If paradise to a group of caffeine-hyped 11-year-olds means cannonballs off the diving board, eight large pizzas on the picnic table and jokes off the cuff, Dan Siadak's backyard is Eden. The best part? In this paradise, there are no pesky serpents-parents haven't arrived yet.

A restless boy taps Siadak's arm. "Mind if we throw Bailey into the pool?" he asks. Seemingly for the first time on this warm July evening in Lansing, Mich., Siadak does mind. Bailey, a puppy who has spent much of his life wrestling a dirty sock, isn't supposed to be in the pool without proper supervision (read: Dan's wife, Colleen). The boy shrugs and flails into the water. Siadak turns and chuckles. "But that would be pretty cool," he says.

The boys use that word-cool-to describe Siadak, their neighborhood father figure. Employees at RBF Inc., the successful distributorship where he has served as president since 1987, use the word to describe his even-keeled demeanor. Is Dan having a bad day? You can never tell by looking. "The guy has the most consistent temperament I've ever seen," says Joy Lund, RBF's purchasing manager for the past 15 years. "That's why it's so comfortable to work with him."

Ask Siadak what keeps him from being cross, and the cross is exactly what he'll mention. "Faith is the most prevalent part of my personality and being," he says. "I live by a certain priority structure, which I take very seriously: God comes first, family comes second, and career comes third. When you construct your life this way, I believe many benefits stand out."

Two hours ago, standing as he appears now-head tilted slightly, hands at his sides, a genuine smile-Siadak simultaneously experienced priorities one and two. He coached his 11-year-old son Benjamin's St. Gerard Church youth baseball team to a 6-5 victory over rivals from the same Catholic parish. Every boy swimming in Siadak's pool played in the game. The contest was held on a well-kept field that's upgraded yearly, thanks in large part to contributions from Atlanta Braves pitcher John Smoltz, a Lansing native and former St. Gerard elementary student.

From the pool, the boys let out a roar. Bailey's in the deep end. Siadak dives into the moment, not after the dog. "It's these kinds of evenings, where everyone can get together and have a good time, that makes life enjoyable," he says. "It's really a blessing to have the opportunity to enjoy these kids."

It's also a blessing, Siadak says, to participate in an industry that has "rewarded him from the start." At DMIA's Informservices Conference & Expo (i2000), to be held Oct. 18-20 in Chicago, he will begin a new role as the association's president. "I'm looking forward to giving back," he says.

Corporate Genesis
RBF Inc. was founded as Russell Business Forms Inc. in 1964 by W. James Russell, who cleared out an extra bedroom in his Lansing home, purchased a $35 used desk and promptly established a first-year net profit goal of $1. With his wife Phyllis keeping the books, Russell aimed to include his business among the 15 percent of firms during that period that didn't fail before the second year. "We figured, if we could get through that [time], we'd have a chance of long-term survival," he says.

If the company was going to be valuable, Russell decided, it had to start with just that-values. The strategy worked. The distributorship netted a few hundred dollars in 1964, and it has earned a profit every year since. (Last year, the firm's sales grew approximately 10 percent to just under $9 million.) More important to Russell, "the company has kept a high regard for integrity," he says. "There's a moral friendliness to the RBF environment that's more important than anything. Dan and I share the same ethical code, and he runs the company in a way that makes me proud." Russell, DMIA's 1979-80 president, now serves as CEO of RBF.

Siadak began working for RBF as a co-op student during his senior year of high school. He would attend class until 10 a.m., work in a restaurant during lunch, and then work at the distributorship until 5 p.m. On Nov. 3, 1975, he joined RBF as its sixth full-time employee. Siadak's first task was to launch a purchasing department and help with inside sales support, alleviating that burden from more seasoned sales personnel.

"When he started, he had the same controlled, modular voice he has now," Russell recalls. "He had a mature bearing far beyond his years. Vendors were astonished when they met him for the first time because they expected to see a refined, 30-year-old, distinguished gentleman-not some teenager."

The forms business was booming in the mid-1970s, and Siadak faced a decision-go to college or stay at RBF and pursue a career. His sweetheart Colleen, whom he had met in the ninth grade at Waverly West Junior High in Lansing, had enrolled in nursing school one hour away in Grand Rapids. "We really grew up together and learned about love from each other," she says. "I think he knew he wanted to marry me pretty early on. His goals with our relationship helped to dictate his career decisions. This is a guy, after all, who always seems to know what he wants."

Siadak decided against college and was promoted to sales representative at RBF. He and Colleen married in September 1979. Kelly, the first of their four kids, was born in June 1980. "Having a family when I was still young was a big motivator to work hard and to be a good provider," Siadak says.

