Brothers Aden and Ray Miller, Amish Burton area residents, have sailed their business, A-M Seamless Gutters, through some rough waters since Aden bought his first machine in March 2008 and set up shop in a 1,000-square-foot building on Burton Windsor Road.
Brothers Aden and Ray Miller, Amish Burton area residents, have sailed their business, A-M Seamless Gutters, through some rough waters since Aden bought his first machine in March 2008 and set up shop in a 1,000-square-foot building on Burton Windsor Road.
“We thought we had the world by the tail,” Ray said as he was driving a lift along the wall of their new facility while Aden stretched tubing along the ceiling.
Business was good 13 years ago, so Ray bought half the business from his brother while maintaining his roofing business.
Then the economy crashed and they had some serious concerns about their fledgling operation. Fortunately, they connected with a Cleveland roofing company that needed their services.
“That provided us with a lot of work those first crucial years,” Ray said.
By 2014, they had outgrown the building and moved down the street to one twice as big, thinking about leaf guards.
“By 2015, we felt there was a dire need for a good quality leaf guard business,” he said. Not satisfied with the leaf guards on the market, they designed A-M Gutter Guards of aluminum with a bubbled filtration system that allows rainwater to pass through while leaving debris to dry and blow away, according to the A-M Seamless Gutter website amgutterguards.com. The site includes instruction on how to install the guards for the DIY homeowner.
Two growing businesses with stock, inventory and machinery under one roof meant another move.
“We were busting at the seams. We had to do something,” Ray said.
They bought 1.69 acres at 13970 Old State Road a year ago and started building a month later as the COVID-19 pandemic was ramping up in Ohio.
“Building materials skyrocketed,” he recalled, adding, however, they moved in by March 2021.
The clean, well-organized steel-sided building serves multiple purposes. One side stores materials and equipment to produce gutters at construction sites. The other side houses equipment to turn out the leaf guards and shelving for boxes full of the lengths of metal.
The shelves are beside the loading dock, making it easy to load the boxes of guards for Millers’ varied customers. Ray said they sell the leaf guards to individuals, install them if asked or ship them out in trucks to customers in many states.
The gutter business keeps their crew of four full-time and two part-time employees busy, he said, crediting their foreman, Andrew Troyer, with keeping the onsite operation running smoothly.
“He runs the gutter crew day-to-day on the job. He’s phenomenal. Andrew makes it much easier on us,” Ray said.
While he takes care of the business end of A-M Seamless Gutters, Aden handles scheduling of the jobs. Demand for the gutters is high now, but the Millers, like many businesspeople across the country, face supply problems.
“The biggest problem is getting the raw materials,” Ray said. “We used to get three semi loads every two weeks. Now we get a single load, if we’re lucky.”
The supply issue has extended their lead time on projects and they have delayed putting on another installation crew, but demand for gutters, the gutter guards and the brothers’ buoyancy remain high.
“The business is bigger than what we expected,” Ray said.
