Leasing a corporate suite at the newly constructed Fifth Third Field, home of the legendary Toledo Mud Hens, wasn't a tough decision for Dan Kazmierczak. As president of a 56-year-old Toledo distributorship and a lifelong Toledo resident, Kazmierczak believes in supporting his community. Of course, it didn't hurt that he'd be able to entertain customers and suppliers in style during this year's baseball season.

The construction of Fifth Third Field is part of a revitalization of downtown Toledo, something Kazmierczak and his company, Binkelman Corp., are proud to be part of. Binkelman is a specialty distributor of power transmission/motion control products, industrial rubber, and hose & accessories. From its Toledo headquarters and its branch in Saginaw, Mich., the company covers Northwest Ohio, Eastern Michigan and Northeast Indiana. Customers include firms in the bulk material handling industry (steel, stone and aggregate companies), automotive plants, contractors, waste management companies, and rental houses.

Though Binkelman's territory has grown in the last 20 years, Toledo is still home and the firm continues to carve a niche for itself as the "company next door," so to speak. In addition to sponsoring the Mud Hens, Binkelman supports a number of other local events and organizations, like the Northwest Ohio Make-A-Wish Foundation, the Jamie Farr Kroger Classic, the Toledo Zoo, and the Toledo Reads! Mentoring Program.

"We try to differentiate ourselves with knowledge, quality and service — and also by being part of the community," says marketing director Rebecca Conrad, who oversees Binkelman's sponsorship and community-service programs. "It's good for the company and it's also good for the community."

The philosophy helps Binkelman reinforce its image as a local source of products and services — still an important factor for many customers, say Conrad and Kazmierczak. It also goes hand in hand with Binkelman's family approach to business, which means developing close relationships with customers and suppliers, as well as internally among the firm's 33 employees.

When it comes right down to it, "relationship selling" isn't a buzzword at Binkelman — it's a way of life. Just ask Carl Graves, a 20-year Binkelman customer. Graves is a planner/estimator at building materials manufacturer Johns Manville in Waterville, Ohio.

"It's a family atmosphere [at Binkelman]," says Graves. "They treat you with respect and dignity, as we do them. They're good people, with good products and good service."

To see where that family atmosphere comes from, look no further than Kazmierczak, a down-to-earth leader who'd do just about anything for his people. As a case in point, Kazmierczak found a way to give "all Bink" — a company term for referencing all 33 employees — a bonus last year, Binkelman's worst year in recent history. Sales were down just 10 percent, but that was a big change for a company that experienced solid growth for close to 20 years. Kaz, as he's sometimes referred to around the office, gave each employee $100 in gift certificates as a token of his appreciation for their hard work during a tough year. It was a far cry from the bonuses he'd given in the past — anywhere from a few hundred dollars to a thousand dollars apiece — but it was more about the gesture than the gift.

"It's not [the employees] fault the economy is down," says Kazmierczak, explaining that there isn't much you can do when your key industries are down and people are simply buying less. Besides, his employees worked harder than ever in 2001 to compensate for the slowdown. It's thanks to them, he says, that sales weren't off more than 10 percent.

Kazmierczak joined Binkelman in 1974. At the time, his experience included two years at a local manufacturing plant and service in Vietnam from 1969 to 1972 — service that earned him a Purple Heart, Distinguished Flying Cross and two Air Medals, among other honors. He worked for Ed Binkelman Jr., whose company was a well-established, six-employee distributorship specializing in bearings and power transmission. Kazmierczak was hired to do a little bit of everything: inside sales, purchasing, shipping and receiving, you name it. The experience would lead to a 50 percent partnership in the company and full control of daily operations five years later.

In 1981, Kazmierczak was named president and began to implement his strategy to diversify Binkelman into the three product groups it serves today. At the heart of that strategy was people, and Kazmierczak began assembling the team he'd need to push the company forward. Many of those team members are still with him today: his brother, outside salesman Mike Kazmierczak; vice president of sales Mike Fiedler; and inside salesmen Mike Dumas and Ken Fejes, to name just a few. The average employee tenure at Binkelman is about 15 years.

"We have people that really care about things ... people with drive and ambition," says Kazmierczak, pointing to both his long-term and newer employees.

With the right people in place, Binkelman started to expand its product lines and customer base. The company began selling more power transmission products in the 80s, particularly Goodyear V-belts. That was a boon to business and paved the way for expansion into Goodyear's hose products in 1985. Ten years later, Binkelman acquired a local belting distributor, Bauer-Wenner, and was able to complete the mix. Power transmission/motion control represents 60 percent of business today, while industrial rubber & belting makes up 25 percent, and hose & accessories comprises the remaining 15 percent.

The Bauer-Wenner acquisition gave Binkelman the third piece of the Goodyear line — conveyor belting — and boosted its hose business with the addition of Aeroquip products. Business with aggregate companies expanded and an Aeroquip Express store helped build counter sales with contractors and other walk-in customers.

