As a kid growing up in Russia, Anatoly "Tony" Yuffa waited in line for hours to buy soap and made his own hockey sticks. When anti-Semitism forced Yuffa's family to sneak out of Russia one night in 1979, they brought with them to America $800 and their thrifty ways.

"The way I was brought up, every dollar had to be spent right," said Yuffa, now 40. "I had to think very carefully about what I was going to get for it. You don't spend more than you make." That mind-set guided Yuffa in building two businesses, a chain of Shoe Biz shoe repair shops that he sold two years ago, and DazBog Coffee, a regional coffee roaster.

The coffee business, now in its seventh year, has been profitable since day one. In Denver, DazBog will double its Denver coffee production capacity and expand distribution of the coffee outside Colorado, where it is sold in 1,000 restaurants, coffee shops and grocery stores.

On Wednesday, Yuffa will share his entrepreneurial wisdom with about 300 people at StartUp BaseCamp, the annual downtown Denver event designed to guide people who run or want to run their own business.

"DazBog represents the real strength in the American economy - small and medium-size businesses," said Joyce Colson, a Boulder attorney who has organized the event since its start three years ago.

"They're immigrants, and they came over with virtually nothing," she said. "They took their drive, energy and enthusiasm and grew their business from ground zero."

While StartUp BaseCamp began in 2000 as a forum to help technology startups grow, the event now aims to help people start virtually any kind of company.

As many as 30 entrepreneurs and business experts will share their advice, including Max Appel, whose company, Orange Glo International, makes household cleaners; Mary Beth Lewis, chief financial officer of Noodles & Co.; and Donna Auguste, founder of Freshwater Software, the Boulder firm that sold for $147 million in 2001.

While the startups of years past focused more on getting rich and growing fast, Yuffa talks slowly and about patience, passion and, of course, coffee.

"People need to slow down," he said. "I had the best cup of coffee this morning. The cream on this espresso was so thick that you could pick it up with a spoon and it wouldn't fall off."

Yuffa first discovered his love for coffee when he was 15, during his family's nine-month stint in Italy after leaving Russia long ago. They were awaiting visas to enter the United States, and his parents couldn't find work. So Yuffa, the oldest of three children, went to work to support the family.

Each day at dawn, he joined his fellow workers for three shots of espresso before 12-hour days of pruning grape leaves in vineyards.

The ritual hooked him on coffee, but two decades passed before he started roasting beans himself.

Instead, he followed in his father's footsteps and became a shoemaker when they arrived in the United States.

Yuffa helped his father in his shoe shop every day after school. At 23, he scraped together enough money to start his own store in Republic Plaza in downtown Denver. Over the next 18 years, he expanded it to become a six-store chain in metro Denver that sold cowboy boots and repaired shoes.

"I was known as the Russian Cowboy," said Yuffa. By 1996, his younger brother, Leonid, had his own entrepreneurial ambitions. He wanted to start his own coffee shop, but his research took him a step further, to the coffee-making business.

Soon Leonid was joined by Tony and his wife, Simona, and Dan Price, an old high school friend, to start DazBog, which means "God of Richness" in Russian. They roasted coffee beans by night and made sales calls by day.

They held second jobs, banked their savings and racked up credit card debt to start the business. They resisted $3 million from venture capital investors, huge bank loans and flashy advertisements and grew slowly instead.

The company employs 30 people today and may hire a half-dozen people in the next year to accommodate increased production.

"We grew organically," said Yuffa. "It's not a highway race. You've got to have that passion, a love for what you do, not just want to make a lot of money. And you have to have a gut feeling that you can do it with the resources you have."

STARTUP SUCCESS TIPS

What: StartUp BaseCamp When: 7 a.m. Wednesday registration Where: Tivoli Center on the Auraria campus in downtown Denver Cost: $125 per person in advance, $200 on the day of the event. For more information, go to www.startupbasecamp.com