John Meindl didn't write the book on management by crisis, but he could no doubt pen a few chapters.

The 34-year-old chief executive of GeneSys Data Technologies has been dealing with a series of near-misses, long-shot gambles and close calls since the day he decided to dive into the high-stakes world of optical imaging.

Now that the Hunt Valley-based company is a $30 million-a-year enterprise -- and growing -- Mr. Meindl makes it clear he's ready to test fate again. On the table this go-round: A chance to buy a $75 million-a-year sister company in Australia, Hermes Precisa.

"We could stay where we are and make a couple million dollars, live a nice life and in five years sell the business . . . and everybody's fat, dumb and bulletproof," muses Mr. Meindl. "Or you can roll the dice and really try to take this thing up to the next level. Buying Australia will take us up to the next level."

Going Down Under will triple the size of GeneSys overnight. If all goes according to plan, the acquisition could make GeneSys the largest imaging and records management company in the United States.

That's no small feat considering the competition includes such blue-chip names as International Business Machines, Panasonic and Eastman Kodak.

But if the potential rewards are dramatic, so are the risks.

Tripling GeneSys' size means increasing its debt and management burden, too. The acquisition would expand GeneSys' employment roster from 500 to 1,700. Most of those employees would be located in offices halfway around the world.

Nobody really doubts GeneSys has the ability to manage Hermes Precisa. After all, GeneSys has been managing the full-service microfilm company successfully for more than a year for an affiliate company, Omni Holding AG. The $6.5 billion Swiss conglomerate has held a financial stake in GeneSys since 1988, the same year GeneSys was founded.

But it remains to be seen how GeneSys will fare once GeneSys doesn't have the deep pockets and international clout of Omni to fall back on. Omni, which filed for protection from creditors last fall, is in the process of dissolving its relationship with GeneSys.

Then there's the problem of finding the cash to pay for Hermes Precisa.

According to Mr. Meindl, GeneSys is going to have to come up with about $40 million to close the deal -- and it has just one year to do it. Given the general dearth of investment capital these days -- especially for companies engaged in an industry still considered high risk -- that's easier said than done.

That could explain why GeneSys is reviewing other financing options, including some less attractive solutions that might diminish GeneSys' autonomy. Those options include taking on a minority partner or making an initial public offering.

GeneSys has already talked to Alex. Brown & Sons Inc. about a possible stock offering, but Mr. Meindl makes it clear he's in no mood to hand control of the company over to any outsider, including stockholders, if he can avoid it.

So as the clock ticks, the search for outside financing goes on.

If others see risk ahead for GeneSys in the current financing game being played out, Mr. Meindl only seems to see opportunity.

"What an opportunity there is, and what a mistake it would be if we didn't pursue it," says Mr. Meindl, a financier by training but a salesman by instinct. "It would be like [McDonald's founder] Ray Kroc putting up the first McDonald's and then saying, 'OK, what do you want to do here, Ray? Do you want to make some money and sell out [to a buyer] or do you want to take a roll of the dice

and see if you can make it happen?' "

GeneSys' potential market is huge -- and growing still.

U.S. businesses currently generate almost a billion documents a day, a figure that is expected to increase as more businesses computerize their offices -- and begin wrestling with the problem of what to do with all those computer printouts.

The proliferation of paper is forcing management to look beyond traditional means -- namely filing cabinets and boxes in back rooms -- to make sure business documents are kept safe and accessible, said Jim Breuer of the Association of Information and Image Management in Washington.

That presents a prime opportunity for companies like GeneSys, which specialize in building systems that can electronically store documents. Once filed electronically, documents can be retrieved in seconds. And unlike their paper cousins, electronic files don't get lost or misfiled.

The way Mr. Meindl sees it, all that paper translates into market potential for GeneSys. Providing all goes according to plan, he believes GeneSys could grow into a $300 million imaging giant within a few years.

That may seem like a long-shot prospect at this juncture. But, under Mr. Meindl, GeneSys has been rolling the dice -- and beating the odds -- almost since the day it was founded.

Roll of the dice No. 1 occurred in late 1987, when Mr. Meindl, then a consultant to Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Maryland, tried to persuade his client to pursue the optical imaging business. For once in his life, the silver-tongued Mr. Meindl wasn't successful in making a client see things his way: Mr. Meindl got the thumbs down on developing a line of optical imaging products for the health care organization. Blue Cross apparently wasn't interested in investing in the as-yet unproven technology.

Mr. Meindl bailed out and took his optical imaging dreams -- and seven Blue Cross programmers -- with him to found GeneSys. After scrounging up $60,000 among themselves, GeneSys' founders opened their doors for business in January 1988.

Armed with little more than brash enthusiasm and a will to succeed, GeneSys' sales team -- Mr. Meindl and his seven programmers -- hit the street in search of clients.

They didn't come up empty-handed. After signing up a series of smaller accounts, the newly minted company landed its first major job with BellSouth Corp. GeneSys was contracted by BellSouth to build an imaging network to handle cellular phone bills for the regional Bell in its Atlanta headquarters.

As Mr. Meindl recalls, GeneSys installed a state-of-the-art imaging system at the BellSouth site, then sat back and waited for the accolades -- and new business from BellSouth references -- to start rolling in.

To GeneSys' horror, the newly installed network crashed and burned just 30 days after it was inaugurated, putting the company's reputation on the line and a potential financial disaster at its door.

