“Private equity-backed firms have revenue targets, but we don’t. We just want to be better for our customers and our people, and we measure that with surveys. We’re big on those.” Nathan Miller, Vice President
Fixing Family Failings
Stuart, Fla.
Multiple influences propelled Nathan Miller to partner with family members and establish Coastline Cooling, a refrigeration service agent operating in Florida. Among them was the role model presented by his father Byron, who owned and operated a successful service firm, earning a reputation for fixing things right on the first call. Eventually, the senior Miller sold that business and retired.
On a separate timeline, as son Nathan attended business school, he discovered inspiration in advice to “Do good. Talk to people. Learn their pain points and solve them.” And so he did.
Mindful of his father’s success, “I started asking restaurant GMs about their complaints, specifically around refrigeration breaking down,” says Nathan Miller. The seed was planted. He approached his dad: “I said, ‘Let’s start a new service company to be awesome for our people and to keep our customers operating at full speed.’”
Nathan Miller graduated college and moved to Florida. Byron Miller came out of retirement, and Coastline Cooling was born in 2008, with father and son topping the owner/management team as president and vice president, respectively. As president, Byron Miller focuses on training and ensuring service quality among managers and technicians. Serving as vice president, Nathan Miller runs the operation.
Family was deeply integrated in the new company. Nathan Miller’s mother brought several relatives into the business, including two of his aunts, an uncle, a cousin and his own brother. But, unfortunately, this is where Coastline Cooling encountered a common pitfall in privately owned enterprises: The business began to work for the family, rather than the other way around.
“When family members aren’t performing and an attitude of entitlement is clearly evident, morale wanes across the staff, as it looks like the business is giving handouts to family members,” says Nathan Miller. “Family members should be outperforming everyone else.”
“Level up” is something of a battle cry at Coastline. “If you’re not making the team better in your performance and how you embody our core values, then people won’t respect you,” Nathan Miller continues. “At first, we were bad at parting ways with people who had lost the respect of the rest of the team,” he concedes. He reminded himself that a core value of the firm is “taking care of our people as much as of our customers” and eventually took a hard line and terminated poor-performing family members.
Members of the leadership team “are not silent partners. We’re accountable to our people,” Nathan Miller says.
Nathan Miller has taken charge of all hiring. He holds monthly calls with senior team members and quarterly meetings with local leaders from across the business. He distributes trending management books on such topics as being a great boss. He’s transparent about his own list of action items. “And they hold me accountable,” he recounts. “I have the most action items — and I fail a lot. They get to see that and see me own those failures.”
Similarly, Nathan Miller declines to take credit for good ideas, insisting that those usually bubble up from the techs. Coastline applies the EOS (Entrepreneurial Operating System) approach to organizational management, which includes acting on the recommendations of anyone on the team. He believes it’s a departure from the top-down management model still prevalent in this industry.
One idea that bubbled up from the team is a nascent “Hire to Retire” program, an initiative to keep techs engaged and growing.
“At most companies, people often feel like they plateau,” says Nathan Miller. “We want to find out what they’re good at and laser focus them on that area. We discovered one person who was totally in the wrong position and moved them to where they are now succeeding. And as we grow as a company, we’ll be creating more new roles.”
