By MARK HENRICKS

Ned Berkowitz leaned his head against the glass and stared out the window of the airplane carrying him away from home on one of the countless business trips he had taken in 13 years in pharmaceutical sales. He was earning $150,000 a year, plus stock options and the perks of being a regional sales manager for a multinational corporation. He was a high-level member of several hotel and airline frequent-customer programs, with the pampering that implied.

He was also away from his Slingerlands, N.Y., home and family, including two children, an average of two nights and three or four days a week. At home he spent much of his time catching up on messages and paperwork. "At some point you have to measure that against the six-figure salary, the stock options and the perks and answer the burning question: What the hell am I doing this for?" Mr. Berkowitz says.

The answer he eventually came up with was, in his words, "You can take the buck and a half a year and stuff it." He read a magazine article about the document-shredding business and, six weeks later, handed in his resignation and mortgaged his home to purchase a franchise for a Canadian document-shredding company, Proshred International. That was in April 2003. Now, Mr. Berkowitz said his travel time has shrunk to zero. "I don't do any overnights," he says. "I don't go anywhere."

Home Sweet Home

A sizable number of professionals exploring entrepreneurship in search of a better lifestyle are road-warrior refugees like Mr. Berkowitz, says Bonnie Ross, a business coach in Snyder, N.Y., who counsels people looking at life-changing options. While some travel-worn clients eventually decide to seek a new job requiring less travel, most wind up as entrepreneurs who have chosen their new ventures in part because of the low travel requirements.

These entrepreneurs typically are driven by more than a desire to stay home, however, says Henrietta Harrison, an executive coach in Westport, Conn. Their travel burnout "may be the straw that breaks the camel's back, or the one that seems the most obvious," says Ms. Harrison. "But most of the folks I've worked with have had a variety of reasons for deciding they wanted to do their own thing." Boredom, desire for a climate change, and frustration with bureaucracy also figure in many such decisions, she says.

The travel straw can definitely be a breaking point for people like Jennifer Aston. Ms. Aston, of Florence, Ala., was a government employee whose job as a trainer periodically required her to be on the road five days and nights a week for long periods. "To leave your family every Sunday afternoon in the driveway crying -- it gets pretty tough," says Ms. Aston. "That went on for five weeks. Then I would have a few weeks' break and crank up again."

For Ms. Aston, the end came in 1996 when her husband phoned her Knoxville, Tenn., hotel room at 10 p.m. to describe a painful earache tormenting one of her two daughters. "She was lying in her bed screaming," Ms. Aston recalls. "I could hear her over the phone." She began calculating that if she left immediately and drove all night, she could make it home and then back to Knoxville in time for her 8 a.m. session the next morning. "It was insane," Ms. Aston says.

Soon she left her job to become, first, a stay-at-home mom, then an independent party-supplies saleswoman and, finally, a virtual assistant on contract to a cosmetics-company president. Her earnings are less than her former $45,000 annual salary as a trainer, but she travels only a few days every few months and is otherwise home to handle earaches, school dropoffs and other duties in person. "Getting off the road was the best thing that could have happened to my family," she says.

Getting Directions

You may not have to reach a break point to yearn to desert the road-warrior army. Ms. Aston says she was spurred in part by calculating the financial costs of her business travel, including shopping sprees she used to relieve on-the-road tedium. She also suggests people consider starting a low-travel venture while still employed and pursue it part-time for a while to ease into the new lifestyle and get the business off the ground. "You can do it in one hour a day if you focus," says Ms. Aston. "I call it a power hour."

It's not always easy or quick to find an exit from a career on the road, says Ms. Ross. Some of her clients spend a full year picking a direction, creating a business plan and starting to put it into action. Much of that time is spent plumbing their desires to determine what they really want to do. "They already know what they want to get away from," she says. "So we focus on what they want to change to and how to get there."

And many weary road warriors seeking asylum in self-employment find that they still haven't completely escaped travel. "You physically have to be there at certain times," says Maura Schreier-Fleming, a self-employed Dallas sales consultant who occasionally travels to meet clients and give speeches. However, she notes, her travels today are much different from when she crisscrossed West Texas selling lubricants for an oil company.

Before Ms. Schreier-Fleming quit her job to go solo in 1998, a day of flying and driving often ended with her working on a balky piece of machinery outdoors on a wintry Panhandle prairie. After-work comforts consisted of a motel and meal in a small-town café. Now she tends to visit balmy tourist spots to deliver talks. "I just got back from a fabulous conference in Las Vegas," she says. "The meals were wonderful, I had a blast and got paid."

Other potential drawbacks to the travel refugee lifestyle include lower earnings, especially at first. Mr. Berkowitz's shredding venture has yet to pay him a salary, so his family depends on his wife's pay. He also swapped a seat in first class for the cab of a shredder van. "I went from being the most shiny-shoed, designer-suited, white-collar guy on the planet to a guy in a pair of Dickies driving a truck," he says.

But recently he hired a driver and his early investment in sweat equity has turned the venture "cash-flow positive." He hopes for profits soon, and meanwhile he's nourished by the glow of living the travel-free entrepreneurial existence he previously had seen only described in on-board business periodicals. "I can't believe I'm the guy I read about all these years," he says, before excusing himself to pick up his son from school. "I always wanted to be that guy, and now I am."

-- Mr. Henricks, an Austin, Texas, journalist, is the author of "Not Just a Living: The Complete Guide to Creating a Business That Gives You a Life" (Perseus Books, 2002).

This article appeared in WSJ.com Startup Journal