June Miller, Ed Miller, Scott Miller, Kimberly Miller, Peyton Miller
MAKING IT WORK
THE MILLER COMPANY CELEBRATES FOUR DECADES Writer / Christy Heitger-Ewing Photography Provided
In 1978, Ed and June Miller opened The Miller Company, a copier business that originally operated out of a garage. “Mom and dad started it out of my great aunt Jenny’s garage,” says Ed and June’s son Scott Miller, CEO of Miller Company, Inc. “She loaned my parents $10,000 to start the business. Prior to that, dad was a school teacher at Valley High School.” Through the years, the company expanded and moved three times. Currently, they are located in a 25,000-square-foot facility in Bluegrass Industrial Park. Just before COVID-19 hit last spring, they had finished a beautiful $250,000 renovation of their
lunch-and-learn room, their showroom, and their Google lounge for employees and customers. They had planned to host a 200-person March Madness party, which unfortunately was cancelled. “That was the beginning of the end,” Scott says. “We’re still waiting for people to come look at our renovation.” Though they have always been a copier company, primarily representing Sharp Electronics, they have also done business with a number of other manufacturers. In the last three years, their main thrust has been technology as they focus on solutions in phone information technology (IT), cabling, security, and wide-format printers. “Cannon, Sharp and HP are our primary 22 / AUGUST 2021
vendors at the moment,” Scott says. “We have hundreds of them in the IT world, which is what has kept us in business during the pandemic.” They are one of the area’s largest independently owned copier dealerships and IT service providers. Although their copier business suffered a nearly 80% hit in revenue for hardware sales, IT is up 2,000%. Through the years, Scott has tried to keep up with technological changes. When Scott joined the company in the early 1990s, the fax machine had just been introduced. Before long, the facsimile became about 35% of the company’s revenue stream. By the time Scott took over in 2005 as president, the fax machine had all but died when people began scanning and emailing documents rather than faxing them.
