When you walk into the window-less, but brightly lit office space of O’Malley Brothers on Hwy 26, you are struck by how sparse it is. You don’t really see a lot of furniture until you walk around the corner to office manager Jennifer Dolan’s space. Jennifer is upbeat and friendly, surrounded on her L-shaped desk by computer monitors and stacks of papers representing on-going jobs for O’Malley Brothers. It seems busy.
The other thing that strikes you are the motivational signs all around the office. There is one with Theodore Roosevelt’s famous “Man in the arena” speech. Another one lists Stephen Covey’s “7 Habits of Highly Effective People.” Still another one reads, “Success is never owned, it is only rented and rent is due every day.”
The sparse office, the full schedule of work, and the motivational signs reflect the company’s owner, Mike O’Malley — no frills, just hard work, a strong focus on business, together with a deep commitment to living life fully, with purpose and discipline.
When owner Mike O’Malley comes in for the interview, he looks like you would expect. He is fit and muscular, consistent with someone working outdoors everyday in the physically demanding forest industry. He is wearing a bright, safety orange t-shirt and a bright lime green baseball hat, both emblazoned with the script of the O’Malley Brothers logo. He wears work jeans and has a utility tool strapped to his belt. His face is tanned and it is obvious from the smears of dirt on his clothes that he has been working. Still, his shirt is tucked in and he looks organized and put together. He speaks with a calm, quiet confidence, like someone who is used to leading a team and a company.
This Mike O’Malley, who Dolan calls “Mike 2.0,” is far removed from the chaotic person he once was and the reputation for trouble he once had. This Mike O’Malley is praised by those closest to him as hard working, inspiring, and generous.
His partner and wife of 24 years, Nichole O’Malley, says, “I would literally call him like Father of the Year material at this point. Yes, that’s how awesome he is to his family. And, he’s a pretty awesome husband, too.”
It wasn’t always this way.
Early trauma
Mike O’Malley grew up in Sandy. His parents were entrepreneurs and business owners.
“My dad had Woodpecker Woodworking in Sandy,” said O’Malley, “He was also kind of a real estate baron in the early days of Sandy. At one point they owned about 25 pieces of property. He did his woodworking custom cabinet business, and then a lot of real estate ventures. My mom was the founder of the Hairline. Then together they worked their real estate stuff.”
However, Mike’s parents split up when he was young and it had a lasting effect on his life. He recalled, “I came from a very different upbringing than my siblings. There’s six of us, and my oldest sister, I believe, is 16 years older than me. My youngest sister is five years younger than me. There’s a 21 year age gap between my youngest sister and my oldest sister. We were all raised differently. The first couple of kids were raised during the time my parents were married. The second couple of kids were raised, probably, when things were first starting to fall apart. Then I was raised in a single parent family for as long as I can remember. That trauma of my parents splitting up always affected me.”
O’Malley managed to graduate from Sandy High School, but it was close. “I graduated from Sandy High School in 1996, just barely, thanks to a good counselor. School wasn’t the place for me at all. There was never even a thought I’d move on to any higher education, because it just wasn’t for me. I don’t like sitting around in a classroom. I can’t learn from books. I have to be hands on,” said O’Malley.
Trouble started early
But high school was also the beginning of a major issue in his life. O’Malley said, “I started drinking in high school with friends. That’s just a snowball that never stops. If you have the addiction like I have, you’re never going to be able to fully control that. It’s just always going to keep getting worse and worse and worse. For me, there were lots of dumb things I did, lots of mistakes I made.”
After high school, O’Malley became known around the Sandy area as a hard partier, drinking in local taverns late into the night and often running into trouble with law enforcement. “I’ve been in trouble with law my whole life, in and out of trouble, narrowly escaping the law a lot of times — lots of run-ins with the Sandy PD and the Clackamas County sheriffs,” said Mike.
