The envelopes, please ... Top companies hailed for innovation, service, resilience.

• Author: Schwab, Robert
• Position: Swingle Tree and Landscape Care

From worldwide Fortune 500 company First Data Corp. to an amusement park in Glenwood Springs, winners of the ColoradoBiz Top Company of the Year competition for 2004 again represent a breadth of Colorado commerce and industry. The companies and their CEOs are:

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Services

Swingle Tree & Lawn Care, Denver

EMPHASIS: MARKETING/PRODUCT INNOVATION

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How do you make a lawn-care company grow in drought that has been called the worst in the West in 500 years and the grass itself won't grow?

Tom Tolkacz, the owner and president of Swingle Tree & Lawn Care, knows the answer because he's experienced it. He's lived it.

Swingle Tree was an award-winning company even before the drought, but Tolkacz has earned it a ColoradoBiz Top Company of the Year award in the services category during what you would think would be the worst of times for a company charged with keeping its customers' lawns and trees a bright and healthy green.

"We like to say we've had to have 'rigid flexibility,'" Tolkacz said, meaning that Swingle Tree's 180 employees had to keep offering customers the best, high-quality service for lawn and tree care and yet change the company's approach to providing other services as well. "We've had to adjust," says Tolkacz.

But Swingle Tree, a company started almost 60 years ago by founder John Swingle, has had to adjust to a lot of things through its lifetime. In 1998, it was named Small Business of the Year by the South Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce, and the award was accepted by Dave Dixon, Tolkacz's partner and chief executive officer at the time.

"That's when Dave was ailing," Tolkacz said. Dixon had already been diagnosed with cancer, and he died that November. Tolkacz, who had a buy-sell agreement in place, took the option to buy out Dixon's estate and has been the sole owner ever since.

But the drought that has hit Colorado for the past five years has been the company's biggest challenge. Even as it was starting, the company bought a holiday-decorating company that has developed into a $1 million-a-year business focusing on commercial and residential outdoor Christmas decorating, and some interior Christmas tree decorating in malls and offices.

But it has been the long-lasting drought and Swingle Tree's response to it that has made the company's financial performance stand out.

"We're still a small firm, and it was pretty apparent to the guys and gals working in this industry that, you know: The drought is here, what's the company going to do about it?" Tolkacz said, describing that time. So the company's employees as a group came up with about 40 potential products and services that might be offered customers who were dealing with the drought; that list was pared to 17 and then culled once again to four strategies, Tolkacz said. One was a focus on tree watering and care, and even during the drought, Swingle Tree has become the largest privately held tree-pruning company in the state, and probably the largest private tree-spraying company in the Denver market.

"Without a doubt, we water more trees and shrubs than our next three competitors combined," said Tolkacz. And watering trees works for Swingle's customers, he said.

"People who had their trees watered, when the (March and May snow) storms in 2003 came, actually told us, you know, 'The trees that I had watered, didn't snap and break in the storm.'"

That service holds its value long after the price for it is paid, and it deserves Top Company designation. It illustrates that Swingle Tree has not only earned another award; it leaves a legacy of green across the metro region.

Retail/Wholesale

eBags Inc., Greenwood Village

EMPHASIS: OPERATING EFFICIENCY

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Jon Nordmark says no one ever joins eBags.com because they want "to make a lot of money. They join it to build a great company."

And over the past 18 months, 51 people, more than double the company's 2002 workforce, have joined eBags in Colorado to make the company that much bigger and that much greater. In those same 18 months, eBags has also shown the world it was no fly-by-night Internet company just selling luggage.

In fact, eBags, said Nordmark, chairman and CEO of the Internet retailer, just bought a shoe company. It will be run as a separate operation called Shoedini.com, but will follow the same business model as eBags, selling product from a "virtual inventory"--and showing the rest of the dot.com world just how to survive a bursting Internet bubble.

"Most people view us as a luggage company, but that's only about 28 percent of sales," said Nordmark. "We sell a ton of handbags, and a ton of backpacks and a lot of business cases. Those are our four largest areas, and then we sell a lot of travel accessories.

"This is an opportunity to sell footwear, because it's a similar type-item, an accessory to clothing.... Most of our suppliers, about 180 of them, ship from their own ware-houses to the consumer. The shoe manufacturers can do the same thing."

Nordmark's excitement for his company is infectious, even over a telephone line.

A former executive at Samsonite, Colorado's original luggage company, Nordmark points out that Samsonite also is selling shoes--in France--and makes about $20 million a year in the trade. His hopes for eBags' shoes are smaller initially, but you can detect by the enthusiasm in his voice that he's chasing a pretty significant payoff with the shoe buy.

EBags' story as a survivor of the Internet-market crash has already been told in newspapers and magazines over and over, but Nordmark puts it in a nicely wrapped word package, a lot like a neat little handbag:

"We say we beat the dot.bomb; we beat the terrorist attacks, which killed our luggage sales--that's what turned us on to backpacks, handbags and that sort of thing; and then we beat the recession.

"We overcame all those terrible events," he added, "and people ask me, 'What's the one thing (that helped you), and I don't think there is any one thing. It's like the stars have to kind of line up; a little bit of it is luck; a lot of it is hard work; and a lot of it is a lot of decisions that in hindsight were good.

"It's about building a vision," he said. "Our vision is, wherever you are in the world, if you ask someone on the street, 'Where can I get the perfect bag?' if the answer is eBags, we've done our job."

It takes "a long time to build out a vision like that," said Nordmark. But he also realizes the right vision for his company is one for tomorrow as much as for today.

"We're not building eBags for the Baby Boomers like me," he said, "we're not building eBags even for the GenXers.

"We're building it for the GenY, or what they are calling the 'millenniums.' The people who are between 10 years old and 23 years old today--because they are the shoppers of tomorrow."

Sort of like a good piece of luggage. A company that will last.

Financial services

First Data Corp., Englewood

EMPHASIS: OPERATING EFFICIENCY

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First Data Corp. is an $8 billion company that is growing bigger and has the whole world for room to do it.

It is one of the state's eight Fortune 500 companies, and it moved to Colorado just in 2002 from Atlanta because its now-chairman, Charlie Fote, already lived here and he didn't want to move.

So he moved the company instead.

From here, and at other installations around the world, First Data conducts millions of credit- and debit-card transactions, pays merchants, cashes checks and makes money transfers every day.

It has 31,000 employees around the world, including 2,700 in Colorado, and Fote says being here, offering current headquarters employees a lifestyle that fuels their performance, and having available a highly educated, active pool of potential new employees, is the strongest strategy for future growth he can map out for his company.

"If we don't continue to add great people ... that's my biggest competitive threat," said Fote. If you "get lulled to sleep...