Roy Park Jr, the owner of Park Outdoor has issued a new edition of Sons in the Shadow – Surviving The Family Business as an SOB.  We talked with Park about running a family owned business.

Roy, what do you know now about out of home that you wish you knew when you started in the business?

It’s not as much what I wish I knew. What I have learned is not something I considered 50+ years ago, and that is the impact of the billboard business on so many people.  Over the years Park Outdoor Advertising has become a unique and important part of our communities. In our 54 years we have helped promote local business, support local non-profits with free billboard space, provided a passive income stream to our more than 500 landowners, and employed some 60 people, who live, shop and worship in the 15,000 square miles we cover.  It has been an honor to serve our communities.

There are lots of father/daughter and father/son teams in the out of home industry.  What advice would you give to them on keeping a strong working relationship?

My book, “Sons in the Shadow: Surviving the Family Business as an SOB” is all about that.   One of the readers told me after his father visited with me after reading the book that he was more than halfway to making things work out if his son joined him as the “Son of the Boss.” The son said he was amazed at the parallels between my early career and his and that the book gave him the benefit of my foresight to deal with his early struggles of working as an SOB.

Park has loyal employees with a long tenure at the company.  What have you and your senior managers done to promote loyalty?

The key is to establish a positive working relationship with every employee and treat people the way they want to be treated.  The average tenure of our employees is almost 20 years, and they have been just as good to us as we have been to them.

I think our people, who are at the forefront of their communities appreciate the contribution the company makes to their communities, and we offer a stable career to each of them.  Park Outdoor has no debt and is immune to the ups and downs that larger corporations face with bankers or what the stock price looks like.

This brings me to what one of our longest-term employees and his wife wrote to me just last week “We have always appreciated Park Outdoor being a company where family was as important as business.”

In the book Halftime, Bob Buford talks about the importance of moving from success to significance in the second half of a career.  Talk about how you have used the Park and Triad Foundations to move from success to significance.

Buying the company with borrowed money to run the next 37 years, after it was halved in size, I think Park Outdoor has created a significant Brand in the outdoor industry.  We founded the Outdoor Advertising Association of New York and convinced Mario Cuomo in 1989 to pass a law requiring that fair compensation be paid by any city, village, township or municipality in New York State if they require any outdoor signs be removed from that date forward.

The mission of our Triad Foundation founded in 2003, with Triad standing for a union of three, urges American citizens to take advantage of the opportunities offered them by their country, to continue their commitment to democracy and free enterprise as well as to religious liberty, journalistic integrity, freedom of thought and speech and broad access to education and employment.

Coming from a rag-tag group of billboards on telephone poles, to steel structures some 110 feet in the air, we have become one of the most well-known brands and highest ranked independent billboard companies on the North American continent.  Between Park Outdoor Advertising and the Triad Foundation I believe we have been able to move from success to Significance in a small part of America.

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