By signcraft
Posted on Friday, May 16th, 2025
Many, if not most, sign people find their way into the industry from an interest in the creative side of sign making. While that helps handle the daily demands for coming up with new ideas, it doesn’t always help with the business of running a profitable business. And it’s the ability to run a sign business profitably that determines whether you’ll be able to be your own boss in years to come.
“Early in the business,” says Leon Yoder, Legendary Designs, Shipshewana, Indiana, “I had one outstanding employee who didn’t require much management from me. As the business grew and I no longer had that employee, I discovered I wasn’t as good a businessman as I thought.”
So Leon started learning about what it takes to run a successful business. He took workshops and worked with small business consultants.
“At first I believed my business was unique,” he says, “and that their concepts wouldn’t work because my business was about me. I did the designs and made the signs. But another consultant really challenged me and got me thinking. I began to realize that with the right training, others could do most of what I needed done.”
He decided there are three main systems that drive the success of a sign business. Then he went to work on developing them, one at a time. The SignCraft Sign Pricing Guide and some free cloud-based apps got him started.
He hired a new designer and other staff, and devoted time to training. Not only did it grow his business, but it freed him up to develop—and enjoy his business. Now he could run his business, rather than it running him. Here’s his explanation of his approach:
I started with pricing. I developed a pricing system based on SignCraft’s Sign Pricing Guide. I spent some long hours on that, but it lets my employees price work accurately without me having to do all the estimating. We price our work on three levels of complexity.
We’ve used this for several years and keep tweaking it. It really works well. It was the first system I got set up, and it really moved me towards working on my business more.
The next system was managing the jobs. You have to be able to look up past jobs when you have to repeat one. I tried a lot of different things, but I’ve settled on using Evernote. It’s a cloud-based app that comes in a free and pro version.
I literally run my business in Evernote. I create a note for each job and put in the job number. Everything else related to that job goes into Evernote tagged with that job number. Contact information, screen shots of drawings—anything drawn or written gets photographed and goes in there. Once the job is complete, I print a preview of the invoice, take a screen shot and that goes to Evernote. I’ve got six years of history that I or any staff member can access instantly, even from my phone.
I use the paid version because it does OCR [Optical Character Recognition], which means if I scan a handwritten note, it converts that into searchable text. They also give you a lot of extra data storage, too.
We also create a written work order for each job. It’s very detailed and it goes through the shop with the job. Everything the staff needs to produce the job is on there.
The third system is training. If you have employees, you need the right people and you have to train them in your approach. We’re working on creating a better training program and a performance-based earnings approach.
We’re breaking our training down to skill sets in levels. So we have a skill like Basic Sign Production or Office Skills, level 1 and level 2. We define what needs covered in each one, then the employee knows what they have to master to get paid at that level.
We’re developing sales scripts that help staff determine not just what the customer thinks they want, but what they need to achieve their goal. We have narrowed it down to the three Ps of the sign: Purpose, Placement, Permanence.
Asking those questions helps us learn what the customer really needs and expects. Sometimes what they think they want isn’t what they really need—or what is even possible. Then we can educate them to what we can do.
Our hope is to make this third system work to continue to grow the business. It’s a work-in-progress.
—Leon
You’ll see more in the SignCraft profile on Leon from the November/December 2014 issue.
