As housing tanked, he rebuilt his firm

Brian McCarthy was born with cerebral palsy that left him with impaired speech, shaky hands and a pigeon-toed gait.

"I had the umbilical cord wrapped around my neck," he said. "I've spent my life trying to unwind it."

He's done a pretty good job: McCarthy is a skier, a mountain biker, a canoeist, a hunter and a camper.

More to the point of this harangue, he's also a skilled entrepreneur who started a home-building business that peaked at $1.7 million of sales in 2005 before the housing market headed for the basement, leaving him with sales of just $40,000 in 2006.

Whereupon McCarthy rebranded his company as a remodeling business, with a focus on reworking homes to accommodate the handicapped and the elderly. The payoff: McCarthy Builders and Remodelers grossed $1.5 million in 2007 -- and is headed for a record $2 million this year.

It hasn't been easy, said his wife, Maria, a Realtor who has sold most of the homes he has built over the years.

"He's had to adapt and adapt and adapt," she said. "But he never gives up."

"Some mornings I have trouble buttoning my shirt, and I couldn't fix a screw on your glasses," he said. "But I can lift and pull, put up sheetrock and swing a hammer." However, he concedes that the scars and bruises on his fingers indicate periodic difficulties with the hammer thing as well.

Then there are the shoes: "I walk through a new pair of shoes in about two months," McCarthy said. "I'm pigeon-toed on my right side, so I quickly wear out the toe. Then I overcompensate on the left side and wear out the heels."

"He spends more money on shoes than I do," his wife said with a grin. "It's not fair." The good news, however, is that there's little trace of a problem with walking nowadays.

McCarthy spent the first 10 years of his life with braces on his legs. And tight muscles curled his tongue and left him with a speech impediment that made him "the chosen one to be picked on" as a youngster, he said.

Later the discrimination took a different turn: As he sought work, potential employers contacted by telephone thought he'd been drinking and would hang up.

One of them is Tammy Reck, a Realtor in Edina Realty's Lakeville office who handled the sale of some of McCarthy's early homes.

She described him as "a man of integrity who does meticulous work at a competitive price." She called those early McCarthy projects "some of the easiest selling jobs in my career" because of their quality.

Referrals worked wonders

"I'd pass his name on to anyone who wants a good job done," she said.

Ron Orr Jr., a Maple Grove real estate investor and broker, agreed: "Brian's experience, passion and hard work shows, and I'm always happy to refer people to him."

McCarthy's determined march to success predates his business. Armed with a degree in hotel restaurant management, he won a job as food-and-beverage controller at the St. Paul Hotel, parlayed that experience into a job supervising 15 restaurants and 1,300 employees at a Vail, Colo., resort and wound up as head of food service for the Puget Sound ferry system in Seattle.

By the end of the 1980s, "I was tired of working for other people," McCarthy said. So he returned to the Twin Cities and in 1990, with a bank loan backed by his father, he built his first home and sold it for $125,000. More than 140 townhouses, condos and single-family dwellings later, he's starting over with a new business focus.

And it's going well: Half of his sales in 2007 were remodeling projects, the other half coming from the sale of the last of his housing inventory.

More important, half of the remodeling projects involved what he called "barrier-free design" for handicapped or elderly clients: wider doorways, accessible entrances, counter heights altered to accommodate folks in wheelchairs, and showers with thresholds that fold down, then pop back up.

In 2008, virtually all of the revenue has been generated by remodeling projects, 75 percent of them involving barrier-free design.

Simple: "I started networking the agencies that work with the disabled and the elderly," McCarthy explained.

Oh yes, and the help of folks like Reck, Orr and Milnar, who long ago looked past the impaired speech and shaky hands to find the entrepreneurial gent behind them.