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Maggie Fox is a fan of keeping it all in the neighborhood.
Standing in the parking lot of the Fox Cleaners location at 41st and Harvard, you can see the Blue Sky Bank midtown location.
Being able to bank with her neighbors has been incredibly convenient, but Maggie says more importantly, she’s built a relationship with the Blue Sky Bank team.
“We come in [the bank] and the girls know our name,” Maggie says. “You know, we come in through the drive-through and they know our names. It's always the same people. I love that because that's what we do here.”
Maggie began working with Blue Sky Bank in 2016, when she purchased Fox Cleaners from her business partner.
This wasn’t just a business decision. It was a personal one.
Maggie’s late husband Tim had built Fox Cleaners from the ground up, starting in 1984. After he passed, the business began to decline over the years. She wanted to restore the family business to what Tim had envisioned.
One of the first steps was finding a bank that would support her vision to rebrand and revamp the Fox Cleaners brand.
“I wanted it to have a new fresh look and feel and Blue Sky helped with that, for sure,” Maggie explains. “They helped fund that exercise, which was no small task for me.”
It was important to Maggie to find a bank that was local. She says Blue Sky Bank and lender Ryan McDaniel took the time to fully understand what she wanted to accomplish, and she wouldn’t have gotten that personal service from a big bank.
In fact, Maggie says, she moved all of the business accounts from a larger bank in Tulsa to Blue Sky Bank for that reason.
“We really wanted that kind of small-town connection, that small-town feeling and service that you just don't get from a larger bank,” Maggie says. “We wanted to have that relationship with a bank that would help us further our business and achieve our goals. And they've done a great job.”
Once she had a new logo and brand in place for Fox Cleaners, Maggie got to work revamping other aspects of the business.
Dry cleaning, she explains, has an older clientele. When she bought the business, about 80 percent of Fox Cleaner’s clients were 50 years or older. Maggie wanted to tap into a younger market of millennials, and knew she’d need support from her bank to make the right changes.
With a working capital loan and equipment loan from Blue Sky Bank, Maggie remodeled several stores with eco-green products and new equipment. She expanded free pick-up and delivery services, upgraded the systems to take online orders and payments, and began offering wash-and-fold and same-day service.
It hasn’t been easy, Maggie says, to make so many changes at once. But having the Blue Sky Bank team by her side gave her the support she needed to navigate them.
“It’s given me great confidence to know that somebody's got my back,” Maggie says. “They want us to succeed.”
There are five Fox Cleaners locations in the Tulsa metro area:
Maggie says she plans to open more stores and to acquire the building that houses the production for the dry cleaning stores. She knows that any time she has questions about financing her business or expanding current operations with a business acquisition loan, the Blue Sky Bank team and lender Ryan McDaniel is just down the street and always willing to chat.
“Ryan's so special,” Maggie says. “We've had that kind of white glove treatment from the very beginning and he's just always a phone call away.”
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