Just over a decade ago, Zoltan Dicso was sleeping in his car, scraping by in “survival mode”. Today, he runs a successful Clifton-based company, listed on the 2025 Inc. 5000 as one of America’s fastest-growing private companies, a testament to grit, reinvention and unwavering purpose.
Childhood on the margins
Dicso was born in Budapest, Hungary. His early years were turbulent: an alcoholic father, a mother struggling with mental health and long stretches of time on the street. As a teenager, he chased belonging where he could find it and wasted the next 13 years of his life. He describes those years as a constant, uneasy search for safety, “survival mode” more than a life. The turning point came in 2007, when he lost several close friends and his brother in the span of a year.
“That was the wake-up call,” he says. “Jail or a grave. That’s where this path went.”
He bought a one-way ticket, didn’t say goodbye and landed at JFK with $200 in his pocket and no idea what came next.
Starting over in New York
The first years in the United States were stark. Dicso didn’t speak English and didn’t know anyone. He was homeless at times and took any work he could find. Construction became his foothold. He learned to mix, patch and finish; to read a wall and how water gets in; to show up early and stay late. He tried twice to start a business and failed twice.
“I thought a company was a form, an insurance policy and hard work,” he says. “I learned the hard way that it’s also marketing, finance, quality control, long-term planning—all the things you don’t see on a job site.”
In 2018, searching for structure, Dicso joined a small mastermind group where the conversation wasn’t about shortcuts but systems. He began studying a management framework and applying it piece by piece, organizing work into clear roles, developing effective promotional actions and operating on statistics, not whim. The point, he says, was simple: “Build a team around a purpose, not a person.”
Why Clifton?
By 2017, Dicso had incorporated ZD Stucco Repair and, after years of working wherever the work was, established the company in Clifton. Eventually, he set up shop on Mt. Prospect Avenue, a short drive from many of the neighborhoods where his crew now works. The choice, he says, was Clifton’s excellent geographic position:
“Clifton is very close to all the major thoroughfares, Route 3, Parkway and the Turnpike, making it easy to serve homeowners and businesses across New Jersey and the greater New York area.”
Building a second life. One wall at a time If you ask Dicso about “success,” he doesn’t talk about revenue. He talks about people: the crew members who stuck with him through lean winters; the homeowner who sent a photo after a leak was finally fixed; the foreman who started as a laborer and now runs his own team. The pride is mutual: when national recognition arrived, his employees posted the news with the same exuberance as their boss, – in August 2025, Inc. magazine named ZD Stucco Repair to the Inc. 5000, listing the firm as a Clifton-based construction company serving New Jersey and New York.
“Have a purpose you can say out loud,” Dicso offers. “It won’t make obstacles disappear, those get bigger as you grow, but it will make you bigger than the obstacles.”
He still keeps a mental list of the people who gave him a chance: the contractor who hired him when his English was mostly hand signals, the first customer who trusted him with a whole house, the neighbor who pointed him toward Clifton.
“People changed my life,” he says. “Now my job is to be one of those people for someone else.”
