The military shaped – and continues to shape – Mike Crawford’s life.

From building businesses to coaching youth sports to surviving a near-fatal diagnosis, the discipline and other skills he learned never left him.

“It’s one of those things where you treat people with respect,” Crawford said. “Just like my commanding officers showed me how to do things by doing them the correct way. I try to embrace that in my businesses. Everybody has a voice. Everybody has a role. They all have a role which is their fundamental mission, but they all add to the greater good in many other areas in a way I don’t think enough employers really embrace.”

Crawford, 56, founded MED Alliance, a high-end medical supply company, in Sycamore 25 years ago. He also opened Hobnobbers, a sports bar in Sycamore, 11 years ago.

He has two sons in college, Alex and Zack, both of whom attended Wartburg after graduating from Sycamore. Alex graduated in 2025 and Zack still attends. Both wrestled in college and with the Spartans.

Mike Crawford also wrestled at Wartburg and graduated in 1991 after growing up in Watertown, Wisconsin – about 100 miles north of Sycamore. His father – also named Michael Crawford – was a U.S. Marine.

Initially, Crawford said he wanted to be a doctor.

“After my first semester report card, I changed that little pathway,” he said.

Though his grades ended his dream of becoming a doctor, Crawford stayed close to the medical field, starting in sales and working his way into management by his late 20s. The company was sold and he got a good severance package.

“Instead of buying a Harley Davidson or something, I rolled the dice and started my own company,” Crawford said. “And it turned into something I’m really proud of.”

The bulk of Crawford’s military career was with the Iowa and Wisconsin National Guards and the U.S. Army Reserve, with his honorable discharge from the Army.

He didn’t serve overseas or see combat during the first Gulf War, as the short conflict was over by the time he graduated. So he served in the Wisconsin National Guard. He was mostly in supply-chain management.

Crawford said there’s a lot of overlap between what he learned in the Army and running MED Alliance.

“It’s surprisingly exactly what I was doing in the military,” Crawford said. “I have a larger umbrella, but supply chain management is what we do. And the medical device world is very regulated. So there’s a lot that goes into it.”

In 2014 he bought Hobnobbers, formerly Muggzies, in Sycamore. He said he hasn’t drawn a single paycheck from the restaurant. The establishment sponsors youth sports, adult recreational leagues, and is a big sponsor of Sycamore athletics.

When the high school installed its video boards in 2017, Hobnobbers was among the first to have commercials. They still do eight years later.

“Mike’s awesome. He’s truly great for the community,” Sycamore athletic director Chauncey Carrick said. “He’s been generous to Sycamore High School and Sycamore athletics. He goes above and beyond for us. We’re really lucky.”

Carrick, a former head wrestling coach at the high school, said Crawford also was the president of the wrestling club for almost a decade.

He also coached youth football. And once again, he said the lessons learned in the military came in handy.

“From the time we stepped on the field to the time practice was over ... it was business,” Crawford said. “Everyone has a role from getting there, preparing, making sure your equipment’s good, your uniform is correct, to the warm-up activities. And then our game day protocol, which we learned through good practicing skills. ... You could just see the kids excel in that sort of an environment.”

All the skills that helped Crawford earlier in his life got put to the test in 2023 when he was eventually diagnosed with a rare liver disease. He started feeling bad early in the year, to the point where he stopped drinking as a precautionary measure. He ended up in the emergency room with a dead gallbladder, and by late October 2023 was diagnosed with a rare liver disease.

He was given four months to live without a transplant. Fortunately, he got the transplant five days later.

At the time, however, he wasn’t sure when or even if the liver would come. So he entered survival mode. He wanted to make sure his sons were in good shape if he died. He had heard stories about families needing years to untangle estates they inherited. He said he wanted it to be a weekend project for his kids.

So even with extreme uncertainty about his survival looking over him, he made a list of hundreds of items for his children. Passwords, contact information for lawyers, anything he could think of.

“The mental toughness was the one thing that kept me rolling,” Crawford said. “You do a lot of things in life, and now that it’s coming to an end at a fairly young age, the mental toughness, I learned it through wrestling and I learned it through the military.”

He also said he was blessed after the transplant with the generosity of the Sycamore community. He still needed a lot of help for about five months after the surgery, and he had so many offers for assistance he could not accept them all.

Randy Culton, currently the Sycamore wrestling coach and a long-time youth coach with Crawford, said the support Crawford received during his recovery shows exactly what he means to the community.

“He’d rather give to others than receive,” Culton said. “He doesn’t want anyone feeling sorry for him. He would do anything for anybody in the blink of an eye. He gives so much to everybody that everybody and their brother tried to help him out because of the things he’s done.”