Source: Upstate Business Journal —
When Mark Cothran was 6 years old, his father Al, a former Air Force and commercial airline pilot, was killed in a training crash at an Army helicopter school in Texas.
Years later, Al’s younger brother, John, gave Mark what he calls a “what-am-I-doing-with-my-life speech.”
At the time — this is the late 1970s — Cothran was studying finance and banking at the University of South Carolina, where he recalls a conversation over lunch with his Uncle John:
“I said, ‘Oh, yeah, I’m going to be a stockbroker.’ He said, ‘A stockbroker? Why?’”
Cothran’s answer was simple. One of his friend’s uncle was a stockbroker, he explained, and Cothran had heard that this man earned more than $100,000 a year — and drove a Porsche.
But Cothran’s Uncle John told him he didn’t know any brokers making that much money and so encouraged his young nephew to try real estate instead. After all, John had developed such Greenville properties as Sugar Creek, a residential community, and the Foxcroft neighborhood, and he helped launch Greenville Builders Supply in the early 1970s.
“I didn’t know anything about careers, right?” Cothran says now. “You’re a high school guy. Doctors clearly — according to everybody — make a lot of money, and attorneys make a lot of money. You didn’t have like a whole list of things. It wasn’t like there was a career day back in the day.”
Now Cothran, a self-proclaimed entrepreneur-developer, is CEO of commercial real estate firm Cothran Properties and residential company Cothran Homes.
But it was after college that he tried real estate sales in Columbia.
“I did not like that,” the Greenville native says flatly.
As for a Porsche, he now owns one of those too — among his collection of high-end sports cars. Those include a 2005 Ferrari F430 Spider; a 1974 Triumph TR6; a 1980 Corvette; and a 1962 Alfa Romeo Giulietta Sprint Speciale (“actually the most aerodynamic production car until the 1980 Corvette,” he says).
His background in finance continues to drive his thriving businesses.
“Well, I figured that was the purpose of business. You find something to do, what you like doing,” he says. “Especially when you’re a finance guy, you come up with something and it has to be a viable business.”
He opened Cothran Properties in 1986. Before that, he started working for U.S. Shelter Corp. in 1983, acquiring apartment complexes west of the Mississippi, though not the West Coast.
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