Company of the Day – Allison Outdoor Advertising

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Company:  Allison Outdoor Advertising

Markets: North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee.

Headquarters: 35 Outdoor Drive, Sylva, NC  29779

Phone:  828-586-2737

Email: claude.allisonoutdoor@yahoo.com

Allison Outdoor began in 1958 as a custom sign and billboard company.  Allison has grown to become the largest outdoor advertising company in Western North Carolina and North Georgia with 1,270 static faces and 29 digitals.

Claude Dicks

Allison Outdoor went through a planned management transition at the beginning of 2019. Insider caught up with Company President Claude Dicks for an update.

You are a good ways into your management transition.  How are you settling in as CEO and how is Keith Horton doing as your General Sales Manager?
Things are really good.  Everyday is a new day and I feel that we have had a number of situations which have popped up and individually and as a collective group we’ve been able to solve pretty well.  After spending 7 years as The General Sales Manager this challenge has been a nice change of pace.  Keith has been a great addition.  He is a consummate team player.  The experience that he is bringing everyday to the entire company is a wonderful blessing.  The other big shift was moving Johnny Wiggins as our Construction Crew Foreman to our Lease / Ops Manager.  He has brought a renewed energy to the position and is handling all of the road widening projects extremely well.
 
Any advice you would want to pass on to other owners going through a management transition?
I did a lot of praying in trying to find the right fit as the Sales Manager.  At first I was leaning towards someone younger, but I knew that I was going to need some help wading through issues and decided that experience over youth was the right way to go.  Keith is from the country and has a little twang in his voice and I knew that he would fit in well here in our market.  The other important part was we brought him in on October 1st of last year.  That gave us 3 months to get him up and going, trained on Apparatix and getting comfortable.  This was key for us even though it wasn’t “In the Budget.”  By the time we hit January we had a full head of steam going.  
 
Tells about the Allison Digital Network?
We just put our 28th and 29th Digital in the ground last Friday in Blairsville, GA.  We our keeping fingers crossed we can get it powered up to get late September billing.  We currently have 15 Digital’s in NE. Georgia / Western North Carolina and 14 up in the Tri-Cities.  We’ve invested heavily over the last 5 years.  The bulk of our boards are Formetco and we have some Prismflex boards that we picked up in an Acquisition.    
 
How are you incorporating programmatic providers into your revenue strategy? Which providers are you using? 
We’ve been utilizing Blip for 2 years now and they run on all our boards.  We get small incremental income generated that we wouldn’t be getting normally.  We are in the process of getting connected with Adomni and Vistar through the IBO Marketplace.  We’ll keep our fingers crossed and see what kind of revenue comes from them in the near future.
 
What are your top 3 priorities for the next 12 months? 

1)  Buying Easements.  We don’t know how well this will go, but we are going to be allotting some capital towards reducing our lease expense through purchasing of easements.

2)  More Digital’s.  Permitting can always be a challenge, but where we can put a digital that makes sense we will continue to invest.  The return is too great not to.
3)  Modernization.  We are planning on slowly doing change outs from our paper poster faces to single sheet poster faces.  This we feel over the long haul will help us save money on current expenses associated with the older paper poster faces.

 

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