Evolve Or Die // Rick McDonough of Typestries / Better Sign Shop

00:00:00Speaker 0: Learn how to build a better sign and print shop from a few crusty sign guys who've made more mistakes than they care to admit. Conversations and advice on pricing, sales, marketing, workflow, growth, and more. You're listening to the Better Sign Shop podcast with your hosts Peter Kourounis, Michael O'Reilly, and Bryant Gillespie.

00:00:28Speaker 0: [Speech]

00:00:30Speaker 1: Alright, welcome back to yet another episode of the Better Side Shop podcast. As always, I'm your host Brian Gillespie, joined by my co-host, Mr. Michael. Michael, how are you?

00:00:41Speaker 2: I'm good, how are you?

00:00:42Speaker 1: Good. Good.

00:00:44Speaker 3: not the burrito anymore

00:00:46Speaker 2: I was just going to say, like this is the first one where I don't think I was introduced as the burrito and

00:00:51Speaker 3: Just you can cut me right now.

00:00:52Speaker 1: Just Michael in a sweater.

00:00:54Speaker 2: I've been waiting for this day, like to not be a burrito, and now the day has arrived and I kind of feel a little let down.

00:01:01Speaker 1: I'm I'm sorry, man. I hate to disappoint. You you look like a therapist though. The sign therapist. That's what we could give you a new nickname. Or do we already use that one?

00:01:12Speaker 2: Well, I think well we haven't used it officially in the podcast, um but you know, I even I have like elbow patches around me.

00:01:19Speaker 3: That's very academic, I have to say. It's really academic.

00:01:23Speaker 2: I need a a pipe though and I don't have a pipe. But, you know, I'll take the sign there. I I like that better. It's a little more makes a little more sense. I mean, I think you can draw a line to connect it to where burrito a little little abstract.

00:01:37Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll get the burrito costume back. Uh, this is going to be an exciting episode, man. We've got uh another special guest with us, Rick from Typistries. Uh, I think you and Rick go way back, Mike, right?

00:01:52Speaker 1: and like why don't you

00:01:53Speaker 2: We do, yeah.

00:01:54Speaker 1: Why don't you introduce him? Like, set set Rick up.

00:01:57Speaker 2: So weirdly, yeah, this is the first time Rick and I have actually seen each other face to face. Um, but we've been buddies on Facebook for god, almost 20 years now? Is that like something like that? Like way back.

00:02:10Speaker 3: Signs 101, wholesale printing, hocking those printers, keeping them running for years. Yeah.

00:02:17Speaker 2: Um, but yeah, yeah, so I it's it's kind of weird that we've just sort of crossed paths or for over all the years and you know, commenting on each other's Facebook posts and stuff like that. And when I, you know, when I did my time at at Shotbox, um, I saw Rick on the chat support channels quite a bit, uh, giving him holy hell, which I would just go pop a bag of popcorn and just kick back and just watch Rick go to town.

00:02:44Speaker 2: Loved it.

00:02:46Speaker 2: it was like it it brought joy to my day. So I'm really excited that we've we've got you here, we can meet face to face and kind of chat about your your history and your business because I know you've been doing this a hell of a long time and and have helped a lot of people out over the years from what I've seen. So I'm excited for this. So

00:03:04Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:03:05Speaker 3: No, thanks for having me. Yeah. I mean, honestly, it's it's an honor. I've been listening to all the episodes and I've learned a lot, actually, even after doing this as long as I've done this. Uh, you know, I picked up tons of stuff. You've had some amazing guests. Some of the guests I know personally, some I don't. Um, but man, I just feel like this does such a service to the sign industry and if I could share a little bit of what I've learned the hard way, because honestly, we've pretty much learned everything we do here the hard way. Either cost us money or cause us pain.

00:03:37Speaker 2: or caused us to fear

00:03:38Speaker 3: Yeah, hair, for sure, no doubt.

00:03:41Speaker 2: Grand beard, yeah.

00:03:43Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, no, but this has been something we've been at since, uh, well, really 1993 is kind of when we started. I was at college and started this business and it kind of came, it came out of, uh, left field really. I I was always into woodworking and I had a beautiful woodworking shop and, uh, I was like a young high school woodworker and, you know, featured in Fine Woodworking and all these things.

00:04:06Speaker 2: cool

00:04:07Speaker 3: My teachers were always encouraging me to do more, do more, do more. So I went to Franklin and Marshall and actually early action, which is kind of fitting because my daughter's going through this college process right now and I had never visited the campus and I was like, oh, this is great. I'm going to go to Franklin and Marshall. And here I went, I went off to school and I was like, I'm going to be a geologist because I love the ocean and oceanography and all that stuff. And uh, I was also working as a lifeguard for the local Long Beach Township Beach Patrol. And I had this boss there named Don and he just encouraged us all to keep learning and keep growing and he could be a pain in the ass too, obviously.

