"I pay myself $55,000 a year," he said with all seriousness, as he sat across from me in the dining area of his four-year old Kayenta Hampton Inn.   This was my second interview with him.

  "Ahh, come on," I said.

"I'm not kidding," Mike said.   He said the same thing years earlier when I worked for the Kayenta Township Commission; a board he serves on.  

"Maybe you shouldn't put that in the story because people won't believe it," he said.   I told him they also say he owns homes in Flagstaff and Phoenix.

"They're not mine," he said.   "The Flagstaff house is my mother-in-law's and my daughter owns the one in Phoenix.   I own a double-wide trailer here in Kayenta and two vehicles; one doesn't have a motor in it."

Those who know the outspoken 65-year-old businessman know him to be modest, rarely ever seen wearing a business suit, much less a tie.   Sometimes, he's even mistaken as an employee because he wears faded jeans and polo shirts.

When we went to grab lunch at his Burger King next door, he didn't cut to the front of the line and tell the cashier that he was the boss.   He stood in line like everyone else. And when the cashier didn't know him and almost asked him to show an ID, he took it like it was nothing.   "Attitude is important when you're in business," he said later.

Richard Mike didn't start his first business until he was in his forties and today is probably the most well-known Navajo businessman.   His notoriety may be due in large part to his outspokenness about regulations that hamper business development on Navajo.

"Richard is a very outspoken small businessman who sees areas of major conflict in policies (Navajo and federal) that needs substantive changes or elimination," said long-time friend, Al Henderson, who holds an MBA and is

former economic development director for the Navajo Nation. "For example, business site leasing, land use and centralized authority that have impeded and continue to impede private business development on the Navajo Nation."

His story starts when he was a kid out in Kayenta   working part-time for Lillian and Keith Smith. "I remember we'd spend the whole weekend selling at Squaw dances," he said. "We'd sell pop, hamburgers, and all that stuff into the wee hours of the morning."

Then when he was in the eighth grade, he started working for Glenwood Heflin who in turn, introduced Richard to his brother, Reuben Heflin, owner of Kayenta Trading Post.   "Reuben Heflin took me everywhere, to Navajo Tribal Council meetings, Advisory Committee meetings, to the bank and other financial institutions when he began building the Wetherill Inn.   He taught me how he ran his business and what to do when the light goes out.   You never close shop, despite the fact that you lock the doors, or something like the meat freezer breaks."

After graduating from high school, he said, the Indian power movement started and an "anti-trader" mentality took hold.   "They punished the traders.   That whole era brought about the death of trading posts.   I remember during this time, this Old Man Salt kept four of his high priced silver concho belts in pawn.   He didn't have any money on them, he just kept them in the vault for safe keeping because he didn't trust his family of four sons.   He gave Reuben Heflin strict instructions that were he to die, these belts were to go to his brothers and sisters, not to his sons.   When the Federal Trade Commission had its hearings against the traders, I remember the sons telling the Trade Commission that Reuben Heflin took these belts away from their father. I remember thinking that the Federal Trade Commission didn't know who these speakers were . . . and nobody stood up to tell the Federal Trade Commission.

Kayenta was different in terms of business, he said.   "We've always had Navajos in business like Winifred Watson with her Kayenta truck stop, Lillian and Keith Smith with the Kayenta Garage, Lois and Ned Benally with the "Black Store", H.T. Donald with Tsegi Trading Post," Mike said.

Mike is the oldest of two brothers and two sisters and a legendary father King Mike, who served in World War II.   In 1990, he built his own Navajo Codetalker museum inside the Kayenta Burger King from items collected from his father. King Mike was the only Codetalker who brought back a number of artifacts from the battlefields of the Pacific. In April, he moved the Codetalker collection and other Navajo artifacts and history collected over many years into his own museum and gift shop next to Hampton Inn. The museum even carries original guns carried by members of the Navajo police in the early 1900s.

