;GN=J KLGJQ
Meet Gap Engineering’s “Power Team!” They are (left to right, back row) Michael Yeh, Buchanon Dowling, Troy Snead, Ryan Ramsey, and Adam Magruder. Front row, left to right are Mary, Dana Hewling, Mike, and Jeannette Oyervide. Photo by Gwen Juarez
were higher paid, so that’s the way I went.” But to his surprise, when he entered the engineering industry, he was able to combine his interest in electronics with his degree. He states, “I found that doing process control as a chemical engineer allowed me to play with all the expensive toys [computers].” Mike credits his entrepreneurial spirit to his parents who were both self-employed. His dad owned many businesses, mostly in manual labor. Mike wasn’t interested in manual labor so he decided to study chemical engineering instead. Were it not for his parents, he may not have mustered up the courage and motivation to start his first business - a teen disco in Salt Lake City. Mike’s father has now passed away but he is still blessed to have his mother, Yeiko Homma, who is 91. After running the disco for a period of time, Mike had to shut it down. Shortly thereafter, Mike received an offer to move all the equipment to an Indian reservation in Fort Duchesne, Utah. An Indian reservation is an assigned area
of land managed by a Native American tribe, under the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, separate from the U.S. Government. There he ran the bar for the Bottle Hollow Resort. Initially, there were two barmaids. Mary, from nearby Neola, was the third barmaid they hired. That is how Mike and Mary first met. Mary recalls, “We had this chemistry. He would flirt with me by throwing pieces of ice and beer tabs at me. We would throw that back and forth. One New Year’s Eve, I asked him if he wanted to go to an after-hours New Year’s party. He agreed, and we have been together ever since!” In fact, they’ve been together for 36 years, of which they have been married for 30. The Hommas currently have four living children out of six. Tragically, two have passed away. The early years were a struggle. The Hommas not only had a family to support but they also had to pay Mike’s tuition fees. Ever resourceful, they were always coming up with innovative ideas to make money. One of their businesses involved removing gold pieces from
8 SMALL BUSINESS TODAY MAGAZINE [ JANUARY 2017 ]
electronic boards and returning it back to gold. Mike remembers one gold piece being about 10 ounces! Mike was even a cook in a Chinese restaurant during that time. While times were hard, Mike was motivated to graduate and build a successful engineering career. Following his graduation, Mike started working for Hercules Aerospace (Utah) in 1985. He made carbon fiber for the military. He did this for five years before the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty was signed with Russia. The treaty led to a drop-in production and Mike knew what this meant. “The writing was on the wall!”, he exclaims. “It was only a matter of time before they laid people off.” So, he went to work for Fina Oil and Chemical in Big Springs, Texas. While the pay was better, Mike realized that the rules for making money were set. “Because of how they structure salary increases, I was never going to get enough increases to reach everybody else”, Mike recalls. “They told me it would be better to go elsewhere once I had enough experience in the oil business.” So he went to work for Coherent Technologies.