00:04:42Speaker 3: Um, but this opportunity to run this magazine for American Lifeguard Magazine for the United States Lifesaving Association came along. And he basically said, I I want you to learn how to do desktop publishing and print a magazine. And I was like, Okay, lifeguarding, magazine.

00:04:59Speaker 3: Well, I can see.

00:05:00Speaker 1: Yeah

00:05:01Speaker 3: So, that that turned into uh buying a Mac 2SI, a 19-inch grayscale monitor. Uh, I think I had uh TypeStyler. We had Macromedia.

00:05:13Speaker 2: I was thinking about that the other day.

00:05:15Speaker 3: Yeah, we had type style. It was the coolest thing, man. All of my headlines had like big waves and swashes and stars behind them. Oh man, it was so much fun.

00:05:23Speaker 2: Oh, God.

00:05:24Speaker 3: We thought we were the coolest thing, right? So then that led into making a yearbook because the beach patrol was buying this yearbook from the printing company every year and they were getting just creamed from manual paste up and taking all the headshots and I I said, you know, if I'm doing this magazine, we could probably do this 200-page yearbook.

00:05:42Speaker 3: Yeah, why not?

00:05:43Speaker 3: So then I figured out how to do this yearbook and then it turned into like a year-round thing and then um my girlfriend at the time who is now my wife, who's been my wife for a long time, I'm super supportive and I'm super lucky to be where I'm at in that sense, uh literally said, you know, instead of just working for the town, you should probably do some of this on your own. Both of my parents own businesses, uh they needed signs and they needed things designed and all their friends needed things designed, so like one thing led to another and then I found out that a buddy of mine was opening a deli and he loved, I worked with him at the beach patrol, he loved like these sandblasted wood signs.

00:06:21Speaker 3: and I thought to myself, wow, I love to do woodworking. I'm having fun with design. So, let's go ahead and try to make this guy a sandblasted wood sign. And I actually made that sign. It lasted him 30 years.

00:06:35Speaker 3: It lasted way too long. That's actually most of the stuff we... most of the stuff we make here lasts way too long. That's really the problem.

00:06:42Speaker 3: But that's kind of how we got into the sign business. A little bit before that, I should say, before I made a sign for him, I did make a sign for my mom's store and I made a sign for my dad's business. Um, and I made those literally in my kitchen. I mean, we literally started out like everybody else. And uh, I went back to school, junior year at Franklin and Marshall, and I carried my Roland 24-inch plotter into my dorm room and my roommates are like, "What the hell did this guy do over the summer? This is crazy." Uh, so then I had to make money at college, so we we did t-shirts and we did a magazine at college called The College Shopper, which was like coupons and advertorials for college students.

00:07:21Speaker 3: I mean, jeez, we did everything. Pharmacy bags, anything that we could design and make money on, we did. Uh, I'll never be let down on the fact that the nicest restaurant I had ever been in at the time found out about me and had me come in and I made these beautiful menus for him. And this was at the time where, you know, you couldn't just print on paper from a machine, you know, you'd have to use an image center and make a film with the image center and if either a positive or a negative, depending on how the printer did it. And we were so proud of this, right? And so he says, come over to the restaurant for dinner. So I take my now wife, then girlfriend, to dinner and we're looking through the menu and she goes, I'd like a sald for dinner.

00:08:00Speaker 3: I said, "Excuse me?" Yeah, I'd like a sald. And I read down the menu and god damn it, we spent so much money on image setting and output and printing and it was spelled sald instead of salad. And everybody missed it. And so to this day, proofing. And this ties into the shop box thing because proofing is the biggest thing in my world. Every time we don't proof something, it's just like the biggest Murphy's law in the world, right? Every time you don't proof something, you get screwed.

00:08:33Speaker 3: It just happens. Hello.

00:08:35Speaker 2: and sometimes even when you do

00:08:36Speaker 3: Sometimes when you do.

00:08:38Speaker 2: Yeah, one of one of my first one of one of the very first signs I made when I started out in the in the industry. Well, sorry, when I started my business on my own. Like this was very early in my career, but I had just started my my shop. I was like maybe six months into it and my little town approached me to make a really huge, I think it was like a five by twenty foot sign for the old historical society building. A really nice old historic looking sign, right? Everybody proofed it, it just said Miamisburg Historical Society on it. I mean, so many people look at this sign. It went through quite a few rounds of revisions. It went up on on the wall, they had a ribbon cutting, the whole nine yards.

