Company: Railroad Outdoor, LLC
Markets: Georgia
Headquarters: 4110 Maple Dr, Atlanta, GA 30305
Phone: 800-977-6889
Railroad Outdoor, LLC develops, operates and manages static and digital billboards throughout Georgia. The company was formed in 2010 by two Atlanta commercial real estate brokers, Mike Fitzgerald and Kelly Shaw. The name Railroad Outdoor comes from the fact that many of the early signs were located in railroad right of ways. Insider talked with Mike Fitzgerald.
What impact has Covid had on your company?
We geared up for what we expected to be an onslaught of cancellations, slow pays and bankruptcies but thankfully that scenario hasn’t happened yet. We saw a drop of 17% in revenue in the 2nd quarter but were able to recover very quickly. Most of the loss was due to cancellations from large national advertisers. It looks like we’ll close out the year up 25% in sales over last year. Our accounting setup is not sophisticated enough to track same sign ad sales so that number doesn’t give any indication of how much of that growth is organic and how much is due to the new signs we built.
How have you decided where to locate your 7 digitals?
We have probably been a little too conservative when selecting locations. We have another 19 faces permitted for digital that we have yet to convert. We like to see amazing traffic counts, limited competition and long dwell times and of course above average reads before we take the chance on a digital module.
Do you use any automated platforms (Adomni, Adquick, Blip, Vistar) to sell space? What’s been your experience?
We use BLIP — I think we were their second or third customer to go live. We’ve been very happy with the results on our digitals. Likewise, we were an early adopter for Adquick and use their service to show our inventory on our website and to create sales proposals and track occupancy. The product has really come a long way and the new mapping widget for our website is the best I’ve seen anywhere.
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