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Steve Miller of Asheville,
executive vice president of The Biltmore Company and new NCCBI chair,
literally worked his way up from stable boy to top leadership positions in
business, tourism, and healthcare in his community and state.
Similarly, he labored for years
within the volunteer leadership of NCCBI to become one of Western North
Carolina’s most visible executives. As the new chair of NCCBI, the state
chamber of commerce, he says he plans to continue its long-term priorities
of lowering state income taxes and increasing government efficiency.
“The NCCBI chair changes
annually, but the primary themes do not,” Miller says. “Former chair Jim
Hyler worked with Sue Cole, who worked with (former chair) Barry Eveland and
me and I’ll do the same with Graham Denton (who will be NCCBI chair in
2006-07).”
Nevertheless, Miller says the
“incredible importance of responding to the whole healthcare issue” has
emerged over the last few years. He believes NCCBI is in a particularly
strong position to provide leadership on healthcare because the organization
“has members from all the affected segments, employers, providers and
insurers.”
“The cost of healthcare and
medical insurance continues to grow at a rapid pace and is stretching the
ability of our member businesses to pay for those increased costs. At the
same time, healthcare has become one of the major drivers of economic growth
in our state,” he says.
Miller brings a multiple
perspective to the issue. “I’ve been on the Mission Hospitals board 10 years
and just completed a two-year term as chair, so I learned a lot from the
provider side,” he says. “I also have an employer perspective. It’s
certainly the most important benefit the employer provides. So you want to
provide the highest quality, but at a price you can afford.”
At the Biltmore Co., Miller says,
he’s learned that some things can help keep costs down. “Our costs only rose
2 or 3 percent the last few years,” he notes. “We instituted some principles
of consumer-driven healthcare. We try to help employees make smart choices,
such as having a good relationship with a primary care doctor, managing
chronic diseases such as diabetes, encouraging them to have smart healthcare
practices. They’re also sharing more in the costs. We try to make sure they
see their primary care physician rather than going to an emergency room,
which is much more expensive and less effective for long term health.”
Miller points out that there’s
also another side of the coin to the healthcare situation. “The healthcare
system is one of our region’s largest employers, as it is in many parts of
the state. Healthcare is one of the major drivers of our economy and with
aging baby-boomers, it’s only going to get bigger. A Wachovia economist
points out that a lot of the service jobs replacing manufacturing ones in
North Carolina are higher paying ones in healthcare.
“It is my hope that NCCBI can
create a forum for healthcare providers, insurers, and employers to work
together to develop policies that will move us towards a high-quality,
affordable, and sustainable healthcare system that is accessible to all the
people of our state. I am confident that we can examine the highly complex
and controversial issue of healthcare from a variety of viewpoints.”
Miller notes that he’s talked
with Eveland and NCCBI President Phil Kirk about how the organization might
be most effective in dealing with the healthcare issue. One possibility is
tying efforts into the most recent Emerging Issues Forum held at N.C. State
University in February, which focused on healthcare and developed an 8-point
action list.
“There’s a lot of opportunity for
employers, providers and governments to work together,” Miller says. “One of
the reasons I’m such a big believer in NCCBI and have been involved with it
for such a long time is that is what it’s good at doing: getting people
together to examine issues from multiple perspectives. NCCBI is not going to
solve the problem. It’s too complex for that. But we can get people together
to share information on things that work to improve the health of their
employees and lower costs. At the same time, if we determine public policies
we think will help, we’ll lobby for those. We can certainly provide a forum
to help our members deal with this. But we have to keep a dialogue going or
the system is going to collapse on itself.”
Miller says lifestyle programs
are one of the things insurers, employers and providers can work together
on. “Lots of health insurers have excellent programs to help companies
manage their employees. A lot of hospitals have programs providing technical
expertise to help people manage their weight.”
Installing advanced information
technology systems throughout the healthcare system — an issue raised
repeatedly by speakers across the political, provider and insurer spectrum
at the Emerging Issues Forum — is also important, Miller says. “During my
term as chair at Mission, installing a new information technology system was
one of our largest capital investments. It helps standardize procedures and
eliminate mistakes.”
