Allied Blacktop company was featured in US Builder’s Review for our 60th anniversary. The article has a nice quote from owner Dan Smith about the heart and soul of Allied, “One of the things that really sets us apart is that we focus on relationships in an industry that’s notorious for ignoring them. We try to really listen to what the customer is saying.” Hey, we didn’t invent listening to our customers, but we definitely work at it! Dan also talked about how Allied has not only stayed in business, but flourished during the economy’s ups and downs. Allied is now the go-to for high profile projects like the University of MN, Mystic Lake Casino and General Mills. One secret is unity. “We work at it until we all agree on the same vision,” Dan said. “We don’t try to achieve warm fuzziness, because that’s fake, but we try to push through being on the same page. Sometimes that means living through the uncomfortableness of very direct communication.” Download a pdf of the article.
In other news we swept up the last bit of debris on our Treasure Island Resort and Casino project. If you’ve never seen how big a parking lot at a casino/resort is, take a look! 
Yes, that definitely took a few pounds of asphalt.
Allied did the lot, walkways, some concrete work, auxiliary lots at the Tipsy Turtle Bar (ok, we just really like saying that name), pretty much everything you see here in our choppers-eye-view. We used a Cape Seal process that does a great job of minimizing oil bleeding and rock tracking. In this process you perform a regular chip seal, then sweep up and haul away the excess. A final coat of emulsion (CS41) is applied after that to set everything in place. Find out more about chip sealing.
