Contractors are always looking to maintain their competitive edge whether it is with customer service, quality work or enhanced marketing plans. KTM Paving, located in Hermantown, MN, is always seeking out opportunities to remain competitive in its market. Investing in employees is one of the several areas KTM Paving has been able to enhance the company.
“What separates us from our competitors is that we invest in our employees,” says Steve Emerson, sealcoating superintendent. “We attend the National Pavement Expo so that we are on top of new techniques and the latest equipment available. Every year we put at least 80 hours of training into our employees.”
By investing in training and education courses, KTM has been able to maintain a higher retention rate. “We keep our employees and have a low turnover rate,” Emerson says. “Roughly 50 percent of our work force has been with the company between 6 to 10 years. In the long run, this keeps us competitive because we have quality workers.”
Steady growth over the years
KTM Paving was started in 2002 by brothers Tim and Ken Maki. As a suburb of Duluth, MN, KTM Paving has a service area of a 150 mile radius completing work in Northern Minnesota and Northern Wisconsin.
With roughly 10 employees, the company has placed a focus on diversification since the beginning offering services such as paving, excavating, septic systems and gravel. Now, the company is owned by Tim Maki and has roughly 40 employees.
Currently, the breakdown of services are 60 percent paving, 25 percent underground utilities, 10 percent truck rentals for other area companies and sealcoating is 5 percent of KTM Paving’s work. The pavement maintenance division operates two four-man crews—one striping and one sealcoating. While the company continues to offer the original services it has expanded into pavement maintenance division including sealcoating and striping services.
The pavement maintenance division has enhanced KTM Paving’s relationships with existing customers. “The pavement maintenance crews are able to service our old customers by keeping up with their maintenance schedule,” Emerson says. “We can go from gravel to paving to maintenance work to have repeat customers.
“We look at the full scope of the project so that customers have years of a quality parking lot. We always follow-up on projects so that the customers can keep the quality and not have to replace it.”
Serving both residential and commercial customers, KTM Paving has completed work for several resorts and other property management companies. KTM Paving has even completed some work for the Department of Natural Resources repairing various bridges for all-terrain vehicles (ATV) in the wilderness.
Along with those projects, KTM Paving completed some emergency repair work to roads after the flooding that occurred in spring 2012. “The disaster that hit us in the spring caught our utilities off guard,” Emerson says. “With our equipment and man power we were able to capitalize and fix up the areas quickly.”
A lot of the infrastructure wasn’t capable of handling the amount of water that came through the area washing out the hydro dam. “We would prep the site in a day and within a week or two we would be back to pave it in a day,” Emerson says. “We would close the road down, work on one side of the road and then the other side. We had to install all of the signage.”
As for the future, KTM Paving is hoping to maintain the steady growth expanding into services that utilize larger equipment such as excavators. “We are in a good place to grow,” Emerson says. “Our plan is to continue to grow and diversify our services.”
