By Rusty Pray INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
Posted: February 13, 2004Chris Miles is all business. It has been that way for almost as long as he can remember.
The resident of Medford Lakes started his first business as a 12-year-old, and he has been employing people since he was a student at Shawnee High School.
Now 33, Miles is president of Miles Technologies, which designs software and provides computer and Internet services to small and medium-size companies.
His firm, which he founded in 1997 in part by mortgaging his and his mother's homes, generated $3.1 million in revenue in 2003. Three times, it has been listed among the 100 fastest-growing private businesses in the Philadelphia region in surveys by Rowan University and the Philadelphia Business Journal. In 2000, the trade publication listed it No. 1.
Miles recently moved it from Marlton to a 28,000-square-foot commercial center in Moorestown anchored by Cornerstone Bank. He owns the building. He paid $1.8 million for it.
Not bad for the product of a broken home who as a boy had no contact with his father for 10 years.
"It's definitely no surprise that he's the success he is," said Drew Wagner, who went through Shawnee with Miles and remains a close friend. Wagner, a physical education teacher at the Medford school, said that with Miles, "there's no doing something halfway. It's all or nothing."
Miles, who has a wife, Cindi, and a young daughter, Sierra, makes no bones about his obsession with success. Growing up the youngest of four children in a single-parent home, he had a "drive that was destined to make me a workaholic. From the time I was 14 years old, I knew that what I wanted to do was own a successful company."
His first business was a computer bulletin board where he posted weather and stock information as well as tidbits on the Beatles, still his favorite band. He charged an annual fee of $5 and had 150 subscribers.
Miles turned to computers "because I was looking for something to make me feel good."
His father, Michael, had left when Miles was 4, and his mother, Joan, worked cleaning houses to make ends meet.
"There was never a ball thrown to me as a kid," Miles said. "I knew I had a void because of my father. By working hard, I could get accolades - much like a kid who played sports."
Miles and his father, who lives in Delray Beach, Fla., reconciled when Miles was a teenager after an older brother reestablished contact. "My father basically said to him that he could feel sorry for himself for the next 20 years because his parents made a mistake, or he could go forward. Eventually, I got a call from my brother. He said, 'I have someone who wants to talk to you.'
"After that, I wanted to visit my father; my mother paid my way," Miles said.
His experiences growing up shaped the way he is today - a perfectionist who demands much from his 33 full-time employees. He does have outside interests; Miles enjoys boating and playing guitar. But business "is what I like to do," he said.
"I know that Chris as a younger kid was working when other kids were just out playing," said company vice president John Bialous, another friend who met Miles at Shawnee. "When you grow up with a father, they do a lot for you, which is nice and good and all. But Chris was kind of his own father. He taught himself how to do everything."
At 17, Miles bought a lime green truck for $700 and started Majestic Design, a construction company. He and his 10 to 15 employees repaired and built docks and bulkheads around the Medford-Medford Lakes area.
Later, while earning the engineering degree he received from the University of Delaware in 1993, Miles started a window-replacement, roofing and siding business in Delaware. He employed more people.
"When I was 20 years old, I had an employee handbook," he said.
Miles got into his current business almost by accident. Because he knew a lot about computers, people often asked him for advice. One day, someone who had been referred to him called, and "at the end of the conversation, I said it would cost $100 an hour." His first client readily accepted. Miles Technologies was born.
It was not an easy birth. "I wasn't Donald Trump starting with $10 million," Miles said. In addition to using $120,000 from the refinancing of the two homes, he accumulated $147,000 in credit-card debt.
"I paid off all my debts in two years."
He said he had never entertained the thought that that wouldn't happen.
"There's no way to work as hard as I work and not eventually succeed," Miles said. "I just can't envision that happening."
Contact staff writer Rusty Pray
at 856-779-3894 or rpray@phillynews.com.
Information Overload A niche market is sprouting to help deal with accumulating data.
Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20151222142841/http://articles.philly.com/2006-03-13/business/25414757_1_knowledge-management-laptop-scienceBy Jane M. Von Bergen INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
Posted: March 13, 2006Now that he works for Miles Technologies.com, salesman Edward Nallen notices how immaculate his car is.
Oddly and delightfully so - for a salesman who schleps his office in his backseat as many salespeople do.
"I literally had cartons and cartons with files and papers," he said. "Now I carry a laptop and that's it."
In a messy world, Nallen's desk is remarkable for its emptiness:
No order forms, no piles of client files, no message pads. No blank contracts. No reports.
FOR THE RECORD - CLEARING THE RECORD, PUBLISHED MARCH 14, 2006, FOLLOWS: An article in yesterday's Business section about companies' grappling with information overload mischaracterized an industry expert's definition of knowledge management. Jonathan Spira, author of Managing the Knowledge Workforce, said knowledge management is a component of the $60 billion U.S. market for "collaborative business knowledge," which also includes search tools, e-mail programs and document management.
No clutter. No nothing.
Well, maybe one photo.
Nallen doesn't have a file cabinet, and there's no copy machine in the sales office or even in the building.
The Moorestown company's 55 employees share two printers, one on each floor, which don't get much use. Nallen prints out travel directions - because powering up the laptop while driving wouldn't be safe.
Nallen now lives what he sells: Miles Technologies.com is a $6 million company that helps companies go paperless. Miles designs the strategy, sells the necessary software and equipment, and provides service and training.
"You can't say you should go paperless if you don't believe in it," Nallen said. His only sin is a stack of business cards hidden on top of the computer processing unit under his desk. Soon he'll enter them into his laptop.
At Miles, bosses raise their eyebrows when they see mess on a desk. "We're not real tolerant of a lot of paper and clutter," said John Bialous, the vice president and chief operating officer.
Founded in 1997 by former civil engineer Chris Miles, 35, who discovered a gift for the efficient use of technology, Miles Technologies.com is a tiny sliver in the multibillion dollar business of knowledge management.
Just as individual workers cope with the onslaught of information that crowds e-mail in-boxes, file cabinets and desktops before spilling into piles on the floor, companies must also manage ever-increasing amounts of data.
Knowledge management, a growing discipline, encompasses information science and library science, as well as sociology and group dynamics.
Information science is the often technical aspect of how firms capture, store and retrieve knowledge. Library science deals with labeling and organizing knowledge so it can be found and used.
Knowledge management uses both disciplines in strategizing how to share knowledge - both explicit, as in facts, and tacit, as in cultural or philosophical understanding. It considers which workers need what knowledge at what time and from whom for maximum collaboration and profitability.
Business consultant Andrea Hornett, a senior lecturer at Penn State's Great Valley campus, said that knowledge management is becoming the key to competitiveness in a global economy.
"The philosophy or notion that is undergirding this development is that in a globally dispersed economy where capital flows quickly, all the traditional ways of competing - efficiency or cost or design - are easily adopted by competitors any place on the planet. Labor costs can also be outsourced."
What counts, then, she said, "is how can we manage our knowledge. What are our areas of know-how that we can offer? If we are focusing on what we know, how can we identify it, transfer it, acquire it, share it, store it and retrieve it?"
How big is the business?
Jonathan Spira, author of Managing the Knowledge Workforce: Understanding the Information Revolution That's Changing the Business World, estimates that the knowledge-management market will top $60 billion this year in the United States.
It includes 22 market categories - everything, he said, from document-management hardware and software to teleconferencing equipment. Also included would be search tools, e-mail programs and portal design - the way individual workers enter and interact with their companies' electronic repositories of data, explained Spira, chief executive officer of Basex Inc., a knowledge-management consulting firm in Manhattan.
"We're really in the first throes of the knowledge economy, and we really haven't figured out how to manage it yet."
Contact staff writer Jane M. Von Bergen at 215-854-2769 or jvonbergen@phillynews.com.
