Editor's note: MLive readers and hubs chose 13 Michiganders to Watch in 2013. You'll see mini-profiles of the choices all this week. For the entire list, which we'll update every day with profile links, click here.

Mark Sellers, 44, of Grand Rapids

Bar/brewery owner

Sellers, a former Chicago hedge fund manager, has become the king of the Grand Rapids Arena District after spending millions to open HopCat, Stella's Lounge, buy McFadden's Pub, and help finance the Pyramid Scheme venue, and most recently, reboot the defunct Grand Rapids Brewing Co.

Prodded by Sellers, HopCat fans helped christen Grand Rapids with the honorary crown of "Beer City USA 2012," a title that helped draw microbrew lovers from around the country to West Michigan, where the beer industry is experiencing a surge in interest, investment and employment.

In 2013, Sellers is bringing his successful formula — he only opens bars he'd want to hang out in — to Lansing where he plans to revive Lansing Brewing Co. and open a second HopCat location.

Five things to know about Mark Sellers:

• He controls the Titanic, kind of. Sellers is chairman of Premier Exhibitions Inc., a company with exclusive salvage rights to the Titanic shipwreck, and which hosts the traveling museum exhibition coming to Grand Rapids in 2013. Through the same company, he controls the Bodies Revealed exhibition that visited Grand Rapids in 2010.

• He plays a mean piano. Sellers, a 1986 East Kentwood High School graduate, dropped out of MSU after a year and went to Berklee College of Music in Boston for a semester before moving to Los Angeles to play music and live the life of a “wandering hippie.” He returned and graduated from MSU in 1998 and earned an MBA from Northwestern University.

• The bar business was a steep learning curve. HopCat sets record sales numbers now (did $3.3 million in 2011), but the bar nearly went broke the first year. Sellers had to pump $50,000 of his own cash into the bar in order to make payroll shortly after opening.

• His wife, Michele, helps keep the business on an even keel. Michele Sellers is heavily involved in the couple’s company, BarFly Ventures LLC. She interviews all incoming staff, works with management to develop policy, writes the content for the bars’ websites and functions as a kind of stabling agent for her husband. “I am far more risk averse than he is," she admits. Also, it was Michele who was home brewing in college.

• He feels fortunate: “If you’d have told me 10 years ago that I’d own the No. 3 best beer bar in the world and control the Titanic shipwreck, I’d have asked you what you were smoking — none of this was the plan.”

Tomorrow: Roger Curtis, Michigan international Speedway, and Dan Gilbert, Quicken Loans.