After working 20 years for a company rated one of the nation's best employers, Milton Habeck decided he wanted out.

Habeck designed and implemented software for S.C. Johnson & Son Inc., the giant Racine consumer products company better known as Johnson Wax. After his last promotion, he concluded he was spending too much time in the chief executive's office defending his ideas.

Tired of fighting for his work, Habeck quit Johnson Wax and started his own company, Unbeaten Path International.

"My creativity was being stifled. I was expected to be a defender of the policy book," said Habeck, who was regional controller and information services director for the Americas when he left Johnson Wax in 1991. "Eventually, an entrepreneurial style becomes a battle with the rule book."

Leaving a profitable company like Johnson Wax isn't easy. The good pay, benefits and comfortable perquisites are hard to give up. But suppressing an entrepreneurial spirit can be even more difficult.

For Habeck, starting a business provided an outlet for many of the ideas he had developed at his old job and allowed him to try new things -- like setting up a virtual office.

For instance, Habeck had been working on multiple projects and was constantly asking Johnson Wax to hire more people to work on them. Because Habeck was working on these projects and ignoring "ordinary Monday afternoon work," he said, his boss got annoyed and refused to supply him with more workers.

"Now, I can hire as many people as I want and put them to work on things I want to do," said Habeck, who financed his business with personal savings.

At the start, Unbeaten Path picked up where Habeck left off in his old job, consulting for the company and finishing work he had started.

"That first year, when I was a consultant, I got a raise three or four times what I would have as an employee at J-Wax," Habeck said.

Although Johnson Wax is no longer a client, others include Proctor & Gamble, Jacobsen/Textron, Nestle and 3M. Habeck wouldn't disclose revenue, but he said the company has doubled its sales in the last two years.

Unbeaten Path now has 14 employees, five of whom are based in the Racine office, which also happens to be Habeck's home. Most employees work in other parts of the United States.

Habeck set up a virtual office, in which employees work out of their homes at their own hours and dial in to the Racine office over their computers.

"It would be more expensive for me to buy a desk than to allow employees to dial in through the Internet," Habeck said.

The product that has brought Unbeaten Path the most clients is a Y2K remediation method called Resuscitator 2000. The Y2K problem is the inability of a computer to recognize the year 2000, reading it instead as 1900, and causing computer-controlled equipment to malfunction.

Resuscitator 2000 uses a process called encapsulation, which takes advantage of the fact that the calendar repeats itself every 28 years. The 2000 calendar, for instance, is the same as the 1971 calendar. Encapsulation "tricks" the computer into thinking it is 28 years earlier.

Encapsulation was patented by a Wayne, Pa., company, Turn of the Century Solutions. Habeck, thinking he had invented it, was unaware of the patent when he began development of Resuscitator 2000. After he discovered the patent, he called the president of Turn of the Century and admitted he nearly infringed on the patent.

"When I informed my attorney that I had called the company and told them about my product, he hit the ceiling so hard there is still a dent in it," Habeck said. "But my company could have gone up in flames. I didn't know what else to do."

Fortunately for Habeck, Turn of the Century licensed Unbeaten Path to use the patent for Resuscitator 2000. In return, Unbeaten Path pays Turn of the Century a licensing fee for each installation of Resuscitator 2000.

Unbeaten Path charges from $30,000 to more than $150,000 to install Resuscitator 2000, depending on the size of the computer system.

One client, a Delaware-based division of Proctor & Gamble Co., completed its Y2K work in November.

"We had been thinking about upgrading our software, but compared to just patching it for the time being, it was much more expensive," said Carol Pippin, spokeswoman for Proctor & Gamble's information technology department. "Unbeaten Path was the first and only company that contacted us, so we used them."

Habeck expects business to boom after December, when businesses realize they need to do something to make their systems compliant. Resuscitator 2000 will help those companies because it is so fast: It takes only two or three weeks to complete the work. But after February, Y2K work will die down.

"I don't expect to be working 28 years from now, so my Y2K involvement should be nearly over in about a year," he said.

Still, Habeck has plenty of ideas in the works that should be ready to go by then.

He would like to introduce clients to the way his office works using a virtual private network. A VPN allows employees to work at remote locations, but dial in to other offices through the Internet, exactly as Habeck and his employees do.

The company is developing a product called Pajamas Virtual Office it hopes to market to existing clients.

"We would really like to find clients that would like to take advantage of this kind of workplace, but we have to work on making it affordable for them," he said.