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New Dawn for D’Addario
Following his father's untimely death in 1986, then-24-year-old David D'Addario
set out to reinvent and diversify a one-time construction giant
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Business New Haven
10/23/1995
By: Terry Pitt
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“It's not as good as it was in '86, '87,” acknowledges David D'Addario. Then again, “It's not as bad as it was in '90. We're here and the phones are ringing.”
D'Addario, the entrepreneurial son and grandson of men who made D'Addario a household name in Bridgeport, exudes energy as he talks about his family's business in a memento-filled office overlooking the area of downtown Bridgeport he is helping to rejuvenate.
“I'm a casual guy,” he explains. “I dressed up for the interview today, but brought work boots and jeans so I can walk some property I'm looking at later.” Designated to lead the company, as his father put it, “when I'm gone,” the call came sooner than expected in 1986 when Frank D'Addario was killed at age 62 in the crash of one of his company's aircraft on his way home from a business trip to Chicago.
Groomed for the job since he started to work at age 12, David, the youngest of three girls and two boys, says, “I was the inside guy, with suit and tie. Larry, my brother, was more involved in the equipment and the trucks. He was the outside guy.”
Following his father's death, D'Addario felt the pressure of knowing that others - employees, his mother, his siblings - expected him to assume his father's role. At 24, he became obsessed with proving to all of them that it was business as usual at D'Addario Industries.
“For the first two years we were open literally 24 hours a day,” he recounts. “We ran three shifts and had 200 trucks on the road, plus renting extra trucks. We wanted to prove all the naysayers wrong, all the competitors wrong.”
To accomplish that, D'Addario before long began to make radical changes to the family-owned firm that includes some 35 companies with a total of 500 employees. The company has not gotten smaller, just smarter, with a very different look than it had nine years ago.
Once known principally for road paving and construction-related industries, businesses owned by the D'Addarios now range from West Coast retailing to a national bottle and can redemption machine business to environmental waste treatment facilities in Waterbury and Chicago. Despite the changes, the family business still has significant operations in its traditional construction-related industries.
Nicknamed “Double D” by his friends, David D'Addario, a 33-year-old Yale graduate who majored in sociology and economics, has made several business deals in the past three years to reposition the company in ways his father and grandfather never imagined. But some of his ideas may have come from what his father called the “Hi-Ho graduate school of business,” in which he enrolled David after rejecting his son's request to spend two years at Yale School of Management following graduation from Yale College in 1982.
Some observers assume that the company is downsizing because they see fewer trucks and construction equipment on the road. But D'Addario likens it to GE no longer making toasters and small appliances. Under his leadership, D'Addario Industries is diversifying and growing.
D'Addario isn't back, he says. In truth, it never left. Critics concluded the company was in trouble after he sold hundreds of pieces of large construction equipment at auction. But that maneuver turned out to be a masterful stroke, generating cash to reduce debt and finance other strategic acquisitions.
Among the successes are four recent deals totaling more than $50 million. D'Addario closed a $15 million purchase of the 210,000-square-foot building which now houses the $26 million Chase Manhattan Bank's Connecticut headquarters on Broad Street in Bridgeport. He sold selected business inventory and equipment to O&G Industries for more than $24 million - a move analysts say would be worth far less today had he not gotten out at the right time. More recently, he closed two deals with the state for $7 million to allow a new home for Housatonic Community College on the site of the former Hi-Ho Center mall and an $11 million deal to develop a state police barracks in Bridgeport.
The state purchased the state-of-the-art, 48,000-square-foot state police barracks on July 31. The new complex is the largest barracks in Connecticut, and will bring about 120 troopers, the state fire marshal's office, the elevator inspector's office and the ROCKY program for inner-city youth to Bridgeport, according to D'Addario Chief Financial Officer Nick Vitti.
In addition, the state police command post will feature a $25 million fiber-optic highway monitoring system to oversee traffic on I-95 from Greenwich to Branford. When it opened, Vitti said, “Over the last 18 months, we have provided hundreds of jobs for area contractors who were an essential part of the building's transformation.”
The new $28 million home for Housatonic Community-Technical College, which will bring thousands of students to downtown, is scheduled to be completed by the end of 1996. Renovations to D'Addario's corporate headquarters, next to the college, are moving forward in tandem with work on the school. It has been listed for lease by Bruce Wettenstein of Vidal Inc., with space on lower floors starting at $10 per square foot. Courtyards will link the office building and the school, and the parking garage will be reconfigured to accommodate more than 1,300 cars. The Mashantucket Pequot Indians announced last month that they had leased a floor of the 80,000-square-foot office tower.
In the meantime, D'Addario retired its tax debt to the city of Bridgeport for the former Hi-Ho mall and Sears Auto Center with a $4 million payment in 1994. It's an issue D'Addario says critics and the media misunderstood.
“Most of our businesses were doing well, but the mall got a lot of attention,” he explains. “We have a philosophy that all our companies must stand on their own. The mall couldn't - no matter how creative we got. So we addressed the problem in a different way and split the mall into an office building, which now houses D'Addario's world headquarters, a community college and police barracks, with three different owners.” In the aggregate, the D'Addario family of businesses has been doing fine all along, he maintains.
Bridgeport Mayor Joseph P. Ganim praises D'Addario as a public-spirited business owner who shares his vision for economic development in the Park City. “Without Dave D'Addario's participation, there would be no state police barracks coming to Bridgeport and no Housatonic Community College moving downtown,” Ganim says. “These are two key pieces of the puzzle for our city, and D'Addario played a big part in making them happen.”
Adds Ganim, “That Dave D'Addario has paid $4 million plus interest in full for back taxes to the city is a tribute to his commitment to Bridgeport and his abilities as a business owner.”
Currently, D'Addario is expanding its environmental waste treatment business in Waterbury and Chicago and its bulky waste landfill business in Milford.
D'Addario continues to exude a strong sense of family fealty. His wife Polly was his sweetheart at Trumbull High School. Their 11-month-old daughter, Siena, rules the family roost in Southport. Sister Virginia, former owner of the Virginia Alan shops, now runs the family's furniture and interior design business on the West Coast. His brother Larry is chief of operations at the oil company, where sister Marylou (now a mother of three) formerly worked. Her husband, Sean Kennedy, runs the company's block-and-mason division in Milford.
While some business owners dwell on a sour real estate market or bemoan the lackluster building climate, D'Addario Industries continues to grow by taking a page from the corporate giants, strategically selling off business units that don't fit long-range plans while adding new business ventures in vastly diversified fields.
“I want to be respected as a good competitor, shrewd and tough,” David D'Addario says. He seems a good match for the job to which he has fallen heir and which he has embraced: revitalizing Bridgeport while reaching well beyond its borders to do business across America.
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