Print Solutions Magazine

Talk to Jim Riley about a topic he values—operating two successful companies, developing more than a dozen patents, applying his favorite rub to steaks before grilling—and the soft-spoken, conscientious thinker reveals a different side. Behind the placid exterior is someone highly motivated and intellectually energized to find profitable business answers to client problems.

Riley, CDC, president and owner of St. Louis firms Riley Barnard & O’Connell Business Products Inc. (RB&O) and LaserBand LLC, is never the loudest guy in the room, but he’s likely the most cerebral.

And what’s he thinking now? There’s no logical explanation for why his friend, Jack “Shark” Sharkey just challenged him to drop to the floor and do 20 push-ups.

Riley sits in a chair in the corner of his family’s large pool house in Ladue, Mo. For the past hour, he’s enjoyed listening to his three kids from a previous marriage, Shane, 33, Molly, 30, and Meghan, 27, chat about funny childhood memories. His other two kids, Michaela, 11, and Katie, 7, are asleep. Their mother, Claudia, Riley’s current wife of 14 years, smiles at her husband and says, “Well, honey, are you going to show us what you’ve got?”

Riley smiles at his wife, then across the room at Sharkey, the man who introduced them in 1988. The night before Riley and Sharkey left for a 2-week trip to Oktoberfest in Europe, they went to a Greek restaurant Claudia’s family owned. Sharkey figured his buddy would be attracted to the alluring brunette who sometimes worked there. “By the end of the night, she was sharing a booth with us, and I felt like I knew her whole life story,” Riley recalls. “I couldn’t get her out of my head the whole time I was in Europe.”

They soon began dating and married in 1991.

“Come on, Jim, we don’t have all night!” Sharkey bellows. “Are you going to get on the floor, or wimp out?”

When Riley thinks, he’ll tilt his head, purse his lips and place his chin in the palm of his hand. He may have been in that position for a long time while finalizing the 8,000-word application for U.S. Patent 6,510,634 (“Multiple computer generated multi-web moisture proof identification bracelets on a single form with window”). But now, there’s only a flash of the thinking posture.

“It’s 11 o’clock at night, and I’m 57,” Riley says. He rises from his chair and removes his brown sandals.

“So?” Sharkey says, grinning.

“So, I might just surprise you!”

Riley kneels on the floor and wipes his hands on his floral-print shirt before extending his arms in push-up position. The room is silent. He’s thinking I can do this, and his triceps begin to prove it. Sharkey leads the others in a fast count: “One, two, three…” When Riley gets to 20, he receives applause, but he keeps going. 25…30…35… After 40 seemingly effortless push-ups, he stops. “That felt pretty good,” he says, looking at Sharkey. “Your turn?”

The push-ups seem like a spontaneous triumph, but hardly anything Riley does is impulsive. What Sharkey forgot was that his friend works out each morning, and 40 push-ups are part of his routine.

Among DMIA’s leaders, Riley is known for a different kind of routine, one that reveals the droll, entertaining side of his personality. For the past five years, Riley has given 15-minute impersonations of the association’s outgoing president during DMIA’s annual Board meetings. The routines have become something of an underground legend.

“Some people mistakenly think he’s just a quiet, nice guy. He is, but he’s also one of the funniest people I’ve ever met,” says Robert O’Connell, president of New York City-based distributorship Vanguard Direct, and treasurer of DMIA’s Board of Directors.

Jeff Long, DMIA’s 2003-04 president, recalls: “He was so good at imitating my body language, it was amazing.” Riley mimicked Long by wearing an orange shirt, red pants and a white-haired wig. “It must have taken him months to capture my speech patterns and motions. It was dead-on.”

Says Riley: “I certainly don’t mind making a fool of myself, and I love to have a good time. There’s a time for that, and also a time to get down to business.”

It’s almost time for Riley to begin a one-year term as the association’s new president, which officially begins Nov. 1. (See “Riley: DMIA Needs New Identity” on p. 34.)