A few weeks after Kelly was born, Siadak was promoted again, this time to manager of RBF's new Saginaw, Mich., branch. "Here we were," Colleen says, "still newlyweds and new parents, moving to an area with no family and no friends. It was pretty rough." Dan began working 12 to 15 hour days, not resting on weekends or on laurels. The branch achieved rapid growth. "Sometimes with a little hardship, we learned quickly the values of quality time and sacrifice," Colleen says.

According to Pat Bossio, CFC, branch manager of RBF's 8-employee Livonia, Mich., office, which launched in 1985, Siadak's impressive reputation as a leader was overshadowed only by his reputation as a good guy. "He stood out so much," Bossio says. "He really showed me how different this company was." Siadak, who owned a green Lincoln car with leather interior, would "drive around and haul forms in this awful-looking [Chevrolet] Monza," recalls Bossio. "He was very successful, but he didn't feel compelled to show it. Integrity is a term that gets thrown around all the time, but Dan and [Jim Russell] are truly men of integrity. They work hard, care about customers, believe in their products, and always-always-tell the truth."

Moral Proverbs
The Siadaks moved from Saginaw back to Lansing in November 1985, when Dan became RBF's sales manager. In 1986, he was promoted to vice president of sales and marketing. A year later, he became the distributorship's president and chief operating officer. "His development of customer relations was excellent," Russell says. "I mentored him on the importance of establishing clearly defined goals. Professionally and ethically, he was the perfect fit for the job."

Siadak aimed to continue the working environment established by Russell, one in which employees pursued goals based on passion from within, not pestering from the boss. "Compromise" was something you did to solve disagreements; it was not something you did to your ethics. Today at RBF, doors stay open, and so does communication. The company's morals are based on the Old and New Testaments, Siadak says, and the Judeo Christian code is at the forefront of the firm's business philosophy. You don't have to be Christian to work for the distributorship, of course, but you do have to exude honesty and sincerity. "We all have our idiosyncrasies," says Kathy Brooks, RBF's human resource manager, "but everyone is respectful. There just isn't any back-biting here."

Instead of chewing out employees, Siadak offers them things to chew on. He recently developed a 3-year strategic plan that outlines the company's SWOT-strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. One-year action plans were included for each of RBF's five branches (Atlanta; Fort Wayne, Ind.; Lansing, Mich.; Livonia, Mich.; and Midland, Mich.). One-year plans were also developed for the firm's five corporate departments (purchasing, data processing, client services, human resources and operations). Part of the strategic plan's theme was "Building a Digital Nervous System." Siadak gave copies of Bill Gates' bestseller, Business @ The Speed of Thought, to each RBF manager. "Strange as it may sound for a forms company," he says, "we're pushing to become as paperless as possible." By the end of 2000, RBF will have a new phone system with an automated Rolodex®, a WAN network to link its branches more efficiently and T1 lines for faster Internet access.

"We're a very goal-oriented company," Bossio says. "We have an organized pattern of procedures and policies that leaves nothing to guesswork." Those policies start with a simple premise-clients come first. "You have to have a solid foundation before you can offer anything worthwhile to customers," Bossio says. "That flows down from Dan."

Many of RBF's 45 employees have been with the distributorship for longer than a decade. Around its headquarters, Siadak is known for being intelligent, polite and tactful. He says he draws strength from reading one Bible chapter from the book of Proverbs daily. (He reads Proverbs 1 on the first day of the month, Proverbs 2 on the second day, and so on. The book includes 31 chapters.) Folks who stereotype deeply pious people as withdrawn or abrasive would be surprised by the quick wit and good-natured humor Siadak routinely displays. Make a joke ("Proverbs was probably a good pick. Thirty-one Lamentations would just be depressing."), and he's likely to laugh and return a funnier one.

God comes first to Siadak, but RBF's devotion to morality is noticeable company-wide: At the distributorship's headquarters, a picture frame with text from Psalms 1:1 hangs in the upstairs hallway. The company's annual meeting held each November begins with a prayer. RBF's Statement of Values, included in promotional packets for prospects, begins with three lines about biblical principles.

RBF's principles were tested in 1989. That year, Siadak pursued a large account that "would have made our year" if the distributorship attained it, he says. Before RBF conducted a final presentation to try to win the client, one of the prospect's employees delicately asked Siadak to remove the value statement in case it offended the company's upper management team. Siadak said, "This is who we are. We believe in these things, and this is how we operate. If it means we can't go any further, so be it." RBF included the value statement and won the account. "If we would have lost [it], we would have kept our integrity," he says. "No professional gain is more important than your belief system."

