David W. Miller II, former owner of Trinity Restoration,
stands in front of the building that once housed his business. (Photo by Rip Stell)
TULSA – “I’ve been avoiding coming to this place,” David W.
Miller II said as he gazed upon the south Tulsa hilltop home of Bill Knight
Collision Repair. “I haven’t been back since we shut it down.”
Although numerous vehicles stood around that shimmering wall
of glass, demonstrating the iconic structure’s new life under the Knight
moniker, that’s not the dream Miller clings to or the nightmare he regrets. But
the 2008 bankruptcy of his firm Trinity Restoration became something Miller’s
determined to not just relive, but to highlight and share with others.
“The one thing I’ve discovered is that I do have something
that’s valuable, and that’s this story, this experience,” said Miller, an Oklahoma State
University marketing graduate who has scratched his way through bankruptcy by
joining the Panok Oil and Gas sales and marketing staff, starting a new public
relations firm HK Consulting and volunteer teaching at his alma mater.
At the root of those efforts lies his newly published book,
Hard Knocks MBA: The Search for Job Satisfaction and Business Success. Miller
used the first year of Trinity’s bankruptcy to scratch out the manuscript’s
first draft. He then fine-tuned the 345-page tome as he escorted a number of
OSU entrepreneurial students through his rags-to-riches-to-rags story.
With its hardcover publication by Tulsa’s Total Publishing
and Media, Miller sees some potential to turn his lessons learned into a new
career through teaching or the national speaker’s circuit. But his main goal
remains sharing the heartbreaking experience and lessons learned to help others succeed.
“It was very cathartic for me,” Miller said in an interview.
“It was good. It was good for me to think it through, to get it off my chest. I
had to learn to accept it, to get over it. I’m still mad at myself, but I don’t
kick myself every morning.”
In many ways the crux of the saga still revolves around that
hilltop building overlooking south Tulsa’s Memorial Drive automotive row and
the Creek Turnpike. Miller built that shiny $4.2 million, 25,610-square-foot
landmark as Trinity’s home. Completed in June 2007, Miller threw a $50,000
party to celebrate his impressive three-year run in growing the automotive
restoration company from $0 annual revenue to $2 million.
By tripling its physical size, the marketing guru expected
to raise his sales to $6 million – but that was just for starters. With that
extra space and the heightened quality of his staff, the automotive lover in
Miller dreamed of creating an international e-sales platform for classic muscle
cars built by his groomed staff from authentic and newly minted pieces.
That launch drew the eyes of Orange County Choppers, which
soon propositioned Miller to become the lone Great Plains franchise for its
high-dollar celebrity motorcycles. Miller saw the value in their hot reality TV
product, and his 8324 E. 97th St. plant had the space, so he charged in at a
cost of $250,000. Miller then augmented that with a $100,000 niche franchise to
sell the Eleanor Mustang, a limited-production monster based on the famed
vehicle from the film Gone in 60 Seconds.
“I did too much too fast,” said Miller, who now wishes he’d
had a partner or board of directors to rein in his exuberance. “I had so much
success that I kept making these bad decisions and I thought I could get away
with it. In 2008 everything I did was wrong and I just got so far on the limb that it killed us. A more conservative businessman might not have done that.”
‘They hammered me’
Thus speaks hindsight. Two months after his Eleanor
decision, the bottom fell out of the Wall Street tub. That cascaded into
October 2008’s global financial meltdown and a widespread lending freeze. Even then, two months after the SemGroup bankruptcy, many
Oklahomans doubted their high-flying oil economy would suffer too many problems
under that spreading, paralyzing morass. But Miller witnessed the writing on
the wall.
He’d pulled off the dream in less than a year, seeing his
revenue reach the targeted $500,000 a month on its way to a $6 million annual
benchmark. But as that 30-percent Wall Street plunge hacked retirement plans
and spread consumer fears, Miller saw his revenues drop 50 percent overnight –
and they didn’t recover.
