Claude, you assumed the President’s role beginning in 2019.  How has the business grown and changed over the last three and a half years?

To start, we’ve always had a very strong and consistent base of business and sales reps, which allowed our company to stay very steady and consistent through Covid and beyond. Most of the challenges were behind the scenes. We had a brand new executive team and we did a lot of work making sure that we had good policies in place. This has allowed us to be more proactive instead of reactive, but it did take some time. Like a lot of Independent Operators we’ve experienced excellent Year over Year growth even during the Covid year.

Looks like you have digitals in 16 cities now?  What has been your strategy in deploying digitals into your markets?

At this point, we are working hard to put Digitals in our markets that don’t currently have one. And that is requiring more time and conversations with local leaders. In markets that we have multiple digitals we base it off the demand / occupancy. If we feel like we can get a solid return with another unit going up we’ll put one up. Depending on what our typical rates are in a market we may do a smaller digital. The last one we did was in Bryson City, NC with a traffic count of 10,000 DEC. We did a 8 x 16 and our ROI will end up being better than that of a larger unit.

Are you working with a single or several digital manufacturer? Any preference?  

We have worked exclusively with Formetco. We did acquire Mashburn Outdoor in Tennessee and they had Prismaflex Digitals at the time. Since then we’ve slowly replaced all those units over the years.

With inventory in three states, do you have salespeople living in and dedicated to those markets?

All of our inventory is about 100 miles from our office. We have sales reps who live and work in those markets.

Talk a little about managing operations over a three state area?  What are the challenges of or opportunities of being a multi-state company.

Since we are relatively close to 95% of our inventory, we have our Operations team work out of our Sylva office. And they service 100% of that inventory. Our market in Tennessee, we have a very experienced Sub-Contractor who helps with both Vinyl installs and any Digital issues.