Way Out #14: Leaving a $200K Salary to Build an Indoor Dog Park with Devon Brown
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I Did the Math on How Many Years Until Retirement… and Said F*** That.
Devon Brown traded a six-figure corporate career for a dog park, an SBA loan, and a life she actually wants to live. This is her story.
The Life Everyone Said She Should Want
On paper, Devon Brown had made it.
She was earning close to $200,000 a year. She had been promoted three times in less than a decade. She had her own team, her own reputation, and a role at Grainger, one of the largest industrial distribution companies in North America. that most people would have killed for. She lived in the north suburbs of Chicago with her husband Matt and their two dogs. She had built, by every conventional measure, exactly the kind of life you’re supposed to want.
And she was miserable.
Not in the dramatic, crying-in-the-car, screaming-into-a-pillow way. More in the quiet, creeping, hollow kind of way, the kind that’s almost harder to recognize because it hides inside a life that looks completely fine from the outside. Devon wasn’t unhappy at home. She wasn’t unhappy in her marriage. She was unhappy the moment she walked through the doors of the building she’d been walking into every day for years, and the moment she sat down at a desk she didn’t want to sit at anymore.
“Every day was about the job. I was stressed. I was getting pinched nerves that lasted for months. I was underweight. I was drinking heavily. I didn’t realize I was in this fucking nasty cycle.”
But cycles are hard to see from inside them. And Devon had been inside this one for a long time.
A Girl Between Worlds
Devon grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, the youngest of three kids and the only girl. She got the “princess” brand early on and wore it without complaint. She had what she describes as an idyllic childhood: fireflies in the summer, roller-blading in safe neighborhoods, a dad who wore a suit and worked at a big company, a mom who was involved in the Junior League and held the family together.
Then, in fourth grade, everything changed.
Devon’s father’s job moved the family to Paris. Devon took the Metro to school every morning, and every day as the train crossed the Seine, she’d catch a glimpse of the Eiffel Tower through the window. Just eight seconds of it, every single morning. And every morning she’d think: “Oh my God. I live here. This is fucking awesome.”
It didn't last. Devon's father lost his job, and the family landed in a small mountain town in Colorado. It is the kind of place that's beautiful and suffocating in equal measure. Devon's mother could see where things were heading for her older boys. She'd seen enough. So she packed up herself and her youngest, left her husband and her sons in Colorado, and moved back to Paris. Just the two of them.
She had to navigate a bilingual school filled with incredibly wealthy peers, often feeling inadequate as a "petite curvy blonde American" trying to fit into a willowy, chic French mold. At home, she was also navigating a strained relationship with her mother, whom she describes as "not the most emotionally mature." To survive the tension, Devon claimed her bedroom as her ultimate sanctuary—the only place in their apartment where she could truly escape. Despite these challenges, she boldly embraced the adventure. By her own admission, she became a bit of a "wild child," making the most of the city, testing her boundaries, and cultivating a fearless spirit that simply refused to back down from a challenge.
When Devon returned to the United States for college, she pursued a degree in chemistry. But on graduation day, she found herself without a job lined up. Since she didn’t know where she was going to end up working, she didn’t want to tie herself down to a local apartment lease, so she chose to live out of her '07 Honda CRV for three weeks. Treating a local Harris Teeter supermarket as her personal office, she spent her days relentlessly applying for jobs, completely confident that she would land on her feet. Her undeniable grit paid off when she received a life-changing phone call while sitting in that very grocery store parking lot: a job offer from Epic Systems in Madison, Wisconsin, one of the most respected electronic health records companies in the world. With that, she began a chapter of her life that would define the next decade.