He went through most of his high school years at St. Michaels Indian School in St. Michaels, but graduated from Flagstaff High School where he was enrolled at the BIA Dormitory. "Benjamin Hanley and Harry Sloan were my dorm mates," he said. He was awarded a National Merit Scholarship under Dr. Ned Hathalie, the first President of Navajo Community College (Diné College) and went to Ohio State University where he began work toward a doctorate. "I took all the classes, but didn't turn in my dissertation," he said. "All I wanted was a board of five unbiased members to say, 'Congratulations, you are now a Doctorial Candidate, you can write as good as any educated American. That was every important to me."

He began employment with a publishing firm in Denver, Colorado, then worked for the Urban Indians of Federal Region IX (Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska, and Kansas) before returning to Window Rock and ended up getting a job with the tribe as a grant writer. A few years later, he headed the Navajo Scholarship Office; a tribal program that awards scholarships to Navajo college students.  

While employed as the tribe's scholarship director, he bought a trading post in Crystal, New Mexico and ran that for a few years. "The days of trading posts were almost over by then," he said. "There were hearings by the U.S. Senate which really killed the Trading Post credit system that a lot of Navajos relied on."

Mike sold the trading post then got into the burger business, but at great sacrifice.

"I was still working for the tribe and I worked it out so that I could attend a three-day a week on-the-job training in Farmington for one year," he said. "The training was for people who wanted to own a McDonald's franchise. We (Nina Heflin and me) had decided that we wanted to do something and we saw some opportunity by running a McDonald's.   Well, just before we (McDonald's trainees) were getting ready to take our test, after one year of training, they pulled me out of class and said   "you're out of here."

He had failed to get into McDonald's. "You had to pass the test to become a franchise owner and they wouldn't let me take the test," he said. "I cried and moped around for about half-a-year," he said. "'What is wrong with me,' I thought to myself.   I am a failure. Anything negative, I thought about myself.   Then one morning I just woke up, about seven months later . . . and I decided I'm going to try again. But this time, I went to Burger King. I didn't tell Burger King that I had failed at McDonald's. They just wondered why I was whizzing through their training material. Been there, done that!"

In his first year, the Kayenta Burger King broke Burger King sales records in Arizona. "It was their highest volume store in Arizona," he said with a smile.

And in the following years, he built other Burger Kings in Page, Chinle, Shiprock, N.M., Burnside Junction near Ganado, and is working on a new one near Cameron. He has since sold his Page Burger King restaurant.

"Business is a gamble.   Sometimes you just have to hope you've made the right choice," he said. "I sold the Page Burger King after 10 years and we broke even.   It wasn't worth all the labor and fuss. When I reflect on this, I remember I was so convinced we'd do better in Page than Kayenta.   If I had started there first, I would have gone bankrupt.   It would have been my first chance and I don't know if I would have continued in the fast food business."

In hindsight, the Page Burger King was in a bad location, he said. "And Page was offered to me first before I even started Kayenta," he said. "And I almost went with that because I was getting frustrated with all the red tape here on Navajo."

Then in 1999, he began working on Hampton Inn. But initially, he didn't have the necessary capital. "I needed a $1 million down payment and I didn't have that," he said. "I'd saved up $500,000   for the Hampton Inn but that wasn't enough. If you take the number of years between my restaurant construction openings, during those in-between years, I'm saving for the next down payment to a new restaurant.

So he turned to a Federal small business program offered by U.S.D.A. that helps disadvantaged businesses secure low interest loans. But to access the capital required him to raise more than the $500,000   he had. "I went to Washington and talked to the agriculture secretary to change the law," he said. He got the loan.

He now has his sights on a Burger King in Cameron. Today, his businesses employ 245 people during the high season and around 190 during the winters, and pays tens of thousands in taxes back to the Navajo Nation. "He is successful, intelligent, experienced and knows what he is talking about when it comes to Navajo Nation small business development," said Henderson.