Company of the Day: Parker Outdoor

Company: Parker Outdoor

Markets: Washington, Idaho & Arizona

Headquarters: PO Box 22, Orondo, WA  98843

Phone: 888-800-2001

Email: ParkerOutdoor@aol.com

Parker Outdoor is a family-owned and operated billboard business which started in 1987.  The company has an out of home plant with more than 164 faces including 9 digital screens in Washington, Idaho and Arizona.  The company has 2 full-time and 2 part-time employees.  Brad Sourbeer is President.

Brad Sourbeer, President, Parker Outdoor

Are you pushing long term contracts?

We have asked long term clients to extend out contracts 2-3 years with the same rate . Most are concerned about inflation and we have felt it would be better to have them at current rates long term vs. maybe a slightly higher rate and lose them. This has worked well with most opting for 2 years. It helps us also to  focus on keeping the digital’s booked since they require another level of sales . We developed our own spreadsheet to track that inventory , so it’s always current allowing us to fill in gaps and book out in advance . Once we added the additional digital inventory it became evident that tracking was key and updating it once a week was not nearly enough with lease’s occurring sometimes daily. I have also started tracking how many lease’s we do each month and volume , to help give us a better understanding of our workload based on inventory . We used to average 10-12 new lease’s per month , now we are generally hitting 20 plus . Also we try for a 3 period minimum for digital buys otherwise it get’s too hectic with a bunch of 4 week buys and clients do not always see the return with that short window.

An ad which worked too well for a client.

We had a real surprise with a Real Estate Broker who we were running separate ad’s for their inventory . He had not sold a land listing for over a year. So, I had our designer make up an ad that was titled ” Cheap Dirt” and bingo it sold within a couple weeks . So the surprise was when his lease was up , he did not renew … I asked why of course and he said the billboard worked great ( nothing wrong) just wanted to try something else. I thought to myself , ya like something that does not work….Success is sometimes overwhelming !

 

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