Peter Jackson, CEO of Miller Industrial Supply, came up in the world of consumer marketing and design before breaking into industrial distribution when he bought Miller Industrial – a 100-year-old MRO and hardware distributor based in the Chicago area – in 2018.
Although he’s a newcomer to the distribution industry, he brings ringing endorsements from his former employees and a belief that management should look more like coaching than controlling. He was never comfortable in big corporate environments and found his way to Groupon when it was just a start-up just before the company took off. Using his experiences there, he became an independent consultant where he began to wonder: How do you play by different rules in industries that cling to the status quo?