Reinventing your career — whether by starting a new business venture, going back to school, or quitting the big city to run a ranch in Montana — is something you’ve probably fantasized about at some point. While these fantasies might seem like pipe dreams, shifting gears professionally is absolutely possible, says Jennifer Anderson Merchant ’01, senior associate director at the School’s Career Management Center. “Flexibility and adaptability are essential to identifying and seizing opportunities,” she says. “Curiosity and a willingness to dive into something are also really key.”
Merchant, whose own résumé details 15 years in film financing, distribution, and technology as well as time on Wall Street, says she counsels people to “think broadly” about their skill sets and “see that link between what you can do and what you enjoy doing.... It’s taking that moment to think, ‘This might not be as different as I thought it was.’” Read on to be inspired by six adventurous professionals who have each made a bold career change — and find out how they did it.
Ron Simons ’89
A Dream No Longer Deferred
When actor and producer Ron Simons ’89 was about to graduate from Columbia College with a double major in computer science and theater, he grappled with which passion to pursue. “The two things that would keep me awake at night were reading scripts and poring over code,” he explains.
Ultimately, though, the practical won out. Raised by a single mother who worked in Detroit’s automotive industry, Simons also stayed regularly with his grandparents, which enabled him to go to a private Jesuit school and earn a scholarship to Columbia. Grateful to his family and eager to prevail beyond their economic hardships, he decided, “I was going to be the breadwinner.” Acting, he adds, quoting poet Langston Hughes, “became my ‘dream deferred.’”
Simons worked as a software engineer at Hewlett-Packard, then took a job at Intellicorp. When that company urged him to get a PhD in computer science, he decided instead on business school. “Rather than go further into the technology,” he recalls, “I wanted to get closer to working with people and ideas.’”
After Columbia Business School, Simons took on high-level marketing roles at Microsoft. But when, at 38, he found himself facing a promotion, his 40th birthday loomed large. “I didn’t want to be on my deathbed with a bunch of ‘shoulda-coulda- wouldas,’” he says.
With Microsoft stock to keep him afloat and his family secure, he quit his job and began acting in regional theater. His break came when he was cast in a 1997 production of The Cider House Rules at the Seattle Repertory Theatre. Bigger roles followed, and Simons enrolled in the University of Washington’s MFA program in 1998.
Now a theater professional, Simons has appeared in TV shows like Law & Order and in such movies as 27 Dresses. In 2009 he founded SimonSays Entertainment, whose mission is to tell the stories of underrepresented communities. It has produced acclaimed films and plays, including the Broadway revival of Porgy and Bess starring Audra McDonald, for which Simons earned a Tony Award.
“I find stories about the subcultures I come from fascinating — I love reading stories about black people and gay people, and inner-city youth and what they’re going through,” he says. At the same time, he adds, “I may be fascinated by a story about Japanese cowboys in the Midwest. I have a hunger to learn about people.”
This connection with others has been a through-line in Simons’s career and an impetus for his civic engagement. He is involved, either as a volunteer or board member, with numerous organizations, including the Columbia Alumni Association, and has also launched a foundation that supports educational and arts institutions. “I want to give others opportunities to learn and develop their artistic selves.”
Hiromi Shimazu ’93
A Passion for Fashion
For years, Hiromi Shimazu ’93 felt divided between two personalities. “One was my business side and the other my creative side,” the Tokyo- and New York–based alumna recalls. During the week, she served as general manager for a multinational fashion house. But nights and weekends, she pursued her love of design. She took textile classes and private lessons with draping experts. She collaborated on a book about color merchandising. Though she wore her creations, she’d never confess to designing them. For one thing, she was promoting the family of brands for which she worked. Second, she says, she felt she had to keep her creative endeavors hidden from those who knew her in business to avoid any conflicts of interest. “I was pursuing my passion as a hobby,” she explains.
Then, on March 11, 2011, a massive earthquake rocked Japan’s coastline, causing the deadly tsunami that set off the Fukushima nuclear disaster. It marked a turning point for Shimazu. “I didn’t want to have any regrets ... that there’s something I really wanted to do but didn’t,” she says. Having created enough clothes to show buyers, she left her job to launch Princess Hiromi, a line of career wear geared for, she explains, “someone like myself who has a very multifaceted lifestyle — I have presentations, I work with clients, I do events. We want to have clothes that make women look powerful and chic.” Her aesthetic, which blends simple, sophisticated silhouettes with colorful flair and favors high-quality Italian textiles, grew out of a desire to dress women with more authority. In Japanese culture, she says, “women tend to look a little more submissive .... Executives would look like assistants, wearing a knit set. In New York, you wear jackets.”
