About a decade ago, Patrick Dori, now 47, was an omnipresent
force, simply floating in midair over a beach, watching a
contraption made of iron roll across the sand. And it was then that
Dori had his sudden epiphany: "My God, you could put
advertising on that machine!"
Then he woke up. Drenched with sweat, twitching and
hyperventilating, Dori realized the machine in his dream looked an
awful lot like something his father would have made--his father who
had passed away a year before and had been an ironworker. Dori
explains, "I know it sounds weird, but I just feel that it was
my father sending me a message."
It's been said by some that if you own a business,
you're living the American Dream. But some entrepreneurs have
businesses because of their dreams.
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Today, Dori owns Beach'N Billboard, a Hackensack, New
Jersey, company that imprints beach sand with advertisements. The
ads usually last until about noon--when beachgoers, wind and surf
have finally wiped them away--and they're made with machinery
that looks very much like what Dori saw in his dream.
Meanwhile, Beach'N Billboard--which Dori founded in 1997 and
which brings in annual revenue in the seven digits--has slathered
the New Jersey coastline with sand ads for products like Skippy
Peanut Butter. Dori also licenses his idea to entrepreneurs as far
away as Portugal, Puerto Rico and the Netherlands.
Corinne Gregory, founder and president of The PoliteChild in
Woodinville, Washington, also attributes the creation of her
business to a dream. At the time, she owned a consulting company
and was awake when she first came up with a plan for a new
business--she wanted to teach children good manners and make a
living while doing it.
But a dream showed her how to implement the business--what the
lesson plans would be and where the classes would take place--in
existing public and private schools and YMCAs. "I was in a
classroom, holding the instructor's manual and curriculum. I
was teaching these preschoolers how to mind their p's and
q's, and they were loving it," recalls the 41-year-old
entrepreneur, who swiftly put her dreamed-up ideas into action.
Gregory founded her business in 2000 and has sales projections of
more than $500,000 for 2005.
Getting those ideas down quickly is vital if you're going to
mine your dreams for dollars. Jeff Taylor was an ad agency owner
when he created his magnum opus in a dream at 4:30 a.m. over 10
years ago. He simply saw a flurry of graphics and a text-oriented
bulletin board--but Taylor understood the meaning behind the
visuals.
After writing his ideas down on the pad of paper next to his
bed, Taylor hurried out of his bedroom and into a coffee shop. For
the next five hours, he jotted down his plan for his Maynard,
Massachusetts-based job search engine, Monster Worldwide, better
known by its web address: Monster.com. "I have a little poster
in my closet [that] reads: 'Eighty percent of life is showing
up,' and [this is] a good example of that," says Taylor,
41. "It would have been pretty easy to have rolled over and
gone [back] to sleep, and that would have been a
multibillion-dollar opportunity I would have let go by."