Good Sense in the Early Days

Soft spoken and imperturbable, Riley says his even-keeled temperament hasn’t changed much since he grew up in Hastings, Minn., a river town where he lived on a family farm with four brothers and four sisters. His father was a farmer who worked nights at an oil refinery. “He taught me the value of diligence, and both my parents were big on education,” Riley says. “They aspired for us to have a better life.” (Tragically, three of his siblings died at early ages, one in an auto accident and two from medical issues.)

Riley says his father was non-judgmental, but succinct and frank, traits Riley now possesses. “Claudia sometimes calls me ‘Jim Blunt,’” he says. In high school, when Riley drank beer for the first time and felt terrible the next day, his father didn’t scold him; he woke him at dawn for field work. “He told me, ‘You can have fun, but you better be able to get up and do what you need to do, every day.’ I still live by that lesson.”

Riley graduated from the University of Saint Thomas in St. Paul, Minn., where he met his former wife, Patti. He was eager to enter the workforce and make money, but instead was drafted and sent to Vietnam, where he served with the Navy Seabees for a year in the Danang area. His son, Shane, was two weeks old when he departed. Riley didn’t see him again until after his first birthday. “It was a sinking feeling, leaving loved ones, but I felt an obligation and duty,” he says. “The experience certainly made me appreciate what we have here.”

After returning from Vietnam, he began working for Standard Register (SR) as a sales trainee. He says he enjoyed the forms industry because it gave him the chance to solve customers’ problems creatively. Two years later, SR promoted Riley to its St. Louis office, where he was responsible for growing the company’s health care sales. “So many challenging issues existed in the market. I saw that I could be an asset to customers if I put their needs first,” he says.

Riley saw that St. Louis abounded with graphic communication firms, and he set out to distinguish himself through smart solutions and customer service. Meanwhile, the medical market appealed to his intellectual side. He enjoyed analyzing clients’ processes, then suggesting creative alternatives. “I’m analytical, but in an odd way,” Riley says. “I like to attack an issue from different angles. I home in on a challenge from different perspectives. I have an intense desire to figure things out, to come up with a better way. It’s an itch I have to scratch, and that has served me well in the medical market.”

Riley spent seven years at SR, then opened the St. Louis office of L.J. Schuster Company, a Minneapolis/St. Paul-based distributorship, in 1981. He says he had a handshake agreement to buy out the St. Louis branch he started, but the owner changed his mind and decided to bring his two sons to St. Louis to run the branch. “One morning, he said if I wanted to buy the company, that was fine, but I needed to come up with a million dollars by noon. Otherwise, I was fired,” Riley recalls. “I tried to reason with him, but eventually grabbed my briefcase and walked out the door.”

Within weeks, he and another former L.J. Schuster employee, Steve Barnard, established Riley & Barnard Business Products Inc. Their former employer closed the St. Louis office a year later. Meanwhile, Bob O’Connell (no relation to the Robert O’Connell from Vanguard Direct in New York, who’s also mentioned in this story) left Duplex to join Riley and Barnard. He became a partner, and the company became RB&O. (Barnard is no longer a partner, but is still a sales rep at RB&O.)

“We aimed to create a firm where people wanted to come to work and there was no ceiling to achievement,” Riley says. “We wanted to establish a company that would continue to evolve and grow, and was open to change and new ideas.” He wanted the firm to offer a mix of high-tech applications and old-fashioned customer service.

RB&O made inroads in the health care market with traditional forms, labels, commercial printing, stationery and promotional products. The firm penetrated accounts by introducing new products. It became a reseller for Colorflex, a supplier of records management labeling technology, including software and hardware to produce color-coded strip labels. The labels can be printed with bar codes for tracking purposes. The distributorship introduced Colorflex to many health care clients and to clients such as Boeing, which purchased five systems to track specification files for each plane it builds.

Riley says he believes strongly in the value of business partnerships and collaboration, and he looks for people who complement his own skills when choosing partners. “I know enough to know that I don’t know everything,” he says. “I like to get input from people I trust and gather information before making decisions.” At RB&O, O’Connell’s practical, here-and-now mindset balances Riley’s ability to plan for future growth and down-the-road decisions, Riley says. “If you complement each other, one plus one can equal three.”

