Ever had a pool cleaner show up at your house in a Jag?
If not, you need to meet local legend Mike Baca, who might just have the most unique story of anyone in OV.
Something of a relentless entrepreneur, Mike seems to keep finding new and seemingly-unconnected ways to make a living — like being an engineer at Intel, a miner, a paramedic, a pool cleaner, a neo-paralegal, an entrepreneur, a communitarian, and a wrestler.
Mike relayed his story while on his second trip of the day to drive 3000 pounds of cantaloupe to Clifton, in Greenlee County right next to the San Carlos Apache Reservation.
“Clifton is where Geronimo was born, but there is actually private land right there where the mine is located, and this is how they were able to have cheap labor throughout the years. They set up a part of the mining town called ‘tent city’ for the Indians who worked in the mine.”
Once he arrives, Mike will give a few locals and kids $100/day to sell the fruit. They gain work skills. The community gets fresh fruit (which can be in short supply). And Mike goes home with a small profit.
Mike was raised as a fourth-generation miner in the neighboring town of Morenci, a 2000-person hamlet. His family runs 150 head of cattle in Northern Arizona, and 150 head in the Dragoons. In 1920, his great-grandfather Maximo registered the family’s first cattle brand.
“I’m a cowboy at heart,” he chuckles.
That….and a whole lot more.
Growing up in Morenci, Mike says the only two things to do were to working in the mine and wrestling.
Mike is always promoted quickly wherever he works, and soon found himself supervising a 4000-foot drilling operation in Silver City, New Mexico. The massive drill heads were studded with diamonds.
For the first of many times in his life, his boss –“Old Pop” — asked, “what are you doing at this job? You could do so much more. I’ll tell you what: if you want to go out into the world, and you can’t find anything, I’ll let you have your job back.”
Mike didn’t need further encouragement, and in no short order was serving as a firefighter/EMT for the Tohono O’odham Nation in Tucson. For a while, it was a dream job.
“You get a bit of an ego as a firefighter…You think, ‘I’m tough”!”
But one incident changed everything.
On a routine brush fire call, Mike found himself a mile off of the main road in an F-350, spraying the fire hotspots. He then bumped into a group of cross-country migrants from the border that were suffering from dehydration.
While Mike hooked up his hose and doused the fire, one of the migrants came up to him and said “agua, agua.”
“I may be a little dark, but I don’t speak Spanish,” he jokes to add levity to the traumatic memory of what happened next.
Mike sprayed some of the firehose water in the air, and the thirsty man cupped his hands to drink the water. The man was severely dehydrated and went into anaphylactic shock, dying on the spot.
Mike was devastated.
“I’m going back to college,” he resolved. “This is not for me.”
This was actually the third time that Mike had attended college, and this time he fed his curiosity by studying Computer Science and Chemistry.
He needed some cash to finance college, so he started cleaning pools at $120/pop. It was a perfect job for a student because he could schedule visits between classes. But Mike wasn’t content just to clean pools.
“I became a pool doctor,” he recalls. “I wanted to really understand the pumps, the filters, the chemicals…and it kind of coincided with what I was studying.”
And then he used his Computer Science education to hone a new skill: building websites. One of his pool clients was super-impressed by Mike’s Internet marketing.
“You’re not really a pool guy – you’re a website guy”, he said. “Whatever it is that you are doing with Yelp for pools and pool pumps, I want you to do for me. I’m a financial advisor, and I can give you a list of 5000 financial advisors that would also be interested.”
Mike soon had a team of workers in India developing websites for pennies on the dollar. (“The first language out of the womb there is HTML”, he jokes.)
Because his team in India was 12 hours away, they often worked during nighttime in Arizona. When his clients woke up in the morning, they’d be happily surprised to discover a new custom website.
One of those Indian programmers, Saurabh, is still Mike’s best friend — 17 years later.
One day a pool client in Gilbert asked Mike if he had health insurance. Mike — who had just had a child – answered that he did not.
“I can get you a job at the Intel in Chandler at Ocotillo Point. You’ll have a 401k and health insurance.” And that was that.
Mike has a natural bouoyancy that seems to catapult him upward in any organization. Intel was no exception.
Mike started at the bottom at the Ocotillo Plant facility, doing hard labor as a “red badge” (a contract worker for Kelly Services). Then, they had him manage a group of five workers. And based on his excellent work, he was then promoted to crew leader. And before long, he was promoted all the way to a “blue badge” (permanent employee) of the plant.
