By MATT CHANDLER
Buffalo Law Journal

Kevin Marmion is a bit of an anomaly - and proud of it.

According to a study conducted by the U.S. Department of Labor, the average person born in the second half of the baby-boom years held 10.8 jobs from ages 18 to 42.

The president of the William S. Hein Co. is 9.8 jobs short of holding up his end of that statistic. Marmion has held but a single job from age 16 to 56 - and counting.

His story is a rags-to-riches tale of living the American dream. During Marmion's junior year at Bishop Fallon High School in Buffalo, he took a part-time job because he was "just trying to make some beer money."

Three decades later, the part-time kid had risen to the top ranks of a company that boasts $32 million in worldwide sales annually.

One day at Bishop Fallon, he recalls, "I was standing out in the hall with a couple of friends and (someone) yelled out, was anyone interested in a part-time job. I went down and applied, and started working in April of my junior year." The rest, as they say, is history.

Marmion continued to grow at the Hein Co., working part-time while he earned a business degree from Canisius College. Upon graduation, he was offered, and accepted, a full-time post in the periodicals department. It would be the first of several promotions on his way to the top.

Today, Marmion leads 85 employees who work in all aspects of legal publishing and printing in a large, nondescript warehouse on Main Street in Buffalo.

He has seen the business evolve from its focus on books in the 1970s to handling microfilm conversion in the 1980s into the Internet age of the 1990s, and watched his role evolve with those changes. Despite the constant change and periods of uncertainty that come with the job, Marmion said he has never been tempted to stray and leave the only employer he has ever known.

"I'm a Buffalo-born guy, which is one of the reasons I'm still here. I've had plenty of opportunities to leave the area," he said.

"I've been approached by other companies to come work for them, but this company is very unique in its values - we put our employees and our customers first. It's a family-owned business where my CEO" -William Hein Jr. - "is the same gentleman I was working for when I was vice president. We have had much of the same team for 40 years."

Marmion says that culture of loyalty has not only kept him working for the second generation of Heins, but has encourgaged him to make the company a family affair.

"I have four or five members of my family here," he said. "It's not unheard of for 15 different employees here to have a cousin, a sibling or a friend working with them." Marmion says while it may buck the traditional business model, he believes the success of the Hein company speaks for itself.

"Most places, they say it's not good (to have people who are related working together), but here we feel the best thing is to have people committed to your organization," he said. "If people see that you have a common goal for them and their families, they do stay committed to your organization. If you don't breathe that into everything that you do, you can't sell it to people, and you end up with workers who are there to build a place on their résumé."

After 40 years in the business, Marmion is not concerned that evolving technology will soon make his company's law libraries and book printing business obsolete.

"Having built libraries from scratch, I can tell you I am a book lover. People told me when microfilm came along, ‘Nobody is going to be reading books, you'll be out of business by 1990.' Then, with the Internet, they said no one is going to buy microfilm," he said.

"I can tell you that we still sell several million dollars worth of microfilm each year. Books have a place, and it's going to evolve, but the previous medium never disappears as people think it will."