Today, RB&O offers a variety of products and services, including laser documents, pressure sensitive labels and bar coding systems, integrated labels and cards, self-seal documents, security documents, direct mail, an in-house digital print-on-demand center, inventory management and distribution and records management. It reported fiscal 2005 sales of $10.5 million, up 9.6 percent from 2004.

“The world is changing, and after we do something for a while, I wonder if anyone out there is doing something better,” Riley says. “I can’t accept doing the same thing again and again. In time, there has to be a better way. We need to rethink everything. Some people move when they feel the heat, and some move when they see the light. I like to think we move when we see the light.”

A New Venture in Mind

Riley enters one of his favorite restaurants, Remy’s Kitchen & Wine Bar in Clayton, Mo. The aromatic lunch spot is a couple blocks away from the office building that houses LaserBand LLC, a company he spun off from RB&O in April 2001. He sits next to Sanjay K. Jain, LaserBand’s president and CEO, who graduated from Harvard in three years, made partner at a large law firm and left it, started a venture capital firm, then launched his own start-up and sold it to retire before he was 40. Riley was looking for a partner to operate LaserBand when his good friend, a former next door neighbor and intellectual property attorney named Rich Haferkamp, introduced Jain and discussed the opportunity with him. “I thought he’d be a perfect business partner,” Riley says. “He’s analytical, intelligent and ethical.”

“As an investor, I was used to analyzing businesses, and this one was intriguing,” Jain says. “The company isn’t in a glamorous industry, but the technology was proven. I understood the company’s potential and became excited about it.” He joined LaserBand as president and CEO in January 2002. “Plus, I went to the same high school as Jim’s wife, Claudia,” Jain says. “When I realized it was the same Claudia, I couldn’t believe it. Without thinking, I turned to Jim and said, ‘Wow, your wife is hot.’” Both of them laugh at the memory.

The market for LaserBand’s products is hot, too, thanks to Riley’s ingenuity, Jain’s business sense and government pressure to improve the quality of patient care.

Between sips of soup, Riley explains why he launched LaserBand. He sought a way to enable hospitals to generate a self-contained identification band from a laser printer, believing such a product could help facilities improve their efficiency, processing time and accuracy when registering patients, as well as enhance patient care and safety. He developed and patented a self-laminating wrist band that ran trouble-free on laser printers and then obtained a registered trademark for the name “LaserBand.” The laser sheets contain a die cut wrist band with self-adhesive tabs. Each wrist band can include laser-generated patient information (including Class A bar codes) protected by a self-contained lamination layer when assembled and attached to the patient’s wrist. The product improved upon another one patented by Standard Register.

Within two years, LaserBand sales had made enough impact to attract SR’s attention. SR sent Riley a letter demanding that LaserBand be withdrawn from the market, claiming infringement on their patented product.

“We were a small company,” Riley recalls, “and with a lawsuit, a large company could grind us down.” Riley’s friend Haferkamp, who also was his patent attorney and an expert in intellectual property law, told Riley he had a decision to make. “We could fold up our tent” and close the LaserBand business, or “we could fight,” Riley says. “It was a defining moment. I kept thinking that if we just gave up I’d always wonder what could have been.”

Riley’s response to SR’s threatening letter was to take the offensive. He filed suit to defend LaserBand against SR’s allegations of patent infringement. After 18 months of litigation, Riley and SR reached a settlement, the terms of which can’t be disclosed, but Riley is pleased with the outcome. LaserBand has been growing ever since.

“No one sues for something that’s not wanted in the marketplace,” Riley says. Only one in 2,000 patents is both commercialized and successful, according to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. “If your idea is available to consumers and thriving, you have something to protect,” Riley says. “Companies will spend a fortune to go after you, and you have to defend your idea with both guns blazing.”

