(L-R): John and Katherine Pace, and their two sons Derrick and Ellis Pace.
(CEG photo)
John Pace, owner of Tarheel Paving & Asphalt company in Hendersonville, N.C., has seen his company prosper over its 43 years.
While navigating through the peaks and valleys of an often-volatile business, Pace has always maintained an excellent reputation while serving the two Carolinas.
"We have a reputation as the best paving company in our area," he said. "We are also the largest and oldest privately owned paving company in Hendersonville. That reputation comes from the fact we have well trained experienced employees that are meticulous in their paving work."
Pace Started Tarheel Paving at Young Age
The 66-year-old Pace has been around paving projects since he was six years old. His father, Bill Pace, owned Pace Brothers Construction.
"If I wasn't in school or practicing sports, I was working for my dad paving," Pace said.
It paid off when he used the experiences to pay for his college tuition by patching and sealing driveways, often for his college professors.
After graduating from college in 1979, Pace decided it was time to try it on his own. He leased a small tract of vacant land and bought a small 12-ft. by 12-ft. aluminum office building, which he still owns today.
The next task was finding some cheap paving equipment.
"J.B Pace was an old friend of mine who had three pieces of paving equipment for sale for $18,000: A 503 Galion motor grader, a small Vibromax roller and a worn out LeeBoy gravity feed paver," Pace said. "With some crafty negotiation, I borrowed $9,000 from J.B and was able to get into the paving business with no money down. I then traded my Harley Sportsmen for a single-axle dump truck and Tarheel Paving Co. was born."
Due to his dedication, top notch service and quality work for his clients, Pace was able to expand his business in 1988 when he purchased a 3-acre tract of land in downtown Hendersonville to build a new shop and office.
By 2001, Pace decided Tarheel Paving company had grown to its capacity. The decision was made to purchase a new ADM MileMaker asphalt plant.
"We won NCDOT contracts before we even knew we were required to have our own QC lab to test the asphalt," Pace said, laughing. "It was baptism by fire. The first year we put down around 200,000 tons of asphalt."
In 2008, when the economy collapsed, Pace sold the asphalt plant and auctioned off most of his large DOT paving equipment.
Firm's Next Generation of Leaders in Place
In 2016, Pace's oldest son, Derrick, graduated from UNC Wilmington and joined the business working as an estimator and project manager. In 2019, he was followed by his younger brother, Ellis, who graduated from Wofford College.
"I honestly never had any idea my two sons would end up working together at Tarheel," said John Pace. "It just sort of worked itself out very naturally. Derrick's demeanor and personality was a natural fit for managing the office, from estimating, to finance, to human resources. Ellis, on the other hand, was just like me. He preferred to be outside running crews and the occasional piece of equipment. I worked daily with both of my sons and in a very short time, I realized I could trust them completely and, with that in mind, I let loose of the reins a little."
Wanting to surround his sons with talented individuals that possessed a strong moral character, Pace hired Barry Bonnett, who had previously worked at Tarheel back in the early 2000s.
"Barry is our lead estimator as well as project manager, but most important he serves as a mentor to my two sons and the men and women who work at Tarheel Paving. Barry always provides a keen perspective on things, which broadens the way we look at decisions."
Today, John Page still proudly serves as CEO of the company as he eases toward retirement, while his two sons serve as vice presidents.
Their mother, Melanie, also has long played an integral role in supporting the vision and culture of the paving and asphalt company, according to Derrick.
"She has worked alongside my father from day one," he said with pride. "Mom has always helped with personnel, marketing, customer service and public relations. This company is involved in the community, and she has done a fantastic job of keeping those relationships alive over the decades."
Paint It Black
Derrick and Ellis have incorporated innovative ideas at Tarheel Paving that confirmed to their father that they have a solid grasp on how to keep the business growing.
For instance, the brothers wanted to distinguish the company from its competition by using equipment that did not sport the usual construction yellow color.
"We thought, ‘What can we do to stand out from the crowd,'" Ellis Pace said. "Derrick and I have always loved black, and we believe the transition from yellow to black symbolizes the idea of clean and quality work under a new generation."
Coincidentally, Tarheel Paving prefers to use Cat equipment that it gets through the Asheville branch of Carolina Cat, one of a network of locations that exclusively distributes Cat products throughout the western half of North Carolina. One of the unique customizations that the full-service dealership and its manufacturing partners can offer its customers is the choice to repaint its equipment.
Derrick and Ellis Pace figured that having their paving pieces custom-painted gloss black, in keeping with its other equipment, trucks and asphalt plant, could be an effective marketing move. In doing so, the company's on-road equipment is now more eye-catching and likely to draw the attention of potential clients slowly driving past one of its paving projects.
