John Ball, Top-Quality Paving
John Ball started his Top-Quality Paving consulting firm in 1998 to bring his plant-to-paving expertise and unique video-training approach to New England contractors. He wasn’t sure it would work but it didn’t take long for him to find out.
Not only did it work out, but he was surprised that his first jobs were in Louisiana, Pennsylvania and North Carolina. “I couldn’t believe it,” he says.
“I love asphalt and it’s really the only job I’ve ever had. A lot of people helped me along the way and if the old timers hadn’t taken a liking to me and showed me how to do something I wouldn’t be able to do this today.”
An instructor at National Pavement Expo since 1998 and at NPE’s West Coast events from 2005-2011, Ball spends more than 40 weeks a year on contractor jobsites, working a week at a time with each contractor. He monitors crews on a jobsite, videotapes (now digitally records) their process, then breaks down the video for everyone to see – identifying strengths as well as weaknesses and improving job quality and production rates -- to provide jobsite consistency throughout the paving process. And he’s known for taking over the jobsite, directing the crews and regularly hopping on a roller, paver or grabbing a shovel to show crews how it’s done. Then he relies on those video recordings in his conference training.
“I don’t come out and bash a crew. I come out and I watch them,” he says. “I just say ‘let’s see what you’re doing out there.’ I just want to watch. There are procedures every crew should follow and what we often see is people take shortcuts – but those shortcuts really make life difficult for them from a production standpoint or from the standpoint of job quality.
“You can’t analyze a crew in one day or even two days,” Ball says. “But after a few days I can learn how they treat their equipment, how they communicate on the job, see their work ethic, view their teamwork, see if they have problems with any people. I can usually tell within a few days what they need, what the problems are and then we can start talking about how to fix them.”
But the key to his success, he says, has been his videos.
“The videos made it all come together,” Ball says. “You can tell people what to do and they might listen and some will get it and take it to the job. But when you show them video of themselves actually on their own job and what they actually do and how they do it, they often can’t believe it. They say ‘that’s not me!’ but it is. That makes a real impact.”
Ball started his career on a paving crew at age 21, then learned how to drive and dump haul trucks for Pike Industries. He soon talked himself onto the crew where he learned shoveling, raking and how to handle a jackhammer.
“Some people think you don’t have to start as a laborer, but you really need to before going to the roller and paver because it’s like doing your homework,” Ball says. “If you don’t do your homework you can’t get where you want to be and you can’t become as good as you want to be.”
He advanced to a steel wheel roller, then to the first roller behind the paver (it paid 25 cents an hour more!) and by 1978 was adept on any roller he was assigned. Then he asked to be put on the screed.
“I had been following them for six years and I thought it looked easy and I figured I could do a better job,” Ball says. “It didn’t take me long to realize ‘Oh my God, there’s something to this screed stuff!’” But he mastered that, too, and was eventually promoted to crew foreman. “Little did I know there was no training for the foreman and there was a lot more work to do than manage a crew and monitor a job.”
He says that at the foreman job he learned how to measure out a job, how to schedule mix, how to order trucks, and how to determine yield.
“I learned the formula for that and now I tell everybody. It’s the basis of a successful job,” he says. And it’s so important that he prints and gives away thousands of cards (printed on his own at $1 apiece) that many pavers now keep on their person or in their trucks.
When he was promoted to Pike superintendent he learned how a job comes together with all the subcontractors and scheduling involved – and that’s when he started teaching. Pike Industries held seminars by equipment manufacturers and Ball says they were informative but so dry many in the class didn’t get much out of them. Then Pike brought in Tom Skinner, Blaw-Know, and Chuck Deahl, Hyster, and they opened his eyes.
“These two guys came in and everyone paid attention,” Ball says. “They told a story and Skinner had pictures and that really captured the attention of the class.”
Ball became operations manager and then area manager at Pike, and in 1998 he was asked to take on the Pike Spring Training event. He first surveyed Pike workers to learn what they wanted to learn, then put together a program to teach what they wanted.
