeral, she saw a man release white carrier pigeons. Intrigued, she spoke to him and found out he’d been raising the carrier pigeons as a hobby when someone asked if he’d release them for a fee at a friend’s wedding. Voilà! A business is born. Edmunds also recently encountered a woman who makes jewelry. Then someone suggested she sell it over the Internet. And another hobbyist started a business.

Once they’re off and running, what’s the only thing that separates successful hobbyists from other entrepreneurs? “They have to find a new hobby,” notes Edmunds.

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barbara benham is a freelance writer based in Washington, D.C. Email Barbara at editor@executivetravelmag.com.