Name: Brandon Miller

Title: HR Manager

Tenure: 11 Years

Hobbies: Brandon enjoys the rural experience of living in a small town. With three boisterous sons, a good group of dogs and cats, his wife’s small goat business, and raising pigs in the summer, there’s always something to stay busy and get dirty. When not tracking with the boys' activities or their animals, you can find him having fun outdoors; hiking, camping, spending time with family, studying and teaching on Sundays, and playing hobby board games.

Bio: There’s a phrase that people use for people who do a lot of things: A “Jack of All Trades and a Master of None.” And maybe that term could apply to Brandon Miller, the Human Resources Manager for Hose and Rubber Supply, except that he actually has mastered quite a bit in his line of work. Though he’d never say so himself.

Miller began working for Hose and Rubber Supply about 11 years ago, when the father of his future bride mentioned that his company was hiring.

“She’s from Utah,” Miller said. “So we moved out there and it was just going to be a year-long thing. And 11 years later, here we are.”

In those 11 years, Miller went from a position in accounts payable to being the HR Manager for Hose and Rubber Supply.
Initially, Miller actually worked for his father-in-law, which was certainly a unique dynamic.

“He had actually been my boss for a good while at first,” Miller stated. “He’s the Controller and additionally became the HR manager when Hose and Rubber merged in 2013. And then, in the last year-and-a-half, I became the HR Manager so now we both report to Scott Hilton.”

Miller stated that when Hose and Rubber Supply merged, an opportunity presented itself.

“As our two companies merged, neither company had a dedicated HR person,” Miller said. “So I ended up getting picked for that and I’ve learned a lot of things over the years. That’s one of the funnest parts of the job; just the variety. It’s a lot of fun for me and I kind of dabble in everything, because of the size of Hose and Rubber.”

There are many different aspects to Miller’s job. There’s never a dull moment, so to speak, and he constantly has irons in multiple fires.

“The October to March timeframe is the busy part of the year, with a lot of year-end things,” he revealed. “I do open enrollment benefits, a lot of compliance, record keeping things that need to be done. You have the annual cycle of things that have to be done and different reporting and such, but you also have a lot of things that happen consistently.”

Those things include payroll twice a month, onboarding and offboarding processes, projects, handling requests, serving as a constant resource for employees and managers, and more.

“Really, it’s about being a resource to the entire company,” Miller suggested. “It’s about ‘How can I help our managers?’ ‘How can I help our employees so that they can focus on their job, instead of all of this other stuff?’ The hope is that I can take things off of the managers’ plates so that they can focus on the sales side and taking care of customers.”

That’s Miller’s biggest goal, really: to make the job easier for everybody else.

“That’s my favorite part of the job,” he revealed. “Just helping people. If someone calls up and they have a question on something and I’m able to help them figure out a positive solution - that’s probably my favorite thing.”

That’s not the only thing he enjoys about the job, however.

“The other thing I like about it is just having the ability to help us grow, as a company,” he stated. “I like thinking strategically. I also like the variety of the job. It’s such a varied job and it’s constantly changing. There’s so much to learn. In bigger companies, the job is kind of divided up. If you talk about benefits or payroll or compliance or different areas of HR, it gets divided up as companies get bigger. 

So the fun thing for me is that I get to do it all. I’m always learning.”

Comparatively speaking, Hose and Rubber Supply is a smaller company, but it’s constantly growing, constantly evolving, and constantly innovating when it comes to customer service.

“We’re a niche market,” Miller said. “And in our niche market, we try to focus on our knowledge and our inventory. So what we’re saying is ‘Hey, we have the product on hand to get you taken care of, but we can also figure out the best solution for you.’”

It’s not just the customers of Hose and Rubber Supply that Miller is dedicated to finding solutions for; it’s also the employees. More than anything, Miller’s job is to ensure that the employees of Hose and Rubber are happy, safe, and taken care of.

“We’re an ESOP,” Miller stated. “And so one of the big benefits to that is that as Hose and Rubber does well, as we grow, everybody gets the benefit. As we work together, we can win together. The ESOP, at its core, is a retirement benefit, but one of the bigger benefits of that is saying that we want to get people involved. We want to ask them what they see as their function, and how can that help everybody else?”

Miller said that Hose and Rubber Supply is a very collaborative company; they value input from the top down. They want to continue to make Hose and Rubber Supply a company that shares all of its success with its employees in a variety of ways.

“From a P&L standpoint, from a sales standpoint, there’s a lot of information that is being shared,” he said. “And one of the big ideas behind that is that, as we’re sharing this information, can we also share ideas on how we can do better? How can we work together on the branch level, on a company level? We also have a quarterly profit sharing program which, once again, isn’t just helping the owner of a company do well; it’s helping all of us.”

And really, at its core, that’s all Hose and Rubber wants to do. It wants to create solutions for customers and it wants to take care of its employees. And shouldn’t that be the standard for any company?

“A big thing about Hose and Rubber, over our history, is our desire to care for our employees and care for our customers,” Miller said. 

“Gordon [Crawford], when he was our CEO, instilled in us that Hose and Rubber Supply has a customer service heart that says our goal is to take care of customers, even if that means sending them to the competition. So that’s the idea. It’s ‘How can we care for the customers, and are we caring for the employees?’ It’s a desire to care.”

Brandon Miller has that desire to care. It’s what has propelled him to his current position and it’s the basis of the entire operation of Hose and Rubber Supply. And no matter how much he works, no matter how many different things he’s doing - he never forgets that desire to care. He may not have mastered everything just yet, but he has mastered that. Brandon Miller is certainly a Jack of All Trades at Hose and Rubber Supply. And he wouldn’t trade it for the world.