Sheila and Mike Ingram to help Honors College become one of nation's best

Photos by Ralph Freso/GCU News

Mike Ingram sits at a big desk in front of a big window overlooking a big golf course so picture-perfect it looks like some kind of posh Scottsdale movie set. Yet artwork of horses, John Wayne and wild desert landscapes adorn his office.

The powerfully successful co-founder and chairman of El Dorado Holdings, one of Arizona’s leading real estate development companies, fits right in with that Western aesthetic.

But today, he’s missing his cowboy hat.

“Can you get my hat? I left it in the pickup,” he calls out to an assistant.

The cowboy hat and suit, the symbol of a formal body of work topped by an unpretentious head, is not merely a brand. For this all-hat-and-all-cowboy man, his Western wear marks humble beginnings. They symbolize the hard work of a gentleman cowboy – a man of his word who takes off his hat if there’s a lady in the elevator.

That’s what Ingram reminded folks, off the cuff, at a February press conference at Grand Canyon University to announce the naming of the Sheila and Mike Ingram Honors College.

“My hat goes off to you and the students of this university,” he said that day.

The benefactor is helping the college in its efforts to become one of the finest in the land, with a renovated 51,000-square-foot building expected to be completed by fall 2026 that will be a collaborative and communal hub for honors students who share a mission rooted in Christ.

But in his office, he doesn’t talk about big buildings or golf – he only plays a round a year these days for charity. Instead, he talks about people who inspired him.

One wall is full of their photos with him, such as musician Reba McEntire, who visits his Montana ranch every year, as well as actor Kevin Costner, politician Mike Pence and Hall of Fame quarterback John Elway.

It doesn’t feel like name-dropping. He’s just as likely to talk at length about late author and motivational speaker Zig Ziglar, perhaps famous only to those keen to self-help salesman inspiration. He shared both friendship with Ziglar and his core philosophies.

“You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help enough other people get what they want,” Ziglar wrote, in addition to his celebrated quote: “Your attitude, not your aptitude, will determine your altitude.”

Ninety minutes march toward two hours, and Ingram talks, walking around the office, before stopping to share what he calls “the power of women.”

It was important that his wife Sheila’s name is not only on the honors building at GCU but is listed first – and he kept it a surprise to her until the press conference.

“She’s been with me through everything, even when we had little and rented a house in Phoenix for 1½ years,” he said.

And another woman had power, his mother Maude. When she died, the loyal women employees of the office were there for him as he was crushed with grief.

“She was a single mom,” he said of his mother, his voice cracking with emotion. “It was just me and her. We held to each other tight.”

Ingram’s father died of cancer when he was 13. The single child had followed him around all day at the Navajo Motel they owned in Roswell, New Mexico. His mother was left with the motel and worried about being able to pay the monthly $1,306 mortgage.

“She was scared to death, and the fear you could see every night,” he said of those days in the late 1950s. “She had an eighth grade education and really prayed every night. Both of us prayed every night for the Lord to see us through.”

Mike took to baling hay for farmers in cooler evenings, only to rise early to help clean rooms or try to fix the TVs in themAt the same time, Sheila Ingram wasn’t having it much better in Oklahoma.

“My parents were poor, and I lived with an alcoholic father, the reason I was married at 17,” she said.

She walked the high school graduation stage a pregnant wife but soon realized that being like her saintly mom, who could cook up a storm in the very apron she made by hand, was not her calling.

Painfully shy but determined, she went to the local Stock Yards Bank to ask for a job. They put her in the back, working numbers.

Then one day she didn’t get her bonus and was told it was because she made a few errors. But being shy doesn’t mean you don’t speak up. She asked for the records and found that the errors occurred when she was out ill.

“I went 10 years without a mistake,” she said of her accounting. “I was not going to college. I wanted to be the best I could be at what I was doing.

“I’m a perfectionist,” she said.

Mike was in New Mexico perfecting another skill. College grades weren’t his distinction, although he earned a scholarship for swimming at Texas Tech before getting married and finishing his studies at New Mexico State because it had in-state tuition.

After working two years in a slaughterhouse factory counting bodies on the kill floor, he landed a job at Merck & Co., which sold animal pharmaceuticals. The boss liked his interview answer: “I’ll make you a good hand.”

At night, he sold vacuum cleaners door to door for extra money. Housewives were offered either steak knives or a free carpet cleaning. The other salesmen were happy to just hand over steak knives and get home, he said, but he pushed to clean not only a single carpet but finish up whatever else was dirty.

“I’m selling two, three a night, I mean every night, and pretty soon I’m their top salesman,” he said. “It taught me a real lesson. You always go over and beyond what the deal called for.”

By 1972, he left to begin a partnership in a new animal pharma company, Tufts & Son of Oklahoma Inc.

He has a sales story for that, too: Ingram risked buying a large quantity of rat poison at a lower cost, which he distributed to retailers. He used part of the savings to purchase a gross of rifles that he would give away to whomever bought enough rat poison. He more than made up the difference, and business soared.

Then one day, he went across the street to Stock Yards Bank to use the office. It was locked.

Sheila was at the door, telling him it wasn’t open yet. He talked his way into the bank and she let him in.

Not long after, Sheila started working as his assistant, using her skills with invoices and detail-oriented tasks.

They worked hard together, but the two divorcees soon found a deeper bond. He had three boys, she had two children.

“Pretty soon he starts asking me, ‘I’ve got boys that are rowdy. Why don’t we get dinner together so they have somebody to talk to and I can eat?’” Sheila said.

“We didn’t go on a date by ourselves.”

