Demolition day arrives as the Allstar Asphalt, Inc. crew digs up a driveway.

CEO Steve Gagnon stands in front of the Allstar Asphalt, Inc. fleet of trucks.

When CEO Steve Gagnon walks through his office doors each morning, he has another opportunity to win customers for Allstar Asphalt, Inc. and continue his life’s passion of building parking lots. The paving company, based in Wheeling, Illinois, was purchased by Steve and his father, John Gagnon, in 1987.

Steve jumped into this field when he was 19. He was sealcoating driveways after his freshman year in college and told his father he wanted to drop out and continue construction work full time. His dad needed only a few seconds to realize that his son was more suited for this work than the classroom. “I think he knew who I was,” Steve says. While reading the newspaper one day, John saw a “For Sale” ad for a paving company and the two jumped on the opportunity.

That’s how the father-son team became partners. “He was the brains and money, and I was the brawn,” Steve says. After John died in 2014, Steve remains dedicated to their original commitment of excellence for the client.

Allstar Asphalt offers a variety of paving services that can be customized to each project. It specializes in medium-size paving jobs such as private roads, new parking lots, rebuilds and additions. The scope of work also includes all site work, including sewer, lighting, concrete and landscaping services for parking lots.

Experience and Expertise

Experience matters to Steve and his clients. “It’s easy to make mistakes in the pavement business, but when you’ve been tearing at the ground for over 30 years, it’s also easy to avoid them,” he says. Steve and his team have reached their level of expertise with “time and hundreds of jobs.”

Steve also claims expertise in grading with lasers, and he’s passionate about explaining how it works. “You position a rotating laser beam where you’re trying to establish grades in and around the parking lot,” he describes. “It tells you where to slope the asphalt. You don’t want level. Level is how you get a puddle,” he says. “A puddle means water will eventually degrade the asphalt. With slope, though, water drains into catch basins. Those catch drains and sewer systems are placed in the middle of a parking lot so water drains to that spot.”

Steve says that Chicago deals with a lot of drainage issues. “We’ve had issues where parking lots weren’t engineered properly. We’re constantly fixing drainage problems, puddles and low spots. The ground is somewhat flat here. We don’t have hills to help us, so we have to make our own.”

Trust and Longevity

One of the company’s biggest assets is its team of employees, Steve says. “I can trust my crew because they’ve been with me and have been doing this for 20 to 30 years.” In all of his years working with asphalt, Steve has seen just about every problem and has quick solutions. His employees cement the company’s reputation for providing solutions before problems happen. “We look for the things that are going to go wrong and make sure they don’t. There is nothing we haven’t seen at this point,” he says.

Plus, the team has fun together and works with a spirit of equality. “We tell jokes and laugh together,” he says. “Everyone has a specific job. No one is more valuable than another; everyone has a purpose.” Jobs include grading surfaces, installing sewer systems and concrete drains, laying asphalt and hauling materials.

Besides himself, Steve has six full-time employees and sometimes supplements them with subcontractors. Serving the greater Chicago area, Allstar Asphalt completes about 150 parking lots a year. The company’s record for job size was 1,650 tons of asphalt laid in one day at Twin Groves Middle School. The parking lot job measured 68,000 square feet at 4 inches thick, which equates to approximately one and a quarter football fields.

Happy Customers Equal Success

Measuring customer satisfaction is important to Allstar Asphalt, competing in an industry with a generic product. Since every paving company uses the same product, it’s important to stand out from the competition. Steve wants to meet or surpass a client’s expectations. “We’re committed to getting the job done right the first time,” Steve says, which naturally leads to customer satisfaction. Repeat business indicates they’re meeting that goal; returning customers account for 75% of business.

The company’s clients include park districts, retailers, shopping malls and hotels, but the biggest clients are school districts, with annual contracts nearing almost $2 million. A typical high school parking lot resurfacing contract alone can be worth up to $300,000. Allstar Asphalt’s largest education client is Township High School District 211.

Environmentally Sound Projects

Steve says there are no environmental dangers with asphalt. “Asphalt is the most recycled material in the world. Every bit of it gets chewed up, ground up and reused.”

Even though asphalt is a sustainable material, every job site must be environmentally certified before any work can begin. An environmental company comes to each site to test the soil for poisons or pollution. “Occasionally, the testing company will find something like naturally occurring arsenic, so we make arrangements for it to be removed and taken to a special location,” Steve explains.

The company completed a LEED-certified project for the Chicago Park District in 2013. “We did a permeable walking path at the WMS Boathouse at Clark Park on the Chicago River,” Steve says. This type of asphalt path allows water to seep through it, rather than forcing water to run into the river. “Water hits the permeable path and soaks through to the ground. It has an environmental purpose.” This type of path is used to minimize the negative impact from flooding and storm pollution.

Future Plans

Steve is eager to connect with general contractors, property owners and managers seeking to build parking lots for larger jobs. The Allstar Asphalt estimating department works hard to differentiate from the competition and secure those partnerships. “We estimate in a rapid and efficient manner, supplying the contractors with the numbers they need to bid their job,” he says. Some of the general contractors Allstar Asphalt works with are F.H. Paschen, Clune Construction, Walsh Construction and W.E. O’Neil Construction Company.

Steve wants to grow the business a little more each year by using direct mail campaigns, capitalizing on word-of-mouth referrals and pursuing bigger jobs. From the beginning to the end of each job, no matter the size, Steve says, “I enjoy building parking lots. I’ve been doing this my whole life.”