• I want to thank all the members that have upgraded your accounts. I truly appreciate your support of the site monetarily. Supporting the site keeps this site up and running as a lot of work daily goes on behind the scenes. Click to Support Signs101 ...

How many of you could leave your shop behind for at least a month and not have any issues?

Johnny Best

Johnny Best

Active Member
This What’s your sign guy must be Biden. His son makes millions for him and he is gone on vacation all the time. But Biden could not write as many words as this guy does.
 
Boudica

Boudica

I'm here for Educational Purposes
WhatsYourSign? said:
He's sure spending a lot of time worried about something.

It's easy to remember why I left this place - 5 years have passed, but nothing has changed.
Click to expand...
and you are spending a lot of time on a 5 year old thread when you claim to be at a trade show. Must be getting a lot out of it. :thumb:
 
W

WhatsYourSign?

New Member
Boudica said:
and you are spending a lot of time on a 5 year old thread when you claim to be at a trade show. Must be getting a lot out of it. :thumb:
Click to expand...
I'm waiting in line for Guardians of the Galaxy at Epcot at the moment.

I went and visited with our vendors, met a few new ones, and then headed out to enjoy Orlando. A good way to write off a few extra vacation days!
 

Attachments

  • 20240410_100019.jpg
    20240410_100019.jpg
    3.5 MB · Views: 133
  • 20240410_100652.jpg
    20240410_100652.jpg
    2 MB · Views: 121
  • 20240410_100924.jpg
    20240410_100924.jpg
    1.4 MB · Views: 120
  • 20240410_104204.jpg
    20240410_104204.jpg
    1.2 MB · Views: 132
  • 20240410_145558.jpg
    20240410_145558.jpg
    4.1 MB · Views: 127
Gino

Gino

Premium Subscriber
I don't care much about colors, the comings and goings of people, crabs or you leaving this place, but I'd really like to hear more about how this multi-million dollar company came about. If you take off again for 5 years, I might not be here next time, so I'll never your secret.

I mean it's only fair. You said you really made it work with the people from this site and the other forum, why not share what took place, so others can reap in the success ?? Care to show us your factory and how your people are running things without you..... seriously. I'm really interested. Don't tell me you're as toxic too, as you say this place is and won't return the information.
 
W

WhatsYourSign?

New Member
Gino said:
I don't care much about colors, the comings and goings of people, crabs or you leaving this place, but I'd really like to hear more about how this multi-million dollar company came about. If you take off again for 5 years, I might not be here next time, so I'll never your secret.

I mean it's only fair. You said you really made it work with the people from this site and the other forum, why not share what took place, so others can reap in the success ?? Care to show us your factory and how your people are running things without you..... seriously. I'm really interested. Don't tell me you're as toxic too, as you say this place is and won't return the information.
Click to expand...
I'm not sure if you're actually genuinely interested (or just looking for more reason to scoff at my work) and it's hard to narrow 5-6 years of hard work and difficult decisions down to a few paragraphs, but I'll give you the abridged version:

-----

- For the first two years or so, I pissed away a lot of money trying to figure out wtf I was doing (to give you a background on my level of knowledge I had about the industry when I got into it, I learned about ACM panels from somebody on here and at the time, it felt like a big breakthrough as we'd been using aluminum for everything before that...I started my company as a marketing agency and only purchased a failing graphics shop as I believed I could sell websites/marketing to people buying signs and vice versa).

- When COVID started I hadn't paid myself in 4 years and I was on the verge of bankruptcy...I had drained my retirement and life savings + racked up $227k in CC debt (I'm 6 years into signs but I started the company 8 years ago)... We got a small amount of money from the first round of PPP funding and with it I told my wife I was going to do three things:

1) Hire a business coach to help me figure out wtf I was doing and where I was bleeding cash.

Note: I've now worked with 3 different business coaches (each for 12-18 months), and this is some of the best money I spend every month (along with the money I invest in a mastermind I'm a part of).

2) Open a second location in a larger metro area 90 minutes from us...I didn't know how long those early days of COVID when everything shutdown was going to last but I figured if we could market to a larger city, we'd have a chance at making enough to survive.

3) For the first time in 4 years, I was going to start paying myself.

- July 2020 was a horrible month for us as we tried to figure out what we were doing with the larger jobs in the larger city and it nearly broke us.

- From there though, things started to get better (they had to, we were out of cash reserves so I couldn't take another month with a big loss).

We didn't get that second round of PPP funding because we couldn't show a loss of revenue since we expanded into a larger market and our revenue didn't drop as a result (even though our profits had).

- From there, I made all sorts of bad mistakes:

-- I hired bad contract installers to do jobs we weren't capable of doing at the time.

-- I didn't have a sales contract to account for rising prices, so when metal prices went through the roof and permitting took 4+ months, I took a big loss on several jobs just to complete them.

- I purchased crappy bucket trucks (because I wasn't attractive to lenders to buy new ones)... These would cost us more in repairs and lost revenue than payments on a new one would have.

- I finally doubled down one last time and put my home's equity on the line to purchase two brand new bucket trucks and bring in two industry veteran installers so we could start doing much bigger jobs.

- I hired what is now my GM as a 25 year old with no sign experience but was a college athlete and I figured would be good at sales (I was right).

- I then hired another college athlete onto the sales team (this one was a D1 All-American).

- I hired a fractional CFO and a bookkeeping company to get a grip on our finances and to make better decisions.

- I hired a Director of Operations who only stuck around 18 months but made an impact during her time with us and got us moved into a custom-built 10,000 sq ft facility.

