Best Paving Practices (When Conditions Aren’t the Best): Customer Budgets & Expectations
BY AsphaltPro Staff
Everyone can hit a fastball, but what do you do when a curveball comes across the plate?
Picture this: You’re paving the entrance to a large condominium complex. Everything is going smoothly until 3:30 p.m. hits and 30 cars swarm your job site as parents living in the condominium complex wait to pick up their children from the school bus. Your job site comes to a complete stop at the worst possible location. The area is so clogged with cars and the crew that traffic on the road is backed up. A state trooper pulls up and starts yelling at you about the traffic. Then, the asphalt plant calls and says they’re closing early for the weekend and they need you to come get whatever mix you need to finish the job. You can’t shut down for the day because the customer needs this job done by 4:15 p.m. today. You can’t come back Monday because you’ve got another job that can’t be rescheduled. What would you do?
This is exactly what happened on a job the American Pavement Specialists crew was on this spring. Our only option was to stop the job to wait for the kids to get off the school bus and the cars to clear, send all the trucks back to the plant for the last load of mix, and hustle to finish the job by the end of the day.
When it comes to best paving practices, there are tons of resources available. Those may be applicable on the jobs you’re on Monday through Thursday, but what about Friday when you’re on a job like the one described above? Or the following week, when the plant breaks down and it’s 60 degrees Fahrenheit and windy as hell?
Believe me, I wish it were possible to train my crew on a set of best practices and be done with it. But in our industry, every day is different. We’re using a different material in a different area under different weather conditions. To be an asphalt pro, you have to be ready to switch up your best practices to meet the conditions of that particular job site. The training never really stops.
That’s why over my next few articles, I’m going to talk about best paving practices for when conditions aren’t the best. In part one, we’ll cover customer expectations and budgets. In part two (December 2024), we’ll cover weather conditions. In part three (January 2025), we’ll cover issues at the asphalt plant, and in part four (February 2025), we’ll cover equipment issues.
Let’s start at the beginning, with your customers.
Company reputation is very important to Stanley, so he isn’t afraid to say no to customers’ projects if they could in some way harm the company’s reputation.
Customer Demands
One thing that drives me crazy is when folks who aren’t in our industry tell me, “Did you see the job X contractor did on Y road? Terrible!” Maybe they did a terrible job. Or maybe they were forced to pave under adverse conditions. You and I have no idea what the customer asked them for, what the customer’s budget was, or all the contractors’ recommendations the customer might have rejected.
Let’s face it, some customers want their product to be perfect and are willing to pay for it. Other customers might just want the parking lot to look black. Asphalt pavement is basically one big math problem. The customer could spend $1 million, or $500,000, or even $100,000, and you can’t expect the contractor to give a $1 million result for $100,000. If the capital’s not there, it doesn’t mean we can’t make the pavement better than it was within the customer’s budget. But, to assume the results of the project are the contractor’s fault is unfair unless you know the customer’s demands.
On a job with a tight profit margin, choosing which crew members to send may be counterintuitive. It may be the case that I send my best guys when you might think I’d send my second stringers. This is because if the profit margin is so thin, I cannot afford mistakes like putting 2 ¼ inches of asphalt on there instead of the 2 inches they’re paying me for.
Manage Expectations
If a customer comes to you with a budget smaller than what their pavement actually needs, you can either turn down the project or deliver the best you can for that amount of money. If you take on the project, be sure to manage their expectations for their pavement now and in the future.
This is true for their budget, but also for adverse project conditions. Imagine the weather turns bad, but the customer still needs their lot done. Imagine the plant breaks down in the middle of their project. It’s not your fault, it’s not the customer’s fault. No customer wants their lot to suffer for that. Somebody has to answer for that and it’s probably going to be you. Manage expectations from the get-go.
Choose Customers with Care
If I can’t deliver quality results on a project, I typically won’t accept the job. We can only do so many projects per season, and I’d like to fill that book of work with customers who are interested in quality, customers who are reasonable, customers who are appreciative.
This fall, a new customer called me needing to pave a 3-acre parking lot and said he had $20 million on the line. Knowing what it could cost him if the project didn’t get done, I moved heaven and earth to finish a five-day job in three days. When we wrapped up at 6 p.m. on Friday, he stopped by and demanded—not asked—that we repair a couple of catch basins. If he’d been appreciative, we probably would have done the work for him. Now, I know not to work with him in the future.
Also this paving season, I was called to give an estimate for a driveway project in Long Island Sound for a mansion on 20 acres with ocean on three sides and a 50-car garage beneath the house. I knew from the project timeline that we probably wouldn’t be called to pave until after Thanksgiving. Even though we would have protected ourselves by having that customer sign off on work so late in the season if we’d estimated the project, we didn’t want to risk it. Let’s face it, even with the customer signing off on that late season work, they have more money than we do so they’d likely win in court. Even if we won, we’d have a black eye from it. We’ve been in business 32 years, and I’ve never stepped foot in a courtroom, and I’d like to keep it that way.
I’m not afraid to turn down a job that isn’t right for us. I’m not afraid to pass on a project where I know I can’t deliver the type of quality I want my company to be associated with. I’m not afraid to say no to a customer that doesn’t seem like a good fit when I could have filled that time doing something else.
The Bottom Line
Those are my own best practices for choosing my customers and my projects, but like anything else on the paving train, this may be subject to the specific conditions your company faces. It’s a math problem every contractor’s going to have to solve for themselves.