Focus: Michael Baccellieri: You have to share with the community

Hard work, ingenuity and people are the driving passions for sometime Puget Island resident Michael Baccellieri, boatbuilder, beekeeper and owner of Longbottom Coffee and Tea.

“I’m here most of the time,” Baccellieri said while sitting on his deck watching the Columbia River roll by. “It’s like a gift, an oasis, really.”

Baccellieri owns seven companies. He has nearly 100 employees and he admits he’s nearly tapped out.

But he’s happy.

“If I didn’t love people and love to serve people,” Baccellieri said, “all of it would be an undertaking, but it’s a joy to be honest with you.”

People always want to know how he manages to have so much time off to focus on his particular passions.

“You have to share the majority of your profit with the employees and the majority of your profits with non-profits and the direct community,” Baccellieri said. “You’ll be able to take the time off because they’ll look after your interest. Your interest is their interest.”

His employees, of which there are nearly 100? They’ve been with him, on average, for 25 years.

“I have a general manager, but everybody is self-managed,” Baccellieri said. “Everyone has been interviewed to be working with their gifts, so they are happy. When people get to know why they are here and work in their giftings, they are happy.”

It is a philosophy that his maternal grandfather shared with him.

“He was my mentor and my hero,” Baccellieri said. “He taught me everything, mostly about people.”

His grandfather died at 87 after being diagnosed with cancer two years earlier.

“He was in his bedroom above my bedroom and I could hear him,” Baccellieri remembered. “I would go up because he was in pain. He was on his knees rocking back and forth and I would get on my knees and rock with him.”

He shared a favorite story about his grandfather.

“He worked in mason supply after joining the Army,” Baccellieri said. “At 80 years old his company threw a party for him. He didn’t understand what was going on and asked my mother to find out and translate. She explained that it was a retirement party. He thought the company was going out of business and they couldn’t afford him. So he had my mother explain that if the company was in financial trouble that he had saved a lot of money and was more than willing to share with them.”

Baccellieri and his wife, Jody, first discovered Cathlamet while taking a boat up to the San Juans. It was particularly stormy one year, and the couple spent two weeks at the marina before Jody suggested they buy a house here. It turned out to be a good decision and it has brought their family a lot of pleasure.

“This is our eighth year here,” Baccellieri said. “It feels like eight months. People are so kind here.”

Baccellieri’s parents and grandparents emigrated from Italy in the 1930s.

“We dreamed that there were bags of gold to pick up in America,” he was told. “We were right. They just weren’t bags, they were opportunities.”

His father started a wholesale fruit and vegetable business.

“It was one of the largest independent wholesale businesses in the state of Oregon,” Baccellieri said. “Dad serviced the majority of the stores from Sheridan-Willamina all the way south into Toledo along the coast.”

Baccellieri grew up in a delivery truck.

“From the time I was seven years old, I was on the truck with my dad. Spring, summer, christmas vacations. We worked 27 hour days,” he said.

Four days of the week, his dad would end his route at a restaurant in Depoe Bay. The family had a 22 foot double end dory moored there. While dad rotated produce in the cooler, Baccellieri and his brother would warm up the engine in the dory.

At 15, he was driving his own semi and taking half classes at Tigard High School. He grew up fast.

“My dad taught us how to work,” Baccellieri said. “My mom taught us how to love.”

He met Jody and they fell in love at 16 and married at 20. 42 years later they are still married and have two children and several grandchildren.

At 22, he left the family business and got into building. He started a corporation and built several of the homes that hang along a cliff in the West Hills of Portland.

“I see the stuff in my mind before it happens,” Baccellieri said. “I’ll look at a set of plans and see all that needs to happen in little pictures and then I don’t have to do anything twice. It’s very interesting how it works. It is just the way I used to build houses and apartments. It didn’t matter what it was.”

He learned carpentry from a man who was first his employer, then his partner and finally his employee.

About 10 years later, he was approached about Longbottom Coffee and Tea.

It had been a mail order business for a couple years and the owner was looking for someone who could make it grow. Baccellieri’s pastor mentioned him and they actively pursued him for awhile. Fortunately for them, and a little less so for Baccellieri, they caught him on a day when he had wrenched his back.

“It was in one of those micro warehouses, 700 square feet,” he said.” It was called Longbottom Trading for the longbottom leaf tobacco in the Tolkien series.

“When they approached Baccellieri, he told them he would have to own the business if he was going to do it.

They went to Elmers and he used a napkin to draw up a contract.

“In a year, how much can I own?” he asked.

They offered him five percent a year if he could grow the company five percent a year, for up to five years.

“What if I make it grow 25 percent the first year?” he asked.

They told hime he could have all 25 percent. So he went to the library and did research. He found out about the competitors and started calling customers.

He added 70 new customers and traveled to buy a second, now necessary, roaster.

What had began with 26 customers and a gross income of $54,000 grew to a part time employee and over a million dollars in the first year.

“I worked 20 hours a day,” Baccellieri said.

He started hiring.

“I just implemented my grandfather’s whole fair and equitable mentoring and my father’s business prowess,” he said.

Six and a half years later, Baccellieri owned the company.

“For a business to grow significantly into a multi million dollar operation, you have to have employees,” he said. “For it to grow, you have to keep your employees. Businesses that rotate their employees lose their ass. The ones that keep their employees make a fortune. The only way you get to do that, is to provide an incredible work environment.”

How do you do that? Take care of your employees, according to Baccellieri.

“The longer you keep them, the more money you make. If you share that money, you get to keep them more.”

So while the business is mostly taking care of itself, Baccellieri is building boats and learning about bees, or spending time with friends and family.

“One of my granddaughters has severe allergies,” he said. “I was reading about a natural way to deal with allergies. One of the big ways was honey and pollen.”

Bees, honeys and hives quickly became a passion. He built 18 hives and took a class and got certified.

“I’m certifiable. I’m literally certifiable when it comes to these bees,” he said. “My little Lillian who is eight went to a hands on bee school with me. She was the only child there. She’s even keeping a journal.”

Baccellieri shared a story about another grandchild.

“She called me one day and said, ‘I want to go to Coffee Pot Island and look for treasure. I had a dream and I believe there is buried treasure there.’”

So what did Baccellieri do? He built her a treasure chest and filled it with little treasures like change and a pocket knife. He stuffed it in a tree and marked it with shells. The next day they rode over there. Without giving away his part in it, he gave her some ideas about where treasures would be hidden.

It wasn’t long before she found it.

“She gets over there and picks it up,” Baccellieri said. “It’s real heavy. She turns around and says, ‘Oh Nono, I think we found somebody’s last will and testament. It’s heavy and it’s a treasure chest.”

She was about nine years old. A few minutes later she told him that they needed to put an ad in the local paper.

“For what?” he asked.

“For lost and found,” she told him. “This is a real treasure, Nono.”

He never told her the real story.

Baccellieri’s daughter Rachel is a second grade school teacher with a degree in early childhood education. His son Michael Raymond has a diesel certification.

“He did five tours in the middle east,” Baccellieri said.

“Mostly with the 2nd Sniper Battalion. Leopold Optics, the scope company, picked him up. They fly him all over the world. He built a huge range in Madras where the targets are two, two and half miles. He teaches long range shooting and special tactics.”

“He is my hero, both the kids are,” he said. “My wife did an incredible job and these kids are amazing.”

Baccellieri restored his first boat when he was seven. He restores boats and builds them now, some as donations.

“I have so much fun,” he said. “I have fun pouring concrete. I have fun digging ditches. If there are people there to associate with, life is pretty darn good.”

“For the most part, life is good,” he smiled. “I have too many blessings to count.”