Austin Ernesti, the CEO of Sandy-based Trajectory Northwest, didn’t know Mike back then, but has heard some of the stories. Ernesti said, “If you know anything about Mike’s past, you know that he was born and raised here, and his parents owned businesses long ago. They went from owning businesses to Mike being raised in a camper somewhere in the woods for a little bit. So that’s a bit of an up and down. He used to be known for being quite a party animal and causing a ruckus down at local taverns.”
Todd Hoffman is a lifelong Sandy resident, an entrepreneur and the star of the hit television show, Gold Rush. He knew of Mike from before. “These are rough dudes, you know. Mike would get drunk, crash his truck into somebody’s yard, and then walk away, and the truck would be in the middle of some guy’s yard the next day.”
Mark Charlton is a relative and one of Mike’s closest friends. Charlton said, “He was pretty wild. He liked to have a good time and when other people would go home, he would just keep going. He’d be pretty reckless. And, you know, they used to go to the sand dunes and ride motocross and motorcycles and just kind of all that country stuff, but have a good time. I guess it’s liquid courage, but [he was] just totally out of character when he was drinking. He’s always been such a kind guy, but also a little bit of an instigator,” said Charlton.
Mike’s wife Nichole said, “He was very lost in a world of alcoholism. He was definitely lost.”
About those days, Mike says, “I was always a fun drunk. I was never a violent, angry type guy. But ultimately, you know that when you drink like that, there is something deeply wrong in there. What I found from all the [personal recovery] work I’ve done since, for me it was rooted in childhood trauma. [Alcohol abuse] was a coping mechanism.”
Facing losing it all
Mike had started the O’Malley Brothers business in 2013, focusing on trucking and firewood. For a time, the business did well enough to stay afloat. But, by 2017, due to his hard drinking ways, the wheels had started to come off, not just with the business, but his whole life. He was on the verge of losing everything that mattered — his business certainly, but even more importantly, his marriage, his wife, and his children.
Mike had various run-ins with the law, but that wasn’t what finally made the difference. “[Being in trouble with the law] wasn’t what did it for me. It was my family,” said Mike.
Turning point
“The turning point was finally when I was about to lose my wife and my business,” said Mike. “I didn’t want my kids being raised by somebody else. It was really like an epiphany. I just came home one day from the tavern. I don’t know what happened, but at that moment, I said, ‘I’m gonna get help, and I’m gonna change my life.’ Of course, my wife didn’t buy that, because she heard me say that 100 times. But I committed right then to myself, you know. There was no specific thing that day that was different than the other days. It was just at that point that I had had enough. [That was in] June, 2017.”
Naturally, Nichole was very skeptical at first. “Throughout the years, I would kind of throw out some ultimatums, like, “Hey, if you don’t get your s**t together, we’re done.’ And he’d be like, ‘Okay, okay.’ Then it was all talk, no action type of thing. This went on, off and on, for a few years. Then finally, one day, I think he just had enough himself. He knew that I was not interested in his cr*p anymore. He just had enough, finally. You have to want to change for yourself. You can’t change for other people. You have to want to change for yourself. That’s one of the things I told him. I said, ‘Don’t go to rehab to save our marriage. Do it to save yourself first, and then we’ll talk. We’ll see what happens.”
Mike said, “I just knew that my wife had had enough. I knew she wasn’t going to put up with anymore. Like I say, something, something changed inside of me, a higher power, or something took control for a minute. I made an appointment that very next morning to go in for the intake at the rehab. My wife went with me. We went and did the intake paperwork and then paid the money. A few days later, I started into my recovery process.”
The rehab process required Mike to attend the local rehab center three days a week, three hours a day for 90 days, then three hours a week for the rest of the nine months. Mike said, “I went to a rehab center off of Stark Street in Portland. I would travel down there every afternoon. Our meetings are at six o’clock. It was a little different than a 12 step program, a little more in-depth. I feel like it really went to the heart of the matter. The most important thing was that it required taking accountability.”
