This year’s FAPPS Distinguished Service Award recipient will only be a familiar name to about half of you. She is not a Past President of FAPPS with instant name recognition. She is just a regular member of FAPPS that made a big, lasting impact on FAPPS through hard work and thousands of volunteer hours over a multi-decade period.

While never serving as or even running for President, she served on the FAPPS Board of Directors, about nine years in all. Always listening, seldom arguing, but her stance on an issue was never in doubt.

She has run a successful process server agency for decades, since 1974. Along with her husband and son, she is well known in south Florida, and is the kind of person you phone when you want to know how things actually work.

From 2000 to 2013, she was the one person most responsible for putting the FAPPS Convention ahead of all others when it came to fun and education. We’ve heard this countless times: If you want an entertaining and valuable annual meeting, look to see how FAPPS does it. We heard it again today from Shawn Condrey, the NAPPS State Association chair who has seen a lot of State Association Annual Meetings.

Margie Zawacki, as President, sold the Board on the idea of a two-day Annual Meeting around 2003. The goal was to make more room for education, and the result was that the FAPPS Annual Meeting became much more fun and education focused. Most of the business was done on Friday, and our Convention had time slots for a lot more meaningful education focused activities, and some of that was disguised as fun. The Convention Committee had a lot more time slots to plan and fill, and our recipient rose to the occasion. Our annual meetings now had themes, and members would dress the part, enjoy the event, and come back year after year.

Our recipient was the first to voice the idea of a FAPPS Distinguished Service Award – something like the NAPPS MacDonald Award. While I said "voice", it came, as many of her suggestions did, on a handwritten fax. She was one of the three people who developed the concept, laid out the ground rules, decided on the name of the award, and kept pushing to not let the idea die in infancy. The Board approved the plan during my first Presidency in 2012, and we awarded the FDSA for the first time in 2013 to one of this recipient’s suggested nominees, Don Eisenberg.

From the earliest newsletter years when I was the editor, she was a contributor. I would get articles from her, or ideas for articles in bullet points, hand written, arriving as always on my fax machine. She continued writing articles and suggesting topics for many years. Through 2013 she served on the publication support committee, reviewing and correcting articles for the newsletter.

And to this day, she is still serving FAPPS, currently on the Arbitration and Grievance Committee.

For the 2025 FAPPS Distinguished Service Award, I give you a friend of FAPPS, a voice of reason, an advocate for business large and small. Janet Deal.

For the Committee,

Bob Musser
Chair, FAPPS Distinguished Service Award Committee

From the Award itself:

Spirit of a Leader

A true leader has the confidence to stand alone, the courage to make tough decisions and the compassion to listen to the needs of others. She does not set out to be a leader, but becomes one by the quality of her actions and the integrity of her intent. Leaders, like eagles, don’t flock. You find them one at a time.

2025 FDSA – Janet Deal

For your many years of service to FAPPS and private process servers, for your countless contributions that benefited so many members.