Venture Concept No. 2

Opportunity 

A business without a sign is a sign of no business. Every business needs signage of one form or another. All existing businesses are potential customers.

Businesses need signage and the options to satisfy that need certainly aren't few in number. There are two other sign shops less than a quarter mile away from the shop I currently work at and at least six or seven in a five mile radius. Online options have sprung up in the past decade as well to help meet these needs. The problem arises out the duality in this industry: Want it cheap? Get it online. Want it done right? Get it from a local shop. Now of course this doesn't always hold true as there are plenty of brick and mortar shops that cut corners, but in the majority of cases this is what can be expected.

Most web-based sign offerings I have seen so far have been produced using cheap substrates and the print is hard to read and overall ineffective at it's intended use. Most of these companies allow little flexibility in the layout of the sign; they provide a set of templates with a choice of a few fonts and colors, then allow you to upload a small .jpeg and off you go. Going to a local sign shop is of course a viable alternative and in most cases a step up on the quality ladder, however most business persons tend to be very busy running their respective businesses. Few have time to take out of the working day to go to a shop and sit with someone and hash out the details for their signage. In my experience signage is a low ranking concern for most business people, usually not thought of at all until it is needed.

In summary, this is my customer:

• Business person of almost any type in any industry. Near universal demand for signage
• Understands that quality is more important than price when it comes to promoting their business, yet still value conscious.
• Has little time to deal with this unmet need, requires a user friendly system to place orders and make revisions

 Innovation

 To meet the above needs my business is formed around the simple idea that with today's technological and logistic infrastructure, a quality sign can be produced and sold at a fair price to a customer any where in the country. Our website will be our storefront and will be designed around ease of used and especially ease of communication with the designer. It will feature a locally hosted file server to allow both the client to provide artwork files without any size limitation and to view high quality layouts without the worry of errors in transmission over fax or email. Once the customer has approved their layout with an electronic signature the production process will begin immediately.


Having real, bonafide, authentic, flesh and blood human designers is a large part of what sets us apart from other online signage offerings. The problem with many of the signs produced by these companies is that their layouts are generated by an automated program. The customer types in their verbiage and selects from a very limited font selection, and boom; the computer spits out a layout and what you get is what you get. What sets apart a quality sign from a scrap of material with letters on it is the details. Just because a sign says what you want it to say does not mean that it is communicating that message to the customer. In order for a sign to properly connect with the human eye and the human mind's eye, it must be designed by a human, and a competent one at that.

 
Venture Concept

By matching a simple and easy to use web interface with a production process focused on efficiency with out sacrificing quality we will be able to meet the needs of our customer. Our customers will come to us for their signage solutions because we provide the middle way, quality and convenience. Our competition is numerous, and fall into the two categories named above: Web based discount signage and local store fronts. The web based discount signage provider's primary weakness is their quality. You get what you pay for and most business owners I have met are wiling to pay for more than what they receive from these vendors. For the local store front the weakness is fundamental to their nature: they are immobile and inflexible, and often inconvenient.

Distribution and customer service are our primary concerns and vital to our success. Shipping costs for signage can be quite high simply because they are so oddly shaped. A normal package is relatively uniform, a sign on the other hand is usually two dimensional and can be quite large. To offset this we must negotiate reasonable rates with a preferred vendor to enable us to ship at a reasonable cost to the customer, otherwise our main selling point of convenience is overshadowed.

To make this business work most efficiently we would need at minimum three designers, and six production workers. This staff would be divided into three 8-hour shifts; a designer too handle both their own work as well as make any needed changes to the artwork during production, and two production workers to run the machines and assemble the product. With three shifts we will be able to run production around the clock which will enable the product to be finished and shipped as efficiently as possible.With appropriate investment in equipment such as flatbed printers, routers, plotters, and laminators we would be able to produce a wide variety of signage. The lack of overhead from a storefront we will be able to keep our prices down without needing to skimp on material.

Secret Sauce and the Future

My secret sauce is my understanding of this industry while also not having come into it by normal means. I had no interest in signage or graphic design before I took my current job. I took it because I was out of work. Being always somewhat of an outsider has allowed me to see things from a different perspective.

I would like to expand my venture into monumental signage. These sort of large and complicated projects have always interested me in my current job but I rarely have the opportunity to participate. I could incorporate this type of work into my current production process with an additional investment in equipment. I can wholesale the finished components to a local sign shop for final assembly and installation, allowing a healthy profit for the both of us.

 Should my business be blessed with success I would hope to use it as a springboard to pursue my longtime goals of operating my own flight school. In five years I hope to have established the business to a degree that it becomes a go-to for signage and I am able to grow and expand. In ten years I hope to be able to leave the day to day operations to an experienced manager while I am able to pursue other projects.


Feedback

The feedback I received from my previous venture concept was largely positive and supportive. One point of criticism however did stand out and that was regarding what differentiated me from my competition. Upon re-reading my post I found myself to be in full agreement with the persons comment. To rectify the situation I added a paragraph to the Innovation section which I felt was to short anyway even on my first post. In it I described how utilizing human designers as opposed to automated programs sets my firm apart from other online sign companies. Its the subtle things in a sign's layout that sets it apart and I will be able to provide these vital subtleties to my customer in a way they are not currently able to receive. Other than that addition my post is largely unchanged based on the very positive feedback. I am confident that should the need arise, I could take this concept to an investor and know that it describes my vision well.