Shimazu has two permanent shops in upscale shopping centers in Osaka and Tokyo, and Princess Hiromi will soon be permanently available at Matsuya Ginza, Japan’s equivalent of Saks Fifth Avenue. Shimazu has already received several awards, including the 2015 Japan Entrepreneur Award from the Swedish embassy.
As she builds her business, Shimazu often finds herself revisiting the business strategy courses and case studies covered in business school. “I’m doing everything from designing, shipping orders, and PR to collaborating with factories,” she says. She also counts many Columbia Business School alumni in Japan as loyal customers. Shimazu enjoys stitching her business and law degrees together and weaving in her love of fashion and design. “People are not one thing,” she says. “We are so many things. In my own education, nothing was wasted.”
Ron Getto ’86
Lucky Strike
Until 2008, Ron Getto ’86 enjoyed the career in investment banking he had envisioned when he went to Columbia Business School. For 14 years he served in a series of roles at Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, most recently as senior vice president for equity capital markets, and went on to build an asset management business at Cantor Fitzgerald. Then came 2008, and Cantor Fitzgerald dismantled this venture and let Getto go. He looked for jobs, but no one was hiring. “Who knew if the markets would ever come back? I realized I would run out of money eventually if I just sat paralyzed,” Getto recalls.
He began casting about for entrepreneurial opportunities. On the one hand, the notion of owning a business felt foreign. “I’d never operated a business and had never been the manager of a substantial number of people,” he says. At the same time, looking for a business to run drew on his education and experience. For instance, at Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, he oversaw hundreds of IPOs, so he “got a sense of valuation and what makes for a good business.” He thought back to business school and what he had learned about maximizing cash flow and planning.
After months of research, Getto unexpectedly hit on bowling. “You need very little working capital,” he explains. “You don’t have to deal with inventory, sizes, colors, seasonality.” He discovered that while league bowling was declining, “what was sneakily coming up was an increase in open-play bowlers. Bowling is the number one participatory sport in America, and no one was paying attention.... The bowling industry looked like it was at an inflection point.”
A broker told him about an old family-run bowling alley that was for sale: Starlite Lanes on historic Route 66 in Flagstaff, Arizona. Getto and his wife visited; within a weekend, they determined that the university town, with its mountains, pine trees, and plenty of healthy places to shop, would be a fine place to live. Two months later, Getto was the proud owner of a bowling alley.
Now, he says, his 16-lane alley is packed every night of the week. “The revenues and profitability have exceeded my expectations by far.” He employs 22 people, eight full time, and is proud that he is able to offer them healthcare and benefits. He turned the pro shop into a snack bar and grew revenues 16-fold.
Owning his business affords him the chance to serve as a visiting business lecturer at Northern Arizona University. Getto also co-founded a local investment-management firm, Four Peaks Wealth Management, and is considering developing another family-entertainment center. In his spare time, he’s recently taken up yoga. “It’s not about the last penny. It’s about having fun and enjoying what I do.”
Matthew Grogan ’89
His Own Slice of the Pie
After landing a post-college job with Lehman Brothers, Long Island native Matthew Grogan ’89 “fell in love with Wall Street.” He decided to attend Columbia Business School, and after graduation, as a newly minted banker living in New York, he found himself “always on the hunt for great pizza.” Since childhood, Grogan had a special connection to the Italian specialty: whenever a new pizzeria opened up in New York City, his father, an NYC native and fellow pizza fanatic, would take him to eat there. So when Grogan read a newspaper article about a new pizza parlor opening up under the Brooklyn Bridge in 1990, he had to check it out.
The restaurant boasted fresh, coal-fired pizza — a rarity then, when heavily processed ingredients were the norm. Meanwhile, the pies themselves “looked different from anything I’d ever seen,” Grogan recalls. “There were no slices. There were big, white circles of cheese. The bottom was mottled. I took one bite, and not only was I hooked, but it was a transformational event.”
That life-altering eatery was Grimaldi’s Pizzeria, a mom-and-pop parlor that became a New York landmark. Grogan became a frequent patron, driving from his apartment on the Upper East Side to eat at Grimaldi’s several times a week. The pizzeria became the backdrop against which Grogan’s life played out: he often hosted dinners there for clients and friends and grew close to the gregarious proprietors, Patsy and Carol Grimaldi.
