Company: Atlantic Billboards
Markets: Georgia
Address: 4880 Lower Roswell Rd., Suite 165-303, Marietta, Georgia. 30068
Email: Mike@AtlanticBillboards.com
Phone: 678-571-8889
Atlantic Billboards operates 3 digital billboards in Georgia. The company was started in 2021 by Mike Fitzgerald who is also a Managing Partner in Railroad Outdoor. Atlantic is a member of the Outdoor Advertising Association of Georgia. Billboard Insider talked with Fitzgerald.
Tell us a little bit about how you got in the billboard business
Everyone gets the question, “So what do you do?” The follow up is almost always, “How did you get into billboards?” The short answer is: Indirectly.
Fresh out of MIT with a Mechanical Engineering Degree, I had orders to report to Seymour Johnson Air Force Base as a nuclear ordnance officer on F-15s. But a soccer injury just before graduation derailed my plans. A failed commissioning physical led to a medical discharge leaving me adrift. I was really at a loss for what to do so I signed up with a dot com internet company because that was what everyone was doing circa 1999.
After the inevitable (the company went out of business in 2001) I was in Austin without a plan again. I returned to my hometown of Atlanta and got in the family business – real estate – forming Fitzgerald Land & Commercial Realty in a modest strip shopping center on Howell Mill Road. By 2007, I had grown to 10 agents and things were looking up. Then the subprime mortgage crises hit and decimated the land development business in Metro Atlanta. I was practically bankrupt and had to start from scratch.
In between calls from creditors, I remember sitting down at the desk in my home office above my garage and making a written list of my options. Real estate was a wasteland but a memory sparked: a fellow real estate broker had once pitched a billboard deal. I called Kelly Shaw and asked him if there was still a way to make a living in billboards. He replied with a confident “Always!” We formed a new company and called it Railroad Outdoor because we intended to focus on building signs on railroad rights-of-way. Our initial goal was to build 100 billboards. Armed with a generator, sheer determination, and an old pickup truck, we built our first thirty signs ourselves. To keep from ruining every article of clothing we owned, we tried to divide our days between either building signs or chasing deals. We crisscrossed Georgia scouting new locations, meeting landowners and filing permit applications. We got a jump start thanks to multi-location deals with Patriot Rail and Norfolk Southern Railway. Soon we faced a mountain of expiring billboard permits with no money. Then we secured a game-changing loan from Dave Westburg at Billboard Loans, LLC. Up until that time, we had each invested $15,000 of our own cash and borrowed another $15,000 from my brother and funded the rest with cash from operations. This allowed us to graduate to steel monopoles and we soon found that the best steel fabricators and installers were right in our back yard. Selective Structures, OSI and Skyline Outdoor built structures as fast as we could get the permits.
You’ve developed quite a few billboards on railroad property in the course of your career. What have you learned?
Railroad deals can have more stakeholders and red tape, but the upside is a reliable landlord that gets the business. After 10 years, Railroad Outdoor had exceeded our initial goal and Trailhead Media came knocking so we decided to sell. We retained several sites that were still in the permitting phase including a gem on the east side of Metro Atlanta thanks in no small part to our trusted partner, Right Angle Media.
The site where the old Georgia Railroad (now CSX) crosses I-285 at Exit 40 was a six-year odyssey. The site became state legal when the City of Clarkston annexed the railroad along with an adjoining industrial park. Initially denied at local and state levels, the project was saved by the legal prowess of Webb, Klase & Lemond. Engineering challenges abounded: the billboard had to fit between an active rail line and a bustling urban bike trail, with only a narrow strip of grass for equipment and materials. CSX Transportation proved a stellar partner, and Georgia Power relocated three power lines ahead of schedule. Completed in just five days, the result is a back-to-back digital bulletin on I-285, boasting a 200,000 + daily traffic count and long reads in both directions.
Railroad Outdoor is no longer actively developing sites and will likely sell its remaining structures.
What are some of your objectives for the coming year?
I started Atlantic Billboards, LLC in 2021 to develop quality sites throughout Georgia. My face count is still modest but growing and I’m looking to build and/or acquire 10-20 new structures in the coming year. Permits seem a little tougher to get lately so I’m maximizing revenue by installing digitals on many of my new builds. In my market, Formetco has come up with a great solution for independent billboard operators. They provide 24/7 monitoring often with same day dispatch of repair techs when something goes wrong. They include SmartLink remote switches to solve most problems in minutes. They also throw in a Signbird package that provides marketing drone photos and a short video that really helps when promoting new signs to potential advertisers.
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