An Inspired Move: Kit & Elizabeth Butz

Photo by Suzi Hass.

Like it does for many, the move to Door County meant sacrificing career for quality of life.

When Kit and Elizabeth Butz took a weekend trip to Door County for Fall Fest weekend in 2013, they didn’t think it would end with a life-changing decision.

But the Monday after Sister Bay’s season-ending party, the couple took their son Niko with them on a hike at Newport State Park. Elizabeth was walking out front when she suddenly stopped in the middle of the trail.

“Let’s do it,” she told Kit.

“Let’s do what?” he replied.

“Let’s move back.”

And just like that the family from Evanston, Illinois, a suburb bordering Chicago’s northern edge, was plotting their return to the peninsula, where both had worked previously in the restaurant industry. But coming home meant giving up a lot.

Kit was entrenched with a bustling catering company, while Elizabeth was just getting started in her career as a mental health counselor after earning her master’s degree from Northwestern University. But each was willing to trade the certainty of their city jobs for the quality of life they envisioned in Door County.

“What we kind of saw was, we were done with Chicago,” Elizabeth said. “Niko was in daycare, we were both working full-time jobs, and we were barely seeing each other. I finally realized, Kit knows so many people up here from working here for years, that if it came down to him bartending and me waitressing, we can make money and live up here. That sounded a lot more appealing than what we were doing in Chicago. We decided we’d rather be poor in Door County than doing what we were doing in Chicago. We’d rather know the parents of the kids we send our own kids to school with.”

Almost immediately Kit’s old connections with Al Johnson’s Swedish Restaurant paid off, as he came back to the Sister Bay mainstay to help create and market a line of specialty products to sell to specialty food stores and online.

“If you’re going to come up here you have to have an attitude that you’re going to make it on your own,” Butz said. “So the one positive thing is you end up with a lot more people with an entrepreneurial spirit. I’ve always had that attitude that I’m going to find a way to make something happen, and the Al’s opportunity sort of fell into place at the perfect time.”

Elizabeth, meanwhile, faced a greater challenge. There aren’t a lot of opportunities on the peninsula, particularly in northern Door County, for those with advanced degrees. Shortly after moving an opportunity opened up at the County of Door.

“It would have been perfect, and when I didn’t get it that was disappointing at first,” she said.

But she has since begun building her mental health counseling practice out of her home in Sister Bay while relishing her time with her kids (the couple had their second child, Lila, in December). “I think I’ll like this flexibility. I can make my own schedule and be a mom first and foremost.”

She also knows that her skills are sorely needed on a peninsula where many struggle with mental health problems. She doesn’t accept insurance at her practice, but offers a sliding payment scale to patients, as many business owners offer in Door County, a business practice that awakens difficult questions. “I look at my student loan bills each month and think, ‘Oooh, was that really worth it?’”

But their decision to return wasn’t about careers.

“It never really crossed my mind that we couldn’t do this,” Elizabeth said. “It was about how we were going to spend our time outside of work. We can hike anytime we want to, go to the beach, do so many things we couldn’t do in Chicago.”