By Perry Yaremchuk
Posted on Monday, January 6th, 2025
Working at a dozen shops over your career, as I have, has its benefits. You get to see good and bad examples of how to run a sign business, and you can take away what works for you. Today I run a municipal sign shop in Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada, and what I learned along the way has helped me be more efficient and productive. I can’t take credit for most of these ideas, but I can promise you that they will lead to a more successful sign company.
One: Get organized and more efficient
This starts with the VERY simple things that most people overlook. Most sign people use a Stabilo pencil dozens of times each day for layout. Marks made with them can easily be wiped off with water or waterless hand cleaner.
If you are marking up a dark panel, you need a white Stabilo pencil. If you’re working on a white panel, you need a blue or black. So, when my pencils get worn down a bit, they become double-ended. You never have to walk around the table or reach for the “other” color.
The tools that you use every two minutes should be in a pouchon your hip. If you are walking around the table to get a knife, you are losing $1 each time you do it. In a year, it’s easy to “lose” an entire week’s work. (Wouldn’t you rather be fishin’?)
Okay, so you have a tape measure on your hip, but if you’re at your worktable, does the table have a ruler along each edge? Nice! You just saved another week’s worth of measuring time! Gridded cutting mats can be a big timesaver as well.
If you really want to ‘”drink the Kool-Aid” of maximum efficiency, I’d recommend going to the FastCap site and checking out the content and the owner’s journey in becoming a Kaizen/Lean guru.
I’ve bought a number of their products. Even though most aren’t designed specifically for sign shop tasks, a lot of good process and efficiency techniques can be learned on this site.
Two: Upsell—or up your profit, not the cost!
It’s one thing to sell a guy a $100 sign, it’s another to sell $150 sign that uses exactly the same amount of time and materials. It’s easy to make it fancier and add colors and shapes and clipart, but does that put more profit in your pocket? And does it make the design more effective?
Rarely.
After entering the basic message, instead of hitting “cut/print” like they would at Signshop X, take just five minutes more to put some thought into the layout (apply the principles from Mastering Layout by Mike Stevens!) and then show the customer an upgraded option.
As I recall, almost 100% of my customers chose the more effective design. Now I was getting better exposure for our shop, as well as separating us from the generic guys.
Three: Sell related products
This is especially true if you can be the source of the clients’ logos and do the revisions needed when using their design on other formats.
This can start with doing a few “freebies.” Whenever you have a job on the printer/cutter, there’s almost always some margin or waste. Turn that into a few tiny decals or magnets, using the client’s logo and include them with the job.
It’s a great teaser with almost zero cost. After they’ve given away the magnets or put the little stickers on their outgoing envelopes, they will see what great advertising it is and pretty much always come back with an order for a few hundred!
Four: Tune up your image
Sign shops are full of unique individuals with different styles, which is great. Very often their focus, though, is on the work they produce rather than the image of your business. From the customer’s viewpoint, however, the image of your business should reinforce their confidence.
Does your shop signage show your design skills and reflect the type of work you do? Does your vehicle have professional, appealing graphics? Washed?
Is your shop clean and well organized? Besides making production faster and easier, that goes a long way towards earning your customer’s confidence and respect.
Your staff is installing signage at your customer’s fancy new office; are they quiet, neat, clean and wearing a nice shirt ( or Hi-Viz vest) with your company logo on it? Leave the site cleaner than you found it, of course.
Which invoice is more likely to get paid: one on a professional letterhead that matches the work order they’ve already seen and approved, or a handwritten one on a generic form?
If your online forms and web presence all have the same branding, you are much more likely to be remembered over those who use generic accounting templates to send quotes and invoices.
Five: Spare the common pricing errors
Price like your life depended on it! If you know your hourly rate, you are ahead of about 80% of businesses out there. If you don’t yet know your hourly rate, use SignCraft’s “How to determine your hourly rate” article to do that.
From house painters to landscapers to auto detailers, most companies really don’t know their true overhead costs and profit margin. If you use the right numbers and a pricing guide that help capture all of your production and overhead costs, you’re on your way to profitability.
If the shop down the street is selling 4×8 corrugated plastic permit signs for $50, let them! You know your costs; they don’t!
Then call the developer and the new tenants and get the work that pays! 🙂