She soon fell in love with a man named Matt, who worked in sales and possessed the kind of easy, entrepreneurial confidence that Devon was drawn to. When his company moved him to Chicago just four months after they met, Devon spent a grueling year driving down to see him every single weekend. Finally, she decided it was time to go all in. But she didn't just blindly quit her job. Relying on her innate hustle, she boldly cold-emailed several C-suite executive staffing firms in Chicago. Even though she was a junior employee, they loved her "hutzpah" so much that they connected her with a recruiter who helped her land a role at Grainger. With a solid offer in hand, she packed her bags and moved to Chicago to start her next chapter.
The Medication Shortage That Changed Everything
The life-changing breakthrough didn’t come in the form Devon expected.
It didn’t come as a vision, or a crisis, or a conversation with a mentor that shifted her worldview in an afternoon. It came as a bureaucratic inconvenience: a national shortage of Vyvanse, the ADHD medication she’d been taking for years. For several months, Devon simply couldn’t get her prescription filled. And so, unintentionally and all at once, she went unmedicated.
What happened next surprised her.
“I kind of woke up. I was like: I don’t know if I’m really engaged in this anymore. I want to relax more. I actually want to eat lunch. I’m not having tension headaches at five p.m. It was like Welcome to Pleasantville, where everything’s black and white, and then things start to become color.”
Devon had been medicated, laser-focused, and running at full speed for so long that she’d lost the ability to notice what was actually happening to her body. The pinched nerves. The weight she’d dropped without meaning to. The drinking that had crept up on her. The stress that had become so normalized she’d stopped realizing it was stress at all.
Unmedicated, she could feel all of it. And she didn’t like what she felt.
When the medication became available again, Devon made a decision that would alter the trajectory of her life: she didn’t go back on it.
What followed was eight months of what she calls her awakening. She started doing inner-child work, a form of therapeutic practice that involves reconnecting with the emotional experiences of your younger self. She started working with a life coach and asking herself questions she’d been too busy to ask before. Questions like: What do I actually want? Who am I when I’m not performing for a company? What does my life look like if I stop optimizing for the resume and start optimizing for the person?
The answers were unsettling. And clarifying. And, ultimately, undeniable.
The Bathroom Calculator
Every hero’s journey has a moment where the ordinary world becomes impossible to return to. For Devon Brown, it happened in a corporate bathroom.
She was sitting on the toilet in the office, phone in hand, and she did the math. How many years did she have left until retirement?
The answer came back: forty-something.
“In that moment, I was like, fuck that. Nope. What? Forty more years of this?”
She’d already had six or seven years under her belt in corporate. She was good at her job. She could see the ladder stretching up in front of her: the next promotion, the next team, the next milestone. And for the first time, she didn’t want to climb it. She didn’t want to walk into that building every day for the next four decades, no matter how high she eventually climbed.
“I just didn’t like how much clarity there was between me and the rest of my life,” she told me. “I could see it. And that’s not what I want.”
Protecting the House of Cards
The reasons to play it safe came from everywhere Devon looked.
Her mother had spent years impressing upon Devon the importance of financial independence. “Never be dependent on a man” was practically a mantra in their household. She was not on board with Devon’s plan to leave a six-figure job for an as-yet-unopened indoor dog park. Devon’s father had once invested a million dollars in a startup and lost it all. Entrepreneurship, in her family’s lexicon, was not safe. It was the thing that happened to other people, the thing you were glad you’d avoided.
And the doubt wasn’t only external. Devon struggled with the same fears every person struggles with when they’re standing at the edge of a chasm… The vast, uncertain distance between the life they’ve built and whether or not the life on the other side is truly better or even possible. Is this crazy? What if I fail? What if I’m wrong about myself?
“I really had to work on protecting my conviction because one conversation with my mom, and she just would bust the house of cards, and I'd be like, my God, what am I doing?”
But she had an ally. Her husband and partner, Matt, didn’t hesitate at all. When Devon told him on a morning walk with their dogs that she wasn’t happy at work, he didn’t offer reassurances or suggest she give it more time. He said: Quit. Just quit.
“He was like, quit tomorrow,” Devon told me, laughing. “And he was like, you can start Zoomies. He was more excited than I was. He was like, yeah, let’s f***ing go.”
