at Godo speaks with
a friendly Texan accent. Sometimes the words pour out quickly,
but that only suggests she has a lot to say. After all, she
believes communication is an integral component in her life,
both professionally and personally.
"Communication is essential to my
business,” she emphasized. “It’s essential
for drycleaners to have communication.”
A lifelong resident of the Dallas area,
Pat has long served as the president of Godo & Godo, Inc.,
which does business under the heading of Avon Cleaners. To keep
in close contact with her employees, she begins every day at
the plant by greeting them all individually.
“I make the rounds when I come in
because my husband did,” Pat explained. “That was
something he started. It’s important to recognize them
and it’s very important to hear their ‘Good
morning’ back to me.”
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“We have it set up for when you
punch it — like if it’s your birthday — it
tells you ‘Happy birthday’ when you punch
in,” she said. “It just has different things to let
our employees know how important they are to us.”
Pat believes such efforts are the least
she can do for the people who help keep her business running.
“A lot of my employees have been
with me for quite some time and I consider them my very best
asset,” Pat said. “We work a lot with their
families, with their children and in every way we can to help
them help themselves. We’ve seen children grow up and go
to college and we’re there for them.”
Pat, who recently relinquished her
president’s gavel for the Southwest Drycleaners
Association at the end of her term, has seen her own son,
Stacy, grow up in the business as well. Now that he and his
wife, Michelle, have sufficient experience, Pat hopes to
give up control of the family cleaners in the near future.
“I hope I know when it’s time
to give up the reins,” she said.
When she first attended North Texas State
University, Pat already knew exactly what she wanted to do; in
fact, she had for quite some time.
“I wanted to be an
accountant,” she recalled. “I really liked doing
the books. I did a lot for my family growing up. At an early
age, I learned to help manage money and that sort of thing. I
was taught fairly early on by my dad. He had three girls and he
thought we all should learn how to take care of
ourselves.”
hile pursuing a business degree in
administration, Pat earned money on the side as a
“gopher” for an accounting firm. She only stayed
with the company a short time after she graduated. Instead, she
went into private business accounting for the better part of
the next year because she felt that public accounting firms
were more impersonal.
Next up, she went to work for American
Bakeries at its Dallas office. “I was the comptroller at
that particular branch,” Pat explained. “I was the
first lady comptroller, so it was very interesting. I worked on
the forecasting, the books, the budget, that sort of thing. It
was a great job.”
It didn’t hurt matters that
Pat’s husband, Karoly, also worked at American Bakeries
in the merchandizing department. She had met him during college
when she reluctantly attended a church function. Karoly had
escaped from Hungary in 1956 as a political refugee during the
country’s revolution. He greatly appreciated the
opportunities America provided and new ambitions soon occupied
his thoughts.
“My husband — when he came to
this country — wanted a business of his own because
everything his family had been taken away from them,” she
said. “He was always looking for a business to buy. I
just said, ‘OK. OK. OK.’”
Drycleaning wouldn’t have been
Pat’s first choice of industries to start a business in
because she and her husband knew very little about it. Despite
that, Karoly told her he had found a good cleaners at a prime
location and he had every confidence that they could learn the
trade.
Pat asked her husband where he was going
to get the money to finance the project and he told her
he’d find it somewhere. “And this is a man with
broken English,” she said. “I said to myself,
‘OK. He’ll never do that so I’m not going to
worry about it.’”
Naturally, Karoly surprised her again a
week later when he informed her that the bank was going to call
him that night to tell him if he could secure a loan.
“I said, ‘Karoly, banks are
not open at eight o’clock at night,” Pat recalled.
“He said, ‘Believe me, I’m going to get a
call tonight at eight o’clock.’”
Of course, the phone did ring at eight
o’clock and the bank approved the loan. So, in the
mid-1960s, the couple bought Avon Cleaners with the condition
that the previous owner would stay aboard for two years to help
show them the ropes. They began with only one route and three
employees.
Pat still worked for American Bakeries,
but she had a flexible job so she was able to help out at the
plant.
“My husband talked me into coming in
part-time, but the first day was 13 hours,” she said.
“It hasn’t decreased much since. I worked at the
counter or on whatever needed to be done. My husband ran the
route and learned how to dryclean. Because we were small, we
were able to hone in and do a great job. We started to upgrade
the plant and the route began to grow slowly, but
surely.”
After working for American Bakeries for
over ten years, Pat left when the company closed the Dallas
office. She kept doing the books for several of her clients,
but she now had more time to invest in Avon Cleaners.
In 1981, Pat and Karoly bought the Daniel
Cleaning Company, a family-owned cleaners that had been around
for about 75 years, adding a 10,000 sq. ft. building and three
more routes to the mix. Things were going well, but
unfortunately, tragedy loomed near.
“I lost my husband in September of
1993 to a brain tumor,” Pat said. “It was a very,
very bad year for all of us. He was just a gallant, wonderful
man.”
aroly had undergone a complete physical exam
that revealed no problems in 1991. Yet, when the couple
traveled to Hungary, Pat noticed he was sleeping more,
something he rarely did during family visits overseas.
“We came back and he had trouble
with his speech,” she recalled. “At that point, I
thought maybe he had had a stroke and took him to the
doctor.”
Medical tests revealed six lesions on his
brain. They were inoperable.
“From that time on, he never talked
again,” Pat said. “He could understand you
perfectly. He just could not respond to you. We made it through
all that time, but we just did not win the battle. We all look
back now and remember him with wonderful thoughts. I’m
just so sorry he could not see his grandchildren.”
It has been ten years since the
devastating personal loss of her husband, but Pat has risen to
the challenge and Avon Cleaners is bigger than ever.
“Two years ago we bought a 25,000
sq. ft. building and have redone it for a drycleaners,”
she said. “We are in the process now of moving all of our
production into that.”
Nowadays, the family-owned business
employs 110 workers. Because about 80% of them speak Spanish as
their first language, Pat has instituted a bilingual
communication program as a way to overcome any language
barriers in her workforce.
Communication has also played a big role
in Pat’s efforts as SDA’s president during the past
year.
“One of our goals this year that we
all set as directors is that we would contact every cleaner in
our association,” Pat said. “What I did was start
off with the current membership and I geographically divided it
between the 57 directors. We took about 15 members a piece and
made those personal phone calls. We are about at the 85% level
of doing that, but we will complete that. I know I’ve
talked with several members who have said they’ve been
association members for 15 years and have never heard from
anybody.”
Though Avon Cleaners and SDA have kept her
quite busy of late, Pat has also managed to find time to serve
as the treasurer for the Fabricare Foundation.
In her spare time, she prefers to spend
time with her grandchildren. She also loves to travel and has
logged her share of frequent flyer miles. In fact, when the
International Drycleaners Congress cancelled its South America
trip shortly after the 9/11 attacks, she and her traveling
companion, Shirley Reichstadt, refused to do the same.
"I looked at Shirley and Shirley
looked at me. We decided, ‘We’re not
cancelling’,” she said. “We were not going to
let the terrorists make us cower in our homes. My philosophy
is, if my husband could come from his country during a
terrible, terrible time, then certainly I could get on a plane.
We did and we had a really good time.”
So far, it seems that very little has
managed to stand in Pat’s way. No matter what life throws
at her, she always strives to keep moving forward. She simply
doesn’t know any other way to live.
“This is what I’m supposed to
do,” she said. “I’m supposed to continue this
business that my husband loved so dearly. This is what I do and
I’m happy with that. Sometimes we’re maligned, but
we’re a good industry — mostly family-owned
businesses — and I think that is what America is all
about.”
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