Today Billboards for Education Founder Matt Richman talks about how he learned to sell out of home.
How did you sell ad space?
Early on it was me. I was working full time and it would be midnight and the kids would be in bed and I’d be emailing businesses about advertising. That worked but got to the point where I couldn’t do it any more. I’m super thankful that William Eubank, one of the top salesmen for fairway joined me in exchange for commission and 5% of the upside. He helped me to grow from $200,000 in revenue up to over $800,000 in revenue.
Did you turn away ads?
Yeah, especially because we were associated with schools. Our approach was we don’t want to put up ads that maybe a school would be hesitant to be connected with. That cut both ways. Both ends of the political spectrum. We tried not to take things that were highly controversial.
Covid’s impact on sales
I got in the billboard business because billboards were resilient. Even in 2008 they only went down this much. This is a safe bet. I was talking to a man who raised a lot of money for hedge funds and he said Matt, we’re going to get you $10 million. We’re going to grow billboards for education. And then covid hits and that money dried up and bank money dried up and all my advertisers said I can’t pay the government isn’t allowing me to be open. We would have gone under but thankfully we got PPE money and our banks worked with us and our landowners worked with us. We were able to keep all the team members on. I had to sell my car just to make sure we were being paid. We made it through. I had never been through that before.
This is the 5th in a series of interviews with Matt on what it’s like to start, run and sell an out of home company. Matt’s previous interviews were on…
Getting Close to Your Community
Bootstrapping an out of home company
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