National
Clothesline
It is impossible to remain anonymous when
your family’s cleaning business is comprised of 30
locations and over 250 employees, but that doesn’t stop
Steven Toltz of Dependable Cleaners in Denver, CO, from trying. Like his father and
grandfather before him, it suits him to fly under the radar as
much as he possibly can.
Of course, being humble doesn’t
always mean staying out of the spotlight. After all, Dependable
is certainly a household name in its home state, largely due to
the company’s extremely successful annual Coats For
Colorado drive that has collected over 1.3 million coats in the
past 25 years.
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“We’ve never gone outside the
city and state to promote it because we never really thought
about it for that purpose,” Steven said. “We always
thought about it as the purpose is to collect coats. Everyone
in Colorado who needs a coat gets one.”
During the course of a single winter
month, it is not uncommon for Dependable to collect 10,000
garments, an amazing figure.
In fact, the company obtained 77,000
coats overall last year, many of which were brand new ones
donated by manufacturers, retailers and embroiderers.
That’s certainly a long way from the 750 garments the
business rounded up during its initial drive in 1982.
To commemorate the success of the drive,
Governor Owens declared Oct. 1, 2003 to be “Denver 7 and
Dependable Coats for Colorado Day.” Two years later,
another proclamation labeled July 1 as “Dependable
Cleaners Day” to mark the company’s 75th
anniversary.
Certainly, the company has changed a bit
since 1930 when Steven’s grandparents, Jack and Esther
Bugdanowitz, first offered drycleaning services at Dependable.
Prior to that, the family business was a tailor shop.
“He thought, as long as we were
tailoring and delivering these clothes (which he did on his
bicycle), then why don’t we clean them, also?”
Steven said.
Though the change occurred during the
days of the Great Depression, the Bugdanowitzes still found an
early formula for success: take good care of customers.
Jack also liked to keep current with
industry technology. Some of Steven’s early memories
recall his grandfather’s penchant for fixing things.
“He was a nuts-and-bolts guy, so he
really understood the business,” Steven explained.
“As a boy, he used to take us to football games at the
Air Force Academy on Saturdays, and when I got in his car
I’d always find a steam trap or a part from a boiler or a
valve sitting there. You’d wind up sitting on
it.”
Years later, the family values were
handed down to a second generation when Steven’s father,
Warren, married Ruth Bugdanowitz. He joined Dependable shortly
after his father-in-law had a heart attack.
“He had no background in
drycleaning at all,” Steven noted. “What he had a
background in was successfully running a business. He had owned
a mortgage company called Provident Mortgage
Company.”
Warren Toltz’s business acumen
proved to be a large factor in the business’s expansion
over the past 40 years. He also tried to pass along some of
that knowledge to his children when they were still quite
young.
“My father gave us
opportunities,” Steven said. “I remember, amongst
other things, selling candy. He’d buy these big packages
of like Brach’s candy and we would go sell them door to
door as kids. My dad had us do this for money. As a young kid,
it was a great experience in learning how to talk to people who
were older, to sell and be able to accept rejection.”
Steven also spent plenty of time working
at Dependable.
“I was involved in the business at
a very young age and I learned everything from the bottom
up,” he recalled. After high school, Steven attended
Menlo College, a California business school, and graduated cum
laude with a degree in business administration.
“In those days, I was starting to
think that someday I was going to run the company,” he
said. “I was trying to get a good education to run the
family business.”
During that time, he was also exposed to
the inner workings of the U.S. legal system. He was a courier
for a famous law firm, Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich and Rosati
— which was responsible for taking some famous companies
public, including Apple Computers and Hewlitt-Packard.
Next up, Steven worked briefly with his
uncle at one of his restaurants, Dante’s, but soon found
himself drawn back to the cleaning industry.
He brushed up on his education by
attending IFI. In that time frame, he also trained at Admiral
Cleaners in Annapolis, MD, before coming back to Dependable
Cleaners as a district manager from 1983 to 1986.
Years earlier, Steven had opted not to go
to law school because he felt his LSAT scores had been too low.
However, at his uncle’s behest, he applied to law school
at the University of Denver. Fortunately, he got in.
“Normally, it takes three years to
get a law degree, but I was in a hurry so I graduated school in
1988. I finished in two years,” Steven noted. “I
took the Colorado Bar Exam in February of 1989 and
passed.”
Steven’s first job as a lawyer was
for the firm Berkowitz, Berkowitz and Brady, who preferred that
their attorneys gain immediate courtroom experience.
“They served as the city attorney
for Littleton, CO,” he recalled. “All of their new
lawyers were made prosecutors for the municipal court. That was
great experience because you had six trials a day and no time
for preparation.”
One year later, he was hired by
Berryhill, Cage & North, a firm he worked with in various
capacities until 2004. Steven’s biggest case was a suit
against General Motors that lasted six years.
“It was a defective seat belt
case,” he noted. “That was an incredible experience
because I flew around the country to do depositions. I had
expert witnesses galore. It ultimately went to trial in Federal
Court.”
Unfortunately, the timing could not have
been worse.
“During the three-week jury trial,
my daughter started walking,” he said. “Right
around the same time, my father had quintuple bypass surgery
— five bypasses at one time — on an emergency
basis. It was a very stressful time.”
Making matters worse, the trial ended in
a hung jury. By that time, Steven’s wife, Michelle, was
about to give birth to their son, and his father had informed
him that if there ever was a right time for him to come back to
Dependable, it was then.
Steven returned to the company, but it
had undergone a few changes. Steven’s brother-in-law,
John Waldman, had purchased some stores and entered into a
license agreement to use the Dependable name.
Both divisions of the family business
have flourished since. Steven has overseen 18 of the stores and
150 employees successfully for a decade.
Of course, he is the first to point
out that he simply tries not to mess up the solid foundation
set down by his father and grandfather. He also believes the
biggest reason for Dependable’s dependability is its
loyal team of managers and employees.
According to Steven, another key factor
is having a background in the law. It has been a crucial
resource.
“Having a law degree is the biggest
contribution that I brought to this business because it is
invaluable,” he said. “When you are an attorney,
you are always trying to figure out what’s the worst
thing that can happen. You are always looking ahead.”
In recent years, it seems Dependable has
ended up in the spotlight more and more, even though Steven
isn’t looking to make any headlines.
In 2001, the company won an
“Outstanding Large Business” award as part of
National Philanthropy Day in Colorado. This year, Steven was
chosen as “Drycleaner of the Year” by the Rocky
Mountain Fabricare Association.
Such awards are always nice to receive,
but Steven is much prouder of the quality brand name Dependable
has carefully marketed over the years. That pride — along
with an aversion to discounting — lead him four years ago
to begin advertising on television, a rarity in the industry.
“I hired a production company and I
produced a commercial,” he said. “We produced it.
We shot it in film, which is much more expensive than
videotape. The final product was a commercial we were very
proud of.”
The message that Steven wanted to
emphasize was Dependable’s same-day service. Having
always been told that TV advertising would never be profitable
for cleaners, he was anxious to track the results.
“When we promote same-day service,
we do a lot more of it,” he noted. “We also look at
new customer accounts. We graph that versus TV time. Right now,
we’re not on TV and our new customer count is about 100
less than when we are on TV.”
Steven also hopes that the television
spots are helping to clean up the overall image of the
drycleaning industry.
“I think it’s good for
drycleaning,” he said. “It promotes a very dressy
image.”