When our company started in 1982 our name was Asphalt Maintenance of Kentucky, in 1986 we added paving to our line of services and we became Asphalt Paving & Maintenance. The good thing about that name was that people knew exactly what we did; the drawback was that it was hard to put that on a sign and be recognizable. One of the first changes I made when I joined the company 20 years ago was to update our image and shorten our name to APM. The benefit was that it was easy to see who we were; but the drawback was that it was hard to communicate what we did.
Now 20 years later, I have made the decision to cast a new vision for our company – one that projects a fresh image of who we are and what we do. A lot of thought went into our new image. The colors, the font, the tagline all mean something to me.
APM is our link to the past; it’s who we were and what we were built on. Integrity, dependability and quality are all characteristics of what those initials represent and so we wanted to keep that as part of our new image. Paving is what we do (all types), and it quickly and succinctly communicates that idea.
The colors are just as meaningful to me. As we looked at various color combinations, I was consistently drawn to the dark blue/gold combination, and at the time, I wasn’t sure why. But one day, my graphic designer included a picture of a pair of blue jeans and it hit me like a ton of bricks – these colors convey a sense of steadfastness, tradition and a certain work ethic that our company was built upon from the very beginning.
Finally, our tagline “Built to Last”. There are two ways in which this is true of APM Paving. First and foremost – This company has been around for a long time and has stood the test of time through good times and bad. Secondly, it conveys a simple but powerful message of the type of job we want to leave behind.
As I enter my next 20 years with APM Paving, my goal is to make every facet of the meaning behind our logo a guiding principle by which we conduct our business. Looking forward to the next 20 . . . .