Grey Vick (right) the founder of Grey Outdoor was interviewed by Neil Bell (left) on the Bell Board Podcast. Grey Outdoor operates 772 faces including 50 digital faces, in North Carolina, South Carolina and Florida. Some excerpts.

Grey Vick on Getting started

I started in 2007. My first company was called Waterway Outdoor…I was always the guy who closed my door while everyone else was out. I’d sit at my computer with my list and grind away at sales. We were leasing like crazy, building signs, but we had expensive money and I couldn’t sell the ads fast enough to keep up with how fast my partner wanted to grow. We made mistakes — overpaid for some leases because we thought rates would keep going up. Then the financial crisis hit and we heard from bigger companies that we’d probably go under. It was a good learning experience — getting punched in the face financially and trying to build a billboard company at the same time.

Surviving the 2009 crisis

We were going out $12,000 and only bringing in $8,000. The first lender that gave me a loan was Courtesy Finance. The key was communication — we went to them and said, “Look, we can pay interest, we just can’t kick out the principal right now.” They said okay. Other people who borrowed money just clammed up and lost their assets. Lenders don’t want the signs — they’d rather work with you through it. We also had an interesting situation where a bank that wouldn’t lend us money ended up calling us to take over about 20 structures from someone who had stopped paying their leases. In exchange for taking that on, they lent us the money to build the digitals we wanted. It ended up being a sweetheart deal that helped us get out of that tough period.

Out of Home means credibility

I tell the story of a heating and air company that was doing $700,000 when they started advertising with us in 2010 and is now doing $17 million. It wasn’t just an incremental gain each year — it compounded. The first year they might have just broken even on what they spent. But by year 10, the return was 10 times the spend. That story resonates because it reframes advertising as an investment, not an expense. The attribution challenge is real — it’s hard to prove a specific customer came from a specific billboard. But the truth is, customers almost always say they found you online, but they knew you because of your signage. I walked into a computer repair shop and said I found them online — but actually I drove past their six vans and their sign every day.  They had credibility before I ever searched. That pre-search credibility is the value of outdoor.

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