On that Saturday morning walk, with their dogs weaving between their legs and the Chicago suburbs quiet around them, Devon and Matt shook hands on a pact. By September, she would quit.
The Four Hardest Months
The threshold between the old world and the new is never as clean as we imagine it will be. For Devon, the months between the handshake and the actual departure were, by her own account, some of the hardest of her life.
She had stock options that hadn’t vested yet. She had financial implications that she needed time to get comfortable with. She had already told her company she was planning to leave, creating an awkward limbo where the secret was out, but she wasn't ready to walk out the door. And all the while, she had to keep showing up, knowing that her heart had already left.
“Those four months were some of the hardest of my life," she told me. "I had basically made the decision. But I still had to be there.”
Her life coach, Tracy, kept her grounded. “If you’re constantly waiting for some sort of moment for it to be okay,” Tracy told her, “you’re never gonna do it.” Devon found herself quoting Zuckerberg in response to her own doubts: if he had known how hard it would be to build Facebook, he would never have built it. Sometimes you have to not know what you’re getting into.
She waited for the stock to vest. She paid off the credit card bills she could. And then, one month ahead of schedule, she walked out of Grainger for the last time.
She was free. She said she felt excited. It finally felt like jumping off a cliff. And she was, she tells me now, completely chomping at the bit.
What Freedom Actually Feels Like
The first thing Devon noticed was the money, or rather, the absence of it.
She had gone from earning close to $200,000 a year to earning, for all practical purposes, zero. Despite waiting for some stock to vest before she left, she and Matt hadn't aggressively saved or scrimped for her exit; they had simply decided to pull the ripcord and figure it out. But liquid assets have a way of depleting faster than you expect when a business is absorbing all of them, and a paycheck has stopped arriving. Devon found herself, for the first time in her adult life, financially dependent on her husband. And it was deeply, viscerally uncomfortable.
“My mom ingrained in me: never be dependent on a man. And here I am, one hundred percent financially dependent on my husband. There are things I used to buy for myself that now I feel like I have to ask him about. Money always came to me easily, and then I quit — and it was like it just dried up.”
She did the work. Therapy. Life coaching. Long, uncomfortable conversations with herself about what money meant to her, what security meant, and where the fear was actually coming from. She began to understand that the gap between how she felt about money and her actual financial situation was a story she was telling herself, and that, with effort, the story could be rewritten.
The second thing Devon noticed was her body.
Looking back, she realized her corporate life had trapped her in what she calls a "nasty cycle.” Between the relentless stress, the pinched nerves, and dropping weight, she had been drinking heavily just to cope. But when she left that life behind, the need to numb herself went with it. She quit alcohol completely.
In its place came a feeling so foreign that her body barely knew how to process it. Energy that didn’t come from a pill. “There are times where I feel so much excitement that I have to just… breathe,” she told me. “It gets all balled up in my chest, and it almost feels like anxiety, but I know it’s exuberance for life. I never used to feel that.”
Today, a year into building her business, she is unequivocally thriving. Anchored by her mindfulness practices, Devon has found the ultimate liberation: the ability to stop beating herself up and simply accept herself exactly as she is.
The Deep Work: What the Shaman Said
In the middle of all of this — the building, the struggling, the money work, the sobriety — Devon went on an Ayahuasca retreat.
She went in as a blank slate. She didn’t do any research beforehand, nor did she read about other people’s experiences.
One night at the retreat, Devon was struggling. Not enlightened-struggling, not productively-struggling, just struggling. Cycling in and out of peace and discomfort in ten-second intervals for seven hours. She found herself talking to the shaman, trying to explain what she was feeling.
“The shaman looked at me and said: ‘You have a commitment to suffering that I think you need to let go of. You don’t have to. It’s that simple. You can choose to be at peace. You can choose the path of least resistance. It doesn’t have to be hard.’”
