Brandon Michael Zdawczyk, founder and owner of a Toledo insurance agency, died Nov. 30 at the University of Toledo Medical Center, the former Medical College of Ohio Hospital. He was 44.

He suffered from diabetes and congenital heart disease, sister Darlene Cox said.

Mr. Zdawczyk owned Brandon Z Insurance Agency on Southwyck Boulevard since its inception in the early 2000s, when he merged two businesses — the former Insurance Benefit Group of Toledo, which he founded a few years prior to that, and a southeast Michigan insurance agency he bought about the same time.

Before that, he was a regional manager at different times in a number of cities, including Toledo, Lansing, and Greensboro, N.C., for Erie Construction, a roofing contractor where he had risen through the ranks from a telemarketer, the position to which he was hired in 1993.

Mr. Zdawczyk also owned two sports memorabilia shops for a few yeas in the mid-2010s, one on Summit Street in Point Place and the other at Angola Road and McCord Road in Springfield Township, until he sold them to focus on his insurance business.

“He loved to take care of his clients. He would check on them and help them save on their insurance,” Ms. Cox said. “He was also a very generous person who would help anybody,” she said,

She recalled how he once took in a homeless person and later helped him start a business.

“He would give you a shirt of his back; he was a giver,” Chad Long of High Point, N.C., said. “I was that homeless person. He changed the trajectory of my life. I was down and out. And then he brought me in, put a roof over my head, and helped me start my own Sprint franchising business.”

Mr. Zdawczyk was born June 27, 1975, in Toledo to Sharlene Landrum-Zdawczyk and Darrel Zdawczyk.

He was raised in the Polish Village neighborhood in North Toledo and was very proud of that fact as well as of his Polish roots, his sister said.

In 1993, he graduated from Woodward High School and later that year was hired on at Erie Construction.

In his free time, Mr. Zdawczyk liked to dine out in the company of friends. He also enjoyed music, cars, karaoke, and sports. He was an avid collector of sports cards and memorabilia and brand-name wristwatches that he liked to gift to family and friends.

He was a former member of SS. Adalbert and Hedwig Parish.

Surviving are his wife, Deandra Zdawczyk; son, Brandon Zdawczyk; sister, Darlene Cox; brothers, Robbie and Victor Lopez; mother, Sharlene Lopez; stepfather, Robert Lopez; and grandfather, Carlos Landrum.

Services were Monday at Castillo Funeral Home. The family suggests tributes to the American Diabetes Association or the American Heart Association.

First Published December 10, 2019, 5:00 a.m.