Photos by Jane Colclasure
Mr. Cool — Bill Miller carried forward the family legacy of R&E Supply through determination, consistency
There is nothing exactly simple about the life of an entrepreneur, especially someone like Bill Miller, whose company, R&E Supply, was founded during the 1940s. Market changes, technology upgrades and the winds of fate have derailed many an otherwise sound enterprise or killed it on the vine for want of a new generation to take over, yet R&E continues to thrive to this day.
Miller was not immune to those challenges, of course, but withstood them through a remarkably consistent and straightforward set of principles — hard work, heeding good advice and leveraging born-in commitment to doing the little things that spelled the difference between survival and shutting the doors — all of which, Miller said, he witnessed firsthand in his father and company founder, Carl Miller Sr.
“The biggest thing he taught was customer service. That was basically his whole theme, and that’s what we do today,” Bill said. “One of the other things that Dad always said is, ‘Don’t worry about your competition. If you’re giving the right customer service and taking care of your accounts, you don’t have to worry about them,’ so we never did pay much attention to our competition. We just depended on what we did and focused on giving the best customer service in town.”
Bill might not have made note of his father’s dedication to the family company early on in life, when he and his older brother would scamper and play around in the store. Later, however, that commitment to doing things right came into sharp focus as he saw what it meant to be all in on one’s venture.
“The thing that I realized about him particularly was when he and Mom went on a world trip, I think they were gone probably over a year,” he said. “When they got back, they came in the store in the afternoon, and I looked at him, and I thought, ‘My gosh, this isn’t my dad. He looks like he’s dead.’
“The next morning when I came in — I guess I came in around 7 — he had already been there since 6. He was blowing and going, looking like himself. Mind you, this is after he’d pretty much turned things over to my brother and me. That’s when I realized this is not his work. This is what he loves doing.”
Carl founded his venture in the 1940s after seeing a major technological revolution in the making in Arkansas at that time. Having earned his engineering degree from Kansas State University, Carl saw how rural electrification would transform the state in many ways, not the least of which was through the ready availability of refrigeration.
Where there was electricity there were appliances and, with that, service companies that required parts and components to keep things running. Thus was born Refrigeration Supply Co., as it was originally called, which today is considered a wholesaler of choice, providing heating, ventilation, air conditioning and refrigeration components to service companies.
“Once the infrastructure was in place, Dad developed from the appliance business into the commercial residential business, and we were carrying both electrical and refrigeration, heating and air at that point in time,” Bill said. “That would be in the ‘50s through probably the ‘70s or ‘80s. In the 1980s, we decided there were way too many competitors in the electrical business, so we stuck with the refrigeration and the heating and air conditioning business.”
By the time Bill graduated from Hall High School, now Hall-West High School of Innovation, in Little Rock in 1962, Carl had repeatedly shown the depth of his commitment to the company, even borrowing against a life insurance policy to relocate and reopen after a fire destroyed the building and inventory. Such acts inspired Bill to his own achievement. He was president of a high school graduating class loaded with future success stories and graduated from the electrical engineering program at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. From there, he made a beeline back home to Little Rock, where he took his place alongside his older brother, Carl Miller Jr., following their dad’s lead.
“Carl and I were basically tasked with running the business with Dad,” Bill said. “My brother’s nine years older than I am, and he and I are different. He’s a technical guy, so he knew all the answers for the service tech guys that had control problems. He could answer all of them. I’m a promoter, and I was the one that did most of the buying of the properties and expansion of our business. It worked out well.”
Bill did not have to wait long to show what he could do, taking the lead on the company’s first expansion to Pine Bluff.
“We had a customer in Pine Bluff that decided he was going to be in the wholesale business, which normally doesn’t work very well, especially when the competitors get wind of it,” Bill said, “but anyway, he opened up this company, and it ran for a good six months or so. Then finally, sure enough, everybody got wind of it, and he came to us and wanted to know if we wanted to buy it. That’s how we got into that market.”
A third location followed before the decade, this one in Hot Springs, and during the 1980s, two more locations opened in Russellville and Conway. In time, stores in Searcy, Jonesboro and Fort Smith would be added to the company network, giving R&E clients a direct local connection to the company in most of the population centers in the state.
Along the way, Bill also drove the company’s technology upgrades, starting in the mid 1980s.
“Our computers were called Datapoint. They were made down in Texas and were one of the first computers that had a platform for multiple locations,” he said. “We also developed our software ourselves, and it was quite adequate for us for a long time, until probably 2005, somewhere in there. [Artificial intelligence] is something we’re actively working on right now with a partner in California. We’re trying to stay ahead of the game.”
Remind Bill that not many 81-year-olds are tuned in to the benefits of AI and other emerging tech, and he just shrugs.
“I’ve always seen [information technology] as being a process for the future,” he said. “Back when I was in high school, I knew there were so many research and development programs going on, you know, during the scientific age when we were in the space race. One of my thoughts at the time was to have some type of capability of being able to digitize all that information and then have a network around the world where you could see the actual data.”
The adoption of computers paid other dividends, as well, allowing for better inventory management, internal communications and, especially, staff training. Bill said any operation is only as successful as its people, which is why the company goes out of its way to provide for employees’ development and career satisfaction.
