Miller Electric Company

Growing along with clients┬áIn the past two decades, Miller Electric Company has seen exponential growth and expanded into a more diversified business. The companyÔÇÖs president tells Keith Regan that the growth can be traced to the firmÔÇÖs customer-first philosophy.  Miller Electric Company is just a few years shy of celebrating 100 years in business. After decades as a small but reliable provider of electric contracting services, Miller grew and expanded rapidly during the 1980s and 1990s.   Today itÔÇÖs a $70 million a year diversified business, with a 50-employee integrated networking division offering fiber optics and voice and data services as well as a 20-truck services unit that now operates alongside the electrical contracting business. Miller also recently added TEGG Services, a franchise operation that provides electrical predictive and preventive maintenance services to commercial and industrial companies, a fast-growing segment of the electrical services industry. Some things have remained unchanged over the years, however, says MillerÔÇÖs president, Ray Bruegman, who joined the Omaha, Nebraska, firm 23 years ago. ÔÇ£Basically, most of the growth of this firm is dedicated to the success of our clients,ÔÇØ he says. ÔÇ£WeÔÇÖve added new clients over time, but much of it comes from the way our existing clients have grown and how weÔÇÖve grown along with them.ÔÇØ For instance, the firm may have started providing electrical contracting services to a regional hospital that, through acquisition, grew into a multi-campus healthcare provider, with Miller providing services as the expansion unfolded. ÔÇ£WeÔÇÖre very strong in customer service. ItÔÇÖs really our main focus in life as a company,ÔÇØ Bruegman says. ÔÇ£A lot of guys in the construction industry like to do a project and walk away the day itÔÇÖs done and hope there are no phone calls back within the one-year warranty period. WeÔÇÖve always taken the opposite approach and stayed in close contact with our customers long after a job is done.ÔÇØ In one recent case, Miller, which serves the eastern Nebraska region as well as parts of southwestern Iowa, went back to a customer who had a small problem four years after a project was done to complete the repair work at no cost. Bruegman credits the firmÔÇÖs flat and employee-focused operating structure for its ability to deliver such close care to customers. Miller is fully employee-owned and rather than have a top-down management approach, the firm is set up as 13 small and independent teams, headed by project managers, each of whom is responsible for bringing in work and maintaining those customers over the long term. ÔÇ£They do the bid-buy stuff because you have to do that, but the main focus is on maintaining relationships,ÔÇØ Bruegman says. ÔÇ£The idea has always been to put the right people on the bus, keep them there, and let it sort of take care of itself.ÔÇØThose project teams operate essentially as smaller firms, each motivated by ownership in the companyÔÇöemployees bought out the previous ownership in the mid 1980sÔÇöto cultivate relationships with customers and bring in new work. Those smaller project teams also enjoy the resources of a much larger company, including MillerÔÇÖs engineering staff, which is capable of producing extensive documentation and control systems for customers using AutoCAD design programs, as well as a large estimating team that can quickly turn around project budgets.┬áThe long-term payoff for doing right by customers can be significant. Miller recently completed a multi-phase project for Alegent Health, when it expanded its Lakeside Hospital in Omaha, one of a number of projects the firm has done for Alegent and its predecessors over the years. Miller also worked on the original construction of the hospital, which is now being doubled in size. In fact, Miller did work on hospitals in what is now the Alegent family as far back as 1969 and during the 1970s did repair work on another hospital in the chain after a tornado ripped through the region. When three separate healthcare companies merged in the 1980s, the firmÔÇÖs relationship with the hospital system was strengthened further. For the Lakeside expansion, Miller provided electrical as well as integrated networking services, becoming involved early on in the design phase and providing ongoing maintenance and services as well. The hospital was built with a state-of-the-art wireless network to enable healthcare professionals to stay connected as they move between patient rooms and record data on mobile computing carts.Another recent project in which Miller played a key role was the construction of a 15-story research tower at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. Miller had worked with the predecessor entity, Clarkson Hospital, as long as 15 years ago and maintained strong ties. Still, as a public project, Miller was required to submit bids to win the work, which included both electrical and networking assistance, including fiber-optic data networks and paging systems. Other recent projects in the Miller portfolio include the new customer contact center for PayPal in LaVista, Nebraska; the Holland Performing Arts Center in downtown Omaha; the Hixson-Lied Science Building at Creighton University; and a two-phase project to equip both a new corporate headquarters and data operations center for Bank of the West in Omaha. Healthcare and data center clients are helping to keep Miller from seeing an overly dramatic slowdown during the current economic malaise. In fact, by mid-December the firm was already projecting revenue for 2009 at 75 percent of 2008, though most of that work is slated for the first three quarters of the year. ÔÇ£Our focus now is on keeping customers happy and working to fill out the rest of our work calendar,ÔÇØ says Bruegman. ÔÇ£We know that if we keep that focus on our customers, things will continue to grow for us.ÔÇØ ÔÇô Editorial research by Steven Shah┬á