Then he met Dr. Yaegel (“the Doctor”), an Intel seed engineer who would commute to work from Portland, Oregon by private jet.
One day, Mike was wearing a Baboquvari Indian wrestling shirt, and Dr. Yaegel, asked, “do you wrestle?”
“I started wrestling when I was 8-years-old,” Mike responded. “My Dad was two time state runner-up in the 80s, and I was part of Morenci’s 3-time state title run in 2000, 2001, and 2003.
In that moment, a fortuitous connection was born – but not just about wrestling: Dr. Yaegel was a college wrestler and a chemist…and Mike had been interested in chemistry and engineering from his early days in mining.
Dr. Yaegel said, “would you consider coming to work with me at Intel in Portland?
I’ll give you the job # online. Just fill out the application, and I’ll take care of it.”
Three weeks later, the Mayflower moving truck showed up at Mike’s house. The $20,000 relocation package meant that he and his wife could buy their first home in Portland.
Mike’s wife had been working at the Justice Court in Pinal County for six years, and she needed a bit of convincing. Mike said he’d build her a great website for legal services, and they moved to Oregon.
In working with Dr. Yaegel, Mike combined his background in chemistry and mining to do something truly amazing: he showed Intel an improved process for the use of wastewater in Litho Technology Development.
Mike’s grandfather had used smelters for to remove the impurities in metal. In his father’s time, smelting was replaced by a new technology that dissolved metal into sulfuric acid to yield copper sulfite. Applying electricity to the solution would yield 100% pure copper plating.
“Mike, I’ve got a great idea,” said Dr. Yaegel “We are going to create a new procedure in Chemical Delivery and Concentrated Copper Waste. You are going to give us the tribal knowledge about mining copper from your family, and we are going to use copper sulfate.” The process was integrated with Bulk Chemical Delivery (BCD) and Industrial Waste Systems (IWS) by a great team including Greg Yaegle, Steve Woodruff, Micah Louisal, and Jonny and Skip Friesen (the “Intel brothers”).
So that’s how Mike – who worked in a facility with 4,400 PhDs – helped Intel design a better computer chip fabrication process.
During his time in Intel, Mike’s wife was watching her legal services business bursting at the seams.
“We have to hire someone, or you have to help me,” she pleaded with Mike.
“Train me – I’m a good monkey,” he responded.
And so, Mike started working for the legal services company before and after his shifts at Intel. At this point, his wife had signed Fidelity Title and First American Title as clients. Her firm was really starting to take off, and Mike wanted to jump aboard the ride.
A 47-year veteran of Intel asked him (much like “Old Pop” the drilling boss, many years earlier ): “what are you doing here? If I was your age, I’d go work with your wife. I’ll give you a job if it doesn’t work out.”
His wife offered him $100k more than Intel, and Mike resigned. He started working with his wife on loan closings.
After two years of working with his wife in Portland, they began to acquire rental properties, and become knowledgeable about real estate. Things were going very well.
“Why don’t we sell our house in Portland and move back to the desert?” asked Mike. And they did.
In 2022, they bought a house on Zillow “without actually seeing it,” and drove back to Oro Valley.
“We didn’t have one client. We hit the reset button. Then we started picking up clients, and now we are booming.” Just last year, they oversaw an impressive $2.5 billion in loans for clients like Wells Fargo, Chase Bank, and Loan Depot.
One day in the Jacuzzi, Mike’s wife asked, “what happened to that old pool company that you had?”
Mike logged in to his pool company account and discovered over 500 emails. To date, he’s only gotten through 100 of them.
When he’s not rolling in his Jag, Mike shows up to pool jobs in his electric Mercedes. Mike’s customers are universally impressed at how prompt, efficient and capable he is.
“By the time the other pool company would have called you to setup a bid, I would have finished the job,” he recently explained to a customer.
Today, Mike feels fortunate that he can “cherry pick” his jobs – picking the tasks and people that he wants to work with on any day.
Which brings us to the present day, with Mike buying houses in his old hometown, where he currently rents 10 properties. Every day, he looks for more — trying to rebuild a town that needs it, and looking for investors to help him build a new vision for the community.
He also hauls a truckload of fresh fruit. “We need good food here.”
Today happens to be his daughter’s last day at Catalina High School.
“Want to earn $100 a day selling melons?,” Mike asks her. Later, they’ll sell the leftover fruit on in downtown Tucson.
And just like that, we see Mike passing the torch on to the next generation.