00:09:15Speaker 2: And then the the next week, the local newspaper had a front page article about how the new historical society sign had the word society spelled wrong with a big picture of it.

00:09:28Speaker 1: Is it E before I?

00:09:30Speaker 2: Yep, exactly. Not a soul caught it.

00:09:36Speaker 2: Yep. We've all been there though.

00:09:38Speaker 3: We've all been there. Yeah. I mean, quite honestly, that's one of the best things that about ShopFox that probably has it that kept us from leaving, because we've been on other software in the past, but man, that proofing engine, that just locks people in. They are they are so hesitant to press that green approve button unless they've really looked at it. And truth be told, if people make a mistake genuinely,

00:10:00Speaker 0: we always try to fix it, right? We're not going to hang him out to dry. Oh, you signed the proof. We try not to be like that. Um but it is just so important in this business, you know, multiple eyes. I think you had an episode about fumbling the handoff, right?

00:10:13Speaker 1: Mm-hmm.

00:10:14Speaker 0: It happens all day every day in this industry. I don't know what it is about the sign industry, but getting people to read work orders, getting customers to read work orders, getting the shop to read work orders, it's like, I personally like to know what I'm doing before I start my work, but it's just something...

00:10:32Speaker 2: I'm convinced it's an industry of people with severe ADHD.

00:10:34Speaker 0: I'm convinced you're right.

00:10:36Speaker 2: And I I mean and I'm... I can say that. Being impulsive.

00:10:39Speaker 2: Yeah, all three of us, I think. Yeah. Um, yeah, and we, you know, we get so excited about building something cool that like the the details don't matter. And then once it's cool, we just move on to something else and, you know, the follow-through doesn't matter. Just on to the next cool thing.

00:10:53Speaker 0: There's one of those right back there in my life. Right there. It's just a reminder. That's why it hangs behind my desk every day to remind me if you're going to start something, you should finish it. So,

00:11:04Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly.

00:11:05Speaker 2: You're the boss. that's what they're

00:11:07Speaker 0: Well, so...

00:11:08Speaker 1: and like for the audience, Rick, um why don't you like tell us about today? Like, what is the the business doing today? You know, rough numbers if you're okay sharing it?

00:11:20Speaker 0: like what's the

00:11:20Speaker 1: So like what's the the bread and butter for you guys?

00:11:23Speaker 0: So to tell you about today, I got to do a quick tell you of where we came from. So when we started, when I graduated college in 1996, I knew I was like, I'm not going to work for anybody. I'm going to do this. So I went and rented an office. As it turns out, the office that I rented was a major drug cocaine distribution ring, den. So I had to literally move out in the middle of the night when the building was being raided, even though I had my office was in a separate corner of the building. And I'm on a payphone calling my friend who was my real estate agent saying, what do I do? And he's like, just go get your crap and get out of there and we'll figure it out. So I moved into the building next door to where... Did you know they were raided?

00:12:03Speaker 0: What's that?

00:12:04Speaker 0: Yeah, no, I had no idea this was coming. Because the people I were I was renting from, they seemed like pretty normal people. As it turns out, they were the largest drug distributors in the area, but that was a, you know, 1996. So, moved out in the middle of the night, found a a guy here on Bay Avenue, Dr. Tom Massey, he's still my neighbor today, who literally like gave me a chance. Like, hey, here's this like 22-year-old guy with all of his stuff to make signs. I've got an open storefront and he let us move in. And so, from 1996 through 2001, we were in this rented space and, you know, we knew like we needed to buy some equipment.

00:12:43Speaker 0: We bought a Gerber Edge, right? Before we bought a Gerber before even bought a shop truck, I was installing signs in my Jeep. I bought a Gerber Edge. I was the only person in New Jersey that had a Gerber Edge. So I had Gerber like sending me all these people asking me to print stuff. That was how I got into wholesale. I was like, oh. And at the time the payment was like a grand a month. I mean, that's a lot of money in 1996. So I needed to pay for this things. And of course, Gerber's like, oh, we'll sell them more media and foils if we just send them more work. So I got into the wholesale thing and then Gerber's like, you know, you should buy one of these routers.

00:13:15Speaker 0: And since I loved woodworking and I was always into dimensional signage, um the guy Jay Cook from Stover Bot, I don't know if you guys ever heard of him, he used to make some gorgeous stuff.

00:13:25Speaker 2: school

00:13:26Speaker 0: Yeah

00:13:26Speaker 2: Oh, cool.

