Miller’s Professional Imaging in Pittsburg, Kan., will do more than $50 million of business this year in specialized work that includes processing more than 1.6 million rolls of film.
In 1971, when Richard Miller graduated from the MU math department and went into the business, the family-owned company showed $175,000 in annual sales. Today, with 500 employees Miller’s is growing at a rate of 20 percent per year—with no sales personnel and no national advertising.
More than 3,000 customers in all 50 states and a waiting list of 800 customers keep this company expanding in an industry that is stagnant nationally. Clients of Miller’s typically are professional wedding, portrait or sports photographers who spend from $20,000 to $200,000 a year for the services. And no wonder. The company has won more than 225 state and regional Kodak Gallery Awards for excellence in photography and lab work—more than three times that of any competitor.
I set out to Kansas to visit Richard, president of the company, to discover the secret to building and running a spectacularly successful business. I could have stopped my search in the lobby at Miller’s. On the table there is a thick book, A Compilation of Essays Describing the Lives of Miller’s Team Members. The book is an example of the employee-centered attitude of this company. Its next edition should feature enthusiasm and leadership. I’m a high-energy person, but I was totally unprepared for the intensity of Richard Miller.
Richard starts the day with sheets of statistics covering what he calls the three main factors concerning the business—readouts of accuracy, service times and productivity from the previous day. Richard says if those factors are good, then customers are happy.
Richard scans large stacks of technological information that arrive daily and relies on his professionals to help with the process. He meets weekly with the nine department heads who share information and participate in all major decisions. Picture Perfect
What does it take to run such a successful company? “I set high expectations,” Richard says, “and was always known to the Miller’s team members as someone who was difficult to please. After 25 years, many of them have come to realize that this actually has been beneficial to them.”
Beyond that, production is everything at Miller’s. Everyone’s job is to support production while maintaining accuracy and service levels. With only four members on the clerical staff, this is a lean company. Those four handle all accounting procedures, mail, correspondence, newsletters and layouts for new products.
Miller’s does almost everything in-house, including overseeing the construction of building additions. Only some tax preparation falls to outsiders.
And titles don’t necessarily come with the job descriptions at Miller’s, which doesn’t have the collection of CEOs, COOs or CTOs (chief technology officers) found in many companies. Employees just wear a lot of hats.
To Richard, the company’s most valuable assets are its employees: “I try to treat our team members the same way I want them to treat our customers. And I want them to exceed the expectations of our customers.” Imagine working in an environment that hosts catered dinners for employees, throws parties at holidays, plans picnics and canoe outings, soccer trips and treks to Royal Stadium. All that, and a lucrative profit sharing plan that’s been in place since 1976.
Profit sharing returns 20 percent of company profits to employees, who are considered “team members.” Last year that was $3.5 million.
As a mathematician, I must do a little computation here: an employee with a base salary of $20,000, for example, should make another $10,000 at least from profit sharing. Still, employee respect and benefits donot produce company growth of 20 percent a year in a declining market. That feat of magic requires supplying a significantly better product than what competitors can produce. And Miller's has done that from the beginning.
Customers and computers are important parts of this business. Richard brought in the first computer in 1973 and wrote all the original programs himself. Today, the business has 760 custom programs and adds new programs regularly. Most programs are written in-house.
The backbone of the plant and the production magic is a DEC Alpha computer with 350 devices hooked to it.
Miller's has a significant amount of specialized equipment, including a $200,000 laser printer that prints pictures perfectly up to 50 inches in length from digital files; and a $100,000 digital printer capable of handling CDs, Jazz, Zip, Optical discs and more. Miller's was the first company to purchase a robotics unit for printing so that customers can send cropped pictures, and this unit automatically adjusts the printing.
The traditional part of Miller's business is in high-quality printing and retouching of photographs. When pictures arrive in the morning, they are bar coded and scanned into the central computer. Before printing, each picture is viewed by a professional who feeds printing information into the computer to guarantee optimum quality. This is one facet of the operation that requires the human eye and cannot be done by computers.
After printing, the cleanup process begins, often accompanied by pages of detailed instructions for one photo. Professionals remove blemishes on skin, clean the glare off glasses, remove braces from teeth, take out stray wisps of hair and even transfer the best face onto the background of another photo.
As we tour the plant, I note several things. Not one of the 500 employees is sitting around or talking idly. Bulletin boards sport schedules designed for a smooth, rapid work flow and charts that show employee accuracy, service and productivity rates.
Mail personnel pick up the mail at 5:30 a.m. so that incoming film is ready for the film processors who arrive at 6 a.m.
At 8 a.m. analyzer operators begin working on density and color balance of the images to prepare for the printers, who come in at 9 a.m. At 12:30 p.m. the cutters and invoicers arrive to finish the dayÕs orders. Like European trains, this company runs on schedules and at full steam.
The future of this business is in digital and internet services. Customers already can take images at weddings or other events and send them to Miller's for digitization and downloading via the Internet or have them written to a CD. By viewing photos on a monitor, customers can crop their own photos on the monitor and send instructions directly to the computers for printing.
The customers have total control, and they love it," Richard says of the technology.
Customer satisfaction at Miller's also depends on accuracy, speed and reliability of service. To guarantee satisfaction while handling 1.6 million rolls of film a year, Miller's deploys an array of safeguards and quality-control measures, most of which have been designed in house.
Bar codes identify customers, their photos, negatives and envelopes, ensuring that no negatives are lost or mixed with other orders. The codes also guarantee printing as desired by supplying computer-stored instructions.
Finished orders undergo a final check through a sophisticated scale that records the number of prints by weight, and finally the prints are ready for distribution. But if problems or questions arise, customers can call for personal attention from a team of well-trained personnel with computerized information on hand.
With 350 devices hooked up to Miller’s central computer, I felt compelled to bring up the Y2K question. It’s not surprising to learn that this company is covered. Because Richard wrote the initial computing system, he was aware of the issues of Y2K, as were his two programmers. They estimated that a conversion would take one full month. It did, and there were nearly 800 programs to convert!
“DEC was like most computer manufacturers,” Richard says. “The computers stored dates as 99121, where 99 was the year and 121 was the Julian day number of the year. So every time we accessed a date function in a program, it had to be redone. Fortunately, we saw this coming about 10 years ago and converted many as we were modifying certain file structures.”
Although there may be a glitch or two with scheduling dates on Jan. 1, Miller’s doesn’t expect any problems internally or externally. January will be business as usual at Miller’s. Fast. Smooth. Picture perfect.