Company: Visual Outdoor Advertising, LLC
Headquarters: 379 Bee Tree Ln. Blairsville, GA 30512
Markets: Northeast Georgia, Western North Carolina, and Eastern Tennessee
Phone: (706) 745-9322
Email: visual.outdoor@comcast.net
The Poteete’s are a husband and wife ownership team with Terry Poteete serving as General Manager and LuAnn Poteete as the Financial Manager of the company. Insider caught up with Terry for a discussion on the Company.
Terry, how did you get started in the Billboard business?
In 2000 my brother Jim told me that some billboards were being built in North Georgia by two small independent billboard companies. At the time I was looking for investments outside of technology stocks so we started our research. I talked to Phoenix Structures, a small independent billboard company in South Georgia and many others to find out everything I could about billboards. I was working at BellSouth in their Finance group at the time so I spent my lunch hours doing research and building a business case in Excel. We built our first two billboard structures near Blairsville, Georgia in May of 2001 right before the 9/11 terrorist attacks. It was not an ideal beginning but we had no debt so we were able to survive and expand the following year. In April of 2004 we purchased a Georgia based independent billboard company with 23 billboards. I left BellSouth that same month to run Visual Outdoor full time.
What is the business climate like in the markets you serve?
Our markets are holding up well as people and businesses continue to move into the mountains of Northeast Georgia and Western North Carolina. The mountains are also a tourist destination for the Atlanta market and billboards are an ideal way to reach those tourists. Rising interest rates are a concern and are impacting real estate and home building businesses in the markets we serve.
Tell us a little about your current inventory?
We have 99 billboards with 380 faces (300 are non-digital) spread across nine counties in Northeast Georgia, Western North Carolina, and Eastern Tennessee. We recently built our 99th billboard structure and our 10th digital face in Chatsworth, Georgia. The Chatsworth market connects in nicely with our existing footprint in Northeast Georgia. We also bought a digital just outside of Chattanooga, Tennessee last year which stretched our footprint west.
How have you grown your business?
We have grown the number of billboards and faces by developing new sites internally, by acquisition and by buying land leases. Most of our growth in revenue over the last few years is due to adding new digital faces and digital conversions of static faces and tri-visions. In the future we will work to fill in gaps in our territory as well as look for new digital and static opportunities. We are a small company, owned by my wife LuAnn and I and are always looking to grow but the financials have to work. Sometimes new sites, acquisitions, and other growth opportunities work and sometimes they don’t and you just have to walk away. I hired my son, Matt Poteete last year to focus on digital sales. I also hired Tracey Hess with TLH Consulting and two other people in the last two years to help with our Apparatix conversion, accounting, and digital scheduling.
How do you chose your digital sites?
I prefer sites that are at a traffic light but I also like sites that have a long read time like ones in a long straightaway, in a curve and on roads where the speed limit is less than 55 mph.
Do you have a preferred manufacturer you use for your digitals?
We use Formetco because of their quality and service. Formetco is close to our territory which is a positive but quality and service are the main reasons for choosing them.
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