Ball took the manufacturers out of the speaking process but consulted with them on their equipment and included their specs and training documents in a class binder. Then for the first time he videotaped crews and brought those tapes to the training.
“We wanted to show how different crews do things and then we picked the best approach and taught that to everyone,” he says.
The long-term goal was to have all Pike’s employees -- 24 paving crews and 42 HMA plants – doing things the same way. That first training event brought in 220 people and cost $58,000 for three days. “I thought I was going to get myself fired because I spent so much money, but we did it the next year and the next year and Pike saw that the quality of paving work just escalated,” he says.
After 10 years of training for Pike Ball retired to start Top-Quality Paving, a name he wanted because “it represents the best of the best,” he says.
And word got around.
“People knew of me because of articles I’d written in Asphalt Contractor and because Tom Skinner and Chuck Deahl told people about me and invited me to join the National Asphalt Pavement Association,” he says.
Soon he was training not only contractors but state asphalt associations, DOTs and other professional conferences such as National Pavement Expo, where he has presented more than a dozen different topics over 19 years.
“When I started I was the only one doing training from start to finish on a job and still nobody does that today,” Ball says. “It was the video that brought it together and it worked from Day One back in 1988 at Pike Industries.
”I like to bring to everyone’s attention, ‘Where do we mess up and where can we improve?’ And if they can view it on a video they can actually see it. Is the paver struggling? Is the asphalt packing up or the roller skidding across the mat? That’s where they really learn it.”
The Puckett Family
Contractors looking to boost production in the early 1970s usually had only one place to turn: Puckett Brothers, which is why the Puckett brothers Richard and Otis (and by extension their nephews Bob, Bill and Paul, all still active in the industry) are welcomed into the Pavement Hall of Fame.
Richard and Otis developed the Power Box paver, for years a first step up for contractors paving with a drag box. To operate, a drag box had to be coupled to the dump truck because it had no power of its own. As the truck drove slowly forward it would dump the mix into the box and the box would place an asphalt mat. That tied up two pieces of equipment.
And because the truck and paver had to remain connected it was difficult to pave small driveways and it was virtually impossible to maneuver the truck to pave tight areas. So to pave those types of areas material was dumped and spread by hand, which was slow, labor intensive and resulted in uneven mats because the material didn’t pass beneath a screed.
That was the reality of small-scale paving in the 1960s, until Otis and Richard decided to take matters into their own shop.
“The drag box worked fine on long, straight pulls, but that’s about all,” says Bill Puckett, Puckett Manufacturing.
In 1965 Otis and Richard started Puckett Brothers Paving Co., Snellville, GA, and like many innovations in construction, the Power Box came about when they were tinkering to improve their own paving by improving their drag box. In the winter of 1968-1969 they developed their first self-propelled paver (PB1) for their own use.
“They wanted something they could use on parking lots and driveways and pave under obstructions and in tight areas and without tearing up the base,” says Bob Puckett, sales and marketing for Ditch Runner. “They took the drag box design and added power to it so it could move on its own without the truck.”
They tinkered with it again in the winter of 1969-70 and the following summer a local contractor asked them to build him one, which they did (PB2), which had some minor improvements over the PB1.
“They built and sold a few more PB2s over the next couple of years while continuing to pave and in 1972 sold the paving company to employees and started to manufacture and sell Puckett Brothers Power Box Pavers full time,” Bob says. “That was the PB3, the third-generation model, and they went into fulltime production.”
The PB3 was a rubber-tire, 9-12-ft. self-propelled paver that ran on a 16-hp Briggs & Stratton engine, was driven by hydraulics, and had a 4-ton hopper. “There was nothing on the market like it when it was introduced,” Bill says. “That’s the reason it took off like it did.”
He says that at the time the PB3 was brought to market the only other competing equipment was other drag boxes, tow-behind pavers or a Blaw-Knox PF150. “So for about $6500 contractors could pave driveways all day long without having to spend $50,000 or $60,000 on a paver,” Bill says. “The big paver manufacturers weren’t making any units for the commercial or driveway market.”
