I'm Mike Palmer from Denver, Colorado, I am 54 years old.
I own a construction company here in Denver and as a hobby I race off-road, primarily the
SCORE series in Mexico.
My trophy truck started at the SEMA show about 20 years ago and I came home, put it on a
napkin and spent 10 years of nights and weekends building it here in Colorado and we've been
racing for about 5 years.
WAHO 1000 is in its 49th year this November.
It's an off-road race that starts this year in Ansonata and finishes in Ansonata.
There will be people racing in it from all over the world.
WAHO 1000 is definitely inherently dangerous, so that's the one thing I stress with my
crew is to be safe, we all want to come home safe.
It can get pretty stressful and problems arise, it's always important to think on your feet
so the people that I like to bring along need to be able to do that.
I met Wayne Smith at a Vertex transfer station about 15 years ago.
We worked on that project together and then just kind of stayed in touch and ended up
working on more projects together and becoming friends and he's been instrumental in helping
me make it to Baja.
So Mike and I met on a project that we were working on quite a few years ago, it was over
10 years ago and I've been fortunate enough to have a lot of vendors and contractors work
for us over the years hundreds, if not thousands.
Very few has impacted me like Mike Palmer did, he carried a lot of the same values that
I did and we met on the project and we've remained friends ever since.
I think in work what we all do is a form of art and this really resonates with Mike Palmer.
He was a guy who took a dream, put the dream on the paper and over the years it took hard
work and he transformed his beliefs into art and his art is his race truck.
He may not tell you how much effort and the skills that he's learned to get there, but
this is an individual who consistently learned new things.
If you look around the shop where we're at, there's tons of machinist tools here, there's
tons of things.
If you think of entrepreneurship and what it takes and perseverance involved, he inspires
those traits because we think and we believe that the work that we all produce as individuals
is a form of art.
When you leave here one day in this planet, whenever it is, you'll left your mark on
the generations after you.
I feel that Mike's commitment to his race team, to his company, and to his friends and family,
is one of those people that I want to be around and it inspires other people.
The best advice I ever got was from a friend.
He was a developer from New York and he told me the story about he and his friends sitting
around having a beer, talking about what they were going to do with their lives.
They all had these great ideas.
He was the only one that acted on his idea.
Act on your dreams, don't let them get by without at least trying.
I think for me, as an entrepreneur, what advice I would give is that the fun part about it
is the journey that's involved and all the failures and all the relationship things
that you build, that's part of it.
How to be an entrepreneur is learning along the way, enjoying, there's no destination
to get.
I think someone told me it was like a mountain without a top.
Even though you continue to climb, you're never going to get there.
If you go into it with an open mind and open relationship on how to solve different issues
that you're trying to do as an entrepreneur, you'll find successes along the way along
with the failures and they make you a better person and a better company.
Well, I wish you the best of luck, my friend.
I wish you the best of luck, too.
Tell us a little bit about your trip to Mount Everest on your mountain bike.
Have a good one this day.
