Jack Miller
Serial entrepreneur. Philanthropist. Great American success story.
The founder and former President and CEO of Quill Corporation, Jack Miller and his brothers grew their company over 43 years from the back room of his father’s poultry shop to the nation’s largest independent direct marketer of office products. Employing over 1,300 people with annual sales in excess of $630 million from over 800,000 customers nationwide, Quill was acquired by Staples in 1998.
Over the next decade, Jack was the owner and chairman of the board at Successories Inc., a business-to-business mail order firm. In 2009, he sold Successories and turned his focus to real estate development and investment at Millbrook Properties and The Benida Group.
Believing deeply in his responsibility to give back, Jack is an active philanthropist. He is the Founder and Chairman Emeritus of the Jack Miller Center for Teaching America’s Founding Principles and History as well as Chairman and President Emeritus of the Jack Miller Family Foundation, which supports a wide variety of freedom, Jewish, and community cause efforts. In 2007, he also established the Foundation for Peripheral Neuropathy to support the funding of collaborative research at numerous institutions.
Jack was inducted into Philanthropy World Magazine’s Hall of Fame in 2008. In 2012, he received the Joseph H. Kanter Citizen of the Year Award at the annual meeting of the National Conference on Citizenship. He has been honored with the Spirit of Life Award for the Office Products Council of the City of Hope, the Torch of Liberty award from the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai Brith, and the Industrialist of the Year Award from the American-Israel Chamber of Commerce. He was elected a Fellow of the Illinois Business Hall of Fame and inducted into the Chicago Business Hall of Fame. In 1998, Jack received the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award.
A 1950 graduate of the University of Illinois with a degree in Journalism, Jack is the author of three books. He calls his first book, Simply Success: How to Start, Build and Grow a Multimillion-Dollar Business the Old-Fashioned Way (2008), “a non-Harvard MBA in entrepreneurship.” His second book, Born to be Free (2018), is a layman’s interpretation of our founding principles and a description of the role the Jack Miller Center plays in teaching them. His most recent book, The Vision, a children’s book collaboration with his grandson, Arkie Ring, is targeted for a younger audience to explain the meaning of the words in the Declaration of Independence.