And contractors recognized the advantages almost immediately.
First, uncoupling the paver from the truck enabled two pieces of equipment to do different jobs at the same time. Once the truck dumped into the paver it could head to the plant for another load. And while that was happening the paver could be paving. “It resulted in greater production because more material could be moved more quickly,” Bob says.
In addition the Power Box produced a better-quality finished product and because less handwork was required and it was less tiresome.
“The Power Box gave contractors the ability to go into parking lots and get into hard-to-work corners where before they had to do the work by hand. When you’re doing hand work and shoveling mix into an area the drag box couldn’t reach, the compaction of material is real inconsistent,” Bob says.
“The Power Box virtually eliminated hand work because you could put the paver into a corner and pave 90 degrees. You could drive it where you wanted, already full of mix, and start paving. When it comes out of the paver screed itself it’s a lot more uniform in density and thickness and the mix is better finished.”
“If you’re doing a lot of driveways every day the Power Box could cut your time down by as much as 40% of what it takes to do the job by cutting out the handwork,” Bill says.
In 1973 Otis and Richard put together a dealer network “and word started to spread about this affordable device that was easy to use and didn’t cost a lot and could really increase a paver’s productivity,” Bob says, adding that in 1974 Puckett Brothers was shipping pavers to almost 20 states. Also in 1974 they began manufacturing the T400, an early track paver, which was essentially the PB3 on a track system.
In 1975 Richard bought Otis out and became the sole owner. He upped the size of the Power Box engine to 20 hp and then 23 hp and made some improvements to the flow system to make it easier to shift material off when the paver was moving. They also changed the name to the T450 to help designate a difference in the T400. As sales of the T450 climbed, sales of the PB3 declined until Puckett Brothers eventually stopped producing its rubber-tired unit.
Puckett Brothers eventually added a larger unit, the T650 and about a year later the T650B (diesel) with a 6-ton hopper, which was still based on the original PB3 design, so by the mid-1980s Puckett Brothers produced two pavers, a small grader and the S240 small steel wheel roller.
Puckett Brothers hit its peak in 1987-88 when it had 60 employees and 40 dealers with 60 outlets that sold 400 pavers in the U.S. and outside the country, but that didn’t halt the Puckett family’s involvement in the industry.
In 1990 Richard sold the company to Gehl Co., West Bend, WI. In 1996 Otis started Basic Mfg. Co. and built 6-wheel motor graders. The Basic line is now part of Shannon Chastain. Richard began manufacturing the T655 paver under the Puckett Bros. name in 1997.
Bob worked for Otis and Richard in their paving business until he graduated from high school, then left but returned in 1971. He stayed through the Gehl sale, then worked at Gehl until 1993 when Gehl moved its manufacturing from Georgia to South Dakota. Bob then joined Neal Mfg. for three years, was recruited by skid-steer manufacturer Mustang Manufacturing and worked there until Gehl acquired Mustang. He spent two years as a subcontractor doing specialty paving projects, rejoined Neal Mfg. in 1999 until Neal was sold to Ingersoll-Rand, and joined his current company, Ditch Runner, in 2014.
In 1993 Bill, who had been with Puckett Brothers following a stint in the Navy in the late 1960s and who had served as vice president of manufacturing until the Gehl purchase, joined brother Paul Puckett to start a parts supply business. They ran Puckett Mfg. Inc., Loganville, GA, for three years before developing their own self-propelled paver. They now manufacture the models 560 and 580 pavers.
[Caption]
Richard Puckett (right) and Otis Puckett (second from right) celebrate delivery of the first Power Box 2 model to local contractor J.D. Moore (center). Two employees are at left.
Jim Scherocman, Consulting Engineer
Spend just a few minutes talking with Jim Scherocman about paving practices and it won’t be long before he says, “It costs nothing to do it correctly the first time and people don’t do it incorrectly on purpose. People do it wrong because they don’t know any better.”
