INTERVIEW | RYAN MILLER


Faith in the future


Integrity, attitude, ownership, excellence – these are just a few of the core principles of PWI, and they pervade the organisation from the top down. President and CEO Ryan Miller, a dedicated man of faith with a deep commitment to both his community and his company, tells OCH how a family business can stick to its core values while innovating and adapting to the challenges of today’s market.


B


ack in 1979, Paul Miller started a small, family-owned welding shop in Nappanee, Indiana, not knowing how that choice would shape his family’s future and create a business that would not only endure and grow, but also continue to embody his own personal values. The founder of Paul’s Welding and Repair was guided not only by his strongly held Christian beliefs, but also an innovative spirit and creative mind, and both his beliefs and his entrepreneurial spirit would be carried through the business by his sons – Ryan, Darren and Kyle – who officially joined the company in 1996, though in truth they had always been a part of the operation. “I was welding at six years old,” says Ryan Miller, the eldest of the brothers and now president and CEO of the company now known as PWI.


“Mom and dad started the company in two


acres of land behind their house, and my brothers and I all grew up doing repair work and general fabrication jobs. I was always involved in the business, partly out of necessity when my father needed help. When I was 10 years old, I helped him to build our first big steel building, which meant I was even running a forklift.” From those early days, with his father running the company during the day and then working with his sons on the building project after hours, it was clear that the company was in the family’s blood.


“My father never made me feel like I had to be


involved, but I felt like I wanted to be part of this business and help him run it,” Miller explains.


Branching out The business may have started out as a simple welding shop, but it was able to grow steadily into something much more diverse. With its focus on solving clients’ problems with high-quality solutions and its ability to build strong customer relationships, it would eventually become a highly regarded provider of innovative material handling solutions for the local RV industry. That would be the platform for the small company to take on more industrial work and, by 2000, it had become a larger entity that was able to branch out into the manufacture of cranes. “We were able to attract more industrial work in the 1990s, and we saw potential to expand our range,” Miller says. “A customer asked us to weld a beam for a monorail crane and from there we started to get more calls for work in materials handling.” In 2015, the company took delivery of its first PCR 31 CNC plasma cutting machine and soon designed what would be the first PWI product line – the ULTRALITE workstation crane series. Two years later, the company and the family would suffer a great loss with the passing of Paul Miller after a battle with cancer, leaving Ryan and his brothers to carry on his legacy. “Both parents died from cancer at a young age,” Miller says. “My mom died 20 years ago,


and my father eight years ago, but I had already stepped into a leadership role in a new way as my dad had been stepping out to some degree due to his illness.” Taking over from the founder of a company,


and from your father, surely comes with a big burden of responsibility. Even when you have been involved from the start and picked up a welding torch for the first time at the age of six, leadership demands very different skills. In typical fashion, Miller did not shirk or shrink from the task but took a very practical approach to learning how to run the company. “We got some outside advice to help us understand delegation for the first time,” he remarks. “I was the company’s first sales guy, and I delegated production to another leader in the business, and by doing so we doubled and then tripled the company’s business fairly quickly.” In 2018, Miller officially stepped into the role


of president and CEO, and one of his first actions was to create the company’s first executive team. Following that decision, he could use that structure as a platform on which to build a long- term vision for the business. Now, PWI is more than just a crane company. It manufactures stairways, mezzanines and many other components for the materials handling sector. The crane segment of the business is certainly the biggest part of the company, but Miller is keen not to limit the scope of his vision. Organic growth and a strong work ethic have enabled the business to adapt to changing


ochmagazine.com | Winter 2025 33


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