A One Trick Pony

 “A person or thing with only one special feature, talent, or area of expertise” 

By Steven Brahney, www.fixasphalt.com


Imagine this scenario- you are a national facility manager - the “salesman” you deal with at your paving vendor just performed a $350k mill and pave on one of your store parking lots. 

The store manager has emailed you and cc’d his DM, the area VP, the director of real estate and worse… your boss, who’s boss is the director of real estate.

The store manager wants to know why customers are asking why there are puddles all over the newly paved parking lot including the cart corral that will be a sheet of ice in the winter. 

You frantically reach out to your salesman to ask why there are puddles all over the parking lot. He lets you know he has to reach out to his “men” - which means his subcontractor. 

Tick tock - tick tock…clock is tickin’  ⏰

Two more calls letting him know your boss needs an answer before his boss calls him. 

He spoke to his “men” and they told him “the puddles were there before so naturally they would be there after you pave too…” 

You ask him how he is going to fix them- (he doesn’t know).

….(silence)…

There is an awkward silence on the phone before he replies, “Hey how bout them Sox. They are having a great season huh?”  

From a 10 ton patch to a 6,000 ton mill and pave and everything in between including very complex drainage correction projects- I have been blessed to see it all from the “front lines”. 

I have learned this business from the ground up. To this day- there is no job outside my pay grade. On a Friday in the summer at 3PM I have no problem doing anything from shoveling a pile of asphalt to getting dirty running a blower to get the job punched out so everyone can go home to their families. 

In 2002, I closed my first two deals and started serving national accounts with one-on-one attention. Since then we have self-performed work in every state on the east coast from Maine to Florida.     

When you join my client portfolio it’s one-on-one attention from a company owner. No sales people. No excuses. No flawed scope of work. No broker’s sales people wearing a company safety vest pretending to operate the subs equipment so he can take a photo for his social media accounts.