At the age of eight, Michael was building dens in his back garden and all over the countryside and later worked and lived on farms in Oldham and Rochdale, England, as a young teenager.

Aged twenty-four, he had his own civil construction business in the Isle of Man, which involved owning and using large equipment.
After learning a few trades in Austria and Germany from working on quite a few, large construction projects, he returned to the Isle of Man, where he progressed to management before living in New Zealand to work on other structures, including roads and bridges.

Today Mike, is still building large items in the garden, like all the large dens he built as a very young child, it seems as though this building obsession is never going to leave him.