Company: Franklin Outdoor Advertising

Headquarters: 20092 Edison Circle East • Clearwater, MN 55320

Markets: Minnesota, Wisconsin

Phone: 320.558.3000

Email: mail@franklinoutdoor.com

Franklin Outdoor is a family-owned business started in 1978 by Jim Franklin and now owned by his son Keith Franklin. The third generation, Dan Franklin, is active in the business today. The company operates a plant of over 874 billboards located throughout Minnesota and Western Wisconsin.  The company also has an on premise sign business, a fleet and trailer graphics signs business and portable 4′ by 8′ and 6′ by 10′ signs. Through its sister company, Franklin Graphics, it prints all of its own billboards and for several other billboard companies. Billboard Insider talked with Dan Franklin, Director of Operations.

Dan, how did you get in the out of home business?

I got into the billboard business when I was 13 sanding and blocking out panels for the paint shop to reuse for painting the next sign. A few years later I moved into installing and posting in the summers through high school and college. After graduation I started full time for the business in the operations side of the business.

What’s new over the past year?

We developed 39 faces this year, both in our existing footprint and adding to our coverage area.  We are continuing our LED conversion plan. We set a budget for each year to use and we started with our signs furthest away from our office and are working our way in. We hope to have all the signs switched over in the next 4 years.

Are there synergies between your on-premise sign business and the out of home business?

There are some synergies, it gives our salespeople opportunities to sell other products to existing customers, and helps build a relationship with potential future customers. It also keeps our construction equipment in use and crews busy when we aren’t building new billboards. With having both the on-premise and billboard businesses it also has allowed us to develop our print shop so we can print our own billboards and other signage in house.

What procedures do you follow to keep installers safe in winter?

If it is too cold we just don’t have the guys go out. If they do have to go out in the cold to get something up we will try to lighten the number of signs they have to get done in a day so they have more time to warm up in the truck. We will also go from 3 crews of 2 to 2 crews of 3 so they can work faster when they are outside. When the guys first start working for us we buy them a set of Carhart winter clothes and winter boots, then every year they get a $100 allowance to buy winter stuff or replace as needed. We had to unload a structure last week and basically sent twice the guys we normally do to make it go faster and they could rotate in and out of the trucks if they needed to.

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