00:13:27Speaker 0: Yeah, so it was so cool at the time. And I said to my wife, I was like, girlfriend at the time, we need this. This is like what we need to do. I'd be so happy.

00:13:34Speaker 0: So we bought the router and to to be honest, 1997, I bought that router. We still have it and it still runs every day. Great machine, which is absolutely crazy. Best investment we ever made.

00:13:45Speaker 0: Um, but that's how then the wholesale sort of took off because nobody had routers at the time. So all these people are calling me up saying, can you run this, can you run that? And we got tied into like the New York City market. So we were making stuff for like film and TV. Nobody, nobody was spending sixty-five thousand dollars buying a router.

00:14:03Speaker 0: Except me. And so we just went and we took some chances early, and then that led into buying our first uh inkjet printer, which was actually an inkjet printer that we converted to a solvent printer, which was a giant failure.

00:14:17Speaker 0: Then we wound up buying

00:14:20Speaker 2: Wait. What was that? What machine was that?

00:14:22Speaker 0: an end card

00:14:23Speaker 1: Ink

00:14:24Speaker 0: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:14:25Speaker 1: Yeah

00:14:25Speaker 0: And it had those square cartridges. Oh yeah.

00:14:29Speaker 2: No, like the odd the the priming gun that you had.

00:14:32Speaker 0: That's what we did. Yes, yes, we would suck the old ink out, push the solvent ink in with the priming gun. I mean, we did get some prints out of the thing.

00:14:40Speaker 2: Um, so yeah, a few.

00:14:42Speaker 0: Yeah, some. So then I said, oh, we have to improve this. So then I went and I spent $185,000 on an Arizona 180 uh solvent printer. And man, we were printing money at that point. Like, now we're at like 2001.

00:14:56Speaker 0: where nobody was printing wraps, nobody was printing banners, nobody was doing any of that stuff. So the natural progression became we would add some wholesale work. And then we got a second Arizona and then we then we saw the Colorspan flatbed hybrid machine, which honestly was one of the coolest printers ever made. Uh, Mimaki just came out with something that is essentially like a modern day clone of a 20-year-old machine. Um, and that thing just took us to another level. And then we started going to the sign shows and then we started being known. And that was about the time that like, I don't even think Four Over was there yet, but certainly Rick from Signs 365, he was there. A couple of the other wholesale guys were starting to do their thing.

00:15:35Speaker 0: And then Gandy Innovations came along and a whole bunch of us bought these Gandy Innovations printers for 300 grand all at once. And the guy that owned the company bought Lamborghinis and fancy houses and suddenly realized, "Ah, I can't pay my support staff, I can't pay my ink bills, I can't pay my software developers anymore." So literally one day, all of our machines just stopped working. We all came in one day and all of us are panicked on the phone calling each other, "Is your machine working? Is your machine working?" And so we all had to scramble because we had, you know, three hundred thousand dollar paperweights and orders sitting here.

00:16:09Speaker 1: Did they end up what ended up happening to the like didn't they get

00:16:12Speaker 0: Oh, they got so the engineers, yeah, the engineers started their own company. Uh, and then the assets, I guess, were bought by uh Agfa, of the company. But the engineers went and started their own thing. And honestly, the printing technology itself and like the maglev aspect of the print head movement and motion control, they were solid machines. I mean, when we got scrapped our machines, we had uh we had an excavator and a forklift out there trying to crush these things and you could not destroy them. I mean, you couldn't get any support, you couldn't get any parts, there was nothing left to do with them but get rid of them.

00:16:47Speaker 0: Um, and that's kind of led to where we are today because the next evolution was to jump to like EFI or Durst. So, fast forward and I'm at EFI in New Hampshire and I'm ready to buy a now a million dollar EFI printer. And uh, we do the whole tour, sign the contract, we take lunch, and during lunch the floor manager shows me around the production floor. And they had one model that was just slightly above the model that we were going to buy. And I was like, wow, I could take two of my flatbeds and I'm going to replace it with this, and I'm going to still run five times as fast. So in my mind, I'm like, this is a great investment. We're going to make a ton of money, change our business.

00:17:26Speaker 0: We even were under contract to buy a building to put this stuff in. And so we go out to the floor and there's six of the one machine they had above this. Six of them.

00:17:35Speaker 0: And the floor manager says to me, he looks at his iPad and he goes, yeah, all six of these are going to this one company. Now I'm like, six of those are going to one company. I'm like, you wouldn't happen to know what company it is, would you? And he's like, four something.