After they married, they had another child to add to the brood, a time he remembers so vividly that his voice cracks again.

“She raised three kids that weren’t hers, and they were pills after their mother left,” he said.

Sheila said she just tried to have compassion and love for boys without a mother.

But life wasn’t always easy. When an oil crisis hit in the mid-1980s and Oklahoma banks closed, Mike’s business had to be sold.

He remembers that time as dark, so much so that one night when they were on a trip they had won, he wallowed alone in self-pity in his motel room.

Then the Jerry Lewis telethon came on TV, and he was struck by kids fighting multiple sclerosis not feeling sorry for themselves. Sheila returned to the room a short time later and handed him the book “The Be Happy Attitudes” by Dr. Robert Schuller, a Christian evangelist. He read it all night.

“I knew then that a positive attitude had to rule my life,” he wrote in his book, “Success Demands a Master Plan.”

“Here is what I learned: Life is not all about me. It’s about others.”

By the time the couple moved to Phoenix in 1985 – with Sheila saying she “cried the whole way” – he was a determined man, quickly getting into the real estate business. They didn’t have much, renting a home for all the kids and working toward a future.

He bought two ranches that John Wayne owned for more than 40 years and had a vision to develop the nearby small town of Maricopa between Phoenix and Casa Grande. It was not much more than dry desert and a gas station. People told him he was crazy.

But Ingram worked tirelessly after co-founding El Dorado Holdings to make his vision come true with a truism he lives by – to develop land, you must create value on it. That meant getting a better road to Maricopa. For more than a decade, he worked on it, finally clearing government and zoning hurdles to have the four-lane State Route 347 constructed.

Today, he could be considered the father of the town. By creating Rancho El Dorado and sister subdivisions, Maricopa has gone from roughly 500 people to nearly 85,000 people today with Mike Ingram Heritage Park in the middle of town.

With developments in Gilbert, Chandler and other East Valley suburbs, and with new ones planned near the White Tanks to the west, his company is one of area’s largest private landholders, with assets exceeding $1 billion.

Sheila didn’t rest on these new comforts, even though the two are opposite personalities. She is still shy and can spend the whole day at home, she said, while Mike “even if he’s driving his pickup, needs someone to come with him. He’s a networker and I’m a doer. We complement each other.”

She got heavily involved in helping others with charities, such as the Crisis Pregnancy Centers, the Phoenix Heart Ball, the Trends Charitable Foundation and countless others.

At one Crisis Pregnancy fundraiser, she remembers helping raise more than $2 million, the most ever, she said, and “I felt I had accomplished something.”

Mike was busy not only improving his business but himself. When Campus Crusade for Christ’s Dr. Bill Bright asked him if Jesus was his first love, it stuck with him. He keeps a reminder in his pickup, a decal with the simple question, “First Love?”

“It’s a question I try to answer every single day, and I look at it every day,” he said.

He began to attend Bible studies with former Phoenix Suns and Arizona Diamondbacks owner Jerry Colangelo and other financially successful businessmen. It was Colangelo who introduced him to GCU.

“I have nothing but great respect for him regarding his heart. He cares about people,” Colangelo said. “He wants to help people and do his part spreading the gospel.”

He invited him to GCU basketball games, and Ingram took to it immediately. They absorb great energy from the students. They sit in the same row, Ingram visible with his big cowboy hat. Ingram decided to lend more support to the basketball program and the college.

“He brings a corral of people with him,” Colangelo said.

One night this winter, he brought nearly 100 of his successful friends to a suite for a game.

“He is one of the best people persons I have ever known,” said Red Steagall, a legendary singer-songwriter and cowboy poet from Texas. “He can fill a bus full of like-minded people so quick it would make your head spin.”

The two talk daily, share a love of Western art, which fills the Ingrams’ Paradise Valley home, and often commune with Reba McEntire and others on his ranches in Montana for riding and shooting.

“He is truly as good of a friend as I had in my life or ever hope to have. We stand on the same platform: love of the Lord, love of our family, love of our country and each other.”

He never forgets those friends. When he penned the first edition of his book in 2012, Ziglar wrote the foreward after striking up a friendship with him at a seminar long ago. He wrote that Ingram fits his mantra that by helping others succeed, you succeed.

Mike and Sheila repeat it often, and it was nationally recognized in 2019 when Mike received the Horatio Alger Award for those who overcome great odds and use their success to help others.

“We are humble people. Our life is serving others,” Sheila said. “That’s what Jesus did.”

It’s why both were humbled to stand before what they saw as polished and enthusiastic students in February to announce the honors building with their name. Education is important to them; although they weren’t honors students, they know its value.

GCU President Brian Mueller said Ingram is not only someone who has more friends than anybody he has ever met but is determined that “once he is in, he is all in.”

It’s a pressure that Ingram says he always feels. He never wanted to let his investors down. And now that he’s in with GCU on its Board of Trustees and as a major benefactor, he wants to do all he can.

“I enjoy putting things together, helping people meet, helping people get what they want in life,” he said.

With that, he touches his hat brim and continues down what Sheila calls his office hallway’s “Wall of Fame.”

“And here is Tom Brokaw, yeah he’s spent a lot of time with me hunting,” he said, “and Dr. James Dobson, who started Focus on the Family, and have you guys seen these? Gary Sinise, Lt. Dan and ‘CSI” – I asked him, ‘You’re telling me you’ve never shot a gun?’ and he says, ‘They’re not real guns.’ And here’s the ‘Chicken Soup for the Soul’ guy, Mark Victor Hansen…”

And on he goes, an 81-year-old man with enormous energy, a lifetime of memories and success he wants to share.