Kirk thinks Miller will be able
to make progress in establishing a productive dialog. He says, “Steve Miller
brings a level of enthusiasm and compassion to this position of great
importance to our state. He is a positive, can-do person who inspires staff
and volunteers to reach new levels.
“He understands the role of a
volunteer chair in motivating and leading paid staff and volunteers. He is
also a compassionate person who believes that government exists to be a
positive force in our society. That is especially evident in his sincere
desire to mobilize the business community to find practical, workable,
affordable solutions to the healthcare crisis in our country.”
Eveland agrees. “I have really
enjoyed working with Steve this last year. He has been very supportive of my
efforts and I have very much appreciated his advice and suggestions. Steve
has great interpersonal skills and will keep people at the top of his
priority list. He is well balanced in his thought process, and has a great
deal of integrity.
“I fully expect that Steve will
do a great job next year. We have been in synch on the priorities for this
year, and I believe he will continue to focus on the three that we’ve had in
place, although he and I have talked about adding healthcare, which I
believe he will do.”
As a member of the Biltmore
Company’s senior leadership team, Miller helped diversify the Biltmore brand
into a successful winery, retail sales, and a 213-room luxury hotel.
Notably, he also persuaded the company to open Biltmore during Christmas;
now, the holiday season is its most profitable season of the year.
Miller also held top leadership
positions with state and regional tourism organizations and chaired the
board of Mission Hospitals, giving him frontline experience with two issues
high on NCCBI’s agenda, healthcare and the state’s tourism industry.
Hands-on, frontline experience is
nothing new to Miller. While he currently works from a sixth-floor office
downtown overlooking cloud-wisped mountains, he began his association with
Biltmore as a stable boy for the owner’s wife.
The summer after his freshman
year at UNC-Chapel Hill, Asheville native Miller took a job cleaning the
stables and grooming thoroughbreds for Mimi Cecil, wife of William A.V.
Cecil, Biltmore Estate’s owner. “I also cut the grass and washed Mr.
Cecil’s car,” Miller, now 50, says. The following fall, Cecil called
Miller’s mother and asked her if the family intended to have Steve work in
the family jewelry store after he graduated from college.
When she said that Steve could
decide for himself, Cecil asked her to have Miller come by to talk about
joining a management training program. He did, and Cecil explained that he
wanted Steve to work in all the Biltmore Estate’s departments and then after
graduation, join the company fulltime should he want to.
“So, I did all kinds of frontline
jobs,” Miller says. “I worked in the gardens, parked cars, sold tickets,
cataloged architectural drawings with the curator. It helped my management
career to get firsthand experience of what it’s like to be on the
frontline.” Although he considered a career in law, Miller chose to join the
Biltmore Co. on the advice of his marketing professor at UNC-Chapel Hill. He
was 23.
“He told me I’d be happier
creating the future rather than perpetuating the past through the law, and
it turned out that he was right,” says Miller. Over the course of his career
at Biltmore, Miller saw the number of annual visitors increase from 350,000
to 1 million and the number of employees from 100 to 1,600 fully staffed.
“Because we were such a small
company when I started, I participated in a lot of decision making at a very
early age,” Miller says. Cecil, the CEO, “was tolerant of mistakes if you
gave something your best shot and it didn’t work — although he didn’t
tolerate you making the same mistake twice,” Miller recalls.
One “big mistake,” they made
along the way, Miller says, was an attempt to capitalize on successful line
extensions of the Biltmore brand. Successful at retailing various items with
the Biltmore brand to visitors, Miller thought the company could offer the
same sort of branded items through a catalog.
“What we learned,” he says, “is
that in those pre-Internet days, you were a catalog shopper or you weren’t.”
While the catalog did fairly well, it became clear that it would not produce
fast cash as hoped. “I learned to fully understand a market before launching
a product or service,” says Miller.
The Biltmore Co. retains an
entrepreneurial culture, Miller says, adding, “If you’re entrepreneurial,
you get a lot of ideas, but they’re not all good. You need a way to evaluate
them.” One recent idea, for instance, did not fly after market research
indicated customers would not buy at the price Biltmore needed to charge,
“So as a result of those earlier lessons, we didn’t do that one.”