00:17:50Speaker 0: And I'm like, for over? And he's like, yeah, that's it. I walked right back into the salesman's office and I took the contract and ripped it up and I said, that's it, we're done.

00:18:01Speaker 0: He's like, "What do you mean?" I said, "I said they're going to crush me." I said, "It doesn't even make sense. They're going to buy six of these things, distribute them around the country. They're VC backed. They only care if they get market share in four or five percent. I need 20% on this wholesale work." And so that was when we had the epiphany that that was donezo for wholesale because we saw the market changing so much. And at that point, you either became four over and size 365 or you said, "Nah, I'm going to get really small." And so today, we're a company of four people and it was really cool, let me tell you.

00:18:37Speaker 0: doing two, three million dollars a year and and having like having these weeks at the end of the week when you look at the numbers and you're like, this is amazing. I love it. And at the end, my CPA is like, congratulations, you made six percent of working your butt off, right? So, we just sort of intentionally got smaller. We're we're a little below a million in total sales volume now. I feel like we have this business pretty well optimized. Uh, there's a few things we'd like to change. Uh, we're going to ISA next week and we're going to do a little bit of shopping. Um, routers.

00:19:11Speaker 1: It's on the list.

00:19:11Speaker 0: So we have, yeah, I mean what we really need to do is we need to go from the Gerber version of 3D, which is great for the prismatic letters but not for the textured backgrounds. So what we do is we have some texture files that we've built and we run it in two and a half D and then we fine-tune them by hand. Uh but that's super time-consuming. So we're going to replace that with something a little more modern and way faster. And when we got rid of the wholesale, we sold all the printers uh to oddly enough another wholesaler. He's up in the New York City market. So him being hyper-local and like instant turnaround, it's perfect for him, right? Um so but we

00:19:50Speaker 0: do still need some printing technology. I mean, listen, uh, TJ is amazing. I I have him run bus wraps for us. I have him run our shuttle.

00:20:00Speaker 0: buses. Uh, I I we definitely send some stuff to 365. I mean, why would we print banners? It doesn't even make sense. And this is what I mean about optimizing a business, right? Like, if I have three people here,

00:20:11Speaker 0: I would much rather be working on something in the shop that we're making one hundred fifty two hundred dollars a square foot on than a banner that we're going to sell for two dollars, you know.

00:20:20Speaker 0: And the reality of it is is that you have eight hours in the day to have somebody out in the shop, you're going to get eight hours of work done on a beautiful dimensional sign, you know, carved gold leaf, LEDs, backlit, whatever it might be, or

00:20:34Speaker 0: you're going to spend eight hours a day making banners. And it just doesn't make sense. Now that doesn't mean we won't sell banners, but between 365 and B2 and TJ, there's so many people uh with so much firepower out there.

00:20:48Speaker 0: uh it's kind of funny we recently bought a new GrafTech cutter and I really kind of bought it for my son and his come of his little side businesses he comes in and he does some work here but he's got some of his own things

00:20:59Speaker 0: And um recently I had a customer, Kathleen gave me an order for like a thousand stickers. And normally we would just run them here, even with this brand new GrafTech. And I was like, you know, let's give Fire Sprinter a shot on this, right?

00:21:12Speaker 0: Dude, those things came in so perfect. They're wrapped in cellophane stretch wrap. And shout out to Fire Sprint because those guys have it together for sticker printing. And literally, he did it for less than we could even buy the material for. And it came out perfect.

00:21:26Speaker 0: And in the same amount of time, we literally worked on a vehicle wrap and making a a dimensional farm sign, which is, you know, a twenty-eight hundred dollar project. Why are we going to make stickers?

00:21:35Speaker 0: This is what I'm saying about optimization. So where we are today is like we're trying to use outs, you know, we have a unique view on outsourcing and qualifying good outsourcing sources because we were the people that

00:21:49Speaker 0: The whole sign industry east of the Mississippi was outsourcing to. And listen, we used to get these orders at four o'clock on a Friday and people would be like, I need it on a, I need it Monday morning. And they'd be good customers and

00:22:01Speaker 0: On more than one occasion, I've sent my guys to Poughkeepsie, to Albany, to, you know, to Pittsburgh, PA. I mean, a couple times we went to the airport and literally, you know, prior to all this like

00:22:12Speaker 0: 9/11, uh prior or prior to all this like crazy FAA stuff, uh we literally convinced like people to take our packages and pay people to take packages and put them on a plane to like Florida.

