How to Succeed in Signs Part III: Money
Updated: May 11
Intertwined with customers and employees, this is actually priority #1.
HOPE YOU GUYS are enjoying this series! It’s actually causing us to take inventory on how we’re running Media 1/Wrap This lately as well.
Success is a constant responsibility you must maintain but business is also a very slippery slope, easy to slide back down to mediocrity as you deal with the daily struggles of actually running a company. So make sure you mentally assess the trajectory of your business model regularly, and adjust as needed. Little incremental adjustments are way easier to make than waiting a whole year and realizing you and your little toboggan are at the bottom of that slope and now you gotta drag it all the way back up the hill.
So far, we’ve discussed…
Principle #1: Do stellar work. Say what you’re going to do, and do it. Make sure your clients feel like they are your only clients.
Principle #2: When it’s time to grow, make sure your employees buy into your vision, support it and work towards building a successful company.
… Which brings me to Principle #3: Money. Neither above principle can exist (for long) without financial compensation. (Maybe this should be Principle #1!) Because now you have expenses! Equipment, rent, insurance, payroll! How are you gonna pay for all that? With the money from building signs, that’s how.
But how in the hell do you know how much to charge for those signs?
This topic right here, will 100% make or break your business. There is nothing else. All your good intentions, the beautiful signs you build, your hopes and dreams, your employees — rely on one thing only, profitability.
How do you know if you are profitable? Well damn, that would take an encyclopedia, and I have a measly 600 words to get my point across. So I’m going directly to the prices you charge.
Charge too little, you’re done inside a year.
Charge too much, you’re done inside a year. Clients won’t overpay.
Enter my friends at SquareCoil ERP software. I can’t delve into all the benefits of this sign management software, but here are a few:
We joined SquareCoil in 2021 during the Covid pandemic, and it was instrumental in ushering our company through a very precarious time.
Honestly, without it? I don’t know if we would be here, because we were still pricing by sq.-ft. formulas I learned decades before. Randomly guessing at what we “thought” we could sell a project for.
SquareCoil stopped all that. It does everything a sign company needs: databases, estimating, billing, companywide organization, time management, etc. All the stuff we were not doing.
After 35 years in business, it was an eye-opener for us.
The strength of the program originated and developed in the trenches of a real sign company’s day-to-day operations, and was honed over the years to intuitively provide a roadmap to success.
SquareCoil creates estimates based on material costs, plus labor costs, plus your specific shop’s overhead… Then you add in the profit you want. It laid bare the fact that we were losing money on certain projects and making bank on others. It gives a real-life accounting for how much each and every sign costs us… and ultimately makes us. It changed the way we operate, it changed the overall environment and accounting of our shop, and it organized us in a way I didn’t even know we needed to be organized.
Next level help y’all.
This is not a shameless plug. It’s just 40-year-old Media 1 telling all of you that SquareCoil 100% transformed how we run our business, and it’s worth a look.
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