They took to the air like helium, becoming - take your pick - either Utah’s answer to the Wright Brothers, or what their friend Hal Jackson calls “Howard Hughes times two.” “I thought I’d have to talk him into it.” “I had no idea he was at an air show in California,” says Mark. He was about to call Mike and tell him he thought they should take flying lessons when Mike called him. On the very same day, Mark had gone to the Spanish Fork-Springville airport and talked to a pilot there. Intrigued by what he saw, he got on the phone to call Mark and tell him they ought to start flying airplanes. It was 1996, they were 24 years old, and Mike tagged along with his father-in-law to an air show in California. The twin brothers are practically omnipresent at the Spanish Fork-Springville airport, where they store their current collection of seven airplanes and one helicopter.Īviation was a foreign concept to both of them until what Mike describes as “a weird twin moment” 20 years ago. Their biggest, most enduring, “problem” is flying airplanes. The short answer to their success: “We’re workaholics,” Mark grins, “we’re addicted to work. Mark has become a motivational speaker on the side, although as he points out, “Not by design but request.” English translation: If they’ll pay his fee ($15,000) he will talk about what’s worked for him and his brother, and why. Currently Mark (with Mike as a silent partner) owns a company that designs and sells electronic tugs for moving aircraft, and Mike (with Mark as a silent partner) is in the oil business, removing wastewater at oil facilities in eastern Utah. Hot tubs, RVs and motor homes, electrical, health care, pharmaceuticals, engineering. In the years since, the twins have been in and out of more entrepreneurial enterprises than Mark Cuban. Ten years later when they sold the business, it was reckoned to be the largest deck- and gazebo-building business in the country. By the time they graduated from Orem High School four years later, they had their own tools - and Deck-It had 200 employees. When Mike and Mark were 15 they started a deck-building business, talking their neighbor into letting them use his tools by giving him a cut of the profits. They grew up in Orem, where their dad raised 11 children on a Seminary teacher’s salary, meaning the Patey kids learned self-reliance or bust. 5, and 46 minutes later, taking his own sweet time (“I finally had some room in there”), came Mark at No. They entered the world 43 years ago, smack in the middle of Ken and Sharon Patey’s 11 children. Twenty-three hundred years later, the Patey brothers, Mike and Mark, are all about proving him right. SPANISH FORK - It was Aristotle who first philosophized that when people work and collaborate together in cooperation and harmony, “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”
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