Jeff Miller:
Industry icon? I guess that’s better than Sage.

Chrissy Blasinsky:
You forgot to mention that Jeff used to be a chairman at NACS, too. And then he wasn’t chairman anymore and we just sent him off into the pasture…

Jeff Miller:
That’s right. I rode off into the sunset …

Chrissy Blasinsky:
… on your unicorn with the rainbows in the background.

Jeff Miller:
That’s it. I’m excited to talk about this because this was always, you know what do they say, start with the end in mind. That was something that we always took to heart at our stores and at our business. We typically brought about four to five people to the NACS Show and the way we planned, we each picked areas that we were interested in and explored those and then broadened out from there. What I typically did was I would walk the whole Show and get a feel for the trends.
I think the best example of that was one year it might have been Red Bull and 5 Hour Energy were the two energy drinks. And then the next year it was like two aisles of dancing girls and monster trucks , so it was very clear that energy was going to have a big impact on our industry. And certainly after coming back from that year, we jumped into it as well. The other thing that we would do is of those who came, we brought either district managers, our marketing people, some operation people, everybody got to pick an idea. So when we came back from the Show, we would meet within the week of getting back while everything was still fresh, and everybody would talk about what they saw, what education sessions they went to, what they learned, where they saw it.
Where we should improve our business, what we should be doing better, what we should focus on. And then everybody got one idea that they could own. And so they were empowered to go out and either order the product or explore a relationship with a particular vendor or whatever, and bring it back to the group. Some of those stuck, some of them didn’t, but we were able to do more sooner because we had four or five people focusing on a particular project or product, as opposed to one person trying to line up all these different things.

Jeff Lenard:
Your company had 30-40 stores, something around that range. So you’d send five people and then these five people would gather, or would it be part of a larger group that would begin to flesh out ideas? Did it start with the five-ish and then build out from there?

Jeff Miller:
Yes. I mean, we’d do a deconstruct afterwards with just the people who went and kind of flesh out that’s a stupid idea or that’s a really good idea, or if everybody didn’t like your idea, you got to fight for it. And if you fought long enough for it, you got to keep it. And then hopefully it succeeded because the ribbing you would take afterwards if it didn’t was probably ceaseless , but it was all good fun. It was competitive. And I think it helped us get a lot more done sooner.

Chrissy Blasinsky:
What was the plan for the education sessions? The expo, obviously, it’s the excitement, it’s the 425,000 square feet trends and new products, but before all that happens, there’s usually anywhere from 50 to 60 education sessions, which in our last podcast we had Henry on and he said you need to divide and conquer when it comes to the ed sessions because it doesn’t make any sense that all five employees sit together in one session when there are so many. So how did folks tend to divide and conquer?

Jeff Miller:
Well, usually I had a pretty good idea of where we were headed for the following year from a strategic direction, whether it was new software or we’re going to build some car washes or whatever it may be. We always had weaknesses that needed to be shored up. So, wherever we had problem spots, if there were sessions discussing those areas, then we’d make sure somebody attended those or more than one attended those. If there was a new area we were looking at going into, then whoever was in that area we’d make sure we focused on those. And that was pretty much the way we did it. I’m sure we missed a lot of stuff cause there’s always so much stuff, but in terms of how to get the most out of it for our particular business, we tried to focus in on what the upcoming challenges were.

Jeff Lenard:
I think a lot of people may presume that it’s all fun in games and yes, it is a lot of fun. It is a lot of fun in a work context when you come back and there’s everyone else who didn’t go to the NACS Show. How do you convey that energy, that excitement that you got all these great ideas with perhaps a perception from those who didn’t go that it truly was a way to drive the business forward?

Jeff Miller:
I was involved in NACS governance for 10 years through the executive committee and then treasurer and chairman and past chairman and my staff and managers got to the point where they hated my involvement because every time I would go, I’d come back and I go, oh, this I was great. We saw this, we gotta do this. I saw this new thing, we gotta do it, we gotta do it. And so they learned to regret my involvement with NACS. I’d like to tell you there was some sort of management philosophy. No, it was just me getting excited going to these meetings coming back and it was all top down.

Jeff Lenard:
I heard that the NACS Show fits nicely during the time of the year, because it’s October and before the holidays, it gives you a chance to dive in strategically and be ready for the next year.

Jeff Miller:
Yes, it really does. The timing is perfect because it forces you to begin to think about next year in October. It does fit nicely into the overall planning because it makes you start thinking about next year. It’s not just products and vendors. It’s also about your marketing plans and that’s always something that you’re working on in the fourth quarter for the next year. So you come back and you see stuff that is going to shape how you’re going to market.

Chrissy Blasinsky:
Jeff, you’re talking a lot in the past tense. For the audience, what’s going on with you? What happened to your company in the last year or so? Where are you at, buddy ?

