Just down the boulevard from Moorestown Mall in New Jersey, an imposing $1.8 million fieldstone and brick office building is situated on a large corner lot. A low-slung luxury sports car is parked right next to the door.
It all belongs to Chris Miles, EG '92. A little more than a decade ago, Miles was taking a full course load as a civil engineering student, while employing 10 people in an aluminum siding business in Delaware and 12 more in a dock-building business in Burlington County, N.J.
Today, at 34, he is CEO of Miles Technologies, an information technology company with 37 employees, more than 450 clients and $3.1 million in reported revenues last year. The Philadelphia Business Journal crowned it the fastest-growing private company in South Jersey.
His vice president is John Bialous, BE '92, a Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity brother from UD. (During his busy undergraduate years, Miles found time to pledge a fraternity and date his future wife, Cindi, in New Jersey while balancing work and studies.)
But, if Miles' career path were a game board, he would have been stuck in the molasses swamp more often than he rolled a double. For example, he:
Miles was 12, the youngest of four children in a single-parent family, when he got his first job as a gofer for a New Jersey construction company. His mom cleaned houses to support the family, and the kids were expected to work for what they wanted.
Eventually, he worked his way up to constructing docks for waterfront homes, and the on-the-job wood chipper accident led to his decision to become an entrepreneur.
At 16, he decided to start his own dock-building business. "I was 16, and I was the boss. I had people under me," he says.
By the time he transferred to UD, he told the University's public safety department he had to have a car on campus because he had 12 employees depending on him for their livelihood. He was 18.
Sitting in customers' living rooms doing estimates for the window and siding business while he was a student at the University provided an education, too, he says. Since his dad took off when he was 4, Miles says he was left with no built-in role model for a happy marriage.
"I'd spend three hours a night talking to families. I got to see successful families and unsuccessful families, and I thought, at the time, what was the psychological reason why these families thrived and those families failed," Miles recalls. "Two things happened from that. I realized my evenings should be spent with my family rather than other people's, and I realized that your time is the key ingredient that makes a happy family.
"Partly because my father left when I was a kid, family is super-important to me," Miles says. "I have the genes in me to be a workaholic, but I consciously decided to put family first. I don't work weekends. I don't require my people to do it either. I start at 8 and leave at 5 as often as possible."
Because his dad, who has since re-entered his life, wasn't there when he was growing up, Miles says he gleaned wisdom from business books and self-help books as he tried and failed and tried again.
"I had to learn what 'collections' meant at 17," he says.
Miles was working in construction after college when he noticed his customers kept asking him for help with their computers. He had all his business records online, a cinch for an engineer who had hosted a subscription-only computer bulletin board when he was 12.
"I was using computers more extensively than anyone else in South Jersey in the business I was in, and people just kept asking me to help them," he says. "I never ever dreamed of charging them. Then, I was like, 'Chris, what are you doing? You're making a living in construction, but you're not setting the world on fire, and you're helping all these people with computers for free.'
"When you're 22, you can make $25,000 or $30,000 a year and do it just for fun, but then you get out of college and you get a wife, a house, college loans to pay and everything else, and you realize this isn't a game anymore," Miles says.
His business philosophy is rooted in hard-earned experience and precepts gleaned from books: The One-Minute Manager and Guerrilla Marketing: The Secret to Making Big Profits From Your Small Business are favorites.
Miles Technologies' slogan is "You request. We respond. It gets done!" The company provides IT services, including computer networking, custom software applications and
web site design to small-to-medium companies. Quick turnaround is made possible by Miles' unconventional, upfront management methods. Programmers work in a gymnasium-sized room, and their individual output is projected on a giant screen at the front. Those who don't produce are let go after 60 days.
"We make a decision on each employee, but I think that decision is good for them, too," Miles says. "Believe me, I hurt when tough decisions need to be made. It's very difficult when you let someone go, but imagine if the owner of a business doesn't have the nerve to fire anyone. Then you have this poor employee who works at a business for 30 years and never achieves his or her goals.
"If I didn't have the people who are top performers at Miles Technologies, my people could not possibly make the amount of money they do. If I didn't have the nerve to make tough decisions, we would be carrying all those people who didn't work out. We're also helping our customers because they pay for our time. It goes back to the real basis of our country--if you work hard and do a good job, you'll succeed."
Miles has been tough with customers, too. The company has sent letters to customers who were just too demanding. "I'm not going to allow one of my employees to be berated by a customer who has a track record of treating us badly," Miles says. "I send them a nicely worded letter. In every case, the customers stayed and they've been very nice to us."
Miles says he looks for the best people, expects them to do their best and gives them regular feedback on how they're performing. "At other companies, they store up all this negative stuff to beat up someone at a performance review. That person can't do a darn thing about what happened last month. Regardless of what's happening in my life or in my business, I have to tell someone every day when he or she is doing a good job. When someone's not doing so well, it's like a toddler who's just learning to walk. You tell them that the reason you have them here is because you know they can perform tasks better than that.
"I'm an engineer," Miles says. "I have a background in problem solving. In my head, as I'm talking, I see a flow chart and I see the logical progression to a solution. A lot of people don't see that."
He applies the same principles to his family life. He says the most important part of his day is the part he spends at home.
"My daughter is 2-1/2 already, and she's 10 percent raised. I'm an engineer. I think about these things, he says."
--Kathy Canavan