00:22:23Speaker 0: I mean one time, one time I actually booked a flight and left and I had this whole box and I called my wife and I said, yeah, I'll be home tomorrow morning, you know. She's like, where are you going? I said, oh, I said I'm going to Orlando, you know. But to be honest, it was the coolest thing because

00:22:38Speaker 0: We had always been like big Disney fans, right? I mean, what you know, what parent that's in this business that has kids doesn't love Disney and their creative stuff?

00:22:46Speaker 0: And this was a job for Disney. And we got this job from a company that had the contract with Disney and their Orange County, Florida, like, you know, wholesale provider let them down.

00:22:57Speaker 0: They had received our letter because we used to send letters to people, believe it or not, for marketing for the wholesale. And she was like, I want to give you a shot on this. And I have the picture of the job. It was something for the golf course.

00:23:10Speaker 0: I have the picture of the job on my desk because I was like, oh, this is the coolest thing. We got to make signs for Disney, you know. So and so it was worth getting on an airplane to save the day. Uh and I did go to the park the next day for two hours. I did.

00:23:22Speaker 0: and then I went to the airport and came home. But no, it definitely where we are.

00:23:27Speaker 1: might be the only scenario where my wife is impressed by my sign work is if it is like hanging up at Disney. Yeah. The rest of the time it's like, yeah, no, you made it. Yeah, it's cool. It's great.

00:23:38Speaker 0: the next trip that we went there, I insisted that we take the whole family to the golf course where the sides were installed so I could show them and of course my kids were like, "Dad, come on." You know, come on.

00:23:48Speaker 0: So, but we actually had made some other signs for Disney as well when we were doing wholesale work. Uh, we could talk about this now because the non-compete has long since expired. Um, but we were making some stuff and the the company we were making it for told us it was going to New York City. Well,

00:24:03Speaker 0: was getting delivered to New York City, but it was actually being installed in Disney. And I I think they partially did that because they didn't want us to charge them too much. They wanted a better deal. Yeah, yeah.

00:24:14Speaker 0: It was this really cool like three-dimensional set of letters that were like 12 inches thick and a 3D globe and you could probably figure out what TV network uh company it used to globe and earth and where it might have gone at Disney.

00:24:27Speaker 0: but yeah, it it we've built some really cool stuff. But I think the biggest thing that we learned is is that in the end, you need to make money, right?

00:24:36Speaker 0: and you got to get rid of the things that just don't make money. And if the world is changing around you and this that's what really what happened in this industry, the the wholesale business just went bonkers here with these venture capital firms.

00:24:49Speaker 0: they wanted to do, you know, the B2s and the four overs and they're happy with four, five, six percent, you know. And then you really have like Signs 365 and they are they have it so dialed in, right?

00:25:02Speaker 0: with the quality and the products that they're offering and the equipment that they're running, that you almost can't even bother to compete in that same space. Like you got an arena full of 30,000 people, you're not going to stand out, you know.

00:25:14Speaker 0: you got to work so hard to stand out and it's just a giant race to the bottom at that point. And I have never been a put something on sale, race to the bottom, sell it by the pound, you know, as Dan Antonelli has always said, you know, don't sell vinyl by the pound, right?

00:25:29Speaker 0: Yeah. us being more design centric, um and really concerned about helping our businesses and being involved in the local community, all that wholesale work got so big and blossomed into something that like, you know,

00:25:43Speaker 0: the opportunity cost was that we were losing these cool jobs like in our backyard. It was great. We were sending out, you know, 50 grand a week worth of wholesale work.

00:25:53Speaker 0: But literally I would drive home over to my little town and I'd see a new sign go up and be like, oh, that really sucks. We missed that one.

00:26:00Speaker 2: Didn't get that one.

00:26:00Speaker 0: And then I would go check with my team and yeah, and my team would be like, yeah, they came in like a month ago and nobody got back to them, you know, and it just terrible stuff. Like, so we just had a big correction and then of course,

00:26:14Speaker 0: The wholesale thing we sort of got rid of that right before COVID and then COVID happened and then suddenly we became because we had the router and the laser, suddenly we became like a a plastic shield factory like everybody else.

00:26:25Speaker 0: I mean, I think we went through like so many pallets of acrylic during that, that was crazy.

00:26:30Speaker 0: But the interesting thing about that was that we really helped keep a lot of people open, and the fact that we were willing to work helped us reconnect with a lot of those people that we lost connections with when we were so focused on the wholesale stuff.

00:26:44Speaker 0: Um, you know, I think last episode you had a mailbag question about should I do wholesale or should I do retail and should I do both. It's really difficult to do both, right?