Mr. Meindl admits BellSouth could have shown GeneSys the door and demanded its money back, and nobody could have blamed them. But in a rare example of corporate indulgence, the billion-dollar Baby Bell waited patiently -- for three months -- while GeneSys technicians repaired the problem.

By the end of the 12 weeks, GeneSys had survived. Company technicians used feedback from BellSouth to overhaul GeneSys' imaging line, resulting in a tougher, more efficient product to sell in the commercial marketplace.

"This company owes BellSouth a lot," says Mr. Meindl. "Besides launching us, it gave us the needed cash to get us going, and it made our product what it is today."

From that less-than-stellar beginning, an optical image of success has materialized.

GeneSys is expected to earn about $5 million on revenues of $30 million this year, making it one of the largest privately held technology companies in Maryland. Clients today include such blue chips as Chrysler Corp., Amoco Corp., Bell Atlantic Corp. and GTE Corp.

GeneSys' strides have not gone unnoticed by its industry brethren. To date, IBM, Intel Corp., Panasonic, Digital Electronic Corp. and American Telephone & Telegraph Co. have struck agreements with the Hunt Valley firm to produce imaging systems built around their respective computers.

The partnering arrangements are aimed at increasing GeneSys' market share. And by most accounts the company is doing just that.

GeneSys was recently ranked No. 1 by Dataquest for selling the most single-user imaging systems in the United States in 1990, beating out such big names as Canon and Kodak. GeneSys' market share, meanwhile, continues to grow by acquisition.

Using the deep pockets of Omni, GeneSys purchased two of the three largest document-conversion companies in the United States -- B&B; in Upper Marlboro and Micor in Philadelphia. Price tag for the two companies: about $10 million.

So far, Mr. Meindl's uncanny knack for turning misfires into gold-plated success hasn't failed GeneSys. But it remains to be seen if his touch will last long enough for GeneSys to leap to the forefront of the optical imaging business.

Before GeneSys can leap out front of the $3 billion-a-year imaging market, it's going to have to get its corporate house in order.

According to Mr. Meindl, the company's most immediate concern is how to obtain financing for the Australian deal and get out from under Omni, which filed for protection from creditors in October. The Swiss conglomerate, which looked like the white knight GeneSys needed just two years ago, is trying to sell off assets to keep creditors at bay.

Omni's financial nose dive has ground GeneSys' buying binge to a halt and forced the company out in the street to fend for itself, something Mr. Meindl and his partners had wanted to avoid.

Julian Menear, senior vice president of Young Capital Group Inc. in Chicago, said Omni's decision to pull out of GeneSys suggests the cash-strapped conglomerate "didn't have the money or conviction" to go forward with GeneSys' ambitious plans.

"GeneSys has got a lot of guts to go about this without having a firm commitment for underwriting," Mr. Menear said. "It's tough to raise money for high-tech at the moment."

Omni's balance-sheet problems come at a critical time for GeneSys, which is trying to make a name for itself as a provider of networked, multi-user systems. Networked systems allow multiple users dispersed throughout a company to work off the same optical imaging program.

To date, GeneSys has made its mark as a provider of single-user systems, but it has only just begun to make a name for itself in the networked arena.

Single-user systems, which start at about $1,000, are technologically less sophisticated and less demanding than their networked counterparts, which can easily cost $1 million or more, said Thornton May, an industry guru who holds court at the Norton Institute in Lexington, Mass., the research arm of Peat Marwick Mitchell & Co.

According to Mr. May, an increasing number of customers are buying multi-user imaging systems, part of the trend toward giving companies better tools with which to communicate and ** swap information internally.

American Express uses a networked imaging system to prepare customer billings. As a result, monthly bills now include small images of credit receipts.

Mr. May said applications like that will become more the rule than the exception as the industry comes up with better ways to integrate optical technologies into the day-to-day operations of customers and as the cost of components come down.

Even relatively unknown companies, like Micro Dynamics of Silver Spring, are already ahead of GeneSys in the networked arena. Micro Dynamics was recently ranked No. 2 by Dataquest in worldwide shipments of department systems, which support between 11 and 50 users.

In Dataquest's ranking of the top 20 companies in the networked market for document image management systems, GeneSys doesn't even show up.

Then there's the question of expertise. Just because GeneSys has done well selling and servicing smaller systems doesn't mean the company can replicate that level of expertise when it comes to large-scale, multi-user systems, Mr. May said.

Though Mr. Meindl claims his company is now shipping more networks than single-user systems, the burden of proof remains on GeneSys to show it can put in a successful, sustained performance in the networked arena.

Another potential red flag for GeneSys is competition -- at the high end of the market, there's a lot more of it.

According to Mr. May, competition at the low end of the market is a far cry from that at the high end of the market, where industry heavyweights like TRW Financial Services, FileNet and Wang slug it out on a regular basis. A company like GeneSys could get lost in the shuffle and lose what market momentum it had built up if it isn't careful, Mr. May warned.

"Every company wants to play in the big pond, but there are more players in that pond and there are different rules once you get there," Mr. May said.

For Mr. Meindl, taking a run at the No. 1 spot may be the biggest gamble of his corporate life. But as an executive who's been on the corporate ropes before, he says it's going to take a lot more than naysayers to keep him from trying.

"I want to be able to put us on the map and I want to make a mark," says a suddenly defiant Mr. Meindl. "I don't believe what people are saying today, about how tough it is to make it.

"Sure, the large guys want to stick it to you and control market share. But you can take them down -- we've taken them down before. I think this company can be a $250 to $300 million company, extremely profitable and well-positioned, and then I'll move on. But I'm going to get it there before I go."