Nick Yoss drove past the property now run by the South Beloit Boys & Girls Club in Illinois for more than a decade.
“This place is right between home and my job,” he said. “I drove by every day for 15 years.”
He had noticed the property’s worn out look and the cracked pavement. Then, a few years ago, the property underwent a major renovation. Not only were there new gym floors and a new counter installed inside, on the exterior the parking lot was resurfaced, the landscaping cleaned up, and a new sign was installed.
“I saw the work that had been done and I didn’t want it to eventually end up like it had, so I offered to seal it and stripe it,” Yoss said. “They were tickled pink.”
Yoss owns Synergy Pavement Group, which serves Illinois, Iowa and Wisconsin. It took a crew of three people to complete the sealcoating. They came back two hours later to do the striping. They used a seal rig, an edger, striper and other equipment on the job. The work earned Synergy Pavement Group the 2024 Good Neighbor Award from Pavement Maintenance & Reconstruction Magazine.
"To support the South Beloit community, Nick donated the sealing and striping at the South Beloit Boys and Girls Club,” the award nomination stated. “The previous parking lot had been poorly maintained, as the cost to maintain it weighs heavy on the budget of a nonprofit such as the Boys and Girls Club; when the lot was repaved in 2022, Nick decided to make sure that keeping the integrity of the new lot would not be an issue for the club."
Synergy is a full-service, nationwide pavement maintenance and repair company providing paving, patching, crack filling and of course, sealing and striping. Yoss started the business in 1998 in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He had visited the local Menards, where he saw an advertisement about sealcoating.
“I thought to myself, ‘I can do that,’” he said. “So I drove across the street to Staples and printed out business cards.”