Mike explained what “taking accountability” meant. “It means I can’t blame. I don’t choose to blame what I did on alcohol. Anything I did was because I made a choice, whether I was under the influence or not. It was a choice I ultimately made. I’m not going to blame that on alcohol. To me, that’s the difference. Then, I do these other things [I’m doing now] for personal and mental development,” he said.
Nichole began to see a change right away. During his time in rehab, she began to hope that things could be different. “Life went from chaotic and toxic to not,” she says. Now, she sees the fruit of the change in Mike.
“It’s definitely been a new lease on life. I feel very fortunate that we have the second chance that not everybody gets. Statistically speaking, we shouldn’t have made it through the stuff that we went through, and made it so well,” said Nichole.
Does he drink at all at this point? “Nope,” says O’Malley, “I’ve not had a drop since then.”
However, Mike’s journey had just begun and would lead him to unexpected opportunities and new paths. Mike said, “[The rehab program] started to shift my life. I realized that I didn’t need alcohol to cope. That really turned my business around right then. And it saved my family, it saved my marriage. Still, at that point, I felt that there was still more to do on myself.”
Second step
Once he had finished rehab, Mike found new opportunities for personal growth that he hadn’t seen before.
Mike said, “My brother-in-law, Mark Charlton, was involved in a group called Forge Legend. It’s a leadership group of self development, an awakening type of thing for men. I got involved in that in 2020. That was the second shift in my life. [Through that] I learned that you really need to start living a purpose driven, disciplined life — doing the daily work on yourself, finding ways to give back, finding ways to work and live your purpose.”
Charlton said, “Mike went through one of my men’s events. It’s a very intense, real and raw, militant style coaching program that basically doesn’t allow you to get away with your own BS. We just have a focus on faith, family, fitness and finances. So he came through [the program]. He had already been doing some [personal] work in the [sobriety] program. And, ultimately, he just made the decision to change his life.”
Charlton added, “I think he actually saw how valuable he truly was. Like before, it seemed he just didn’t believe he was worthy of creating success. I think the biggest shift was just his mindset. He just decided that he was not going to accept the status quo. But the biggest shift was just his mindset. He’s like, ‘I’ve got maybe six years left with my daughter before she’s gone. And this isn’t the version of me that I want her to see.’ He talked about that quite a bit. He was [always] extremely hard working and a great provider, but he’s like, ‘I haven’t been involved in the kids’ lives in the way that I want to be.’ It was just a shift of an intentionality in his life.”
Mike said, “Through that [Forge Legend] program, I was able to open up my mind to what’s really possible. That’s kind of when my business started really taking off, in 2020. Then, we had some opportunities that were provided by the tragedy of the Riverside Fire [that year]. We were equipped to help out with that, with the equipment and the crew we had. In 2020 we went after this fire [recovery] work pretty aggressively. That’s most of what we’ve been doing ever since. We’ve been repairing our forests, making them safe for the public. [We’ve] really been working on the burned timber that’s everywhere. It’s been kind of a whirlwind these last five years, really.”
Moving into focus
Today, O’Malley Brothers company primarily focuses on forestry restoration.
O’Malley says, “So we’re first and foremost a forestry company. We can pretty much tackle any aspect of forestry. We can do forest road maintenance, forest road construction. We can do logging, thinning, fuel reduction, fire recovery work. Those are all things that are under our forestry blanket. We’re geared up to do all that work. We also do a little bit of civil work like, bridges and culverts and habitat restoration stuff when opportunities arise. Then we have a demolition side that does demolition work. But our main focus, especially since the 2020 fires, has been just forestry work, forest recovery, forest management. We’re doing a lot of road maintenance and a lot of hazard tree stuff. We work almost completely with municipal, federal and state contacts. We don’t do a lot of private work. We do 24 hour emergency work for ODOT (Oregon Department of Transportation). So we’re out there. When we get the ice storms and the wind storms and the fires, we’re the ones they call to go out and get the highways open.”
