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Indiana's Triangle Asphalt Paving has weathered tough economic times before and expects to weather the current economic situation. You can read more about how Triangle Asphalt succeeds in its day-to-day operations in the June/July issue of Pavement Maintenance & Reconstruction, but until that issue reaches your desk here are a few of the things the family-owned company is thinking about day to day.

1. Finding, training, and retaining qualified employees who are willing to work hard. Though they have a loyal and experienced crew, most of whom have been with the contractor for six to 20 years, Triangle Asphalt is constantly on the lookout for good people. Employees are found through references of current employees, family members of current employees, and advertising (though advertising has proved to be the least effective approach).

2. A reduced amount of work. Hit hard by increased fuel costs, a 90% price increase in the cost of liquid asphalt, and a 37% hike in HMA prices in one month of 2008 alone, paving not surprisingly slowed significantly by mid-summer last year. In fact, paving work for new construction in Triangle's market died almost completely. Where 95% of Triangle Asphalt's work in 2007 had been new construction - schools, city/county, and churches - that was not the case at all in 2008. And Steve Day says that by late June last year private overlay work was almost nonexistent.

3. Bottom-line profit as margins - the result primarily of increased fuel and HMA pricing - are thinner. A significant factor was increased fuel costs last year, which at least so far have eased a little in 2009. "The high cost of fuel just sucks the cash out of everything," Day says. And he means everything because that single cost affects every piece of equipment Triangle Asphalt (and every other contractor) operates, so any cost is multiplied across the entire fleet.

An example: Day says that from January 2008 through June 2008 the contractor's seven dump trucks burned $37,000 for fuel each month. "In 2007 that cost was about $17,000 a month so it's more than doubled and it just consumes your cash," he says.