Fellows stories: Rob and Alisa Miller
Husband-and-wife Fellows Rob and Alisa Miller realised their skills as business leaders were transferable to a huge range of impact causes, and the couple were prime movers behind the high-profile NHS Hero Support campaign, which ramped up the distribution of PPE during Covid.
Their primary focus remains family, and the couple are now supporting their son Amity in his music career. “We’ve always said that you liberated us from a difficult situation running a business, and gave us the ability to live a different life…”
Rob: Post sale, we’ve gone through different life cycles, different lives. Immediately post sale, it was fantastic in the sense that we had that weight lifted off our shoulders. We didn’t have all the stress. It enabled us to do things that historically we weren’t able to do – hobbies for example. But most importantly, spending quality time with our children. This was one of the paramount reasons that we decided to sell: we felt that we couldn’t concentrate on a business and our family simultaneously. And the most important thing was the family.
Alisa: I had a different experience in the sense that I didn’t feel this huge release, because I was scared at the beginning, thinking ‘what do I do now?’ And one of the biggest questions I had was: ‘who am I now?’ My name came with my job title attached to it, because it had been such a huge part of my life for so long. Suddenly, I didn’t quite know who I was.
Rob: And the second stage of it was then us realising we needed to do things cerebrally to keep our brains alive. We kept getting involved in things where we could take our skills and transfer them into completely different projects, both charitable and political. We quickly realised we could bring value in completely different sectors, which we wouldn’t even have thought about before. This was not with a view to making any money, but because we wanted to help. We wanted to have an impact on society, wanted to help people in whichever way we could.
Alisa: There were suddenly opportunities to make differences in other ways, like the pandemic. We found ourselves connecting to other people with strong skillsets and strongly motivated to act. We thought: well, let’s do something. And I think if you’re an entrepreneur, you’ve got that mindset of ‘here’s a problem that I can solve…’
Rob: Following the outbreak of COVID-19, with a small group of other people, we set up NHS Hero support. We started a crowdfunding campaign to try and encourage people to donate money so that we could source large amounts of PPE and get it into the places that needed it most. We felt the government was struggling so much at the time from the sheer burden of running everything through a pandemic.
“We wanted to have an impact on society, wanted to help people in whichever way we could”
Alisa: We managed to source over half a million items of PPE from various places, and get them into hospitals, hospices and nursing homes. We even ended up working with [TV personality] Sue Perkins. She ran a series of auctions. The TV show Line of Duty even put together an ad to promote our fundraising. We managed to raise quite a lot of money that way. And the government gave us space on their planes to ship PPE. They told us that we were doing this more efficiently than they were!
There were some NHS departments that had surplus PPE, so we got connected into them and rerouted it into other hospitals. We were told it was more seamless and efficient than going through the NHS internal systems.
For transport, we had 2,000 motorbikes and cars, a private jet and a government charter. We ended up with a team of logistics experts running the logistics. We had a team of medical people running the hospital liaison team. We had a comms department. We ended up building a whole agile organisation!
A lot of the expertise came from what we’d already been doing in politics and other charitable projects. We built a network of people with amazing skillsets that we were able to nimbly pull into this project. They, like us, are very passionate about philanthropy and doing the right thing and contributing to community and the well-being of other people.
A way of coping with an uncontrollable situation is to feel like you have a small degree of control over something. Instead of sitting there wondering who’s going to make all this OK again, you actually have that freedom to be one of the people helping to make something OK again.
“Instead of sitting there wondering who’s going to make all this OK again, you have that freedom to be one of the people helping to make something OK again.”
Alisa: I felt like at the end of the sale process, I was closing a book that I had written and put it on the shelf. And I didn’t know what was going to go in the next book.
But I’ve actually felt that since then I’ve started so many books and so many chapters and completed them. Books I didn’t imagine could be written are being written now. For example, one of the projects that I now run is an eco-project for a sustainable community in my area called Buy Nothing. It’s a franchise of an international organisation, and I’ve been helping the headquarters with their communications, planning and research. This reflects the fact that I’ve gone from someone who was jetting around the world and stopping off at airports to buy a Gucci handbag, to someone who really understands the impact of that lifestyle. I’m doing something quite opposite now.
Rob: Our next chapter is [our son] Amity’s music career, which has become all-encompassing for us. [Amity is a multi-award-winning singer songwriter, the Royal Albert Hall’s current Future Maker artist, and resident artist at Soho’s Spice of Life, see www.amitymiller.com]. Amity has a management team of four people, and we are two of those, a two-person agency. He had a horrific time during lockdown – a mental breakdown – and it was the music that saved him. There’s an imperative to help him. Not because we just want him to be a success, but because we know it’s a tonic for him.
Alisa: Amity was invited for a BBC radio interview, and I got yanked into it somehow. I said to the interviewer that Amity’s psychiatrist had told me there’s nothing I can prescribe that will do as much good for Amity as you’re doing with supporting his music.
It’s been a steep learning curve. We had chapter one, which was our medical communications life. And then chapter two, dipping in and out of lots of parallel and serial consecutive projects that were philanthropic in nature. Chapter three is this new life as music industry executives! Every single one that we’ve got involved with has had a learning curve. It actually is exhilarating. Network, research, read, talk… but you’re in real time. It’s happening around us. It’s exhilarating to keep reinventing yourself and keep learning.