Do you ever drive past a competing contractor and just laugh because you can see how awful their work is going to turn out? Well, if you were driving past me on M-60 in Spring Arbor, MI back in 2020, you would have been laughing at Bart’s Asphalt.
Smoke was billowing out from underneath the infrared machine and my laptop with the flash drive playing How-To Do an Infrared Repair was perched on the hood of my truck. The two guys that were working with me were wide-eyed. We knew without a shadow of a doubt that we were in over our heads. I vividly remember the fear creeping into my mind watching this process unfold. I was an accountant by trade and had just quit my full-time job in tax compliance to do…. this? For the rest of my life? Maybe everyone in my life was right, maybe this fantasy of starting up my own business to work for myself was just going to fall flat on its face before it even started.
By the time the machine shut off at the ten-minute mark of heating, I was already envisioning how embarrassing it was going to be to have to go back into my old job and ask for it back. The three of us eventually worked up the courage to move the machine off of the repair and began to get to work on raking out the asphalt, adding the oils back in, adding fresh hot mix, and trying our best to compact it without it looking like an unsupervised child was left with a plate compactor.
Failure To Launch?
While that repair turned out pretty horrific, I remember how quickly that fear and doubt vanished from my body and how it turned to excitement because we had another ten or so repairs to complete on that property.
As that first week progressed, that excitement continued to grow and my passion for the industry really took root. I had absolutely no clue what was possible with asphalt, what problems I could help customers solve, absolutely no sense of up or down. Simply put, I looked at this industry as a blue ocean. Anything I wanted it to be, I could do it.
Now with six years of experience under my belt, I still feel that way. I wake up every morning and I see limitless possibilities. Sure, my guys put diesel in a DEF tank and got the roller stuck under a car port this year, but asphalt is truly such a beautiful industry to be a part of.
We get to wake up and have the opportunity to control what we can control, the opportunity to provide great paying jobs within our community, to solve problems for customers that think the rock hard gray stuff is asphalt, but most importantly it provides us a platform to provide leadership and influence to our employees, who then go out and can positively impact their families, who then go on to positively impact our communities.
A couple years into this adventure, I realized that asphalt is actually an insanely difficult industry. The allure and promise of working for myself and taking time off when I wanted to, running one of those sweet Weiler 385’s with a new quad-axle, and having a lethal team of employees that always had my back seemed like it may as well have been a thousand light years away.
Over time, that excitement definitely started fading. The days grew longer. Sometimes you miss so many obligations that it tears away friendships and family. I wondered, how can my competition drive by in their brand-new F-250s laughing at us? How do I get this excitement to come back every day? I desperately wanted to be able to feel like Bart’s Asphalt is going to retire me sooner than later so that I could just hit the golf course and turn my phone off.
A New Lifeline
Fast forward to the IGNITE Construction Summit in 2024 out in Palm Springs. I was at an incredibly dark point in my journey. I had herniated a disc in my back from picking up a 30-pound doodle and was useless physically to help with my crews. I was going through a divorce as our interests and goals in life had drifted so far apart. I was flat out exhausted, albeit still passionate about the industry.
From the moment the golf outing started at IGNITE, I just remember this feeling of being in a brotherhood with everyone else that was there. It was such an incredibly intimate conference where we were really forced to talk with the other people there, even if you really wanted to just go swim in that beautiful pool.
I had the privilege of playing that round of golf with Jacob and Chad Buck from Buck Brothers. During the conference sessions, I met this LinkedIn guru, Todd Eicholz, who I had self admittedly been lurking in his posts for a while. And I developed an awesome relationship with Ryan Austin from BSI Paving. And literally countless others from around the country.
Once I got to talking with these guys whom, to me, seemed wildly successful, I thought to myself:
“Holy crap, they almost lost their company from some stupid financial decisions?”
“Holy crap, they had an employee put diesel in a DEF tank too?”
“They had…they had…they had…”
It was more than therapeutic. I found a community of people with the same stupid struggles that I had every day.
Let’s face it, owning and operating an asphalt company is tough. You may not be able to count on the plant being open, but you can absolutely count on this industry trying to eat you up and spit you out.
While it was nothing more than a conversation to some of these guys, it was everything to me. Unsurprisingly, these guys didn’t have the silver bullet to the industry to be successful. But they showed me it starts with an unfathomable amount of consistency, resilience, and, most importantly, community.
Gaining Perspective
When you know your purpose and you have the community and support to fall back on, it gives you an immense amount of mental freedom to operate in a way that you can rest your head peacefully at night knowing that you are moving the needle for your family, your employees’ lives, your community, and the asphalt industry.
Thank you to anyone and everyone that I have had the privilege of having a conversation with within this industry and I am beyond excited to continue to shape the asphalt industry in a way that we are all proud of.
I guarantee you, you have a story to tell, whether it’s big or small, that will impact someone in this industry. And as someone that has thrived on hearing these stories, I am beyond excited to continue to hear more as the years go on and hopefully, I have the opportunity to hear yours as well.
