Spouses Dorothy Beckert and Warren Miller are the co-founders of BECKMILL CAPITAL, LLC and BECKMILL RESEARCH, LLC (www.beckmill.com), and are originators of the Value Map, a proprietary tool that aims to help middle-market companies increase their value and prepare for sale. At Beckmill, Beckert and Miller focus on protecting and enhancing the unique capabilities embedded in a company's processes and current work force.
Headquartered in Lexington, Virginia, with a satellite office in Charlottesville, Beckmill limits its activities to mergers and acquisitions, value enhancement, strategic management, valuation, sell-side ESOPs, forensics, and research. The firm has been significantly involved in almost 400 valuations and transactions. Since SFAS 141 went into effect in mid-2001, Beckmill Research has done allocations of purchased intangibles.
Warren was the CFO in the successful turnaround of United Video Satellite Group, which later acquired TV Guide and then was itself acquired by Gemstar. He began his career as an internal auditor at Union Pacific Corporation. He is a Level III candidate for the Chartered Financial Analyst designation, holds an MBA, and is a Certified Management Accountant. As an academic in strategic management in the 1980s, he completed all of his Ph.D. coursework before deciding a career in academe was not for him.
He passed the first ABV accreditation exam in 1997 and then served on the AICPA's ABV Exam Committee (1998-2002). With Eva M. Lang, he co-authored Advanced Research & Analysis, a required course in the ABV curriculum until 2003. He was cited as "Volunteer of the Year" at the AICPA's annual Business Valuation Conference in Las Vegas in 2001 and was named one of "Virginia's Best CPAs" in litigation support in Virginia Business magazine in 2004.
Warren is an active speaker and researcher. He has made invited presentations at five national and eight state-level professional conferences. He keynoted Cargill Inc.'s triennial Asia-Pacific Management Conference in Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia, in 2001. His published work has appeared in Harvard Business Review, Business Valuation Review, Journal of Property Economics, CPA Expert, Academy of Management Executive, and the business-and-industry supplement of CPA Letter. But the article of which he is most proud is "A Morning in the Life of America's Esquire," which was the cover story in the Spring 1994 issue of the American Fly Fisher.
He also wrote "Three Peas in the Business Valuation Pod: The Resource-Based View of the Firm, Value Creation, and Strategy," a chapter for The Handbook of Business Valuation and Intellectual Property Analysis (McGraw-Hill, 2004). Along with Beckmill Research's proprietary SPARC Framework, that chapter is a precursor to the Value Enhancement Map, which Beckmill Research will roll out early in 2007.
Among other organizations, Warren is a member of the Appraisal Issues Task Force, the Partners' Committee of the Briefcase Fund LP, the Culver Legion, the Strategic Management Society, and the CFA Institute. He has been qualified as an expert witness in business valuation in Virginia and Oklahoma. He proudly served an enlistment in the U.S. Marine Corps, from which he was honorably discharged.
Between them, Dorothy and Warren have three children and three grandsons. Besides their passion for their work, the "Beckmills" also enjoy reading, travel, golf, keeping up with old friends, and living in the beautiful Shenandoah Valley.