At last week’s IBO show Billboard Insider’s Dave Westburg moderated a Founders Journey Panel. The panel included out of home execs from a small company (Charley McIntyre, Bullfrog Outdoor), a medium sized company (Steve Richards, Pacific Outdoor/Mile Hi Outdoor) and two larger companies (Bill Lodzinski, West Virginia Outdoor and John Siegenthaler, Lind Media Outdoor). Here’s what the panelists said when they were asked for tips on how to scale an out of home company.
How do you successfully scale an out of home company?
John Siegenthaler: You need to dominate your market. You could build 3 signs in every market but that’s just economically not viable. Be an asset to your community. You need an adequate number of billboards to create a unified marketing message for your clients…
Steve Richards: I would say number one, offload what your not good at. I offloaded bookkeeping. Building a team and hiring other people that that have strengths in other departments – this critical for scaling. And the other thing is patience. Stay in your lane and be patient.
Bill Lodzinski: Growth for us is easy. If you want to grow, add salespeople. Or if you want to expand you can build new structures. Scaling is more challenging. We have to grow organically and increase our revenue without using more resources or investment. We’ve looked at our internal controls and modified protocols and procedures and eliminated redundancies. It could be as simple as you know we eliminated credit card fees. We always want to make it as easy as possible for our advertisers but we never want to make it convenient and expensive TO the financial health of the company. Sales people went nuts. They thought the AR was going to be affected. There was some pushback but after going through the process we’ve saved $68,000 a year and we don’t pay credit card fees… We had a company that was doing our safety meetings. We brought the safety meetings in house and putting that money back to the bottom line. Scaling being honest about where we can cut.
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