He dropped out of high school to run his family's Wyoming machine shop. Now he's betting on the future of energy itself.

Mike Wandler started at his family's machine shop when he was fourteen, sweeping floors after middle school. He came up during the oil-field crashes that emptied out the shop floor, which meant a kid willing to work got chances fast. He bought into the company at eighteen, dropped out of high school ("most entrepreneurs do," he says), and by 2000 had become president of L&H Industrial, the third-generation heavy-industrial company his family founded in Gillette, Wyoming, in 1964.

He inherited more than a business. He inherited a culture. L&H came up out of the rough oil-field world of the 1970s, his father "screaming at people all day," and for decades the company lost nearly a third of its people every year. Thirty percent turnover, year after year, which is normal for heavy industry and maddening to live with.

Mike spent over a decade working on the problem. In 2012, turnover dropped to 3%. He remembers calling his HR director, stunned: "Did we do something?" It's held there ever since, now down to 2%, driven by an investment in mental fitness and resilience that most industrial shops would never think to make. He's run the numbers on what that retention is worth to a company his size. It comes to roughly $15 million a year.

Today L&H transforms the biggest machines on Earth, the giant shovels and draglines of global mining, and even NASA's crawler-transporter, the machine that carries rockets to the launch pad. The company runs across the U.S. and internationally with some 500 people, and this year Mike and his son Gage were named among Wyoming's Small Business Persons of the Year by the SBA.

He credits a lot of the momentum to Abundance360, which he joined in 2018 and was "hooked immediately." Peter gave him "the download" on what was coming, so he no longer had to scan the future alone. When Peter told the room to appoint an AI czar, Mike handed the role to Gage, and today more than fifty people across L&H build their own AI tools. His approach is refreshingly un-corporate: "My people are creating software every day on the fly that's personal to them, for free."

Now Mike is chasing his biggest bet yet. Through Evercore Energy, he wants to own microreactors and lease clean, reliable power to the mining operations that need it most, a market he believes someone in the free world has to build. He'll tell you he's still early, waiting for the technology to scale. But he's spent his whole life getting machines ready before the world was.

"Being plugged into this world," he says, "has been a game changer for me, my company, my family, and my health." He's set his longevity goals at 200 years. Whether or not he gets there, he says, the quality of the years will be better for "being hooked into this tribe."

“The Abundance Membership: Where leaders gather to go big, create wealth and uplift humanity” - Peter Diamandis

Six hundred leaders. One shared mission: Using exponential technologies to go big, create wealth and uplift humanity.

The Abundance Community believes that the world’s biggest problems, when solved, are the world’s biggest business opportunities. We believe that the best way to become a billionaire is to help a billion people.

We believe that abundance is our destiny.

You've proven you can create value. Your track record speaks for itself: the deals closed, the teams inspired, the shareholders rewarded.

Today, you're motivated to transform that success into global significance. To deploy your accumulated capabilities (your capital, your network, your hard-won expertise) toward solving challenges that matter at civilizational scale.

If this is you, you've found the right place.