Life After Work

William Lillie
Gales Ferry, Conn.

Bill Lillie, 61, can't say much about his career. That's because he spent 37 years at defense contractor General Dynamics, the last four on the top-secret Missile Defense National Team - a Pentagon program modeled on the Manhattan Project that designs ballistic-missile defense systems. Lillie describes his role there as "high-pressure, high-stress, and my family was still in New England while I was in Washington, so I was a bachelor during the week."

When he decided it was time to go home, Lillie found a completely different kind of work - in his own backyard. A few years earlier his wife, Linda, a horticulturist, had launched a company called Sprigs & Twigs Landscapes (sprigsandtwigs.net). The business was starting to take off, but it needed a dose of technology. So Lillie jumped in, using CAD-CAM software to design gardens and PowerPoint presentations to wow prospective clients. Revenues have since almost tripled and so far are up 40% this year over last. This year Sprigs & Twigs added a tree service, and Lillie passed his landscape-planner exam. "What's great about this," he says, "is that it lets you regress to being 8 years old, playing in the dirt."

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