Sydney "Tucker" Jones III was being feted as the paper industry's man of the year by the National Paper Trade Association.

The dinner was in Chicago, and Tucker Jones had traveled from Albany, where he had served as president of Hudson Valley Paper Co. since 1971. He was the fourth generation of his family to run the company, which started in Albany in 1875.

Samantha Jones had traveled from New York City, content with her prospects at IBM. But as she watched the ceremony unfold, she reconsidered her future.

"When I watched my father receive his award and listened to him talk -- he talked a lot about working with his father -- I thought at that moment: Why would I ever want to get to a point in my life where I said, 'would have, should have, could have?' " she said. "I realized I wanted to work him and also to give back to my family."

Four months later, Samantha Jones became the fifth generation of her family to participate in running the company. She is vice president, and her father remains president. But Tucker Jones, 63, acknowledges that his daughter, 33, is bringing necessary change and innovation to a business that traditionally has been slow to change.

"One of the greatest dangers in a family business or any closely held business is you get trapped inside your own four walls, and you think everything you do is great," he said. "Samantha has really helped us look at things in a more professional way.

"We knew we were out of date. She became the champion of that. She said, 'We can't afford to be out of date.' What she's brought more than anything else is a fresh set of eyes to say, for instance, 'Do you realize that we don't have a Web site?' "

Samantha Jones is overseeing the development of a company Web site and online catalog and store, due to be launched next year. She downplays that; developing a Web site in 2008 isn't exactly cutting-edge, she said.

And she credits most other changes she's been involved with at the company to the employees. By asking them how they can do their jobs better, which in effect means how they can serve the customers better, she has helped modernize operations.

For instance, she worked with the warehouse managers to reorganize their small fleet of trucks to ensure next-day delivery to most customers. The company has warehouses -- and more than 100,000 square feet of storage space -- in Albany, Rochester, Burlington, Vt., and Hartford, Conn.

"While it may not appear to be a shocking new concept, this change required us to ask ourselves how we can do things differently, and what will it take," Samantha Jones said. "Our warehouse managers collaborated to determine the right origination of trucks, coordination of timing and appropriation staffing."

She has helped implement a new phone system that allows desk-to-desk dialing within the company, from Rochester to Hartford, and connects callers more quickly to a customer-service representative. She also got the company certified by the Forest Stewardship Council. That means Hudson Valley Paper can buy and sell paper that comes from responsibly managed forests; many customers were requesting that.
And she has begun holding weekly management meetings to ensure that managers know what's going on throughout the company.

That the changes aren't more exciting is the nature of the business.

"It's not a sexy business," Tucker Jones said. "We are paper merchants. We're distributors of printing paper and business paper. We've evolved over the years, particularly in recent years, but basically, anything you could print on or write on we would sell. We do not manufacture anything."

With 90 employees, 50 of them in Albany, the company buys paper from manufacturers around the world and sells it to commercial printers, government agencies and businesses in the Northeast. It maintains an inventory of nearly 4,000 items but can obtain probably 10 times that many items for customers, Tucker Jones said.

There are more types, sizes, colors, textures and weights of paper than you can imagine, the Joneses say. Coated paper accounts for much of Hudson Valley Paper's sales; the company keeps 4 million to 5 million tons of it in its warehouses.

Coated paper is high-quality and allows for better reproduction of photography and presentation of advertising. It's used for catalogs, brochures, magazines and direct-mail campaigns.

"In our company, change is more evolutionary than revolutionary," Tucker Jones said. "We want to be careful that we don't throw out what has made us successful over 130 years and five generations in the business. And that is the relationships we have with our customers, our suppliers and our employees."

Tucker Jones has worked at the company since high school. After serving 3 years in the Navy, he returned in 1970 when his father, Sydney T. Jones Jr., was president. They worked together one year before the father dropped dead at age 55. Tucker Jones became president.

"That one year we worked together was a lot of fun for me," he said. "It was very enjoyable to work alongside my dad and see him in a different role as an employer, as a businessman, to see the relationships he had with employees, with customers, with suppliers. I had an employee tell me once he loved my dad more than he loved his own father. It was just an amazing thing.

"But I never appreciated it from his point of view until my daughter joined the business. And now I'm seeing the flip side of that, and it's been terrific."

As the fifth generation, Samantha Jones said it's her responsibility to transform the company, but that she doesn't know yet how she'll do that. She's still learning, still asking questions of her father as well as the employees.

"My goal is to involve everybody in the process, because it is about them," she said. "Hudson Valley Paper is so much more than the fact that Samantha and Tucker Jones are here together. It's all these people who make it work every day."