Jain says medical facilities often turn to LaserBand because its products literally help save lives. Hospital mistakes kill 44,000 to 98,000 Americans annually, and about 7,000 of those deaths are attributable to medication errors, estimates The Institute of Medicine, a nonprofit Washington policy group. Many medical-industry bar codes are designed to prevent nurses from accidentally giving patients the wrong drug or dosage. An effective system requires a nurse to scan a bar code printed on the patient’s ID bracelet, which is encoded with the patient’s ID information. Next, the nurse’s badge is scanned, then the bar code on the drug package is scanned to verify the information matches.

Dr. Andy Whittemore, chief medical officer at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, says he expects bar codes to significantly reduce medication errors and “near misses.” He says bar codes could have prevented an error that occurred at the hospital recently when a nurse gave two newborn boys a tenfold overdose of liquid Tylenol. Whittemore says the nurse drew up 4 cubic centimeters of the painkiller into a syringe instead of 0.4 cubic centimeters. Under a new system to be implemented next year, the pharmacy will send syringes to patient floors already filled with specific doses of medicines, which will be encoded in each syringe’s bar code. The nurse will then scan the bar code to make sure it matches the bar code on the baby’s wristband.

Such stories have led The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) to require hospitals to develop a strategy for implementing bar code technology at the bedside by January 2007. “That’s a big deal,” Riley says.

He and Jain leave the restaurant and walk toward LaserBand’s offices. The JCAHO decree, along with The Food & Drug Administration’s (FDA’s) announcement last year that medication labels must include a linear bar code containing the National Drug Code number, has boosted awareness of bar coding’s benefits in the medical market. LaserBand’s sales have increased 35 percent to 65 percent annually since 2001.

In September 2005, LaserBand received a 3-year contract from HealthTrust Purchasing Group, Brentwood, Tenn., for laser-generated patient identification wristbands and companion labels. The group purchasing organization supports acute care hospitals, ambulatory surgery centers, alternate care sites and physician practices. In January 2006, the company was awarded a General Services Administration’s (GSA’s) Federal Supply Schedule contract, effective until Dec. 31, 2010, for LaserBand and LaserBand2 self-laminating wristbands, ComfyCuff sensitive skin protectors and companion laser labels. Federal customers such as the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Veterans Health Administration now turn to LaserBand for these patient ID solutions.

“One problem facing many startup companies is there’s no reliable way of knowing if customers are actually going to like new products,” Jain says. “We use RB&O as a testing ground. Jim’s customers give us great feedback.” He adds that LaserBand succeeds because it controls branding, marketing and distribution. “When we started,” Jain says, “the wristband market had no brands—they were perceived as commodities. Now there is one huge brand—LaserBand.”

LaserBand carefully controls marketing with a global program of direct mail, telemarketing, trade show exhibits and ongoing research and development to create and patent new products. Only approved dealers sell its patented products, and only “elite Platinum Level” dealers can sell its latest LaserBand2 product line. “There’s a training and support component and attention to detail required that’s part of LaserBand’s corporate culture and brand,” Riley says. “Our products are not commodities, so we want our dealers and customers to treat them accordingly.”

Since introducing LaserBand, Riley has designed and patented an array of other products designed to solve identification challenges in the health care and emergency-response fields. In April 2005, the company added five new products to its LaserBand2 line, including the first laser wristbands for delicate neonatal babies and adult patients with allergies. “I realize it’s a little weird, focusing on some little nuance and hovering over a design idea that obsesses me,” Riley says. “The gist is that I want to solve someone’s problem. I want to figure out a solution and take a pain away. That’s what drives me.”

Some of Riley’s clever ideas have been design and versatility improvements to LaserBand products. While the firm’s wristbands have been engineered to stay on even after contact with harsh elements, he has made it possible to remove and refasten them. Also, adhesive-free zones are designed around all edges, punched holes and other areas where “adhesive ooze” could contaminate a printer. In addition, the firm uses thinner laminates to make the edges of children’s and infants’ bands more forgiving, and all wristbands work with virtually any software (ranging from fully integrated enterprise-wide systems to a simple print-on-demand program).