Jeff Miller:
We sold our stores in February of this year. My father and I did a lot of soul searching and back in September of 2020, we said, you know, we are really gonna have to up our game in our market. We have Wawa, we have 7-Eleven, Sheetz is on the edge of our market. So we’ve got some really first class operators and marketers in our area. And our stores were more 7-Eleven than they were Wawa. We were more focused on grab and go, quick in and out gasoline. And we just felt like it’s time to focus on some other areas. We had moved into commercial real estate, pretty heavily, commercial and industrial, and our heating and air conditioning.
We started out as a heating oil business with a burner service operation. We had since turned that into a mechanical contracting, all residential and it’s just growing in leaps and bounds. So we decided that it was time to make a move. That was in September of 2020. My father passed away unexpectedly in December of 2020, Christmas Eve of 2020, which kind of threw everything up in the air for a while. But, we had a good estate plan in place for those of you who are trying to decide whether to get involved in your estate planning, the answer is do it now because it made life a lot simpler during a very difficult and emotionally loaded time. And so everything kind of went on hold and then about March, we began to pick it up again and it took us a better part of a year.
We finally sold in February of 2022. We have one dealer operation, we’ve got a heating and air conditioning business, we are developing a 100-acre industrial warehouse complex in Suffolk, Virginia. We have medical buildings down in Florida and we got a couple other projects we’re working on. So staying busy. I thought I was gonna just kick back, but I’m still in it. And you know, we always talk about the convenience store industry and how great it is and how we’re different than other industries. And we really are. I’ve been getting educated in these different areas that I’ve just discussed and no, people don’t share the way we share. It is true that we share our stuff with each other and it’s really healthy competition in the convenience store industry. I think it’s a great industry. In fact, many of my best friends came out of the c-store industry and we still hang out together. I’m as busy as I’ve ever been if not busier.

Chrissy Blasinsky:
No other industry shares like this one and I’ve seen the friendships and the camaraderie that fosters amongst the retailers. If you just sit back and watch how you all interact at the Show, you may only see those people once a year at the Show, but you all just seem to pick up right where you left off and it’s really cool to watch and to be a part of it.

Jeff Miller:
You know, one of the things that NACS worked on was engagement. It was engagement with staff, engagement with the board, with retailers, with independent operators, small operators. And I think that’s how you forge relationships is having shared experiences. We did a lot of that when I was in involved, we traveled a lot together and did a lot of fun things. That helps forge lifelong relationships and that’s what you get out of the Show. Towards the end I had a good staff and they were doing the nitty gritty work at the Show.
I was looking more at trends and the overall things. But a lot of the value of the Show was, all joking aside, at the bar because that’s when you get to sit and have conversations with people. I remember one time we were going to go into an initiative and it was going to be costly and one of those long ones that you really had to dedicate to. And I was sitting next to another retailer and we had had a couple of drinks and we were getting deep into it and he was going through the same thing I was going through. By the end of the conversation, we both decided we weren’t going to do it. And it was just one of those things where you needed somebody to talk to who knew where your head was at. When you get to the Show and you get to hang out and talk shop, you find other people whose heads in the same place as yours.

Jeff Lenard:
So that was an example of something that stopped you from doing something costly. Do you have any favorite memories of something that you took back from the NACS Show beyond giving the stupendous speech as chairman a couple times and leading the organization and things like that?

Jeff Miller:
I thought about that question and there were different products over the years and different initiatives that we did, but at the end of the day, it was the relationships and being able to draw on them after the Show, to have the ability to pick up the phone and call somebody. Prior to selling, we were really moving to being unbranded or Miller’s branded. We have a first class image and it’s still there. Our company was bought by Global and they’ve adopted our image and they just bought another company and they’re reimagining them to Miller’s. So getting to spend time in that part of the Show floor and looking at designs and how that all works and how that all comes together,
and then meeting, some of the best people in the world who do that and ultimately hiring one of them to help develop our design, I think was huge. And that probably had the biggest impact. I think if I had to do over again, if I could have waited a little bit longer, we would’ve completed reimagining our chain to all Miller’s stores using this image. In my mind, it’s a world class image. We got a lot of compliments on it, but more importantly, I’ve been in a lot of convenience stores. It stood up next to the major brands and the major independent brands.

Chrissy Blasinsky:
So final advice. Say you’re a first timer heading to the NACS Show. What’s the one thing, you only get one out of 100, what’s the one thing you would suggest?

Jeff Miller:
I would say the one thing is to get involved with the association. I came from the heating oil business. I was doing home heating, oil heating and air conditioning and commercial fuels and lubricants, and then moved over to take over the convenience store business for our company. And I didn’t know anything. Some people still think I don’t know anything, but they all work for me. So you don’t have to worry about that. I started going to NACS Shows in 1994. In 1997, I took over as president of the company, and I just knew I had to get involved because it seemed to me the progressive companies were all involved in the governance of the association, were on committees back then.
Go to the Show, meet some NACS people, and then find out how you can get involved. It will pay huge dividends. A good friend on the vendor side came to me, he’d moved into the convenience store channel and he said, what do I do? I introduced him to somebody on the Supplier Board. He started doing the Round-up Committee. He worked his way up to the Supplier Board and he made contacts and he got to know people and he got to see what was going on. And it’s the same as a retailer. The most impactful thing you can do, if you want to grow your company, is to get on a committee and get involved because that’s where the action is. You can walk around 400,000 square feet all day long and go home with a bag full of candy and a bunch of ideas in your head. But you really want to hang out with the people who are implementing them and, and execution at the end of the day is what it’s all about.
Another thing I did at the NACS Show was look at how other people look at stuff. That was one of my biggest learnings. I’d go around and look at all the stuff myself, and then one day I saw the CEO of one of these big companies that was kicking my butt and he was not looking at the same stuff I was looking at. He was looking at things completely differently. Look at how other people look at stuff and learn from that.

Chrissy Blasinsky:
That’s good advice. I walked the floor one year when I was relatively new at NACS and of course it’s adult trick or treating. I walked the floor with someone who was on our board and asked him what he was looking for. And he said display fixtures and lighting.

Jeff Lenard:
Let’s have more of these conversations and thanks for joining us today, Jeff, and thank you all for listening to Convenience Matters.

Outro:
Convenience Matters is brought to you by NACS and produced in partnership with Human Factor. For more information, visit convenience.org.

show less