00:26:54Speaker 0: you either have to do one or you have to do the other and if you follow what like uh Gene from Fire Sprint did, like dude he's all in with the wholesale stuff. I mean and the equipment that they're buying and same thing with Signs 365.

00:27:06Speaker 0: They're all in with the wholesale, multiple buildings, multiple printers, TJ, same thing. You know, and I know TJ does like a little bit of like half and half and that can be tough.

00:27:15Speaker 0: Um, but you can't have one thing that you're making a small amount of money on take over something else, take away from something that you're making a good amount of money on that's really your core, right?

00:27:26Speaker 0: and like that's kind of what I said was where do I want this business to be? And I want to be happy coming to work. I don't want it to be like, oh my god, we're coming in again and we're just going to press print, we're just going to press print, we're just going to press print.

00:27:39Speaker 0: you know, cut core plaster, fill boxes, finish banners, stick 'em in boxes. It just became like, that became so boring and and it I didn't feel like we were... That feels like... living it's such a common story. Yeah, and we weren't limited to our mission, you know. It's certainly a common story.

00:27:54Speaker 1: I think Mike is... you're kind of the same way, right? Where you're just like, there's only so many like vinyl signs that you could do before you're just like...

00:28:05Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean that's exactly, you know, I got into the wholesale game just as like filler work, you know. And we we I never did the volume that you did or any of these other guys did. I mean we were small, small time on the wholesale work, but it just kept my printers running, right?

00:28:19Speaker 2: um kept employees busy, you know, between jobs. And it was it was, you know, it was fine at first, but you're you're totally right, like it it if you're not careful, it becomes its own life form and it and it will take over.

00:28:34Speaker 0: And yeah. It totally took over. Yeah.

00:28:36Speaker 2: It's like you're chasing volume, but you're not really you're not seeing the forest for the trees, I guess, when you when you fall into that trap. And it becomes so commoditized that

00:28:49Speaker 2: Yeah, it it it like it it grinds you down.

00:28:52Speaker 0: Oh, totally.

00:28:54Speaker 2: Right, none of us got into this industry to print vinyl by the pound, right? Like, you know, we didn't, that's not what we got into it for. And and you definitely can make some money at it if you do it right, but you could, I don't think you can now.

00:29:05Speaker 2: Um, but yeah, I mean it just one day I I was in probably the same boat as you. I just woke up and I'm like, man, I'm so so sick and tired of printing banners and coroplast and smelling ink all day long. Like, I mean, I'd rather smell one shot.

00:29:20Speaker 2: I guess that's better.

00:29:23Speaker 2: I don't know.

00:29:24Speaker 2: But like, you know, yeah, it's it's a weird, it's like it's like your business and and you along with it go through this like weird transformation and you don't even realize it until you're so far spit out the other side that like you don't even you've lost

00:29:42Speaker 2: your bearings. You don't know which way's up anymore as far as the industry goes and and you just realize like, holy shit, I am so burnt out from doing this that like I don't even want to step foot in my shop anymore, you know. Yeah. Yeah.

00:29:54Speaker 0: Well, the other the other problem really became too that, you know, there'd be so much work coming in that we'd be like, oh, we need

00:30:00Speaker 0: need to hire somebody. We need to hire an extra person to do finishing. We need to put, you know, second shift on or whatever. And you get so focused on that that you like look at the forest through the trees, like you said.

00:30:10Speaker 1: You're not doing any cool stuff anymore. You're a baby.

00:30:13Speaker 0: No, cool stuff.

00:30:14Speaker 0: Yeah, so now today, like I I I'm very my perception of the where we want to be today is very similar to you did like a Swatski's Imagination Corporation episode. You know, listen, we want to do the things we like doing. We want to do the things that have the most impact on our clients' businesses, right? Pay big returns, make the clients happy. Um, we want to do things that are a good fit for our shop and like our environment around here because we don't want to be swimming upstream. You know, we're we're in this, you know, very tourism-based coastal community and we can talk about some of the challenges of that, but one of the cool things about that is is we are a very visual-based

00:30:55Speaker 0: place. Uh, I think Tom McElroy talked about that in the Signcraft episode. You know, he moved to Fort Myers and he was like, wow, look at this, I'm in this beach town and there's all these beautiful cool signs everywhere. And I and I like to think that a lot of the cool signs on Mombi's Island came to be because of us, which is sort of true. I mean, I'm not the only person doing this, but the neat thing is is that there's all this stuff that's really fun visually that we can get to be really creative with, that most importantly pays really big returns for the customer. Gets them noticed, gets people in the door, then they're super happy. And then the point of that is is that work sells more of that kind of work that we want to be doing.

