Profile of Bill Miller

This is nine years old, but it’s a great profile of Bill Miller, of Miller Industries (MLR).

Here’s a sample:

HE’S the factory worker’s son who rides a Harley Davidson, employs 2000 people, never wears a suit and has no known interest in football – or soccer as he would call it in his US drawl.

Meet the Vietnam veteran and espionage expert destined to be new owner of crisis-hit Rangers – semi-retired trucking mogul William “Call Me Bill” Miller.

A millionaire several times over, he’s one of the wealthiest men in the southern US state of Georgia.

(…)

Miller, 65, became a high flyer in industry and his career has brought some high profile disasters along the way. But his rise from factory floor to the boardroom has been spectacular.

In the 1950s, he was a blue collar boy with the ambition of working as a line supervisor for Ford in Detroit.

But his dad told him: “At my plant, the guys with college degrees walk around all day doing nothing and making lots of money.”

That sealed the deal and Miller enrolled at the University of Michigan, where he earned a degree in engineering and later an MBA.

After college, he worked for various big firms, typically getting involved in troubleshooting in failing departments.

During national service, he served in Army intelligence where he was an expert codebreaker.

He was just 12 miles from the Czech border in 1968 when Russian tanks rolled in to quell the Prague Spring uprising.

Miller – who also studied at the military language school in Monterey, California – again worked for intelligence while in Vietnam.

(…)

In 1990, he bought three formerly great tow truck companies that were crippled with debt and combined them to form Miller Group.

He then set up a series of savage cuts to bring back profitability.

Miller told business magazine Forbes: “The big companies weren’t geared toward the shareholders. They were geared toward a bureaucracy.”

In August 1994, a shares flotation brought in $30 million, of which Miller pocketed his original $5 million investment.

Two years later, a North Carolina tow truck distributor told Forbes that Miller “came along and he healed the sick.”

But Miller’s run of success was not to last forever. In 1997, he created RoadOne, a US towing company, and then acquired 34 towing service firms. RoadOne, however, crashed in 2005.

Miller’s stock was devalued by more than $100 million before he managed to get the company’s fortunes back into line.

Now he is America’s top manufacturer of tow trucks and wrecking machines – a massively lucrative market in the motor-obsessed US.

Away from work, keep-fit enthusiast Miller is known as a family man who likes the outdoor life. He rides a Harley Davidson motorbike and still plays tennis and golf.

One source in Chattanooga said: “Bill Miller isn’t quite Bill Gates but, in the world of tow trucks, he is a giant.

“He is known to like the look of once great industries, with a tradition behind them, which have fallen on hard times. He reckons that such a challenge can bring a tidy profit if it’s done right.

Posted by on March 30th, 2021 at 3:26 pm


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