Technology Update

An 18-year-old saw a display for seal coating that inspired him to launch a multi-location asphalt paving enterprise.

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Asphalt Contractor Relies on Enterprise and Equipment Tech to Expand Nationally

The value of sealcoating asphalt to preserve it and improve its aesthetic appeal are easy to understand, and one day in 1998, this simple value equation hit one young man hard, leading to a lifelong career as a paving entrepreneur and a national business footprint.

“I was 18 years old and getting ready to get done with high school,” William “Nick” Yoss said. “I was at Home Depot and saw the sealcoat display, went across the street to Staples and had business cards made. Now, we have sealcoating work all over the country for Home Depot, Walmart and Menards. We always subbed out pavement up until 2020, but we could not get subs with COVID-19 happening. So, we jumped into paving the same way we did the sealcoating.”

Today, Yoss is president and founder of Synergy Pavement Group, a family of companies that employs 32 and delivers asphalt paving, repair and maintenance from locations in South Beloit on the Wisconsin-Illinois border and Lake Placide, Fla. Synergy Asphalt performs paving and Asphalt Maintenance Systems performs asphalt repair, maintenance and line striping.

The company tends to keep its South Beloit and Lake Plaza operations separate.

“We used to move capacity around between the two offices,” Yoss said. “It did not work very well.

Every time we get a large project, we would send a couple people down. Between the distractions that Florida may offer a northerner in the winter and time spent away from family, the arrangement did not stick. Separate crews and equipment pools deliver the full spectrum of Synergy Asphalt Group’s service offering from each office.

“We strive to be the best in pavement maintenance and asphalt paving,” Yoss said. “Today, we do everything in house — no sub work for concrete milling or pavement overlays.”

A PAVING CONTRACTOR SOFTWARE STACK Scaling a company in a constrained labor market means there is one glaring top priority for Yoss.

“The biggest technology we are waiting for right now are robot employees.” Yoss quipped. That may be feasible for some disciplines with emerging technologies like robotic

paving stripe pre-lining. But Spectrum Pavement Group is well past the whiteboard-and-Excel stage in the construction technology maturity curve.

The company uses multiple different software-as-a-service (SaaS) business applications to streamline its backoffice processes including Clockshark, a timesheet management and capture application that caters to small and middle market businesses. This gives Yoss visibility and control over hourly time clocks for employees and crews.

Workers and supervisors in the field access Clockshark on a mobile device to log time. Supervisors can clock in and out for an entire crew or switch them from one account to the other if they do not have individual accounts. Meanwhile, back-office users or administrators use a desktop browser application personnel with a national paving contractor — Manassas, Va.-based Brothers Paving and Concrete. Shawn Boyce serves as secretary of PavementSoft and chief revenue officer for Brothers.

“We have designed and built out PavementSoft really to meet our own needs,” Boyce said. “That is what we use to run our field, for our crews and sales — everything runs through PavementSoft.”

PavementSoft can be considered ERP because it gives contractors a single, digital workflow for the full value lifecycle from lead to bid to project and crew management to invoicing — from quote to cash. This supports more accurate estimating by exposing actuals. It also delivers control and the ability to modify invoices before they go out. There are integrations with both

Quickbooks Desktop and Quickbooks Online. An integration with Netsuite is coming, according to Boyce. There is also a Docusign integration to support proposal submissions.

Contractors can license portions of or the entire application — PavementSoft does have an internal timeclock, for instance but a ClockShark user like Synergy Pavement Group does not need to use it.

“Our clock manager is pretty good — it does include geofencing,” Boyce said. “There are some other that are a little bit better because they do more. But ours clocks all of the employees in when they get to the job, logs them out when they leave and rolls up into payroll reports. ClockShark and a couple others do a little bit more.”

“You can be on the job taking photos of progress, upload job pictures, generate and fill work orders, do time tracking and cost tracking,” Boyce said. “The foreman can see all the work orders and all the pictures. At the end of the day, they run a job report that shows paving cost, materials used and hours for each member of the crew, along with a profit and loss statement.”

Photos in PavementSoft can be attached to a variety of different documents ranging from invoices to estimates or internal work orders. During work-in-progress, the application automates weather alerts that affect schedule. At project close

PavementSoft has about 400 customers across the United States and Canada, and takes on a limited number of new customers each year, positioning the software subscription like a selective fraternity or sorority.

“We are very selective,” Boyce said. “They need to be willing and able to change their philosophy about how they do things. Sometimes, the customers don’t want to do that. We start each year by taking about 100 names of companies that want to join. We pick the best 30. Then, we watch everyone’s sales improve immensely because of how quickly they can process estimates and capture cost.”

Integrated CRM and estimating can help contractors increase revenue by letting them pursue more projects without a corresponding increase in time or effort. Invoices with photos help document completion and the software even collects a net promoter score (NPS) survey to help find, fulfill and bill the next customer.

Synergy Pavement Group has a progressive technology footprint for a small contractor, but Yoss says the software is no silver bullet.

“You are not going to see a return on it right away, and you have to get everyone using it,” Yoss said.

“But PavementSoft is very simple to use. When you get your call in

to set up these accounts, collect data for accurate payroll and track and manage employees and crews. The software banks time transactions for later upload if there is no internet connection, making it ideal for a contractor working on linear assets between towns and cell towers. A combination of geofencing in Clockshark that records where employees are as they clock in and out on projects and internet protocol (IP)-based two-way radios help Yoss track where his crews and equipment are located at a given time.

Synergy Pavement Group also uses a paving industry-specific enterprise resource planning (ERP) application from PavementSoft, a software company that actually shares ownership and

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