Yesterday’s Midwest Entrepreneurs class was the second in a row where students got heavily exposed to the heavy industrial, business-to-business (B2B) side of the business world. Although many fail to realize it, the national and global economy is more predicated on businesses selling to other businesses than it is the more glamorous and obvious world of heavily advertised consumer products. There are thousands and thousands of little B2B companies all over this country that virtually no one outside of the communities they are based in has heard of. Yet these companies are important part of the national economy (and a key area for entrepreneurial startups).

With that as our introduction, I turn things over to class member Konor Tempel. 

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Yesterday in class we had the honor to learn about the three-part entrepreneurial success story of one of our very own professors here at Monmouth College, Lee Miller. Not only did we hear about his success with starting and selling the businesses, we learned a little bit about him too. We also learned that he loves a challenge and that, for him, running his own business was often more about the challenge than the money.

Lee Miller attended school with the intention of becoming a Mechanical Engineer after school. He got his first job at a company called Eaton, which is a large car parts manufacturing company. While working there he got a bit bored and decided to go back to school and take accounting classes at West Carolina University in order to better himself in his career. He eventually decided to leave the company and open up his first entrepreneurial business at the age of 28.

Prof. Miller knew that he wanted to continue his career in the automotive industry, so he started a company called Manufacturing Solutions. However, in order to get up and running he needed about $150,000 and was a little short on cash. His dad came into the picture and loaned him some money to get the business started. With the opening of this first business he was faced with many challenges, such as the challenge of hiring people, which he admitted to being one of the hardest things for him because he did not communicate all that well with non-engineers. He was the owner of the company for ten years. He built the company from nothing to eventually employ 40 employees and annual sales of almost 3 million dollars.

A fun fact we learned about Prof. Miller is that while he was running this first company he was living out of a RV that was parked next to the business to save him some money because all of his money was being put towards the business and he did not have a salary until the business was open for five years. It seems this business was his life at the time.

After the ten years in business, Miller decided to sell the assets of the company because his dad was retiring and he wanted to give his dad’s investment back to him. Around this time he remembered a man who had contacted him while he was running the first business asking if he could manufacture these tiny pieces of surgical equipment, which Miller first turned down. After the first business he decided he wanted another challenge in his life so he took the money he received from the asset sale of his first company and used it to open another business. During this time he designed a machine that was able to make these small pieces more efficiently then others and he was able to patent it. As this product became more in demand he was then going to be forced to expand his business, which he did not want to do. Since he wanted to stay small he decided it was time to sell this company. He sold his company to another company of a former customer, agreeing to train the new engineers to manufacture the device.

After he sold the business he was confronted by a marketing company that had an idea to create a new car part; an alignment shim rotator. They wanted Prof. Miller to design and manufacture this part for them. So he took the job and was given a small amount of shares in the company and went to work and designing and manufacturing these parts. The company went on to sell this product to General Motors. However, it had been financed by a venture capital company, so the investors were looking for a “home run” (meaning a big return on their investment fast). As iot turned out, while this company was successful with the part designed by Lee Miller, it was not the “home run” the investors had hoped for. This company is still in business today, and Miller still owns some the stock in it.

After he started and left his third successful business he decided to go back to school and become a teacher. While attending school he helped a couple of foreign exchange students from Thailand proofread their doctoral dissertations. Little did he know that this would end up helping him get a job at the University of Bangkok in Thailand teaching English. When asked why he decided to become a teacher he responded: “I just want to help the future generations any way I can.”

One thing that I learned from Prof. Miller was how much he loves a challenge. Out of college he had a job at a company where he could probably make a decent living for life but he decided to accept the challenge himself and open his own business at the young age of 28. He built the company from the bottom up, sold it, and then went on to run two more successful businesses. But he wasn’t done there, he challenged himself again by returning to school and pursuing a Ph.D. and becoming a teacher to help the younger generations.

If you have any intention on starting a business I would strongly suggest you attack it the same way Lee Miller did. He never gave up on his dreams and he faced every challenge head on; he is the ideal image of what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur.

Thank you again to Mr. Miller for talking to our class and sharing your stories of starting and running three entrepreneurial businesses.

Konor Tempel