As kids, Bill and Chris Tatro spent summers and days after school performing one of the least glamorous jobs imaginable.

Along with their youngest brother Ty, they’d suit up in protective gear, line up dozens of portable toilets and spend hours power-washing them clean. 

“We’d get the suit, the face shield, and you’d come out covered in toilet paper,” Chris recalled with a laugh. 

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The brothers remember scrubbing away layers of graffiti.

“I always say that’s how I learned how to cuss,” Chris said. “None of the graffiti was child-friendly.” 

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Neither brother imagined those childhood chores would one day lead them to running one of Colorado’s most successful wastewater solutions companies. 

This year, the Breckenridge-born business Snowbridge Inc is celebrating its 50th anniversary. What began in 1976 as a single septic pumping truck has grown into a company with around 30 employees, over 80 pieces of registered equipment and operations stretching well beyond Summit County. 

Snowbridge now provides a wide array of services ranging from septic pumping, drain cleaning and grease trap cleaning to municipal sewer system maintenance, lift station construction and trenchless pipe repair for resorts, towns and large commercial customers.

It all started because Bill and Chris’s father, also Bill, needed a career change.

After moving to Summit County in 1970, Bill Tatro Sr. managed the lone restaurant at the Breckenridge Ski Resort while plowing snow on the side. When he lost his restaurant lease, he and his wife, Cheryl, sat down to brainstorm what came next. 

“It narrowed down to a junkyard or a septic pumping business,” Cheryl said. “Since we didn’t have any land, it was hard to have a junkyard, so we went with septic pumping — and I didn’t even know septic pumping existed.” 

Neither did her husband. 

The previous owner of Summit County’s only septic business had recently died, leaving an opening for entrepreneurship, Cheryl said. The couple took out a large loan to purchase a vacuum truck in Canada, flying north for the pickup and driving it back to Breckenridge. Despite paying for a small newspaper ad, Cheryl recalls returning home to an empty answering machine.

“We just started with one truck,” she said.

But after a few months, requests quickly expanded beyond just septic pumping.

Customers would call in to ask whether Snowbridge could provide other services, and Cheryl said her husband rarely hesitated, regardless of his capability. 

“He’d always say, “yeah, sure, we can do that,'” Cheryl said. 

Over the years, that meant adding portable toilets, plumbing services, water cleanup, high-pressure sewer jetting and even roof ice removal for a period. Cheryl said her late husband always found a way to learn those new services. 

Meanwhile, the Tatro boys tried their hardest to distance themselves from Snowbridge. 

“We had three sons who had absolutely no interest in being part of the family business,” Cheryl said. “And they had to work here growing up.”

School buses dropped the brothers off at the Snowbridge yard (off of Colorado Highway 9 near the new Sol Center) each afternoon, and work soon commenced. 

“Lucky me, I was the first one to go through our father’s management of his children,” Bill joked.

Despite earning degrees elsewhere — Bill attended college in Missouri before finishing a degree in animal science at Colorado State University, while Chris earned an aviation degree and commercial pilot’s license from Metropolitan State University of Denver — both eventually found themselves back home. 

That decision came sooner than expected.

After Bill Tatro Sr. developed multiple sclerosis in his late 30s, his health steadily declined. After his death in October 2003 at age 56, Cheryl suddenly found herself grieving while trying to keep the business afloat. 

“My mom was basically trying to grieve, struggling to run the company, hated the management that was in place, but she couldn’t do anything about it because she can’t do the field work well,” Chris said. 

Cheryl ultimately called a meeting with her three sons at an Italian restaurant off of Interstate 70 to ask for their help. Already having difficulty finding jobs in the post-Sept. 11 workforce, Bill and Chris agreed and returned in 2004. 

Taking the reins 

Cheryl officially sold Snowbridge Inc to Chris and Bill, now 50% partners, in 2009. 

But the brothers said their biggest business gamble came even earlier.

In 2005, they invested heavily in newly launched trenchless pipe repair technology, allowing damaged underground sewer lines to be fixed without digging them up. Chris said at the time, many potential customers viewed the equipment as “snake oil.”

“Nobody really believed in it,” Chris said. “Bill and I spent so much time trying to sell it and prove that it was good.”

That investment nearly sank the company. From 2005 to 2009, the brothers often spent entire nights at job sites waiting for pipe liners to cure, sometimes sleeping in trailers to monitor the process. 

Today, advances like ultraviolet curing have dramatically shortened installation times. What once seemed like a risky experiment has become one of Snowbridge’s biggest specialties today. 

“Now, we’re one of the leaders in the state in trenchless pipe repair,” Chris said. “We’re known throughout the country for our techniques, our tools, our abilities.”

Those projects have grown from $5,000 repairs to contracts worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Snowbridge now works with municipalities, ski resorts, the University of Colorado Boulder and customers across the Front Range. They’ve even done work in New Mexico, Nebraska, Texas and other western states. 

Bill said today, the company’s work falls into two divisions: services and solutions. Services include septic pumping, inspections, drain cleaning, lift station work and more, while the solutions division, largely headed by Chris, tackles larger underground infrastructure repairs and rehabilitation projects throughout the region. 

Even with that growth, the brothers say the company’s values haven’t changed. 

“We do what I think America is missing in the business world today,” Chris said. “We stand by our morals and principles and our values of providing real, good services.”

At least one of the brothers looks over the office between Frisco and Breckenridge every day of the year. Cheryl said the business has never closed, not even for a holiday, in five decades. 

For Cheryl, watching the business she and her late husband built continue into a second generation has been rewarding. 

“I am just so amazed and so proud of what these two guys have accomplished,” she said. 

More information on Snowbridge’s current service offerings can be found at SnowbridgeInc.com.