Standing in the conference room at LaserBand, Jain points to a board displaying other ID solutions used by medical facilities. “Would you want to be in a hospital with this as your ID?” he asks rhetorically, pointing to a crude bracelet on which nurses write patients’ names with a marker. He shakes his head. “So many places still use this method.” He and Riley estimate that at least 3,000 of the country’s 12,000 hospitals now rely on a LaserBand product. (To read a case study about LaserBand, visit Print Solutions’ award-winning web site at www.printsolutions mag.com.) “Still, there’s plenty of market left out there,” Jain says, especially among doctors’ offices, outpatient clinics and other specialized practices, which account for 16 times the transaction volume as hospitals.

Reasons for Excitement

“We’re energized,” Riley says. “This year has been a big one for us.”

On June 5, Riley announced that RB&O had acquired Maryland Heights, Mo.-based distributorship SWM Inc. RB&O’s customers now benefit from SWM’s expertise in commercial printing, creative marketing services and promotional products. Meanwhile, SWM’s clients gain access to enhanced distribution and warehousing services, powerful web development and e-commerce tools. The combined company, which will have annual sales of approximately $16 million, is undergoing a rebranding process to develop a new name and identity that better reflects the company’s services and position in the marketplace, Riley says.

Almost all of SWM’s employees now work at RB&O. “If you bring in one new person, it changes the personality of your organization,” Riley says. “We brought in 10 talented people who are glad to be here, and we’ve all been energized as a result. They see a company that’s reinvesting in the future, and it adds a bounce to their step. Meanwhile, we’re learning from them, too.”

Riley says synergy resulted from the move because RB&O and SWM had different account bases, diverse product knowledge and unique vendor partnerships. Upon deciding to transition his company, SWM President and CEO John Sanders says he identified RB&O as the “ideal candidate,” one that would enable his clients to receive more products and services, and his employees to enjoy first-rate chemistry with another group. “Like a championship baseball team, winning requires more than a good manager with a good plan. It takes good players, and the combined company is already succeeding because its staff is experienced, dedicated and motivated,” he says.

Riley says the timing of the deal was “impeccable” because RB&O had just moved its offices, warehouse and digital print center into a rehabbed facility where all operations exist under one roof. Previously, the distributorship shared a warehouse with DMIA member manufacturer The Flesh Company and operated the digital print center off-site.

Taking over a digital print center in the first place was a risk that paid off for RB&O, Riley says. The distributorship’s longtime client, St. Louis-based SSM Health Care, the first-ever health care recipient of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, ended a 5-year contract with RB&O last year. It asked the distributorship to compete for the account against seven vendors, which the hospital then narrowed to three—RB&O, Relizon and IKON.

Riley created a schematic for the health care organization, showing the variety of products it ordered from 60 to 70 suppliers. He then argued the disadvantages of doing so, including the fact that too many people buying from numerous sources leads to higher prices, duplicate efforts and confusion about where to order. In a presentation to the organization’s COO and eight hospital presidents, Riley proposed establishing one e-commerce portal from which all locations could order more than 6,000 printed products. He also vowed to save the hospital transaction costs by aggregating buying, combining orders and reducing the time hospital personnel spend on ordering. He guaranteed savings from 10 percent to 15 percent on any new business.

RB&O’s proposal also included closing SSM’s in-plant facility, which employed eight people, and moving it to the distributorship’s control. Riley and others at RB&O had researched the hospital’s in-plant volume, employees, equipment and equipment leases, as well as potential operational improvements. The hospital’s lease on the equipment would expire in 18 months. It was a bold move and would be a significant investment for RB&O, which would have to hire the eight employees plus a print-on-demand production manager.

On March 1, 2005, RB&O signed a five-year contract with a two-year extension with SSM. “We are now the vendor for anything that can be custom printed,” Riley says. “Our success with this opportunity has elevated our value to this client while making us a better company. Because we acted when opportunity came knocking, we now have a growing five-year contract with a great customer, a successful program sale example to show other current and potential customers, and an in-house digital print center manufacturing product categories that are growing.”

