Taste-Testing a Second Career

Rex C. Curry for The New York TimesMelissa Owen, center, in her new coffeehouse in Plano, Tex., which opened with help from a career mentor.

GOD, as we know, works in mysterious ways. Back in the spring of 2011, Gerry Owen, an assistant pastor at a megachurch in Garland, Tex., was reading through the comment cards that worshipers drop in a box at the back of the church after Sunday services. He came across a card from a worshiper who also happened to be the owner of Generator Coffee, the coffee shop where Mr. Owen, who is 55, and his second wife, Melissa, had married just several months before.

Cake balls at Ms. Owen's shop on opening day.

“It said: ‘Pray for me. I need to sell my coffee shop,’ ” Mr. Owen recalled. When he told this story, he and Melissa were sitting in Cafe Brazil, a coffee shop in Plano, Tex., that is neither the coffee shop that needed prayer nor the one that he and Melissa were now planning to open. “And I read the comment card, and I said to Melissa, ‘Can we do this?’ ”

Meaning, could Gerry, who before becoming a pastor had spent his whole working life at Frito-Lay, and his wife, an operating room nurse, buy the coffee shop? Because they certainly wanted the place where they had said their vows to succeed.

The Owens thought about buying the name and rejuvenating the business, but the more they thought, the more they realized that they hadn’t a clue about how to run a coffee shop. So they hopped online and discovered a Web site, now called PivotPlanet, which since 2003 has been pairing people interested in switching careers with mentors who can teach them how to start.

On the Web site, they found Duncan Goodall, the owner of Koffee on Audubon, which since 1993 has anchored the Audubon Street arts district in New Haven, Conn. For about $1,000 each, the Owens could shadow Mr. Goodall around his shop for two days and get tutorials in most everything from selecting the right espresso machine to making money from leftover bagels. They signed up, bought plane tickets and in September 2011 traveled to New Haven for two full days in the School of Duncan.

The first thing that Mr. Goodall did was talk the Owens out of buying Generator, saying it was not the right investment for them. But by the end of their short apprenticeship in New Haven, the Owens found that they were still excited about being coffeehouse owners.

“We prayed on it,” Ms. Owen said. “Gerry has taught me so much about patience. Being in the ministry, he was like, ‘Hey, it’s on God’s time.’ ” They passed on Generator, which is now under new ownership, but kept scoping out possibilities.

And thanks to PivotPlanet, they now had two guiding lights, God and Duncan Goodall. “I can still hear him talking,” Mr. Owen interjected, referring to Mr. Goodall, not God. “His ideas still echo.”

Ms. Owen nodded, then added: “How would Duncan want that counter set up? His words ring true every day.”

BRIAN KURTH got the idea for what became PivotPlanet in 2001, when he was 34 and a freshly downsized telecom executive, trying to figure out what to do with his life. “I wanted to test my own waters, and I thought of being a doggy day-care owner,” Mr. Kurth said. So he shadowed a local doggy day-care owner for three days. It was a useful exercise: “I realized I didn’t want to pick up poop all day long,” Mr. Kurth said. And it gave him the idea “that there is value in test-driving your dream job before you do it.”

So, in 2003, he started VocationVacations, a clearinghouse matching people who wanted to change careers with practitioners of the career they had in mind. He said he was a pioneer in turning “mentorship into a consumer product,” although he was soon joined by outfits like Skillshare and MentorMob. Later, Mr. Kurth refined the idea to include Skype mentoring, which most clients now use before they book a trip — in effect, test-driving the mentor who will help them test-drive a career.

For a while, Mr. Kurth ran two Web sites: VocationVacations for the mentoring trips and the new PivotPlanet for Skype and telephone mentoring. In January, when he moved the company from Portland, Ore., to Austin, Tex., he brought both services under the PivotPlanet brand. He also started Pivot Enterprise, a business-to-business platform that companies can use to arrange in-house mentoring for employees who want to try out a new job in the same company.

Mr. Kurth would not provide precise revenue or use figures for his company, which is privately held, but he said that over the past decade he has helped “tens of thousands” of aspiring career-switchers. (That number includes those who have heard him give workshops as well as those who have bought his book, “Test-Drive Your Dream Job.”)

PivotPlanet lists mentors in about 200 fields, from acupuncturist to pet therapist to television host. Want to be a meteorologist? Paul Cousins of Portland, Me., will Skype you some advice for $84 an hour. Want to be a winemaker? The site lists four mentors. Interested in becoming a “tiny home builder”? Brad Kittel, in Luling, Tex., will show you how.