Kazmierczak points to former Bauer-Wenner president Ken Sofalvi as an example of the talent the acquisition brought in. Sixty-three year-old Sofalvi is an outside salesman now, a job that required learning an entire new product group — power transmission — as part of his transition to Binkelman Corp. Sofalvi was Binkelman's top salesman last year, which was an up year for him despite the slow economy. He is one of nine Bauer-Wenner employees Kazmiercak kept on after the acquisition, six of whom are still with the company.

Financially, the acquisition brought Binkelman to $9 million in sales in 1996. The following year, the company did $12 million in sales and grew steadily up until 2001, ending the year at $14 million.

For suppliers like Jeff Kline of Goodyear, it's been great to be part of the Binkelman success story. He's watched the company go from being a fairly small player with Goodyear to a distributor of its full industrial product line. Kline is mideast region manager for Goodyear's Industrial Products Division, and he credits much of Binkelman's success to its leader.

"The Binkelman organization under Dan's leadership is a very aggressive, customer focused organization," says Kline. "Goodyear characterizes them as 'self-growable.' You give them a program or a lead and they run with it.

"They have a can-do attitude that starts at the top and goes all the way down to the delivery person."

Though no Binkelmans actually work at Binkelman Corp. anymore, Kazmierczak and his colleagues still consider the company a family business. In addition to his brother, just one of Kazmierczak's relatives works for the company: his daughter, marketing director Rebecca Conrad. Otherwise, Binkelman is more of a family "in spirit."

"Teamwork and family is the culture here," says vice president of sales Fiedler. "[Binkelman] is a special place; we all have a lot of respect for each other."

Kazmierczak believes that culture is what gives Binkelman the "can-do" attitude Kline describes. He says respect and appreciation for employees will yield hard work and dedication. Besides, as Kazmierczak puts it, that's just the right way to treat people.

That philosophy is the reason he felt so strongly about giving employees a reward at the end of a difficult year. It's also why he offers other seemingly small benefits — like paying for health club memberships and training programs, and organizing company-wide lunches and employee outings. It's why office doors are rarely closed, just about every employee has a nickname, and the break room on the first floor is known as the "family room" (complete with a recliner, sofas and a television, it's used for lunch breaks and informal meetings).

The Binkelman atmosphere is one reason vice president of operations Brad Fitzgerald has remained with the company. He started as a delivery truck driver seven years ago, just after he'd finished college. Not sure he wanted to use his degree in child psychology, Fitzgerald was looking for the chance to do "something completely different." So he took the Binkelman job, liked it, and eventually moved into the warehouse, then on to purchasing, and finally into the systems and operations side of the business. Did he just get comfortable and decide to stay? Absolutely not, says Fitzgerald.

"This is a far cry from the corporate world," he explains. "Everyone in this building has the ability to make a change. I came in here and the sky was the limit."

Conrad echoes those sentiments. Before returning home to work at Binkelman, she worked for two big corporations in Chicago: Price Waterhouse (now PricewaterhouseCoopers) and Hewitt Associates, an IT consulting firm. While she liked both jobs, she says they didn't offer the ability to effect change that her position at Binkelman does. Conrad says she witnesses that ability every day in her role as marketing director. Other employees often send her ideas for new promotions or material for the company's quarterly newsletter. When Binkelman wanted to come up with a new corporate slogan a few years ago, Conrad logged more than 191 employee suggestions into a database.

The suggestions were voted on by management. The winning slogan? "Binkelman Corp. The right products. The right service. Right now. "

There's another reason for empowering employees the way Kazmierczak does. He's a firm believer that a company has to take care of itself before it can take care of its customers. Therefore, evaluating accounts based on how much time they demand, how they pay and how they treat Binkelman employees has become an important factor in the way the company operates. Put quite simply, Kazmierczak wants to work with customers who understand value and who are a profitable source of business.

"Not all customers are good customers. ... There are some people we just don't do business with," says Kazmierczak. "One thing we always talk about here is that we have to take care of our customer, but we also have to take care of Binkelman."

Accounts are carefully evaluated before a service or solution is offered. Is the customer interested in all three of the company's product areas or just one? Is there potential to offer a three-pronged solution right away, or should the company go in with just one offering — hose, for example — and then try to pull through the rest of the business? It all depends on the customer and the relationship.

There are no plans to change that approach to business — just to enhance it. Kazmierczak is working to establish a services group, which would organize the company's service offerings under one official umbrella. The group would formalize all the services Binkelman now provides — consultation, application advice, fabrication and engineering — and would include a training center, where customers could go for training in all three product areas. Binkelman offers training programs now, often in conjunction with manufacturers, on an as-needed basis.

While he doesn't have a date for the launch of the services group, Kazmierczak says it's close to becoming a reality. And there's another important point to the program: The services won't be free. Kazmierczak envisions a fee-based structure in which good customers can earn points to reduce the cost of services and training programs. No matter how they pay for it, though, customers will be able turn to the services group for yet another source of local support.

"We try to give customers a better or different way of doing something," Kazmierczak explains. "They come to us with a problem and we will solve that problem. It's that simple."