The digital print center handles numerous products, including padded forms, booklets, and perfect-bound and saddle-stitched books, and turns them around in 24-48 hours instead of two weeks. The center receives about 100 orders a day, 60 of which are sent electronically, Riley says.

“When you work with Jim, you’re not going to remain status quo,” RB&O’s O’Connell says. “He’s constantly moving forward, and he’s not sitting in some ivory tower, pushing the buttons. He’s down here, doing it. He puts in as much time working as anyone else here.”

RB&O records extensive data in an Excel spreadsheet on every purchase SSM and other large clients make. The distributorship provides an annual report on savings to the hospital’s contract managers and vice president of support services. “Jim is one of those distributors who has taken chances and moved with the times,” says Vanguard Direct’s O’Connell. “He’s willing to take risks, and some are sizeable financial ones. He has kept moving forward, and his company has grown because of his vision.”

Wisdom to Know What Matters

There’s work to be done on a short deadline and Riley is in the thick of it: Who wants what kind of steak? Smoke billows from Riley’s sizzling poolside grill. He’s in his floral-print shirt, khaki shorts and sandals, coolly wielding a spatula, oblivious to the smoke, checking on thick steaks. Cooking for 14 people isn’t easy: Some want medium-rare, some medium, some medium-well. Daughter Katie just wants hers soon.

A few yards away, his buddy Jack Sharkey is telling stories Riley is likely glad he’s not hearing. One of them involves Riley about 20 years ago, before he remarried and when he wore a mustache, approaching an attractive woman at a pool. (He didn’t score a date.) Another story is about Riley not being able to get his future wife, Claudia, out of his mind during the 2-week trip to Europe.

Back at the grill, Claudia and her husband have one arm around each other. Their two kids splash each other in the pool, and Riley’s three older ones chat about 27-year-old Meghan’s upcoming wedding. The group is one family in the singular—supportive, laughing and happy to be spending time with each other.

The steaks will be ready soon, and in a few hours Riley will be on the floor of the pool house demonstrating his push-up prowess. But if you snapped a photo of him now, it would be a moment of arrested joy—smiling, spatula in hand, contented kids in the background and eyes on his attractive wife.

Riley is often applauded for his deft impersonations of outgoing DMIA presidents, creating “aha!” moments by exaggerating subtle personality traits. If the incoming president wants a new target to imitate, someone whose nuances portray intelligence and caring, all he needs is a mirror.

Darin Painter, a freelance writer in Cleveland, is former managing editor of Print Solutions. Send comments to bholt@printsolutionsmag.com.

One reason St. Louis distributorship Riley Barnard & O’Connell Inc. (RB&O) has evolved into a dynamic print communications provider is that its leaders aren’t comfortable with the status quo. “We’re always trying to move forward and introduce new products and ideas,” says Jim Riley, CDC, president and owner of RB&O and owner of LaserBand LLC, St. Louis. “We aren’t afraid to try new concepts and invest in technologies we think will help us grow.”

Riley will become DMIA’s new president on Nov. 1, shortly after he delivers a speech at DMIA’s 2006 Print Solutions Conference & Expo (Oct. 3-5). He believes the association would be bolstered by “a new face,” and plans to discuss ways to improve its identity during his one-year term. “Changing the way we present DMIA and its offerings, including shows and meetings, is a primary goal,” he says.

Riley has been a long-time active participant in DMIA, serving on its board for the past five years. He also has volunteered to present educational sessions at the association’s Spring Management Conference meetings. “He’s going to make a great president,” says Jeff Long, marketing manager at Atlanta-based manufacturer Graphic Dimensions, and DMIA’s 2003-2004 president. “He understands the direction of the industry, and he’s a loyal person who I’m happy to call a friend.”

Says Riley: “DMIA is a great association because it’s made up of creative people who share ideas. If you talk to someone at a meeting or read something in Print Solutions, it stimulates your thoughts and leads to action. You develop relationships and trust that are long-term and invaluable. More people should experience that, and giving DMIA a new identity will only help in that regard.”