Semper Fi Paving has grown significantly in a short time. Pictured are, from left, general manager Bill Crow, co-owners Deborah Jewell and Chris Jewell and employee Fred Larrimore.

BELLAIRE — Chris Jewell was looking for his next chapter in life after spending 20 years in special operations in the United States Marine Corps. He landed on the paving industry, eventually starting his own company, Semper Fi Paving.

What Jewell learned as he went was that many of the tenets he learned in the Marines were able to cross over and be very helpful in his new vocation. Now, in a relatively short period, Semper Fi has become one of the more popular paving companies in the Ohio Valley, working with organizations from school districts to hospitals to municipalities. Jewell said much of that success has come from staying true to his lessons learned in the military.

After his retirement from the Marines, he returned to the Ohio Valley and met his wife Deborah. One day he was talking with Deborah’s stepfather, who also was a former Marine. Her stepfather told Jewell that, if he had to do it all over again, he’d get into the asphalt paving business.

Jewell liked the idea. He got on with a small company making $12 an hour and learned the business. He quickly realized he liked more than the idea. He really liked the work.

“I’ve been out here working with small crews, like five- and six-man teams,” Jewell said. “When I was in the Marine Corps, we worked in five- and six-man teams.

“I was a team leader and that was probably my strong point,” he added. “So I knew that we could grow this. If we had a good six or seven guys, we could do everything, from top to bottom.”

So he started Semper Fi with his brother and began with smaller jobs like cut-and-replace repair work. But then he discovered a new method to the job – infrared repair – and added that to the company’s catalog.

With infrared repair, workers use an infrared asphalt recycler to heat the offending area to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Asphalt is then spread over the hole like a filling on a tooth and about 20 minutes later, the spot looks like new with a seamless repair. The work takes about a third of the time, Jewell said, uses less product and creates much less of a roadblock during the process.

All of that led the company to begin growing, so Jewell needed a plan. Luckily for him, he said, the Marines had prepared him for just that task.

He was told that, if he wanted to be an instructor in the Marine Corps, he had to take a curriculum developers course. At first, he didn’t think it was for him.

“I jump out of airplanes,” he said. “I’m a diver. There’s no way I’m going to this school.”

He ultimately did take the course which, he said, teaches Marines to take raw material and develop a curriculum. He used those guidelines to plan out the future of his paving business.

“I went upstairs into the bedroom and I just developed a course on asphalt,” he said. “I taught myself and just started building a curriculum.

That’s where he realized the multitude of similarities between his old vocation and his new one.

“Time, space and logistics is time, space and logistics, no matter where you put them,” he said. “That’s what I did in the military for 20 years. I knew, hey, we had to be here, at this time and work this schedule. It’s all the same stuff, just different material.”

Semper Fi has now completed 10 paving seasons and the company continues to grow. Among its recent projects was paving the side roads around Main and Market streets in downtown Wheeling, which were being redone as part of the city’s streetscape project. The company has also worked with WVU Medicine Reynolds Memorial Hospital repaving its parking lots, and did the same for the Wheeling Island Hotel-Casino-Racetrack, among other projects.

The key component to Semper Fi’s success, Jewell said, came from his military career: integrity.

“We’re going to lay it correctly,” he said. “We’re not going to cut any corners and we’re willing to take a loss in order to do that. The main thing is to focus on the details and get the job done correctly and safely.”

Jewell and his staff have a saying: SD3 or safety and defense times 3.

“We’re always safety, safety, safety and we’re always on the defense, defense, defense,” said the former Wheeling Park High School football player and wrestler.

And as much as the Ohio Valley has given Semper Fi since its inception, the company tries to give back to the community. Following the June floods in Ohio County, which killed seven people and caused millions in damage, the company took the day off from its jobs and everyone went to Triadelphia and Valley Grove to help with the cleanup. Semper Fi paved Martins Ferry’s rec center for free and donated to Bellaire City Schools and Madison Elementary in Wheeling.

The company helps in ways both big and small, Deborah Jewell said.

“We got that huge snowstorm (in January) and (general manager) Bill (Crow) is driving down the street and sees young kids shoveling snow,” she said. “He’s so impressed by that, he buys them all hot chocolate and takes it back to them. It happened that their dad was the pastor at the church down here and he was messaging Bill, ‘Thank you so much.’ Each of our guys give to the community.”

Chris Jewell said the future of Semper Fi – which includes the new building in Bellaire the company just moved into – is simple. He just wants the company to continue the good work on which it has made its name. Crow said that won’t be a problem, as the crew just looks toward Jewell for inspiration.

“He doesn’t quit,” Crow said. “He’s going to push you to be the best version of you that you can be, even if you don’t know what that is yet.”