Since you and I last spoke, Pioneer has grown to become 50% of the market share in the Springfield DMA for digital billboard advertising. Lamar has around 25% and the other quarter is made up of a couple of other operators. We still have a strong presence of traditional billboards in the market and we have been growing our traditional bulletin footprint around Missouri as well. A major update to our website was also needed, so that we could showcase our inventory much more clearly.

When we acquired Midwest Outdoor Media I learned a lot about transitioning customers into my company, but that was much easier being 100% static bulletins. We bought 7 digital faces from Watkins Outdoor Advertising in January and that was a different challenge. We were acquiring some key locations that we needed in order to fill out our footprint in the Springfield market, so it was an important move for us. They were all Daktronics units, which we had not operated before.

Most of the customers were new to us, some we had already worked with, and that transition went really well. Jeff LaRocca is my VP of Sales and he took the lead on most of that and I attribute that to his vast experience in media sales.

Of course COVID was right around the corner, which would have been a big enough challenge without the Watkins acquisition.

To your last point though, we are always looking for good acquisitions that make sense for our growth. In the last few months we have picked up a couple billboards from individuals that just own one or two. I see a lot of our growth in the next year to be new construction and smaller acquisitions that are missed by other operators.

We now operate Watchfire, Formetco and Daktronics units, all between 1 and 9 years of age. One of the biggest uncertainties for me has been how to handle aging digital units. Right now, our 5 oldest are Watchfire units that are all exactly the same size and model. They still run very well and are pushing 9 years. My plan is to replace one of those 5, when the time comes, and use the old sign’s parts to squeeze an extra few years out of my other units.

I have really enjoyed working with Mike Mallon at Watchfire and Bobby Tatman at Formetco. They both do everything they can to make sure we are getting the best they have to offer, and that goes beyond just the sale and into service and support.

We started with Apparatix a couple years ago and it allowed us to be prepared for acquisitions in a way that we wouldn’t have been. In January, if we had to manually handle the new customer database, billboard inventory, scheduling, billing, etc. without the use of Apparatix, I don’t think we could have done it with COVID hitting us in the face. John James has been very helpful in developing some new sales tools to really utilize a network of digital billboards, and we are just getting started in that piece of the business. Internally, we can sell digital more and more flexibly all the time and it is really exciting to be able to build a digital billboard campaign that rivals anything else in OOH.

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