Grey Vick operates Grey Outdoor, a North Carolina OOH company with a 750 face billboard plant including 44 digital faces. Billboard insider talked with Grey about several issues impacting the out of home industry.
How do you handle situations where you’re accessing a landlord’s property?
When we’re going onto someone’s property—especially for trimming trees or doing maintenance—we always try to notify the landowner first. I had a situation recently where a contractor showed up to cut trees, but did not let us know when they were going to notify the landowner. Our landowner called us and wasn’t happy he didn’t get notified before the crew showed up to start cutting. This also reminded me why I like to own the land under all of our signs especially our digital faces.
How many digital flips do you use with your 44 digital faces.
We typically go with 8 ad slots per digital board—that’s kind of our standard. But I prefer doing fewer—maybe 4-6—to provide an effective campaign for the advertiser and also maintain a higher rate and occupancy. This is always going to vary depending on the location and view time. On some faces If you try to sell 16 spots or more, you end up with a campaign that is not effective for the advertiser so the renewals are harder to get.
What do you think of the Lamar-Verde stock deal?
That’s an interesting transaction and I’m interested to learn more about the details. Most middle sized operators like Verde don’t need the cash from an big exit, unless they have tried to build too quickly and taken on a lot of debt, so It’s a smart strategy—you get out of the day to day management of the business without immediate tax liability because you’re receiving shares or equity in the partnership. For operators who are still building, that kind of deal would be attractive depending on how you look at it. Over the next few years when Lamar, potentially buys other companies and possibly a few billion dollar companies. (because they have done a great job managing their debt) You would get to ride the upside of that wave without the same effort it takes to build and grind it out the hard way. You get equity in a larger company and a nice quarterly dividend, with the ability to diversify your holdings to cash fairly easily if need be. For an operator like Verde this deal makes total sense and I definitely see this as a great sales pitch for Lamar to acquire other companies using this strategy.
What else is new?
We are continuing to grow and add new locations where it makes sense and upgrading existing signs to digital where we have strong demand.
A little over two years ago I hired a lady Amber Alexander for an account executive role with a lot of sales and management experience but nothing in media or OOH. I trained her by going through all the processes I was doing to operate the business and we documented and established our company manual that details all of our companies policies and procedures. We’ve spent the last couple of years really nailing everything down so we can operate more smoothly and consistently. Amber is now the Sales & HR Manager for the company. Earlier this year we implemented Hubspot for our CRM and it is connected to our contracts and Quickbooks Online to organize and streamline all of our sales operations. This has really made the business more efficient, organized and easier to train new employees that require less management and ultimately allow the business to continue to grow.
We are currently looking to grow our sales team. What we are looking for is a strong seasoned account rep—someone who loves meeting people, building relationships, and is hungry to grow. Ideally, they’d have out-of-home sales experience, but personality and drive are more important. We have a large account list that we are looking for the right person to take over and grow the relationships.
To learn more about the Grey Outdoor sales position see the Grey Outdoor account executive classified ad.
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