In episode 20 of the Discovering Mount Everest podcast, host Mundo Sanchez interviews Owen and Mary Mecham, a husband‑wife team active in real‑estate investing and impact‑focused entrepreneurship. Mary recounts her three‑year journey from single‑family fix‑and‑flips in Utah to building a buy‑and‑hold portfolio in Indiana, joining Gator lending and ultimately the Owners Club. Her five‑year "Mount Everest" is to acquire multifamily properties (50+ units) in landlord‑friendly states to create affordable housing for young adults aging out of foster care, including two foster‑care girls they currently care for. Owen, a Director of Engineering at Carvana with 24 years in automotive wholesale and AI, describes his shift from a technical career to applying AI tools for property sourcing and evaluation. His personal Mount Everest, born from surviving two brain surgeries, is to launch a mental‑health app called Warrior Thoughts aimed at kids, teens, and adults, targeting 100,000 subscribers to fund $100,000 per month for mental‑health support. Both emphasize the role of the Owners Club and Squad Up Summit in providing community, mentorship, and resources. They close with a concrete ask: help locate 50‑unit+ apartment deals in landlord‑friendly states and assist with deal analysis. The conversation blends personal motivation, strategic vision, and actionable requests for the audience.
Chapters
Tell me about your Mount Everest. What are you looking to achieve over the next 5 years?
My Mount Everest is getting into RV parks.
Setting the date.
Provide safe and affordable housing for 1,250 people transitioning out of rehab centers.
Welcome to the Discovering Mount Everest podcast. I am your host, Mundo Sanchez, 2-time CFO of the Year and Forbes featured entrepreneur. Every week I sit down with powerful voices from Owners Club to uncover their personal Mount Everest and the bold visions they're chasing over the next 5 years. This podcast gives you a rare front row seat into the mindset of elite entrepreneurs and investors— what drives them, what challenges they're navigating, and how you might play a role in their ascent. So whether you're scaling your own peak or seeking to support others in theirs, you're in the right place. Let's begin the climb.
All right, welcome back everyone. We are on episode 20 and we have two Owner Clubs members today. We have Owen And Mary, thank you for joining us on the show in beautiful California. We got the beach in the backdrop and love it. Happy to be here.
Excellent. Only thing, it would be better if it was a little bit warmer.
It is, it is a little cold today, so I'm glad I brought kind of a jacket. So, but excited to dive in to learn a little bit more about yourselves. So, uh, maybe just let us know, like, give us a little bit of background about how you got started in real estate, and then we can talk about where you are today.
Yep, so I started back in real estate about 3 years ago. We started learning about sub-to and seller finance. We started in single-family, picked up a couple fix-and-flips in Utah, and then decided we needed to change markets. So we built a team in Indiana. So we have several buy-and-holds there, which is a great— which is great for our rental portfolio. And that's basically how we got started. And then I joined Gator about a year ago. We were doing some lending, started with Gator, And eventually that led us to Owners Club.
Nice. So you're not in Sub 2, you're just in Gator, right?
Yep.
Okay, cool. Nice. Very cool. How about you?
So I've always been the either overpaid or underpaid assistant. Highly supportive of what Mary has done. So for a number of years, that has been my focus, is to be kind of in the background. Only recently, over the past maybe 6 to 8 months, I've really realized that the future of our life is moving forward together in this venture. So Squad Up Summit when we heard that there was an opportunity to join Owners Club. After spending a few days with the folks in this community, it was a no-brainer that this is the group that's going to help us, elevate us, push us, and get us to the next level. So I am currently— I have a W-2. I am a director of engineering at Carvana. I've been focused on the wholesale vehicle building marketplaces in that industry for the past 24 years, heavily focused with AI, both in how we work and embedding that into our products. So The beauty of doing this together with Marion Real Estate is getting the opportunity to take that skill set and translate it into how we can improve the efficiency of both finding properties, evaluating properties, and building just overall tools to, to make AI part of our daily workflow.
Nice.
So you haven't spent the whole time at Carvana, right? Because has it even been around that long?
So Carvana itself has been around for 10 years. I started at a company that was acquired by a larger auction company, and then that company was acquired by Carvana a little over 3 years ago. So an official tenure, it's 24 years, and but all through 3 different acquisitions, all the same, like kind of the initial skeleton of the company. Yeah, yep. So yeah, in that time we've sold 25 million vehicles, like $350 billion worth of cars. But it's great to help other people be successful on that front. We're looking to figure out how to make our own dreams come true through real estate.
Amazing, amazing. So I mean, it's a pretty big decision to join Owners Club, right? Like, what were some of the things that you were looking for in that decision to like take you to the next level? And then since you've had some time being in Owners Club, has some of that come true or are you still working on that?
Yeah, so we've known for a while like that single family wasn't going to be our like where we were going to stay. And so We're kind of a go big or go home kind of people. And so we were like, okay, we're, we're either going to push this to the next level and scale rather than do it as a hobby. And I think that's kind of how it was working. It was, you know, something for me to do, which I love and I learned a ton of stuff. But so we had been contemplating like pushing this to the next level, which is why I'm working now in multifamily trying to buy large apartment complexes. And so I knew that that was what I needed to do and I knew I needed to find the right people. You know, there's things I need to learn, and I really want to find the people that have been down the road a little further than I have. And so getting involved with the Sub 2 community, I volunteered and helped in the No One Left Behind Challenge, things like that. And so I just— it just brought the community closer. I was already close enough in Gator, but it just brought things closer, right? And so then, you know, Squad Up Summit, thankfully I got Owen there. He'd been coming with me for several months, but Squad Up was really the moment where I think Owen says oftentimes he had a revelation when he heard Tim Story talking, and that was the moment that was like, you know what, we are, we're at this part of our life, we've had a great life, but we know we, we see things in the future that are gonna just be so much better.
