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Fausnight Stripe and Line has come a long way since president Phil Fausnight's brother started the company out of their mother's garage in 1981. At that time, Fausnight was still in high school and worked weekends striping parking lots with his brother. Over the years, Fausnight has helped the company grow from a two-man operation with a Kelly-Creswell striping machine and a used van to a company with nearly 50 employees, a warehouse, and more than 20 trucks, including long-line striper trucks.

The Longwood, FL, company offers striping on roadways, parking lots, and airfields, utilizing traffic paint, thermoplastic, pavement marking tapes, and reflective pavement markers. The company also installs wheel stops and parking bumpers and offers traffic signs, a market Fausnight predicts will grow and one he says fits well with striping.

Fausnight Stripe and Line's job sizes vary, from small parking lots to 15-mile-stretches of highway work. The jobs are spread out among commercial, residential, and municipality work, but about 60% of the company's business is in government road building projects. The road projects are typically highway reconstruction jobs, where the government decides to reconstruct or add lanes to a stretch of highway.

"We'll work as a subcontractor for the road building contractor," Fausnight says. "We'll do all the detour striping, final striping, and any removal of existing striping."

Fausnight says the state and federal road building projects are great to have because they are consistent, steady work often associated with fairly big contracts. But he notes that they do require in-depth management.