In 1999, the Grimaldis sold their restaurant so that they could retire and travel. But in 2010, the couple told Grogan they wanted to come out of retirement and resurrect their pizza-making legacy — with Grogan’s help. His familiarity with the family business, passion for the product, and financial know-how — gleaned from 25 years as an investment banker — made him the perfect partner. The timing was also ideal. “The nuclear war came in finance [after the crash of 2008], and I said, ‘I think it’s time for me to do something different,’” Grogan recalls.
So Grogan left Wall Street and teamed up with the Grimaldis to open Juliana’s in Brooklyn in 2012. Grogan serves as an operating partner at the pizzeria, which last year was named the best pizza restaurant in the United States by TripAdvisor. “I loved what the Grimaldis created back in 1990,” says Grogan. “What a phenomenal opportunity to help them have a second chance. I love doing this.”
Amy Powers ’84
Hitting a High Note in Act Two
That Amy Powers ’84 wrote her college application essay as a limerick should’ve been a clue that she was destined for a songwriting career. But the JD-MBA graduate — who enrolled at Harvard Law School just days after her Columbia graduation — had no such inkling. At least, not at first. “I thought I was going to go into real estate finance,” says Powers, “but it wasn’t a fit.” Instead, after earning her law degree, she worked at international law firm White & Case.
But “as soon as I started working as an attorney, I realized, ‘This might not be my forever home,’” Powers says. She found herself engaging in a familiar habit: “My mind would wander, and I would start to make up little rhymes to popular songs,” she says. “In school I would write about my classes. The first song I wrote at White & Case was called ‘Para’; it was about a paralegal.”
Amid grueling, 80-hour work weeks at the firm, Powers — who played piano as a child and violin in high school — enrolled at the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop, a three-year course on how to write Broadway musicals. After two and a half years at White & Case, she quit to dedicate herself to her lyrical talents, supplementing her income initially with part-time legal work at Sony. “After I started the workshop, songwriting became an obsession right away,” Powers says.
Powers launched her songwriting career by contributing to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Tony Award–winning musical Sunset Boulevard. Countless credits have followed, including music in movies like Sweet Home Alabama and the Oscar-winning When We Were Kings, and songs in Disney’s Barbie movie franchise — one of which earned her an Emmy nomination. Recent projects include co-writing Doctor Zhivago: The Musical, which she is now adapting as an opera.
“Songwriting was such a calling,” Powers says. “If you’re doing something and you’re not passionate about it, you have to ask yourself why you’re doing it.”
Sharon Crockett ’87
An Eye for Change
Sharon Crockett ’87 comes from a long line of creative African American professionals. Her grandmother was a teacher and crafter of everything from hats to Japanese fans, while her father, a cardiopulmonary specialist, was also a jazz musician. Crockett herself studied piano, cello, and painting growing up. “My father always encouraged my siblings and me to pursue our passions,” she says, “but also to have a viable career.”
To that end, after earning her bachelor’s degree in economics from Johns Hopkins University and her MBA from Columbia Business School, Crockett embarked on a successful 20-year career in finance — while taking art and painting classes on the side.
By the mid-2000s, Crockett was living in the NYC area and working for Western Asset Management, a firm based in Pasadena, CA. She realized if she wanted to stay with the company long term she might have to relocate to California. At the same time, she met her future husband and had saved a comfortable nest egg. So, in 2007, after conferring with her financial advisor, “I thought it was a good time to step away,” she says. She left finance to study interior design at Parsons School of Design. “It was very, very hard,” she says of leaving Wall Street, “but I was listening to my gut.”
Shortly after earning her interior design degree, Crockett joined a historic interiors restoration project at Manitoga/The Russel Wright Design Center, a museum in Garrison, NY. This led to jobs at interior design and architecture firms and, in July 2014, to founding interior design firm haus. by bjc. with a former Parsons classmate. Based in Harlem, the company focuses on high-end apartment, townhouse, and office design. Applying her financial skills to her creative passion, Crockett now embodies her father’s sage advice. “I value the control that I have over the direction of our business and the decisions that we make,” she says.
The firm has already completed residential redesigns in Harlem and Hamilton Heights, as well as a cottage renovation in the Berkshires, and has another project lined up in Greece. “It takes tenacity, patience, and guts to shift gears and make a change,” Crockett says, “but it’s worth it.”
Read more stories of career changers.
Illustrations by Kiki Ljung.