Roy Park Junior has published a new edition of Sons in the Shadow: Surviving The Family business as An SOB, a book about his business career including stints as CEO of Park Communications Inc. and Park Outdoor.   In 1976 Roy Park Jr’s father Roy Park asked him to fix the company’s troubled out of home division.  Here’s an excerpt from the book in which Roy Park Jr talks about the  importance of maintaining an out of home plant:

“One of the first things I did after I was hired was to ride the 3,000 boards that my father owned, spread out in a 25,000 square mile area. It was a depressing job that took about two months… I made a point of taking a photo of every board we owned… after I had pictures of all the boards, most of which were built in the 1940s, I issued instructions to remove the old-fashioned lattice work that had the telephone pole uprights. My second instruction was to paint all the uprights black. If they were black, I felt they would fade into the scenery…My photographic portfolio covering every board we owned included instructions pasted under each billboard on what needed to improve its appearance and sale ability.… One of the worst problems was flagging paper on neglected boards that hadn’t been sold and couldn’t be sold in the condition they were in. Forty-year-old rusted faces that wouldn’t hold paper were replaced with new faces, brush was trim, lights were fixed. All this was a heavy drain on the bottom line, but the plant was slowly becoming more presentable, even if most of the upgrading was cosmetic.”

Sons in the Shadow: Surviving The Family business as An SOB is on sale at Amazon.

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