What's Wrong With This Picture? Nothing!
You've never met a man more obsessed with service than Dawson Rutter.
Michael Edwards
Commonwealth Worldwide Chauffeured Transportation is a $34 million bastion of white-glove civility spawned by one man's rage. That man is Dawson Rutter, and he does not seem like an angry guy.
Loud, yes. But not angry.
The 55-year-old entrepreneur makes like a duck's back whenever unpleasant subjects arise. Rutter laughs when I bring up an unflattering Boston magazine article about his legal squabbles with a competitor. He laughs when we view the video of an accident that temporarily produced a $125,000 insurance claim. (The video cleared Commonwealth's driver of blame.) He laughs when describing the two traffic tickets he had received the day before--unfairly he believes--while driving his SUV on New York's West Side Highway.
But when the subject of Carey International arises, Rutter's loud, flat voice becomes a little louder, a little flatter. The joviality segues into resentment. Carey International is the crisp-uniformed gorilla of the limousine business, an industry that in its highest form services C-level executives and red-carpet personalities. In 1998 Carey was in the throes of a roll-up and wanted to buy Commonwealth, at the time a humble player in the Boston market. As Rutter tells it, Carey dangled a juicy number, but its final offer came in 60 percent lower. (Carey did not respond to messages asking for comment.)
"I was furious," says Rutter, ensconced in his curiously featureless office not far from Harvard Business School. "You're set up to sell the business and you think you're going to move on to the next stage of life. Then the rug gets ripped out from underneath you. I was insulted. I was angry. I wanted to show them."
In a pure David and Goliath story, Rutter would have toppled Carey from its throne; in fact he hasn't come close. Carey remains the industry leader while Commonwealth runs a respectable 22nd in size, according to rankings compiled by Limousine & Chauffeured Transportation magazine. What he has done, however (in addition to reaching No. 52 on this year's Inner City 100 list, with four-year revenue growth of 248 percent), is transform a nondescript local operation into a flourishing company with national and international reach and a level of service that, by many accounts, is setting new benchmarks. In the process, he is professionalizing a job that largely attracts an untrained, itinerant work force, closer in character to the motley crew of TV's Taxi than to the English butlers Rutter likes to hold up as models.
Most remarkable to some observers, in the past three years Rutter has taken Manhattan, the industry Everest in terms of size and risk. "New York City is the biggest and toughest livery market in the U.S., if not the world," says Jon LeSage, managing editor of Limousine & Chauffeured Transportation. "Commonwealth is thriving there. And they set up their beachhead after 9/11, which is really impressive."
Conversations with Commonwealth's customers turn up superlatives normally reserved for five-star hotels. "I've been doing this for 16 years and this is the best limousine company--the best organized, the most professional--I've ever worked with," says Maria Wittorp-De Jong, chief concierge at the five-star St. Regis Hotel in New York City. "They take any issue we might have, no matter how small, extremely seriously. Nothing ever lingers with Commonwealth. They take care of it right away."
"We're very demanding; we expect perfection," says Jane Lanouette, senior vice president of publicity and promotions for Boston-based Allied Advertising/Public Relations. "These guys have an unbelievable consistency of service. And they're great people. I'm nosy, so whenever I get a new driver I grill him. And everybody at that company is just so upbeat and so happy."
Commonwealth, in other words, is among those rare companies that have gone from 40 customers to 4,000 without sacrificing the aura of boutique service--it has grown, in fact, by making that aura stronger. And although anger got Rutter moving, somewhere along the way he stopped trying to show Carey and started trying to show himself: that an ex-cabbie with no business training and a thimbleful of ambition could reverse course in middle age and create one of the most successful companies in his industry.
Taxiing for Takeoff
Heaven forfend Dawson Rutter should ever put a bumper sticker on a car. But if he did, the message might be this: Success Happens.
I can't recall meeting an entrepreneur who talks about fate as much as Rutter does. Since his Road-to-Damascus moment nine years ago, Commonwealth's founder has been chugging down biographies and books on leadership in an effort to understand "how successful lives--successful as judged by history--develop and play out." Sitting on a red-leather sofa in his home in a Boston suburb, absently stroking one of the family's 15 cats, which has wedged itself against his side, Rutter muses about Abraham Lincoln, J. Pierpont Morgan, and his beloved Theodore Roosevelt. When he reverts to his own story, however, the character-as-destiny theme evaporates.
Certainly few would have predicted an illustrious future for Rutter circa 1969 through 1981. The son of an advertising executive and a homemaker, Rutter grew up in an affluent New York City suburb, where as a young boy he peddled greeting cards and plant seedlings from his little red wagon. College put paid to that precocious industriousness: Rutter sums up his academic career as "the scene in Animal House where John Belushi is standing in Dean Wormer's office with two pencils hanging out of his nose." He dropped out of Ohio Wesleyan in 1970, Pace University in New York in 1971, Boston University in 1974. Between academic debacles, Rutter amassed the kind of peripatetic resumé--painter, auto worker, short-order cook, construction worker, landscaper, waiter, lawn mower, sheet-metal worker--characteristic of hopeless drifters and embryonic artists marking time.
