SPECIALTY CONTRACTORS

Since the 1990’s, Finley Asphalt & Concrete has been completing more commercial work while also making a name for themselves in the sports court paving business.

“One day, a tennis court contractor called us up and asked if we could pave his tennis court,” Erick said. “We met with them and talked about what they needed and thought we could be pretty good at this.”

The company soon realized that there was not a huge niche for this type of business and the competition was not heavy. Plus they saw better margins in this type of work and decided to specialize in this work in their region.

The company also has grading crews and a drainage crew that can do “light earthwork.”

“We have customers who come to us and tell us that they need their parking lot expanded and we’ll take on those jobs from start to finish,” Erick said. “There are not a lot of contractors that are willing to do that, they just want to do the paving and we found there was a pretty big need for someone to take that parking lot expansion as a prime contractor. So we’ll do that type. of work, as well.”

The company has also been dabbling in Full-Depth Reclamation (FDR) work for a few years in an effort to help give their customers the best value for their pavement and was able to bring this service in-house in 2022.

“We are very excited about self-performing FDR,” Erick said. “FDR is the process of chemically altering a pavements subbase in lieu of removing the subbase, trucking, and disposing of the soils at a landfill, then importing new stone from a rock quarry. This process allows us to utilize the existing soils without hauling any materials off site or bringing new materials on site. The end result is a solid foundation for the new pavement, a cost savings over the traditional removal and replacement, the preservation of natural resources, and many dump trucks kept off the road.”

Finley knows that sustainable solutions like FDR will be in-demand for future projects and is positioning themselves as a “green” partner.

“Ninety-five percent of the asphalt we mill is transported back to the supplier for recycling,” Erick said. “The concrete that we remove is transported back to a recycling yard to be crushed and turned into a usable stone product. Our crews also utilize an asphalt release agent that is a citrus based product in lieu of a solvent such as diesel fuel to lubricate the paver hoppers, asphalt tools, and the dump truck bodies so that the asphalt will not stick to the metal surfaces. This requires a bit more work and effort as it requires holding tanks in our equipment yards, secondary tanks on the equipment, sprayers on the job sites, etc. However, it’s the right thing to do.”

“Once Lewis and I took over, it was our goal to grow the business into a commercial asphalt company focused on quality work, modern equipment, and simply just being easy to work with,” Erick said. “Being simple and easy to work with sounds simple, right? Well, I have run into so many businesses (not just paving) that are simply just difficult to work with. Customers do not want difficulty or to fight with their service provider. We simply treat our employees and customers how we would like to be treated. It’s a simple stupid approach and it has served us well.” ■

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