Mike Bailey By Caleb Jackson Contributing Writer Mar 22, 2022

 

“The story of my life is, I’ve always been going up when the trends are going down,” Mike Bailey remarked when reminiscing about his business ventures of days gone by. “It seems like I’ve never been quite positioned properly to catch the wave,” he added. But these are the words of a man who has seen both successes and failures. Words like these can only be uttered by someone who is willing to go out on a limb, someone who isn’t afraid to try new things. Someone who likes to test their own mettle. Someone like Bailey, who, over the course of his life has built three separate houses and three businesses from the ground up.   Bailey was born in Petoskey, Mich. in 1959 and grew up there before moving to Negaunee sometime around the fifth or sixth grade. His family lived in Negaunee for a few years while his father attended college and his mother worked as the executive secretary for Michigan Bell Telephone. Upon completion of his college education, Bailey’s father took a job as a teacher and moved the family down to Hart. It was here that Bailey got his first job as an asparagus picker at the age of 11. By the time he was 18, he had saved up $9,500 and borrowed an additional $6,250 from his grandmother to purchase 40 acres of land. “I started out with a little shack that I built with a two-pound hammer and a chainsaw,” Bailey said of the property, even commenting that he dug his own well by hand. The second house was a truss-frame house built from reclaimed lumber. While passing through Muskegon one day, Bailey saw a man tearing down an old school. He offered the man all of the money in his pocket and bought the lumber on the spot for a total of $250. Unsure of what to do with it, his neighbor suggested he build a house. “How in the world am I going to do that?” Bailey asked. “I don’t have any electricity and I’m quite far off the road.” So, his neighbor suggested a truss-frame house. The result was a 24-by-36 foot house, sided in shiplapped hemlock that he bought from a local sawmill. By this time, Bailey was running a fairly successful screen printing business. After finishing his high school education in Hart, Bailey attended Western Michigan University and then Michigan State University, where he studied agricultural distribution, but at some point, in his academic education, he received a phone call from his mother. She was buying an arcade and wondered if he wanted in. Bailey, who was feeling “disillusioned” with college at the time, decided to pitch in and it ended up being rather successful, “but we could tell it was going to be short lived,” Bailey said. The popularity of video games continued to increase and arcade cabinets started cropping up in stores all over the country. The writing was on the wall, and Bailey knew that they needed something else. “So, I grabbed a book and taught myself how to screen print,” Bailey said. He ended up working with different artists across the U.S. and even secured a contract with the post office, by which he printed T-shirts with images of postage stamps on them. After building his truss-frame 2/5 house, he got married and his daughter, Morgan, was born in 1981. A few years after that Bailey would get divorced, and a few more years after that, his business began to flounder and flop, eventually leading to his first bankruptcy.  Following the demise of his first business, Bailey got a job at a foundry. Well, he was “not happy with that,” so he decided he would start driving trucks for a living instead. This led to Bailey buying his first truck and leasing it to a company with a childhood friend of his, the start of his second business venture, which he would run for 30 years, from 1997 to 2007. “They were throwing money away back then,” Bailey said, “but it was all at 14 percent interest.” As the business grew, he purchased more trucks. “Then when ’01 hit, I was paying these huge payments on these trucks… I went down to Huntington National and was going to check into a refinance, they said ‘Sorry sir, we’ve closed the commercial loan department and converted them to personal loans.’” It was the beginning of the recession in America, foreshadowing Bailey’s second bankruptcy. Lucky for him though, he had managed to make a serious upgrade in his life before that happened. Sadly, Bailey’s truss-frame house had burned down. He collected $90,000 from the insurance on that and used it to put together a 3,000 square foot Tudor house, again building it with his own hands, although this time he did have the help of power tools and a buddy of his. He also purchased an additional 10 acres from his neighbor for the sake of selling gravel. Later, he sold the new house and the 50 acres in order to pay off his remaining balance, after which he bought one acre of land in Shelby, only three-quarters of a mile away from the previous property. “I have all kinds of berries and I garden,” Bailey said. “I use the one acre so much more than I ever used that 50.” But those who know Bailey now know him as a blacksmith, not as a truck driver or a screen printer, and how he got there is another interesting story.    After losing his trucking business in 2007, Bailey went to work driving trucks for a local farm. One day in 2012, he got knocked off the top of his truck while unloading it and fractured several vertebrae in his lower back. “I finally got an MRI from the neurosurgeon,” Bailey recalled. “The next day I got a call from his office saying that they needed to move my follow-up appointment up.” Bailey came in the day after that, and the doctor told him he needed surgery. He had an unstable fracture in the fourth vertebrae in his neck. “Your next step may be your last,” the doctor told him. The day after that he had his surgery and the day after that he was back home again. The rest is history. While recovering from his injuries, Bailey paid a visit to some friends of his at a forge in Hart, where he f inally got to dabble in a lifelong curiosity of his — blacksmithing. This of course spawned his current business, the Leprechaun Lair Forge (or LLForge), which he views as more of a hobby than anything else. In 2017, he even competed in a forging competition on the History Channel for the television show “Forged in Fire.” He can be found in episode 13 of season five, where his railroad spike knife brought him to the finals in the competition. These days he teaches lessons in forging and offers six different experiences through Airbnb. Details for those can be found on his website at llforge.com. “ But what advice does someone as hardworking and multi-talented as Mike Bailey have to give the world? After all he has built, and after the business he has lost, what advice would he give to others? I always tell people,” Bailey said, “it’s not how much you make, it’s how much you have to spend to live.” Bailey says he finally got his own expenses close to zero, and when he wants to go to work in the morning, he just walks into the shed in his backyard. He describes his own life in two simple sentences, “No bills, no problems. Life is good.”