Here are next five keys to succeeding in the sign business.
- Determine what you do best as a company and market the heck out of it! – If your company is really good at vehicle wraps, make sure that is the highlight of your marketing efforts. Utilize what you are good at to draw in potential customers for other types of signs.
- Have a diversified sign product portfolio – As much as you can single out a niche and master that particular product line, it is always good to have a diversified product portfolio behind your specialty to be able to offer a complete sign package for your customer. A diversified product portfolio will also help alleviate seasonality with certain products and allow you to continually grow your revenue streams.
- Have a great stable of distributors, vendors and wholesale manufacturers – You’ll find that a portion of your sales will be from projects that you don’t have the ability to produce in-house due to the lack of ability, know-how or equipment. Outsourcing certain projects allow you the ability to control employee costs and overhead as well as minimizes space requirements. For the majority of projects that you do have and are done in-house, having a strong cast of product distributors help you control your cost of goods and more importantly offer you a reliable source that has product on hand to deliver you what you need within 24 hours allowing you to keep your inventory levels quite low.
- Go after company certifications or licenses – Having a specialty license or certification can mean great things for your company. In the case of a license it may be a contractor’s or electrical contractor’s license. Being licensed allows you to complete any necessary installations without needing to utilize a subcontractor. This would allow you to build a new revenue stream within your business. In the case of certification, you could be certified by vinyl manufacturers which can be a great opportunity to showcase your skills as they will help market your services through their company website. Other certifications could be woman-owned or minority-owned business certifications that can bring larger projects from large companies looking for a tax break by using a woman/minority owned business, or from government entities that funnel a percentage of their projects through certified businesses.
- Become a property owner – At some point, each Signworld owner should look into purchasing their own production facility. With our focus on locations in business parks and light industrial centers, affordability of buying a building is within reach. In most cases when buying a building, the monthly mortgage on the building is equal to or less than what you would be paying in rent for the same facility. The extended benefit of buying your own building is the long-term equity play of being either a landlord should you decide to sell your company and retire, or sell it with the business to increase the sales price and return of the company.
There are many more items we could add to the list and I’m sure we’ll have a number of follow up articles on this topic. If you are interested in learning more about Signworld and how you can become a successful sign company owner, please feel free to contact us for more information.
And remember to like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter for more information like this.