“Employee relations are one of our big things. We treat everyone like family. That’s in our mission statement,” he said. “We set up a lot of training seminars led by people on our staff who do a lot of training on the technical side, refrigeration and air conditioning. We also put our employees through a lot of online training, monitoring their work and accuracy.
“It’s a big task, and it’s a lot of expense that customers don’t see. It sets us apart because we’re all kind of in the same boat in our industry in that there are very few people that are being formally trained for our type of business. That’s one of the things we’re working on with the state right now, trying to get some more training in tech schools that are toward HVAC and commercial refrigeration.”
A well-trained, customer-centric staff has become increasingly critical through the years as independent wholesalers such as R&E Supply become more scarce and the ones that do remain find themselves competing against huge national wholesalers, particularly as clients themselves have consolidated.
“In the old days, our biggest competition was an outfit out of Nashville, Tennessee, and they’ve been a good competitor in the fact that we’ve always cooperated with each other and helped each other. It’s never been a mean competition,” he said. “When the big boys came in, it became a little bit different flavor because they have national accounts, and they use that to try to force us out.
“The biggest problem we have is not necessarily in the area; it’s when the actual decision goes to somebody else that’s not in our local area. It’s very difficult to convince somebody in St. Louis, Missouri, who already has their connections with these other companies that we can do as good or even a better job. Just like any bureaucracy, the bigger a client company gets, the more it loses the tune of the marketplace.”
Bill, who attained full ownership of the company in 2010, said the company’s fundamental focus on customer service has again and again proven the differentiator against mounting competition and has the company thinking more growth as it looks to the future.
“When we look ahead, we do have some in-state growth plans,” he said. “In our business, the clientele that we sell to are mostly maintenance-type clients, so if you have a new area like northwest Arkansas, which is not exactly new anymore, you have to wait for it to get to the point where stuff is breaking down. It depends a lot on the maturity of the area and what’s coming down the pike for the area.”
True to his track record, Bill is looking to innovate in the company’s expansion, tinkering with a store model that is smaller and more nimble than previous locations and stressing speed of delivery, along with the company’s trademark product knowledge and focus on client fulfilment.
“We’ve thought about some smaller type of footprint, smaller service areas,” he said. “The main thing clients want is their materials quickly. That’s, of course, how Amazon has been successful — you’ve got to get the product to them in a timely fashion.”
Bill’s other project for the future lies in mentoring his son, Cory, currently vice president, to one day step in as third-generation ownership.
“I’ve never pushed the company on him, but I have kept him involved. I’d take him down there a lot as a kid, and he’s kind of grown up with that around him,” Bill said. “A few years ago, when my wife and I decided to take some trips, I decided I’d try him out. I said, ‘Cory, I’m going to let you run the company while I’m gone.’ Of course, I have a good staff that helped him, so it wasn’t like I was leaving it to him all by himself, and he really didn’t have to call me for that much.
“We were gone, I guess, probably two months, and when I got back, everybody really seemed to like him. It just bloomed from there. He’s not a wimp. He doesn’t let people roll over him, which can be a problem, but he also understands how to handle employee and customer relations well. I’m just real proud of him. He’s twice as capable as I ever was.”
Miller has helped drive the company’s technological
innovation over the years and continues that work today.
BILL MILLER ON PEOPLE
“I think all people really have a lot of good in them. It’s just a matter of bringing it out. That said, some people are more alive than others, if that’s a way to describe it. You can find out a lot more about them because of their attitude. Remember, you can teach someone new material, but you cannot develop a new attitude in them, and if you don’t get the right attitude in a person, you’ll never see them succeed in that position. That’s the one thing I could probably say is true for all people.”
BILL MILLER ON WHAT THEY DON’T TEACH IN SCHOOL ABOUT BUSINESS
“You’ve got to know who you can depend on and who you can trust. That trust is the main thing. If you can ever get trust with somebody, that makes for a good relationship in general. That’s the biggest thing I didn’t realize when I was in college was how important it was to get to know my classmates — where they were from, what they did, their parents and all that kind of thing. Networking is very important when you want to start doing things.
“For me, that’s the value of Little Rock Executives’ Association. I can go to any one of my fellow members in LREA that I’ve met over the years and get information I need or get a yes-or-no answer about something. You’ve got to be able to find people like that that you can go to to help bounce ideas off of and decide whether something’s a good project or not. That’s one of the most important things I’ve learned.”
BILL MILLER ON LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT
“Delegation’s really tricky. There again, it has to go back to trust, but even trust can only go so far because if you put somebody in a place of management and they don’t have the management skills, then you’re killing them and yourself. You’ve overplayed their game.
“We try to bring our managers up from within. We very rarely go outside because I found that when you go outside to get a manager, they’ve not been trained the way we want them trained. Their attitudes are often different, or they have a different value set, and it’s hard to retrain them into ours, so most of our managers have come from within, and we’ve had very, very good luck with that. I can’t emphasize enough what a good trick that is to be able to pick good people. If you can’t pick your personnel and have a vibe with them to start with, then you’re in trouble.”
BILL MILLER ON PERSEVERANCE
“You’ve just got to stay focused, and that’s hard to do when there’s so many things hitting you all the time. You’ve got to know yourself, No. 1, and what you can and can’t do. If you have a good foundation and a good spiritual foundation, you’ll find that you can pretty well do anything you want to if you keep focused.”
READ ALSO: Arkansas Visionary: Howard Hurst
