Flag company takes country's patriotic pulse.

• Author: Taylor, Mike
• Position: SMALL biz

Patriotism might be hard to define, but for Jeff Tomczak it's not hard to measure.

"After all these years, it's either a gut feeling or an educated guess or a combination," he says.

Tomczak, 42, is president and CEO of Show Your Colors Flag Co., a second-generation retailer of flags and flagpoles based in Denver. Of course, that "gut feeling" about the prevailing level of patriotism or lack thereof also shows up on Tomczak's bottom line. Sales of American flags make up 30 percent of his business.

"I would say in times of war or in times of national crisis, people do get patriotic," he says. "Election years don't really affect our business all that much, although we did have somebody from Hillary Clinton's campaign rent some flags from us when she was in town (in October)."

Not surprisingly, the two biggest years for the company were 2001 and 2002, the months following the terrorist attacks of 9/11, when revenues jumped about 35 percent, to around $1.5 million both years.

The country's ambivalence over the current war in Iraq is evident, too, by the lack of a surge in American flag sales. Sales at Show Your Colors for the past decade have been flat, at around $1.1 million annually, except for the aforementioned two-year spike.

"9/1 I was the epitome of patriotism in this country," says Tomczak, who does expect to see a boost from the Democratic National Convention in Denver later this year. "I wasn't around during World War II or Korea, and I was just barely born during the Vietnam era. So I don't really have a gauge for what it was like back then, but based on what flag manufacturers around the country have told me, that period after 9/11 was the busiest the industry has ever been."

Tomczak figures he sold 100,000 American flags in the 12 months after Sept. 11, 2001, and he says, "I'm sure we could have sold hundreds of thousands more if I had flags, but no one had flags for several months. Manufacturers couldn't keep up with the demand."

Tomczak is philosophical about being in a business that tends to prosper when the country is in turmoil. He figures flag companies, security-monitoring device makers and airport scanners were among the few businesses that thrived immediately after 9/11.

"It's a sad event to have made money on, but we were in the business, and there was a demand and what do you do? It's just like anything else. If you're in the newspaper business or TV...