Profitable Acts
RBF sells systems to its clients. Nearly all of the distributorship's accounts have signed committed contracts to purchase documents from RBF. This practice is common in the health care industry, which accounts for approximately 75 percent of the firm's business.

Siadak's main selling focus since 1996 has been RBF's Trinity™ system, a comprehensive document analysis and management program targeted to firms with annual forms budgets of $200,000 or more. The system focuses on three goals (hence the name Trinity): improving the quality of clients' paper-based tools, increasing the productivity of those tools, and reducing their cycle times so information moves rapidly.

RBF has executive sales consultants who strictly sell the Trinity system, targeting prospects in geographic regions. Meticulous research from documents such as annual reports, vision statements and news articles is completed on prospects before RBF sends introductory letters to them. When companies schedule appointments to learn more about Trinity, RBF uses a PowerPoint presentation template that can be easily customized to include specific research, logos, past projects and more. The distributorship's eventual goal is to sign at least one new Trinity client per month.

At the heart of the Trinity system is a focus on how much time hospital employees spend pushing paper. "Clients are looking for ways to reduce payroll dollars and avoid being bombarded by information overload," Siadak says. "We analyze how to make their processes more efficient." Quite often, that means eliminating paper forms or converting them to e-forms. After RBF completed document analysis for a Michigan hospital, the distributorship reduced the client's total number of forms from 479 to 81. "They're saving a ton of money," Siadak says. "Some people may think we're shooting ourselves in the foot, and there's no doubt we're losing some paper-based business. Maybe a client that does $500,000 in forms today will do $300,000 in three years-but we'll still have that client. If we don't help customers become as efficient as possible, someone else will."

That someone may be a spin-off company of RBF called Trinity DataTek Solutions, Siadak's revelation that began in January 2000. It's a consulting firm that offers services such as system integration, interactive Web marketing and document imaging technology. It's also an e-forms provider. "Especially for a company like RBF that tries to lock up all the forms business when they sign a client, you have to offer solutions that go beyond paper," says Pat Doyle, manager of consulting services for Trinity DataTek Solutions. The company enables Siadak and Doyle to market consulting services separate from printing with the same level of process analysis RBF uses. Clients can buy into any of four "modules"-process analysis, re-engineering (e-forms conversion), systems integration (database linking and other higher-end integration) and maintenance (data hosting).

"Five years from now, we hope we're generating a lot of revenue from pure consulting," Siadak says. "This has a chance to be wildly profitable." To generate revenue and become established, Trinity DataTek Solutions is gaining business from RBF's clients. But the firm is soon expected to grow on its own, launching services and products separate from the distributorship. The consulting company recently nabbed an order that will bring in between $100,000 and $140,000.

In addition to selling the Trinity system and launching Trinity DataTek Solutions, Siadak is focused on growing RBF's commercial printing business. That niche will account for at least 15 percent of the firm's sales this year. Since 1996, RBF has had its own creative services department, run by Michael Hammond, the company's art director.

Account managers bring work to Hammond, who has designed brochures, direct mail campaigns, plastic card applications, newsletters, laminated medical charts and more. RBF also provides photography and illustration services. Because the $8 billion forms industry is stagnant and the $80 billion commercial printing industry is healthy, "we have a lot of room for growth," Hammond says. Siadak has visions of building a value-added services package for commercial printing clients that would be similar to the Trinity system.

Family Revelation
Contented, the boys have left the Siadak swimming pool and have gone home. Pizza boxes fill three garbage containers, and the air in Lansing becomes quiet and cool. Conversations move inside to the kitchen. Benjamin, still excited about his 6-5 baseball victory (but unaware that his team will win the regular season and lose in the first round of the playoffs), goes upstairs. Christina, Ben's twin sister, whose softball team will surprise the league and win the championship, comes downstairs. Their brother Dan, who just turned 18 and shares his father's dry wit, has informed the group that he will be pulling a casino all-nighter. "Who wants in?" he asks. Twenty-year-old Kelly would accept, but one of her summer classes is a killer. Welcome to the Siadak house in its vintage state; this is Father Knows Best without the need for a laugh track.

On summer nights, Colleen and Dan often travel to their cottage on Morrison Lake, 30 miles west of here. Tonight, however, they're right where they want to be. She is smiling at her ninth-grade crush, the one who exudes confidence, never cockiness, and wonders aloud if eight large pizzas was enough. He is smiling at his spontaneous and supportive wife, the one he calls an angel.

"So who wants in?" Danny asks again. Tonight, there will be no takers. His father has moved closer to the glass door that leads to the backyard. On the kitchen wall hang symbols of the family's faith. God, family, career. The third is going just fine. The second? That's going even better. As Dan stares out the glass and looks at the night sky, perhaps he's saying a quick thank you to the first.

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