“I could have maybe held on at $400,000 a month,” he said of
his shortfall. “But not half.”
Since Miller had rolled over his bank debt with each
expansion, leveraging his home, cars, and just about everything else on the
outcome, Miller realized he stood poised to lose it all.
“We cross-collateralized everything, which was a huge
mistake,” he said. ”Banks always want entrepreneurs to guarantee everything,
which is a mistake. You’ll lose everything.”
That day came just before Christmas 2008, when Bank of
Oklahoma finally called his loan.
Rather than turn out his staff and lock down the premises,
Miller held out to complete a payroll cycle and let workers and customers alike
walk out with their earnings, their tools, their cars and whatever property
they had on the site.
“I tried to close it down the right way,” he said. “Bills were paid. All the employees left with a paycheck. Nobody’s paycheck
bounced. “So we kind of crash-landed instead of cratering,” said
Miller. “But the bankruptcy court really hammered me for that. They hammered
me. Because you’re not supposed to do that. You’re supposed to run it into
the ground and then they go into forensics.”
Miller did that on himself through the book, outlining the
seven habits that made him rich, the seven habits that made him bankrupt, and
the seven lessons he learned through the process. The most important one drew him back to what life’s all
about, starting with his wife, Heather.
“My wife is really strong, but obviously … not well,” he
said of how she took Trinity’s demise. “She wanted to kill me and told me so.” But grown from a shared OSU relationship into a 21-year relationship and marriage, their love held out, with Heather helping to edit the book.
“We’ve got nothing left but each other and the clothes on
our backs,” he said, noting even their home ended up in Bank of Oklahoma’s
hands. “They took it all. I’m not saying they’re bad for doing it. It just
sucks.”
Following his move to Dallas last year, Miller has
entertained various training and lecturing discussions on how to grow this
audience. Never having considered the book from a profit motive, Miller remains
hesitant but intrigued.
“At this point, I just do it to feel better,” he said.
“Right now I’m giving my consulting away for free, which is fine.”
Lessons learned
While he sees his borrowing practices as the bottom-line
mistake, Miller draws his first error at investing in Trinity Restoration in
the first place.
“I didn’t love fixing cars,” he said. “I didn’t want to be
in the back with the tools. I wanted to out front pitching customers. I'm a sales and marketing guy.”
Those missteps overweighed the positive marketing efforts
Miller sees in his building Trinity through its first three years, starting
with his identification of medium-age women comprising his largest customer
base.
“That’s one of the things I hit with these guys when I’m
talking to them about their business,” said Miller. “Do you really know who
your customer is? Do you really know what they need, and how do you meet that
need better than your competitors? For most of your competitors are not hitting
that need.
“That’s why you hear that stat, 95 percent of small
businesses go broke in the first year,” Miller said. “That’s why. They don't know what they are doing.”
Miller also used $100 cash bonus offers to challenge his
employees to deliver better quality – never failing to pay off when they succeeded. In
doing that, month after month, he got his workers to rethink just what they
could achieve.
“We came in Day One and said, ‘We are going to be the best
in town,’ and when I first said it our employees snickered,” Miller recalled.
“They thought I was out of my mind, and to be honest, at first we were not that
good. But we would redo it and fix it and fix it and beat it into their heads.
“A few years later people started coming in and telling us,
‘I hear you’re the best,’” Miller said with a smile. “That’s when I knew we had
made it.”
That reinforced his parting message – to fight.
“Going into business is a fight,” Miller stressed. “It’s a
boxing match with Mike Tyson and you’d better work out or you’re going to get
your butt kicked. You have to expect it to be in a butt-kicking and if you’re
not ready for that, stick to corporate America because owning a business is never 8 to 5.”
KIRBY LEE DAVIS
TULSA BUREAU CHIEF | THE JOURNAL RECORD
401 S. Boston Ave., Suite 105, Mid-Continent Tower| Tulsa,
OK 74103 | v: 918-295-4982 | f: 918-295-0031 www.journalrecord.com
