In a basement bar in Charlotte, NC, the night before NPE 2023 was set to begin, on a crowded and noisy Tuesday night, four team members from Royal Pavement Solutions seemed happily in their element. Ethan, Hector, Peter Pappas, and their leader Kenny Roy. Everyone was in high spirits, and I was eager to find out more behind the company that just won our Best Marketing Video 2023 award.
While we talked about the work they've done, their ambitious plans for the coming year, and their lofty goals of pavement industry domination in Long Island, where the company is based out of, one thing became extremely clear. A lot of companies and employers will talk a good game about how important their workers are, obviously, but what can sometimes just be a lot of "talk", for Roy and Pappas, the President and VP respectively, it is backed up with decisions the company makes from the very top.
"We all have to thrive," said Roy over the music and conversation in the bar, as he pointed to Ethan and Hector. "These are my guys, and if they don't thrive, then the business isn't truly thriving in reality."
With staffing and labor availability being one of the biggest problems for employers all over the country, not just in our industry, I asked him how he has tackled that.
"We have zero turnover. Zero," Roy replied.
How Did They Get Here
The story of Kenny Roy III, Peter Pappas, and Royal Pavement Solutions starts long before the company formed in 2019. The Roy family had a paving company, started by Kenny's grandfather in 1963. However, as happens sometimes in this industry, it was sold in 2016 to a private equity group. Initially, Roy stayed on with them after the transition.
"I wasn't an owner at the time," he said. "I was just a kid working for my family. Even though I stayed on, I knew that wasn't a long term solution for me. I knew I'd venture out and do my own thing." That's what took place in 2019 when Roy split off, and the equity ran company went bankrupt about a year later.
Roy bought back a lot from the original company, and not all of it was heavy machinery. "I adapted a lot of the things from the private equity firm, some of their ideas were really good." Then he went about handpicking the team that would take Royal Pavement to the heights it's currently achieving.
Peter Pappas came on as the VP of sales originally, and is someone that Roy frequently praises as a credit to the company's overall success, along with several other key pieces that had been involved with the original family business before the sale in 2016. Roy sought them out, getting the band back together, and finding those individuals who had strengths where Roy knew it was needed.
This includes Hector, who was in attendance with the group at NPE. "We never actually worked in the same department when he worked with my family before," Roy explained. "But he was always a guy that I saw working his ass off. I thought, this guy has serious skills, the kind that I don't have whatsoever." Roy scooped him up just as he was considering relocating out of the state entirely.
Story after story, Roy explained how he recruited the team. Each person a crucial piece to the Royal Pavement puzzle. "If I'm gonna get people, I want the right people," said Roy. "The time from when we started to now has been light speed, but what's ahead for us is hyper speed."
Kenny has this infectious energy. When you're talking to him, you might think that he is a bit "intense" and he is, for sure, but that intensity is never off-putting. It draws you in. The sense that he projects is not of someone looking to take the credit, or of someone looking for adulation. The success, the work of carrying on the family's legacy, growing it more and more, that's what he's after.
In the few days that I spent in Charlotte for NPE, I had more time with the Royal Pavement crew when we took out the award winning contractors for a post-ceremony celebration. We shared some stories that are better left off the pages of the magazine, living on as we will remember them, but I listened to the way that all four of the Royal Pavement Solutions crew spoke about their work, how they carried themselves with others who were in town for the expo, and, also, in their interactions with locals. Sometimes those kinds of things speaks a million times louder than anything else. They're doing something right. ν