So was it the assignment or alignment to your assignment? Yeah, that was a good line. Yeah, he actually got it. I've heard a couple people tell me that the Tim Story part was what sold them. Yeah, and you weren't— you didn't go to the last year, the prior year, Squat Up, right?
Okay, this was, this was the first time, and for me it was the real, like, the deepest dive I had into the community with Pace. Leading up to all of this, to kind of some background, when you ask about, you know, this is a big decision, what kind of is the impetus for this? A year prior, actually about a year ago this week, I had two major brain surgeries. Oh wow. And the year prior to that was really one of the darkest years of my life because there was a time where I didn't know what the future held or if there was a future to be held for myself. Coming on the other side of having those surgeries, we came, I had basically a mantra, a life mission crystallized in my mind, which was love big, think big. And everything about Owners Club, the people that I've, that I had the opportunity to associate with before even going to Squad Up, If I looked at the things that they, the way they acted in their life, they loved big. They did things for the right reason. And then they acted on it. They took big thoughts. They went for things in multifamily. They look for ways to make co-living more impactful, not just like to their bottom line, but to the community where they're buying these homes. For me, it was 100% alignment with my assignment. So—
Wow.
For me, it's a perfect fit. And thankfully we get to do it together. There's a reason we joined together 'cause we are a team. Looking to do this together forever.
Amazing. That love big, think big, those are the questions that your daughters ask me, right? I almost want to give them better answers now because I know how, you know, important that is to you. Yeah, dang it, I need to go answer better. I feel like I gave pretty decent answers. I'm sure they were great. Yeah, that's awesome. And so it's— has that been everything that you've hoped for so far?
Yeah, and more. Beyond the fact that we're learning and getting in touch with people that can give us the resources that we need to make the real estate things happen, My Mount Everest is actually not real estate related at all. Okay. By going through that trial, I hit some dark moments mentally. I was not prepared from a mindset perspective for what I needed in order to navigate that situation properly. So coming to the other side, I recognized the need for better tools, not just for adults, but I have 4 daughters, ages 22 down to 13.
Wow.
Who face a very different world than I did growing up. So I'm going to build an app called Warrior Thoughts. It's going to be focused on helping kids, teens, and adults work on their mindsets to strengthen their mental health. So the goal is to have 100,000 subscribers over the next 5 years to help provide $100,000 per month that we can use to fund those efforts. For me, the money aspect of it is not the important part. If I can help one person get to a point where when they're facing the darkest challenge of their life, they feel like they have the tools that can help them make it one more day, that's all the payment I need.
That's amazing. I love that. That's some deep impact stuff right there. Alright.
Thank you.
Yeah, and what about your Mount Everest?
Yeah, my Mount Everest is also— he mentioned we had 4 daughters.
Yeah.
We have actually 2 kind of bonus girls that we've taken in over the last couple of years. They—
So is that 6? Or is that part of the 4?
No, so that is— so we have 4. Yeah. And then 2 of them are our daughter's friends. They actually lived with us for some time. They were in foster care. They were adopted out of foster care and then that adoption failed. So they were essentially abandoned by their family at age 17. And so one of them has some disabilities and she's living in a group home now. We've got her services. We're actually her guardians. Her sister is doing awesome. She's in college. She's trying to make her way. She's made the Dean's List. Like, she's doing really great.
Yeah.
But I see this like spot where once she doesn't have student housing, she's gonna be faced with an affordable housing crisis that a lot of people have, right? So I see this demographic of young adults, you know, our kids, we have adult children going to college, trying to figure out life. That affordable housing thing's hitting them hard. Right? And so one of the reasons that I'm looking into multifamily is I want to learn that process. I want to learn how to purchase them, syndicate, things like that. So that I can actually use those apartment buildings to offer a home for hope and solve that in my own community but in other communities too. So I know a lot of people talk about, you know, kids aging out of foster care.
Yeah.
It hits me right in the heart because I'm taking care of these girls every day, you know, they're— It's something I live with and I love and I care about these kids. So that's what wakes me up every day and makes me want to go—
Amazing.
Buy that apartment complex so I can just kind of repeat that model.
Love it.
Yeah.
So if people were to help you, what is it that you're looking for? Would that be just more deal flow? Like, what are the resources you're missing that you need?
Yeah, absolutely. We're looking for apartment complexes, 50 units or more. In landlord-friendly states, preferably. Preferably.
What else? That's the biggest thing. If you can help us with that in any way, that'd be fantastic.
Awesome.
Yeah, we'd love to analyze deals.
Love it. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on, enduring the cold weather, but at least we get a pretty view.
It is lovely.
That's right.
Awesome.
Awesome. Thank you.
Thank you very much. I appreciate it.
Thank you.
I loved hearing the impact and just gives me goosebumps thinking about that. It's awesome.
Well, thanks.
It was great to have you.
Amazing.
Yeah, likewise.
Appreciate it.
I will see you next time, everyone. [MUSIC] [MUSIC]
