A dishonest paving company may count on your not being familiar with their industry to take advantage of you. Here are a few things you can do to protect yourself when choosing a paving contractor.

Material Tags

Ask for “material tags” to avoid being overcharged for paving material. You can figure out the square footage and tonnage a job requires to meet the specifications of the contract you signed. Paving companies all get tonnage tags when we pick up our paving materials, marked with the date the asphalt was picked up and the address of the job site. It’s a paper trail.

Certificates of Insurance

Every contractor should carry insurance: auto insurance, liability insurance, and workers comp. We have never done a job without an employee on site. Ask for certificates of insurance for all three: auto, liability, and workers comp. Make sure they have “workers comp” and get a certificate with your name and address on the certificate. It’s very for us to email our insurance carriers and get this sent to you. You can also ask to be named as “additional insured” on the paving company’s insurance policy.

Check Their License

Make sure the California State License Board (CSLB) license number is listed on your paving contract.

Check the license online for any other personal names or licenses on the license number. You can see this at the bottom of the page. If there are additional licenses listed, click on them to see if perhaps they have multiple company names. If you see the same personal names listed on licenses you thought were separate, you may have received more than one bid from the same individual under separate names if you tried to solicit multiple bids before making a choice.

Unfortunately, a paving contract is only as good as the character of the company who wrote it. A contract may promise one thing and deliver another. By the time the work is done, you’ve paid the bill and figured out the contract doesn’t match the work that was done, a dishonest paving contractor will be gone. They may not answer your phone calls, claim it wasn’t them who did the job, or even change their license number to avoid responsibility.

When you’re choosing a contractor, you’ll want to get honest references for a paving company. Hearing from people they’ve done paving for in the past and learning how satisfied they are with the work is a good way to judge the quality you might expect from that company. Traditionally, people ask paving companies for references from former clients before hiring them.

Unfortunately, dishonest pavers are giving out contact information for family and friends who pose as clients and give fake testimonials to help them get jobs. When that happens, there is no way to confirm that the person you are talking to is a real customer of that business.

At Pimentel Paving, we give potential clients the addresses of paving projects that we’ve done near them, so they can go to the location to see the quality of our work in person.