Devon has thought about those words a lot since then. Not because they instantly fixed everything. They didn’t. But because they gave her permission. Permission to stop performing her struggle. Permission to stop treating difficulty as a virtue. Permission to wonder, for the first time, whether the hustle and the hardness and the drive that had defined her adult life were actually serving her, or whether they were just old armor she’d forgotten she was wearing.
She met women at that retreat (“crunchy,” she calls them, affectionately) who believed that every decision, even the ones that looked like mistakes, were perfection. That not following up with an investor and “ruining it” might actually have been the best thing that could have happened. Devon isn’t fully there yet. But she’s moving toward it.
“The most liberating thing,” she told me, “isn’t some big decision I made. It’s in the small decisions every day to be okay with who I am and what I do.”
Zoomies, Investors, and a Signed Lease
Devon Brown is now more than one year out of corporate America. She doesn’t have an open business yet. She has depleted most of her liquid savings. She is, by some measures, not yet where she wants to be.
And she is thriving.
Zoomies Chicago — Devon’s vision for the city’s premier dedicated indoor dog park — has been years in the making, but in the last twelve months it has become real in ways that still catch her off guard. She has secured investor funding. She has been approved for an SBA loan. She has signed a lease for a building and begun demolition.
“I’ve spent the past year working toward these milestones. And they’re finally happening. It’s breathing new life into me. I’m like — yes! Onto the next thing.”
She talks about Zoomies the way people talk about something they believe in so completely that they see absolutely no limits to its potential. Zoomies is Chicago’s premier indoor dog park, but that’s just the beginning. She wants it to become America’s indoor dog park. Maybe the world’s. She’s aware of how that sounds, and she doesn’t care.
When I ask what’s saving her life right now, she says: her spirituality. Her mindfulness practices. The work she’s done over the past four years has made her more accepting, more resilient, and more able to sit with uncertainty without being destroyed by it.
And then she catches herself and laughs.
“Okay, but on a more micro level: investors and an SBA loan. That’s pretty good too.”
What She Knows Now
I ask Devon what she’d tell herself if she could go back — back to the bathroom calculator, back to the morning walks, back to the four hardest months of her life.
She doesn’t hesitate.
“I wouldn’t tell myself anything about how hard it was going to be. I would just tell myself how good it could feel. I would have had so much more confidence if I’d known that a year from now — even though I still don’t have an open business — I’d be thriving.”
There is something Devon said early in our conversation that I keep coming back to. She said that the decision to leave didn’t start with ambition, or with a business plan, or even with a dream. It started with something simpler and more raw than any of those things.
It started with: I don’t want to be here anymore.
That’s not a grand declaration. It’s not a manifesto. It’s a person sitting in an office with fluorescent lights, doing math on a phone in a bathroom stall, and realizing that the life she was building wasn’t the life she wanted.
And choosing, one brave step at a time, to build a different one.
“I’m more excited about the unknown than I am the known. And that’s what got me here.”
Devon’s Advice for Wayfinders
Identify your core values.
Devon believes that sitting down to figure out exactly what is truly important to you is an exercise "everybody should do." For her, pinpointing that her highest values were freedom and authenticity helped clarify her ultimate vision for her life.Don't wait for the perfect moment to start.
Devon's life coach gave her the hard truth that if you constantly wait for the perfect time when it feels completely "okay" to take a leap, you will never actually do it. Instead of needing to know all the answers or anticipating every hardship, Devon advises that you just have to start by taking one step at a time.Make daily decisions that align with your joy.
It is easy to worry that you are just building a new life or business that will drain you as much as your old corporate job did. To prevent this, Devon leans on a piece of wisdom she received from her mentors: "As long as you wake up every day and make decisions that are in alignment with your joy, you will build a life that is in alignment with your joy.”
Follow Devon
📲 @zoomieschicago on all platforms.
This post is part of the 101 Ways Out series: stories of people who found the courage to exit the status quo and build a life of purpose, freedom, and joy.
