hen Greg Montoya was in Junior high school, he actually hired an employee to do one of his most dreaded chores: mowing his parents' lawn. He used some of the profits from his side business of building and selling bicycles to pay his employee. That's right, a junior high student with a business and a payroll. Imagine the surprise Greg's mom Helen felt when she woke up early one Saturday morning to find a neighborhood kid cutting her grass in the hot, baking Arizona sun, while her son slept soundly in his own air-conditioned room.
Greg's motives may have been simply to get out of his chores, but it was a sign of ambition - starting his own business and hiring an employee before he could even drive. It seems junior high was a pivotal time for him; that was also when he started a candy bar business. He would buy a bag of candy bars and sell them individually at school and double his money. This, of course, was before bags of candy were marked "not for individual sale." Greg jokes, "the candy bar companies hadn't caught on yet. It was probably people like me who clued them in though." |
Then there was that bicycle business; he'd buy parts at yard sales to build bikes and then sell them for a profit. On top of these businesses, school, and the chores he didn't pay someone to do, Greg also had a traditional job - a paper route.
"As a child, I saw success all around me, yet I was being conditioned in school to think in terms of 'job - just over broke,'" says Greg. "I knew if I were to follow that path, I'd be settling."
But he did what school taught him and took a 'real' job - the paper route - to appease those who felt it would teach him responsibility, money management, and the importance of a good work ethic. His sideline money making activities filled a need he had to be in control of his own success.
Greg went on later in life to duplicate his junior high experiences. But not only by delivering papers and selling candy bars; rather, he took a regular 40 to 50 hour a week job as a machinist for a major aerospace company, and in his spare time he got involved in a variety of business opportunities.
It wasn't exactly as he had planned his life to be, taking on a traditional job and working for someone else, but it seemed like a safe route to go, or so he'd been told. So, for ten years
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