- When the Director of Ops left, I promoted the first sales guy into his current role as a GM and he's been absolutely phenomenal (and is worth every penny I pay him).

I've hired a bunch of other people as well - some great hires and some I fired in the first two weeks.

I still don't know how to do anything in our industry (design, production, or install), but I've built a great team full of mostly young energy who are bought into the work we're doing and all see the big picture of what lies ahead for each of us if we put in the work.

---

My current role:

When I'm not on vacation, I still contribute in some ways...

- I have two bi-weekly 90 minute meetings (one with my GM and one with the person who heads up marketing and HR)

- I've leveraged my background in tech and marketing to fully build out ShopVOX and integrated it with a bunch of other tools to automate as much as we possibly can.

- I've built out AI solutions to do a number of things for us (i.e. pull permit code and what's allowable, handle early sales conversations, etc).

- I still manage the finances (at a strategic level, I'm not doing invoicing or collections).

- I don't manage our marketing, but I still help set the direction for our marketing efforts and investments (we spend $10k/month on ad spend).

---

That's things at a high level.

If you guys are genuinely interested and have a desire to learn, I'm happy to help.

I'm not only in a better place financially (I paid off the last of my debt at the end of last year), I've also found the time to take my health more seriously and I'm down 100 lbs, in addition to being a better husband to my amazing wife, father to my young kids (9 and 7), and I'm a better Christian.

If you just want to troll or tell me I'm full of crap... That's not who this post is for anyways.

This post is for the sign shop owner looking for hope that there's something better on the other side of what they're going through today.

I brought this thread back to life to let that person know... There is hope!

Put in the work. Delegate. Trust your team. Invest in them. Invest in yourself. Double down and then double down again... And never give up.

If you do that, there's a version of yourself and your life that only seems like a dream today.

Keep moving forward... I'm rooting for you.
 
Last edited:
Notarealsignguy

Notarealsignguy

Arial - it's almost helvetica
WhatsYourSign? said:
Read the numbers again and rethink your comment. I'm not saying you're dyslexic, but you got some things reversed.

Also - just because we're in a rural area, doesn't mean we only service a rural area. I have a fleet of bucket trucks on the road all over our state.

I don't really care if you guys believe me anyways - I was literally getting ready for ISA this morning as I'm coming off a month long vacation and I thought back to this thread.

My entire reason to bring this back to life is so that if some early stage sign guy or girl is wondering if they can build a self-sustaining sign business... The answer is yet, despite all the naysayers that say it can't be done.
Click to expand...
How about answer instead of deflecting. Who gives a shit if I got it backwards, wtf is 600k sales and 300k revenue. Same thing.

Hock your house, sell your kids and eat the dog to finance this thing that you've ran into the ground, then come back claiming a $7mil revenue projection with like 5 people?? And your ace is a 25yo greenhorn that makes $200k a year. It's not that anyone is crabby, it's you selling bullshit and telling everyone it caviar.
If you made it work, great that's inspiring but cut the nonsense, it's not fooling or impressing anyone.
 
W

WhatsYourSign?

New Member
Notarealsignguy said:
How about answer instead of deflecting. Who gives a shit if I got it backwards, wtf is 600k sales and 300k revenue. Same thing.

Hock your house, sell your kids and eat the dog to finance this thing that you've ran into the ground, then come back claiming a $7mil revenue projection with like 5 people?? And your ace is a 25yo greenhorn that makes $200k a year. It's not that anyone is crabby, it's you selling bullshit and telling everyone it caviar.
If you made it work, great that's inspiring but cut the nonsense, it's not fooling or impressing anyone.
Click to expand...
I have a lot more than 5 people on the team... Was I supposed to give a full brief of every team member? Would you like their resumes as well?

Your reply is the biggest compliment anybody could possibly give me - I've done so well that you don't think it could possibly be true.

I couldn't ask for a greater compliment than that... Thank you.

To future sign entrepreneurs who come across this post - read this guy's comments and others and you'll find all the motivation you need.

Good luck.
 
Notarealsignguy

Notarealsignguy

Arial - it's almost helvetica
WhatsYourSign? said:
I have a lot more than 5 people on the team... Was I supposed to give a full brief of every team member? Would you like their resumes as well?

Your reply is the biggest compliment anybody could possibly give me - I've done so well that you don't think it could possibly be true.

I couldn't ask for a greater compliment than that... Thank you.

To future sign entrepreneurs who come across this post - read this guy's comments and others and you'll find all the motivation you need.

Good luck.
Click to expand...
Sounds like you're sulking. I'm just trying to figure out the $600k sales and $300k revenue thing. I might be dyslexic but that's a lot better than being a full blown retard.
 
Texas_Signmaker

Texas_Signmaker

Very Active Signmaker
People are skeptical because your story doesn't sound realistic at all. I would of quit a long time before you did if I was having that much trouble making it in the sign world. You go from making horrible decisions and failing at business over and over... to explosive growth making $$ hand over fist.... and attributing to some college hunks with no sign company experience? The blind leading the blind. It just doesn't make sense anyway you slice it. You don't share your company name or where you're from, it's not a stretch to think someone anonymous would lie on the internet.
 
Texas_Signmaker

Texas_Signmaker

Very Active Signmaker
Notarealsignguy said:
Sounds like you're sulking. I'm just trying to figure out the $600k sales and $300k revenue thing. I might be dyslexic but that's a lot better than being a full blown retard.
Click to expand...
Even if you change it to $600k revenue/sales.... $300k profit, it's no where near realistic for a sign shop. No ones doing 50% profit margin.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top