Business Spotlight: Mark's Appliance Service emphasizes personal touch

Five years ago, if you asked Mark Miller to predict where he'd be living and what he'd be doing today, his guess would have been wrong. At the time, Miller was living in Lake Worth, Fla., and working as the service manager for an appliance repair company.

One day, while talking with a Maytag factory representative, Miller mentioned that he had grown up in Missouri, and he missed the area. As luck would have it, Maytag was looking for a qualified appliance repairperson who would be willing to start a business and do warranty work for the company in southwest Missouri.

Miller went home and talked to his wife Sherry, and the two decided to leave Florida. They put their house up for sale. It sold within three weeks, and less than two months later, they had relocated to Missouri.

Because Springfield already had several appliance repair businesses, the Millers decided to settle in Ozark, where they founded Mark's Appliance Service. Mark Miller immediately got to work handing out flyers promoting the company. He also visited with retail service managers in the area and asked them to recommend Mark's Appliance Service to customers who needed work done on their appliances.

Initially, most of Miller's work was for Maytag. However, he quickly expanded the scope of his business, and today he repairs, services and does warranty work on large household and commercial name-brand appliances, such as Jennair, Magic Chef, Amana, Frigidaire, Tappan, Westinghouse and Panasonic.

"You have to be authorized to do warranty work for a particular manufacturer and attend schools and seminars that teach you about all of the company's different product lines," Miller said.

Still, Miller said he believes the personal touch has given him a competitive edge. In fact, that's why the company bears his name.

"When a customer calls or has a problem, they aren't dealing with Mr. Appliance or some company rep they're dealing with me," he said. " I try to work with people. Because I work out of my house, I'm easy to reach if someone has an emergency. I also will make a trip out on a Saturday or in the evening if somebody works and isn't home during the day."

Charging a flat rate for service calls also has given Mark's Appliance Service a competitive edge. According to Miller, many appliance repair companies charge a fee to come to your home and then charge by the hour, plus the cost of parts to fix the appliance. Miller doesn't charge a fee to come to a customer's home, and he charges a flat rate of $50 to fix an appliance, plus the cost of parts.

Some of the warranty work Miller does is on high-end appliances. In fact, many common appliances actually are complex.

For example, Maytag makes a range that cooks food in half the time by combining microwave technology with regular convection oven cooking methods. The company also makes a washing machine that determines how dirty your clothes are by analyzing the density of the water in the machine. The machine then regulates the water temperature and adds precisely the right about of detergent needed.

"I've been servicing appliances for 14 years, and things change quickly," Miller said. "In the future, all the appliances in your house will be hooked up to the phone system. If something goes wrong, the machine will call the repairman, who will come out and read a code on a digital display that lets him know exactly what the problem is."

Many of the appliances he services are computerized, and seemingly simple repairs actually can be quite complex.

"There can be seven or eight things that can cause an appliance not to work right. A lot of times, you're dealing with wiring problems or multiple circuit boards, and you have to be able to diagnose and fix a problem quickly."