Greg Owens is the owner of McCarthy Painting, a company that serves commercial and residential clients all around the San Francisco Bay Area, providing stellar painting services beyond the first coat. McCarthy Painting has been around since 1969 and uses environmentally-friendly paint while working with their clients to improve their workplace and home. Greg has developed McCarthy Painting into a seven-figure business while juggling many hats to create a work-friendly environment.
McCarthy Painting has worked with some amazing companies as well such as Google, Autodesk, Abercrombie and Fitch, FICO, First Bank, SPIN, and many more.
Here’s a Glimpse of What You’ll Learn:
- Greg Owens talks about the development of his entrepreneurial spirit from an early age
- The difficulties and benefits of working with family
- How do you overcome a rude awakening?
- The importance of finding the right mentor and the benefits of consistent marketing in growing your business
- How do you ask someone more successful than you to be your mentor?
- What is the EO (Entrepreneurs Organization) and how their mentorship program works
- Greg explains his perspective on the role of volunteering within a group like entrepreneurship
- Greg’s advice on how to build inner strength and why it’s important to focus on things you can control
In this Episode:
An entrepreneurial spirit blossoms when a need arises and an opportunity to dive into your own business presents itself. The desire to change the process towards a more efficient method of handling clients and helping others move forward with the world around them can be truly encouraging and for Greg Owens, Owner of McCarthy Painting, the chance to become an entrepreneur presented itself through his uncle. He was able to grow his uncle’s business from a small company to a seven-figure company through streamlining the process from minding the books to marketing and estimation.
Resources Mentioned in this Episode:
- Greg Owens on LinkedIn
- McCarthy Painting
- Greg Owens’ email address: greg@mccarthypainting.com
- McCarthy Painting Email Address: info@mccarthypainting.com
- John Corcoran on LinkedIn
- Rise25 Media
- Jay Abraham
- Warren Rustand
- EO
- How to Win Friends & Influence Others by Dale Carnegie
- Shawn Achor and The Happiness Movement
Sponsor for this Episode:
This episode is brought to you by McCarthy Painting, where we serve commercial and residential clients all around the San Francisco Bay area.
We’ve been in business since 1969 and served companies such as Google, Autodesk, Abercrombie & Fitch, FICO, First Bank, SPIN, and many more.
If you have commercial facilities in the San Francisco Bay Area and need dependable painters, visit us on the web at www.mccarthypainting.com or email info@mccarthypainting.com, and you can check out our line of services and schedule a free estimate by clicking here.
Episode Transcript
Intro 0:03
Welcome to the Watching Paint Dry Podcast where we feature today’s top facility managers, property managers and property owners talking about the challenges and opportunities of managing hundreds of thousands of square feet of real estate and how to beautify and improve their properties. Now, let’s get started with the show.
Greg Owens 0:32
Hello there. This is Greg Owens here. I’m the owner of McCarthy Painting and the host of this podcast where I talk with building owners, property managers and facilities managers about issues facing their buildings, their facilities and what’s going on today. This is a late March the end of March right now and COVID-19 sort of locked down and So it’s an interesting time to be a facilities manager and building owner and what’s going on with properties and that kind of stuff. We’re here to learn more. Right now I have John Corcoran here who has done thousands of interviews with successful entrepreneurs, investors and CEOs. And we have flipped the script today, and he will be interviewing me on my podcast.
John Corcoran 1:26
All right, Greg, thanks so much for having me. And I’m excited to dive into your background as an entrepreneur and how you got into this at the ripe old age of 16. You started in the company and eventually took it over. And so we’re going to talk about your entrepreneurial journey, a really interesting one, but first before we get into that, this episode is brought to you by McCarthy Painting where McCarthy Painting serves commercial and residential clients all around the San Francisco Bay Area. They’ve been in business since 1969, and serve companies such as Google, Autodesk, Abercrombie and Fitch, FICO, First Bank, SPIN and many more. You have commercial facilities in the San Francisco Bay Area and need dependable painters visit them on the web at McCarthyPainting.com or email info@McCarthyPainting.com Alright, Greg. So Greg and I know each other through entrepreneur through entrepreneurs organization, eo here in the San Francisco Bay Area, and we connected through that, and also a client helping with this podcast as well. And, but you have a fascinating background. So we were talking beforehand at the ripe old age of 16 years old, you said school is not for me. And so you, you go from your home on the East Coast, and travel here to where we live, which is Marin County, California, just north of San Francisco to join up with your uncle who started McCarthy Painting in 1969. So first of all, what was it that you know, you didn’t like about school and decided, alright, I’m gonna go all the way across the country at the age of 16 because that seems crazy to me.
Greg Owens 2:59
Yeah. mean, thanks, John. I knew at a very early age that I wasn’t good at school and so but I was good at knocking on doors and finding work and doing construction work. And I knew I was on this path to being sort of in the construction industry in some way. Because it was like a path that I could do. I was good at hard labor and finding work and doing work and all kinds of projects. So in New York, even, gosh, my earliest memory, like, even at like 10-11-12 I would go around and do projects for people and rake leaves and pick up things and cleaner yards and paint things and fix things and anything, anything anybody needed, and they were willing to pay me for I would do it. I also learned early on that people didn’t wouldn’t, they would ask me how much I charge. And I wouldn’t tell them I said, Look, you know, why not do the work and then you pay me what you think it was worth. And a lot of times I found out people paid me A lot more than what I would have charged them. So maybe I want to charge $5 an hour, but they would have charged me like $40 to rake their yard. And it took me two hours, right because they were that’s a lot of hard work and so or they I know is a huge difference between doing a hard labor and like maybe walking your dogs where they gave me $100 for a weekend and walking their dogs which is super fun, but you know for raking the raking their lawn in the hot days of New York. They only pay me you know, $40 for that. So it was interesting. It was an interesting time sort of learning entrepreneurial skills and that kind of thing at a young age. I was also self aware that I didn’t do well. I always got cold easily used to get cold super easily and overheated really easily. And New York winters were challenging to be outside working. So shoveling snow and doing things like that really sucks. I hated it. And the same thing goes for summers where it’s like 90% humidity and 90 degrees out and it’s super hot and it’s really hard to do hard labor building a rock wall or something like that, that I did one summer was tough. And so I wasn’t really good at school. I I don’t think I’ve ever passed math class. I really had a hard time with a lot of classes and homework and, you know, nowadays they would call it probably labeled me ADHD or something like that. And definitely had some learning difficulties. And so it was a challenging time for me to be in school and it wasn’t my way I learned. When I dropped out of school on my 16th birthday in September, my mom turned around and called My uncle, Fred McCarthy because she was concerned she was worried about me and she really loves me. And so she called My uncle and asked him if he would be willing To take me in and
John Corcoran 6:02
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