Becky Smith was on the Bell Board Podcast last week. We reached out to her to get her thoughts on what makes a billboard operator successful.
Becky, what actually separates the most successful operators in this industry?
It’s not location, sales ability, or size, though those all matter. The real differentiator is intentionality. I can talk to an operator for ten minutes, hear the exhaustion in how they describe a normal Tuesday, and know almost immediately whether they’re building this business on purpose or just surviving whatever it’s become.
Doesn’t matter if you’ve got ten faces or a thousand. The operators who win aren’t the busiest. They’re the ones who understand their own capacity and protect it.
Talk to me about capacity. What does that actually look like day to day?
Every operator has a ceiling. There’s only so much you can personally carry before something breaks, whether that’s you, or a relationship, or a deal you should have closed. The intentional operators know exactly where that ceiling is, and they build systems before they hit it, not after.
I know one operator who isn’t the largest by any measure. Maybe a dozen digitals, fifty statics. But when I asked him how he handled programmatic reporting, he sent me a full, documented breakdown within five minutes. That process existed outside his own head. He’d already thought about what happens if he’s out of pocket for a week, or if he wants to scale again. That’s rare, and it’s exactly why he’ll keep growing.
What’s the cost of not having that kind of system in place?
I talked to an operator who hired his first employee ever. Every vendor relationship, every workflow, every piece of institutional knowledge lived in his head alone, because there had never been time to get it out. He tried to hand it all to her at once. The employee lasted three weeks. He wasn’t a bad boss. He just never had a spare hour to build the thing he needed before he needed it.
Part of that is the industry itself. We’re running two vocabularies at once, the old language of eight sheets and thirty sheets, and the new language of CPMs and impressions and whatever CMS platform you’re on. Asking someone to absorb all of that with zero documentation is setting them up to fail.
The real question every owner should be asking is how do I get what’s in my head into something someone else could pick up and run with. Because the alternative is retraining from scratch every single time, and that’s hours you’re not spending on real estate, on sales, on the parts of this business only you can do.
Where does technology, including AI, fit into all of this?
It’s not about which software you use. I’ve seen operators thrive on Excel, and a few still on paper. What matters is whether you’re using whatever tools you have to buy yourself more room.
AI gets treated like a buzzword, but used right, it’s a capacity tool. Not for writing your marketing emails. For documenting a call while it’s happening so you can stay present in it. For turning what’s in your head into an actual SOP, a recipe for the business that works whether or not you’re in the room that day.
Every small gain in capacity compounds in this business. That’s the lens I use when I look at any operation. Not what tech they’re running. Whether it’s actually creating room for them to grow.
To receive a free morning newsletter with each day’s Billboard insider articles email info@billboardinsider.com with the word “Subscribe” in the title. Our newsletter is free and we don’t sell our subscriber list.
Paid Advertisement