Jim Scherocman has made a career out of helping people pave better.
An independent consulting engineer since 1986, Scherocman has been a fixture at National Pavement Expo (NPE) every year since 2000 and for the entire 11-year run of NPE’s sister shows in Las Vegas and Phoenix. He has written numerous papers and articles, authored the Hot Mix Asphalt Paving Handbook, presented sessions on dozens of topics, and through NPE alone has guided thousands of contractors on paving-related “best practices.”
He could not have found a better way to put to work his two civil engineering and one MBA degree (all from the Ohio State University), and he wouldn’t have wanted to.
Scherocman worked for the Ohio DOT from 1966 to 1968 and began teaching in 1968 when working as a field engineer for the Asphalt Institute until 1974. Since then he has guided public agencies, contractors and engineers on what they can do to construct a quality, long-lasting paving job that is cost-effective for the customer.
“At the Asphalt Institute one of our goals was to work with people to help them build better roads, so I pretty much started teaching right off the bat,” he says. “I enjoy it and it’s an opportunity to give back to the industry that’s been very good to me.”
Scherocman’s path through the paving industry was broad and varied, which gave him insights into paving work from just about every standpoint. Following the stint at the Asphalt Institute, he was chief engineer for asphalt paving contractor Shumaker Bros., Indianapolis, IN, and was chief paving engineer from 1979 to 1983 for the Barber-Greene Company, manufacturer of asphalt paving equipment. That was followed by three-years as director of marketing/asphalt additives for the Carstab Division of Morton Thiokol.
Since 1986 he has been a self-employed consulting engineer, working with contractors individually, serving as an expert witness in paving-related litigation, and presenting training sessions at national and international conferences.
His accumulation of on-the-job knowledge combined with his equipment and materials background and his engineering training enable him to connect with and convey paving and paving-related practices to non-engineers in a language everyone can understand.
And he says the need to teach paving “best practices” is more important now than ever.
“As a rule, contractors don’t train their people and it’s getting worse,” he says. “People used to be hired as a laborer and they would work their way up until they were a paver operator or a foreman. But today we’re so phenomenally short of people and phenomenally short of people who know what they’re doing that we are putting people in jobs they just aren’t prepared to handle. That results in poor-quality work.
“Turnover among workers is so frequent that contractors don’t like to spend the money to train them and then lose them. I can’t tell you how many people say they don’t want to spend money training people only to see them leave to a competitor or out of the industry.”
Scherocman’s answer: “Train them anyhow,” and that’s what he does.
“People hang around longer and you get better work done and greater production when you train them. You’d be surprised how many people will stay with your company because they know what they’re doing,” he says. “When they do it the way they’re supposed to and someone tells them ‘good job’ they’ll stick around. We just don’t reward our people properly.”
Scherocman says another part of the training problem in the paving field is the increased emphasis on “tonnage” as opposed to “job quality.”
“The attitude is ‘how many tons?’ not ‘where is the quality?’ he says. “The need for tons really overshadows most everything else. The sad part is you can get production and quality at the same time if you train your people to do it right.”
So he teaches people to do it right, and it’s why Scherocman maintains his year-round consulting and speaking schedule. “I enjoy speaking to contractors at events like NPE because I can make a bigger impact than I can on an individual contractor basis,” he says.
“It’s important to realize that people don’t do things the wrong way on purpose. They just don’t know a better way to do it, which goes back to the training, which goes back to what NPE is,” he says. “When I work with contractors, either individuals or in groups, I have an opportunity to learn what their problems are and once I know that I can offer solutions to those problems.
“There’s not just one way to do something but you can do it more efficiently, more effectively and more economically,” he says. “When I’m out on a jobsite I’ll often ask people, ‘Why do you do that?’ and the answer is generally, ‘No one told me to do it differently’.”
Jim Scherocman has made a career out of teaching people how to do it differently.