The O’Malley Brothers company currently employs about 30 people and has a large stable of heavy equipment, including large backhoes, skidders, log trucks, dump trucks, and heavy haulers. One of the current employees has been working for Mike since 2008, and several of the employees have been with the company for at least ten years. Mike is also proud of the fact that his children are involved in the business.
Mike said, “My daughter Presley stepped up this summer and took on a pretty big role, such as assisting in project management, going to pre-bids, helping me put bids together. She also goes out in the field when I need her to, and she’ll go get her hands dirty and do what she needs to do.
“My son, Vance, my youngest son, he came on [to the crew] this summer. For a 15 year old, he’s really pretty amazing with what he can do. He can run just about every piece of equipment I have, proficiently. He’s been doing this since he was could walk. He’s really stepping up for a young man.
“Presley’s boyfriend also works here. He’s going to school to be an attorney, but I want to get him out here to show him the other side of things. And he really enjoys working with his hands and that lesson is important. I think everybody needs a little dose of the blue collar.
“My oldest son, Taylor, went through Peterson CAT’s trade school to be a mechanic. They put him through school, supplied his tools. It’s a great program for kids coming out of high school that maybe don’t know what they want to do, and they’ll put them straight through the diesel tech training. He did that, and then, to fulfill his obligation, he had to work there for nine or 10 years, so he’s done with that now. Once he fulfilled that obligation, got his school debt relieved and his tools taken care of, he went out on his own. Now he’s running his own service truck doing mobile equipment repair.
“So, the whole family, other than my wife, the whole family, is involved in the business.”
Mike hopes to see his children move into running the business and it becoming a second and third generation business.
Family and community
In recent years, O’Malley has been deeply involved with the Sandy area community. He has been a strong booster and backer for the Barlow Mat Club for young wrestlers, helping to see that program grow. He has taken on being president of the board of Trajectory NW, a ground-breaking non-profit organization aimed at showing youth the opportunities in all aspects of the forestry field and how they can get involved. In recent years, Trajectory has organized an annual Sandy Invitational Chainsaw Carving (SICC) event in downtown Sandy to raise funds and awareness about the positive aspects and career opportunities in the local forest industry. This last year, Mike took a leading role in helping to organize the event, which drew hundreds of spectators from the community.
Austin Ernesti is the well-known and energetic founder of Trajectory. However, regarding Mike O’Malley, Ernesti said, “Wherever I’ve been, I’ve always been told that I was the hardest worker. I’m just a hustler. It’s how it is. Then I go to a job site with Mike, and I’m like, ‘Oh man, I’m getting left in the dust. What’s going on here? This guy is hauling 24/7, from five in the morning till 10 o’clock at night. He’s just, he’s impressive, that’s for sure.”
Today, Mike’s wife Nichole is one of his biggest boosters. She said, “I wouldn’t mind you using the word inspiring about Mike, because he’s been very inspiring to me, as well as my whole family and everyone around him. I think everyone would agree, inspiring is probably one of the best descriptive words I could use for him at this moment.
She added, “Just the way he’s so giving to his community, it’s actually awe inspiring to me, because not very many people are like that. Like I said, he does it, and he hardly ever says no. He donates a lot of money and time and effort into the community in any way that he can.”
Brother-in-law Mark Charlton concurred, saying, “It’s so awesome to see Mike getting lifted up. He has the biggest heart for people and communities and kids, as well as the trades, something we didn’t talk about. Just watching his heart for bringing back the pride in America, in the trades, and hard work. It’s so needed.
Charlton concluded, “He’s always been a good guy, but alcoholism was the [problem] in there and in their family. So I’ve seen him change in the last six years, like become exponentially great, an incredible father, an incredible husband, and showing up for his family. He almost ten X-ed his business. All of the things in his life just started to align once he got things in the right order.” HVN