While Biltmore’s leadership team
grew together, learning valuable lessons along the way, they had successes
as well. When Miller became marketing director of the house and gardens in
1979, the energy crisis that doubled gas prices and caused long lines at the
pumps cut the number of people in ticket lines at Biltmore by 18 percent.
Rick King, then manager of the
house, who is currently vice president of Biltmore House and Gardens,
suggested that the company should open the previously off-limits downstairs
portion of the estate to visitors. Miller steered the marketing efforts. The
opportunity to tour parts of the home never before public indeed boosted
attendance 17 percent. It also allowed the Biltmore to raise prices 32
percent.
That same year, the first of many
movies filmed at the Biltmore Estate came out, “Being There,” starring Peter
Sellers. It served as another learning experience. “It was wonderful
publicity,” says Miller, “but we didn’t know exactly what we were doing
then. We learned you have to charge enough to make up for the disruption it
causes and now we have strict rules. We don’t allow filming in more than two
rooms at a time, we move our own stuff around, and we have a code of conduct
for the crews. Now it doesn’t disrupt our guests and they’re somewhat
enamored that people are doing a movie.”
Other films shot on the Biltmore
Estate since include “Private Eyes,” small parts of “Forest Gump,” “Last of
the Mohicans,” “Richie Rich,” “Mr. Destiny,” and “Hannibal.”
Another notable marketing
suc-cess evolved from an idea sug-gested by King and Suzanne Pandich, then
curator. They discovered the Vanderbilts used to hold Christmas
celebrations, such as an open house Christmas Eve 1895 where the Vanderbilts
gave presents to employees and their children.
“When I started we were closed
for Christmas,” Miller says. After the idea was broached, “We did marketing
research and discovered that Colonial Williamsburg did a lot of business
during the holidays. We recognized that it had great marketing potential.
Now, Christmas is our busiest time of year and we have more visitors in
December than in any other single month. It began our trend of smoothing out
the seasonal variation in our business, helped cash flow a lot and allowed
us to create more fulltime jobs.”
William Cecil had another
entrepreneurial idea. With a French chateau and thousands of acres of
farmland, producing wine made sense — even if it was North Carolina. The
estate planted vineyards in the 1970s and opened its winery in the
mid-1980s. “Now we market our wines throughout the Southeast,” says Miller,
crediting Jerry Douglas, the senior vice president as being key in the
venture’s success. “We take them to California and win blind taste tests. We
love it when we win taste tests in California,” Miller says, pride and
amusement combined in his voice. “It also helps diversify our business,” he
adds.
That’s important, he notes,
because “External factors outside your control can have positive or negative
affects on tourism.”
Cecil handed over the CEO reins
to his son, Bill Cecil Jr., during the estate’s centennial year in 1995. The
company was poised to embrace the next century with a new vision and
Biltmore management got the go-ahead on a project the company had talked
about for 20 years — The Inn on Biltmore Estate. The deluxe 213-room hotel
“has been very successful and exceeded our expectations,” says Miller.
“Occupancy is high and people come back. A lot of NCCBI members meet at the
Inn. It helped us move from attraction to destination because people can
stay for an extended period rather than just visiting for a day.”
Miller recalls that when he went
to business school at Chapel Hill, tourism “wasn’t even mentioned.” Now, he
says, “It’s gratifying that at every meeting about the state or regional
economy, tourism is always mentioned.”
Adequate funding of efforts to increase tourism in North Carolina where
state support for it lags behind others in the Southeast, is an ongoing
concern, Miller says. He lauds Gov. Mike Easley’s budget request to increase
incentives for filmmakers to shoot in the state, for instance. Last year, 49
million people visited N.C., which kept its position as the 6th most
visited state in the nation. Travelers spent over $12.6 billion, generating
over $1.1 billion in state and local taxes and directly supporting more than
183,000 jobs. Miller notes that one of the things he personally enjoys about
working in the tourism industry is that “People across the state work
together rather than competing. They realize the more people we bring in the
better we’ll all do.”
Happily married for 27 years to his wife Debbie, a former school teacher,
Miller has two daughters, Stephanie, 22, a senior at UNC-CH, who is student
teaching at the Durham School of the Arts, and Michelle, 20, a junior at
Stanford, California.
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