If you're ever unlucky enough to need a tow, chances are the truck that shows up to save the day was made the road in Ooltewah by Miller Industries.
Even though the locally-based tow truck and recovery equipment maker is the largest company of its kind in the world, few trucks on the road bear the Miller name. Instead they are manufactured under brand names like Chevron, Challenger, Century, Holmes and Vulcan.
These days the company has braced itself against a sluggish economy and the subsequent slowdown in sales by securing government contracts that have kept products moving through the production lines.
"We've got a great engineering office and a great sales office, and we've done a lot of work to get this kind of business," said J. Vince Mish, executive vice president, chief financial officer and treasurer for Miller Industries. "One of the interesting things about this is it has actually saved the government a lot of money."
The MR30, which the government has been buying for military use in the Middle East, has a rotator boom in the back of the truck that can be operated remotely, and eliminates the need for a crane in most instances.
The heavy-duty tow truck known as the MR30 is marketed commercially under the Century brand name. The trucks ordered for military use are painted the color of desert sand and can lift as much as 70 tons, and perform some challenging work including air plane recovery. Some are being sent to oil fields in Saudi Arabia, officials said.
"These things go all over the world," Mr. Mish said.
Miller Industries started in the early 1990s, though its roots go back to the earliest days of the tow truck.
Staff Photo by Tim Barber MIller Industries Chief Financial Officer Vince Mish walks behind a new tow truck on Monday that was built for NASCAR's Daytona International Speedway. The truck will be delivered in time for the July 4th racing events.
Today the company employs 700 people worldwide with about 400 of them in Ooltewah. The rest are divided among the company's facilities in England and France.
The company underwent a $10 million expansion in Ooltewah in 2006, adding 50,000 square feet of manufacturing space and 100 employees.
Acquiring government contracts is not the only strategy the company has employed in recent years to boost its bottom line. Miller executives voluntarily reduced their salaries by 10 percent in 2008 and continued that in 2009. The decision was made following two consecutive years of drops in sales. The company's revenue was $271 million in 2008, down from $400 million in 2007.
The company also is making use of its well-trained work force during the challenging economy. Bill Beckley, corporate director of human resources, said the company has made adjustments to better deal with the economic challenges of the last several months.
"We've moved people back and forth based on where demand is," he said, describing how workers are trained to build both light-duty and heavy-duty trucks. "We've got a very flexible work force."
Miller has 300,000 square feet of manufacturing space at its campus off I-75 in Ooltewah. The space is divided among manufacturing for the large, heavy duty trucks and the smaller trucks, known by many as "wreckers."
Today, Miller builds tow trucks for NASCAR, supplying units for 11 tracks around the country including Daytona International Speedway.
But the most familiar trucks are the ones that show up when a car is broken down or wrecked. Most of those trucks are bought from Miller by small locally-owned shops, Mr. Mish said. The average fleet size for a Miller customer is six trucks, he said.
"A lot of our customers are mom and pops," he said. "It's a family-type business."