"I'll admit I didn't understand that at first — I'm old school," said John Pace. "But I thought, ‘Well, they're the ones that are going to run things here, so if they want black, that's what it is going to be.' Carolina Cat gets the yellow pavers straight from the factory and into a paint booth, and when they come out and you look at them, you can see that it all works together."
The first machine Tarheel had repainted black was its 2020 Cat AP600F paver. In 2022, it bought two more black machines, a Cat AP655F paver and a new Weiler P285 paver, according to Ellis Pace.
Connection to Carolina Cat Is Rewarding
The link between Tarheel Paving and Carolina Cat in Asheville has long been a beneficial one for each company.
Besides offering Cat construction equipment, the distributor also sells and services Weiler paving equipment, a manufacturer closely affiliated with Cat, and another maker that Tarheel Paving prefers.
John Pace recalled kicking off his connection with both Cat and the dealership when he bought his first Cat paver in 2014.
"Back then, I wanted a track paver, and I liked the Cat 655," he said. "I needed a paver that I knew I could get repaired easily. To my way of thinking, buying a brand-new paver from Carolina Cat was the best way to go because they would stand behind the product."
Pace describes Ben Patrick, his Carolina Cat sales representative in Asheville, as a "straight shooter" who told him, "‘Johnny, don't worry about anything. We have the muscle behind us to take care of your needs if something happens to this paver.'"
In addition, Ellis Pace believes that Dane Bambach, his Carolina Cat TC, "is one of the most knowledgeable paving techs in the industry. Any time we buy a new piece of equipment, or I have questions, he's right there to ensure we are always taken care of."
"Dane is a quality human being and a man of true integrity," John Pace said.
"If I was going to spend $500,000 on the Cat 655, I wanted to make certain I wasn't going to have to worry about problems with it," he said. "I didn't have a lot of money then to chase problems and get things fixed. And it turned out the decision I made was the right one.
"To a business owner like me, it is just so comforting to know that if a problem arises, you have a company that will send its service trucks out on site to take care of any issues," said Pace, "and we also use them a lot to work on equipment at our asphalt plant that we don't want to have to move up to their Asheville shop."
Weiler Paver Perfect for Pathway Jobs
Tarheel Paving is planning to run a new paving crew solely to take care of the needs of its private customers. It will be in addition to its other crews handling larger, commercial efforts.
They have at their fingertips Weiler's latest model, the P285 paver introduced last January to be a lighter version of the manufacturer's popular P385B, a model that has enjoyed more sales in North America than any other paver produced in the last seven years, according to Carolina Cat.
"Sometimes these smaller jobs get pushed to the side because of our bigger projects," Pace said. "But equipping the new crew with the Weiler P285 allows us to be the full-service paving company that we want to be. Up until this point, not having a reliable, versatile and smaller paver like the Weiler kept us from doing a medium-sized parking lot or a little driveway."
Now, the contractor can run the Weiler to increase the amount of golf course work it has been doing over the past two years as well as creating municipal walking trails, according to Derrick Pace.
"[The city] has been receiving more funding to install nice long pathways that connect up to others in town allowing people to enjoy the scenery of the mountains around Hendersonville," he said. "Those jobs, where you need to pave a path that is eight- or nine-feet-wide and a couple of miles long, is becoming more routine in our industry."
What makes the Weiler P285 the perfect machine for this type of paving, John Pace said, is "every other paver ever built has a screed that is, at minimum, eight-feet-wide, but this model is 7½-feet-wide, something that was attractive to us because we wanted to be able to use a smaller machine to pave cart paths at golf courses that have a width of eight feet or 8½ feet.
"That extra six inches allows us better maneuverability and makes a world of difference in paving," he added. "Plus, Weiler equips them with extensions to make them up to 15-feet-wide, so you get the best of both worlds from that little paver."
Pace Took More Calculated Risk
In 2013, after years of dealing with the economic crash, Pace decided once again it was time for Tarheel Paving to produce its own asphalt and put to use all the lessons he learned during the crash.
"Living through the crash taught me one thing: keep your debt low," he said.
With that in mind, Pace explained that he purchased a used Cedar Rapids batch plant that "after six months, and two million welding rods later," opened as the new Tarheel Asphalt plant on the edge of Vulcan Materials' Hendersonville quarry.
Once the plant was running, Tarheel shifted its efforts to paving city streets and large parking lots, leaving the DOT work to the larger companies.
"In the end we are all about quality and efficiency, while being neat and clean and having good employees that want to work at Tarheel Paving," John Pace said. "We also want people to understand that when they call us, they know they are going to get a professional job and if some aspect of the job is not done correctly, Tarheel will go out of its way to fix the problem, no questions asked. That's just what we do."
For more information, visit www.tarheelpaving.com and www.carolinacat.com/construction/. CEG
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