All you corner-office executives who dream about escaping the pressure of running a fast-growing business, picture this: After 20 years of meetings and marketing initiatives, of battles with suppliers and competitors, you cash in your chips and begin a new life in which you're free to pursue whatever strikes your fancy, no matter how whimsical. Summer in Nantucket? The yacht's waiting. A couple of young go-getters need financing for their Internet company? Toss 'em $20 million. The flaky guys who clean your yacht want to start a juice drink business? What the hell, here's $500,000. Got the urge to produce symphonic concerts? James Judd of the Florida Philharmonic's on the line.

Sound too fanciful to be real? Meet almost-billionaire Michael Egan. Egan steered Alamo Rent A Car from regional shop to one of the world's best known rental car brands, then unloaded the company last November to Wayne Huizenga's Republic Industries. Egan's take: Republic stock worth more than $600 million, and his freedom.

During his 17 years at Alamo, Egan was so far behind the scenes he was practically invisible; he avoided the press like the plague. Suddenly, the new Egan seems to be everywhere, plugging his new juice business on National Public Radio, waxing poetic in the Los Angeles Times about the Internet.

In an interview in his 29th-floor downtown Fort Lauderdale office, this supposedly unapproachable man turns out to be surprisingly chatty, speaking candidly about everything from his persistent weight problem to his favorite painter (Georgia O'Keeffe) and his business ventures. Perched on an antique sofa in pale green shirt, tan pants and mustard socks, Egan looks a lot like a guy who just had a weight lifted from his shoulders.

And how is life after Alamo? "Don't write this - it's wonderful!" he enthuses. If Egan seems almost giddy, a look at Alamo's final years explains why.

For most of Egan's tenure as CEO, Alamo enjoyed tremendous success. But in 1993, times turned tough as higher automobile costs and fierce competition clobbered earnings. In 1995, Alamo lost money for the first time. To save the company - and his considerable stake in it - Egan brought in tough-talking executives from KPMG Peat Marwick and American Express to run things. Many long-time employees resented the changes and felt abandoned by Egan, who they had always viewed as a benevolent boss. One particularly bitter anonymous memo that made the rounds at Alamo headquarters, titled "In Your Rear" (a parody of Alamo's internal newsletter "InGear"), carped that Egan chose "to put his resources behind ?New Blood' rather than those who helped him become the multimillionaire he is today" and concluded: "Our owner is out of touch and has been for some time."

Egan now acknowledges that he didn't handle the pressure of those years well: "I had some 8,000 people working for me, who had given me their trust, and in some ways I felt helpless, and I was angry. Everyone was looking at me like, ?Mike, you've always pulled a rabbit out of your hat.' But this time the hat was empty."

By then, Alamo had made Egan very rich - he took home a total of $6 million in 1994 and 1995 salary and bonuses, and the lion's share of $63 million in shareholder dividends and distributions between 1992 and 1994, for example. So he began thinking about cashing out and getting away from it all. "I saw a lot of my competitors get sold to car manufacturers five years before, and I wasn't in on that," he recalls. "The carmakers were willing to lose millions of dollars, and I was trying to compete. There was no way to win. All you could do was survive." In the summer of '96 when Huizenga approached him about selling Alamo, he says, "I felt myself ready to move on."

Now, at 57, Egan clearly is ready to have some fun with his money. One of Forbes' 400 wealthiest Americans, he made a splash this August when he sank $20 million into an Internet company called WebGenesis, an "online community" of chat rooms and message boards run by two 23-year-olds from New York.

Egan learned of WebGenesis while lunching with Cornell University President Hunter Rawlings. WebGenesis operates a jazzy Internet site called The Globe, where visitors can enter a variety of "rooms" and participate in conversations using code names and icons. It's a lot like online services such as America Online, but with more of a focus on creating "communities" of like-minded people. Egan asked Rawlings to arrange a meeting with the company's founders, Todd Krizelman and Stephan Paternot, who like Egan are Cornell alums. Egan was so impressed with WebGenesis that he ponied up the money for a minority stake. "I was looking for kind of a breakthrough business," Egan says, "and I have probably made the dumbest investment of my life, but it's something I really believe in."

Krizelman and Paternot say Egan's marketing expertise will help attract online partners, particularly in the travel industry, as well as expand their user base. "He has an amazing understanding of what makes it all tick," Paternot says.

Egan is fascinated by the Internet; when talking about the venture, his speech quickens and he moves to the edge of his seat. "Of all American inventions exported to the world, the cotton gin, the auto assembly line, movies, telephone, the chip, the greatest of these by a wide gargantuan margin is the Internet," Egan raves. He calls the investment "kind of a media play on the 'Net"; the Globe's style of online community is a fascinating "genre" (Egan uses "genre" a lot). His investment also bought him a chairman's title. "It's going to be a wonderful experience," but, Egan concedes,"a huge risk."

Before leaving Alamo, Egan took another big plunge, investing $500,000 in 1993 for a half-stake in a juice-drink business, Nantucket Nectars. When Egan met Tom First and Tom Scott they were cleaning his yacht in Nantucket; they were also running a business from a converted ice house, selling juices like peach nectar, blended from homegrown recipes. As Egan remembers it, the Toms "asked me to make a $20,000 investment and were looking for 20 other guys to do the same." Egan says he decided to take a controlling position instead. "I'm not a big buyer of companies. When I do buy them, I buy them with my own money, sit on them and nurture them." Nantucket Nectars projects about $60 million in sales this year, and its market share is growing faster than any firm's in its industry. Egan says he plans to spend more time with the company, coaching the youthful CEOs.

Egan's still prowling for new places to put his money, which is managed by Alamo's former mergers and acquisitions director through a company called Dancing Bear Investments. (The name comes from an Inuit carving Egan and his wife, Jacqueline, purchased at an Aspen art gallery, and the piece has become something of a family symbol; his second yacht, an 88-footer, also was named Dancing Bear). Just last month, Egan and a partner formed a venture to buy travel companies; so far, investments include InteleTravel International, a network of travel agents who work from home. Egan also holds a majority stake in tour operator Certified Vacations and travel software company New River Technologies.

But Egan also wants to spend time satisfying his ultra-refined tastes. He is an avid art collector, with an eclectic collection of mostly American art ranging from an excellent copy of a Rembrandt self-portrait to a rather disturbing oil of a violet-hued crying clown and two "minor" O'Keeffe paintings. Egan himself paints, a talent inherited from his mother, who died when he was a teenager.

A former executive board member of the Florida Philharmonic, he has spoken with music director James Judd about producing concerts. And he's also a gourmet cook - Egan graduated from Cornell's hotel administration program and directed food service departments at Yale University and the University of Massachusetts. His current fascination is what he calls "American country," the dishes of the Pennsylvania Dutch, for example.

Perhaps understandably, Egan's biggest challenge these days is his girth. He's tried crash diets and even the now-banned weight loss drug fen-phen. "It's the pursuit of a lifetime," he sighs. His goal: get down to 185 pounds. "For myself and my own ego, I want to get that done."