Heaviside Group / Paving Marketers

Chris Sloane is the founder and president of Heaviside Group, the parent company behind Paving Marketers, a vertical brand focused exclusively on asphalt and paving contractors. Before moving into business, Sloane pursued doctoral work in physics, completing everything short of the dissertation before shifting into SEO, paid search, and web development. He founded the company in 2011 as a generalist home services shop and has since spun out niche brands — Paving Marketers among them — as the firm leaned harder into specialization.

The thesis that shapes the agency is straightforward: most marketing agencies cluster around dentists, lawyers, and real estate agents, leaving trades like paving under-served by generalists who don't understand seasonality, commercial bid cycles, or the difference between a residential driveway lead and a property manager searching for a commercial contractor. Paving Marketers positions itself against that gap, arguing that contractors who still rely on general contractor relationships for commercial work are leaving property-manager demand on the table because they simply aren't visible in search.

Sloane's leadership team reflects the operator-heavy orientation of the firm rather than a marketing-agency pedigree. Joe Pfeiffer, Director of Technical Operations, brings two decades of web development experience, and Valerie Conaway runs operations. The public founder narrative is relatively brief — most of the site's real estate is devoted to the four-phase service model (Foundation, Starter, Growth, Elite) and client results rather than founder biography — but the through-line is a technical operator who built a systems-driven agency and narrowed its focus to paving rather than chasing new verticals.