When Empire Paving was founded in April 2020, the timing could hardly have looked more uncertain. The COVID-19 pandemic was reshaping businesses across the country, supply chains were under pressure, and few young construction companies could assume that growth would come easily. Yet for Empire Paving, the moment became the beginning of a fast-moving story built on experience, reputation, and a willingness to take on work others might overlook.
Based in Arizona, Empire Paving has grown from a small striping operation into a paving contractor serving customers across the state. Its work now ranges from small residential repairs to full-scale parking lot redevelopments, with services covering asphalt repair, paving, seal coating, striping, signage, concrete installation, and concrete repair. The company works with property managers, industrial owners, homeowners, municipalities, and major retail clients, earning opportunities through responsiveness and follow-through as much as technical capability.
The company’s founders already knew the asphalt business before they launched Empire. Manuel Horacio Espinoza-Gutierrez and his brother-in-law, Jairo Munoz, had both worked in the industry, and their early client relationships came from the trust they had already built in the field. Alisha Wright, Empire’s Business Development Manager, first encountered them before the company existed. “I was a project coordinator and a project manager, and was using these guys” she said, referring to Empire’s current owners, “as one of my subcontractors. And that’s how they got started. They said, ‘Hey, why sit there and work for another asphalt company when we could do it ourselves, to control our own destiny?’”
The plan was modest, but it carried the energy of people who knew exactly what they were capable of delivering. Each founder contributed $5,000, and they began striping parking lots at night while continuing to work their regular day jobs during the day.
“They pitched in $5,000 each and started out just striping parking lots at night,” Wright said. “They started doing that, working their normal day jobs during the day and then, obviously, their subcontract work at night. It blew up. All the customers wanted to use them on bigger projects.”
Those first striping jobs became the foundation for a broader business. Customers noticed the quality of the work and began asking Empire to take on larger assignments. Seal coating followed, requiring new equipment and greater investment. From there, the company expanded into patchwork, crack sealing, asphalt repair, paving, concrete work, and full parking lot projects.
Five years after its founding, Empire Paving has earned the trust of major clients including Wells Fargo, Lowe’s, Dutch Bros Coffee, Discount Tire, and Fry’s Food Stores. Its growth has been fast, but the company’s leadership has remained focused on the same qualities that drove its earliest success: showing up, doing the work properly, and treating every client as important. That mindset has helped Empire build a customer base across multiple sectors. Property managers and industrial owners remain typical clients, but the company’s reach is expanding as municipalities and larger organizations begin to take interest. At the same time, Empire continues to serve homeowners, a market segment Wright believes is often neglected by contractors focused only on larger commercial opportunities. “What we have found is a lot of homeowners have concrete needs for their driveways, or they have an asphalt driveway that they need taken care of,” she said. “They reach out to us all the time, and one of the things that we always hear is they’re often the ones that are left out and forgotten about because it’s not a big enough project for somebody.”
Empire sees opportunity in that gap. A homeowner’s driveway may not carry the same contract value as a major commercial parking lot, but the company believes smaller projects deserve the same level of care. Residential work also creates a different kind of visibility. When a driveway or concrete repair is completed well, neighbors notice. Conversations follow. Reputation grows street by street. For Wright, that principle is central to how Empire wants to define itself. “A small project will always matter just as much as a big project,” she said.
“A small project will always matter just as much as a big project.”
The same attitude has helped the company build relationships with large clients whose expectations are demanding. One of the most significant examples is Amazon, a customer Empire has worked with almost since Wright joined the company in January 2024. The relationship required more than standard paving capability. Amazon’s vendor requirements include strict safety expectations, background checks, and other detailed stipulations, making quality management and process discipline essential. Wright’s previous experience managing Amazon-related work at other companies helped establish the connection, but Empire’s performance strengthened it. One of the company’s signature projects involved redeveloping a parking lot for the largest Amazon facility in Arizona, a project that took nearly two years to bring to fruition and closed in the fourth quarter of 2025. “I was working on that project for the better part of about two years, and we were actually able to bring that to fruition last year,” Wright said, adding that the project brought in $1 million in revenue. “I think that that’s probably one of my most proud ones, is Amazon.”
That project represented more than a major revenue milestone. It showed that a company that began with night striping jobs could meet the standards of one of the world’s largest companies while continuing to build the internal systems needed for sustainable growth. Wright’s arrival marked an important phase in that process. She came on board in January 2024 to help take the company to the next level, bringing structure to estimating, marketing, and internal operations. “I really pushed them outside of their comfort zone and developed the processes, and implemented the programs, for estimating—and a marketing presence,” she said. After roughly six months of building those systems, Empire doubled its revenue in 2025 compared with the previous year. The company is on track to do the same again in 2026.
Growth at that pace can place pressure on any contractor, particularly one operating in a market where reputation is built through performance rather than promises. Empire’s leadership understands that the next stage of growth will depend on processes that can keep pace with opportunity. Estimating, communication, scheduling, safety, education, and customer service all need to evolve as the company takes on larger and more complex work. “Processes have to evolve, right?” Wright said. “New technologies come out. You have to be on the up and up, and understanding what the new systems are and what the new testing is. We’re always looking at education, consistently. What can we do to make sure that we know what’s changing, and what the requirements are?”
For Empire, education is tied directly to accountability. The company does not want to grow into complacency or fall into the patterns customers often complain about when dealing with contractors who fail to call back, delay estimates, or treat responsiveness as optional. “The big thing is just keeping that fire in our belly,” Wright said. “We want to make sure that we’re staying consistent with our customers. We don’t ever get comfortable because a lot of times, I think that contractors get comfortable. I hear so often from our customers that they reach out to contractors, and it’s oh, ‘I’ll get to you in three weeks or four weeks or a month.’ And you never hear back.”
Empire’s answer is to maintain urgency even when projects become difficult or schedules run long. Wright describes crews working late to make sure customers are taken care of and disruptions are minimized. “We end up paving until 9:00 at night,” she said. “That’s one of the things I love about our team, is it’s not, ‘Okay. I worked an eight-hour day. I’m going to wipe my hands, and I’m going to go home and we’ll come back tomorrow.’ They’re going to go to the end of the Earth to make sure that the customer’s taken care of, and we are minimizing inconveniences as much as possible, even when challenges have happened.”
That sense of responsibility connects the company’s earliest days to its current ambitions. Empire Paving began because its founders wanted to control their own destiny. In practice, that has meant controlling the quality of the work, the way customers are treated, and the standards the company expects of itself. “I would hope that as contractors, all of us embody that doing-the-right-thing mentality,” Wright said. “Not just when people are watching, but even when people are not.” As Empire Paving continues to grow across Arizona, its trajectory remains grounded in the same belief that shaped its first jobs: every customer matters, every project carries reputational weight, and the work is only finished when the client has been properly served. From small residential repairs to major commercial redevelopments, the company is building its future one project, one relationship, and one promise kept at a time.