00:31:33Speaker 0: And um, you know, that's just really where we're at and we we can't do everything. I mean, there's a lot of things that we gracefully turn away. Um, I'm lucky because we have a lot of other, we have some younger guys in the industry around here that are into conveniently a lot of the things that we're not into. So, they like receiving some of those leads, you know, we can say, you know, a lot of the personal vehicles like boat wraps, you know, people probably say all the time, oh, I can't believe you wouldn't want to wrap a boat, that's easy money.

00:32:02Speaker 0: Yeah. Okay. Yeah, sure. Hello

00:32:05Speaker 0: you know, I mean there's boats all over the place. And we do a ton of boat names. We've been doing boat names since we started this business. I have no problem doing beautiful boat names, but these whole wraps and everything, especially around here because we're seasonal and the boats come out and then you get damage at the water line and then you got to fix that and people are unhappy. Um so but we have a couple local uh young men who are in the sign industry, wrap industry, they love that stuff, so we feed them that. Um we doubled into uh t-shirts for a while and we decided because I actually used to work for screen printer when I was in high school. And then we decided, you know what, t-shirts and apparel way too much, so we're really fortunate.

00:32:44Speaker 0: we got a couple really good companies around here that have super dialed in t-shirt production. They're doing water-based ink and really nice design, good quality products. So we have a great working relationship with those people. Uh, and this is what I'm saying, like the rising tide sort of rises all raises all the ships and you know, we can't we can't do everything, you know. And I don't want to be in the situation where, and I don't want to get back to the situation where we have to take in everything that comes in the door because that hamster wheel has to keep spinning. So now we could say, you know what, that's not a good fit for us, you know, and here's somebody that might be a good fit. And I'll even go as far as dialing the person up.

00:33:23Speaker 0: if I have someone here in the shop or Kathleen will dial the other company up and say, listen, I've got so and so here, this is what they're looking for. And then you've gained the respect of those other folks as well. And then word starts to spread and you know, now you have the the sales reps and the suppliers and all these people. Oh, listen, you know, he's trying to help out the industry.

00:33:42Speaker 0: Listen, pigs get to eat and hogs get slaughtered, right? And I don't mind, I don't mind if you say I'm a pig and I get to eat, but I don't want to be that guy who's like, I'm a hog and I'm trying to take everything. Um, you know, so. And and I've had sign companies put signs up across the street from me and and like, I don't get upset about it, you know. We had a customer, we had a customer open uh across town a few months ago and there's a sign company in the plaza and one of their employees came out and said, well, this is really awkward, isn't it? And I go, only if you want it to be, you know. Do you know how many people, I mean, do you know how many folks we send to you?

00:34:19Speaker 0: 'cause like we don't do trophies, we don't do t-shirts, you know, we don't do corporate gifts, but they do. And their phone number is on our front counter for all of those things. Like we have a whole referral system where we have a little guide and if it's stuff that we don't do, here's who we would recommend. Um, and you know, we send people as far down as like South Jersey, uh, we send people to North Jersey. Of course, sometimes you just have to be honest and send people to the internet too and say, listen, you could buy this for way less, you know, spot A on the internet. That's a VistaPrint project.

00:34:50Speaker 0: You know what I mean? Send it to Vista. You know, there's no money in business cards anymore. We make we used to make business cards as a core component of our business. Now we make business cards as a courtesy to our core customers who just don't want to deal with it.

00:35:04Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly.

00:35:05Speaker 0: So, yeah, it's just that's how much it's going to be.

00:35:08Speaker 2: that are it's so good at doing all these things that it just for anything commoditized like that it makes absolutely zero sense.

00:35:16Speaker 0: We're not we're not commodi- we used to be commoditized widget makers, but we do not want to be commoditized widget makers. Give us the fun stuff, give us the creative stuff, give us the unique stuff, you know, let us figure out how to mix LEDs and dimensional letters and halo lighting and uh we're doing a really cool project right now where it's taken way longer than it should have for a whole bunch of reasons, but it actually is working out okay because the evolution of the RGB illumination and the RGB modules has gone so far since we even first started talking about this project that

00:35:52Speaker 0: This guy's going to have his awning lighting, his channel letters, and the inside of his restaurant we're working, he's working with an electrician on that part, uh all be able to be color changeable based on the season or if he's having a party. He does a lot of parties, so he does like a lot of showers and bar and bat mitzvahs. And they want to be able to have everything be coordinated. And I'm like, well, I think we can figure out a way to do that. And you know, those are kind of like the fun projects. Like, you know, that's the thing about a...

00:36:19Speaker 0: a sign shop today, you can either be out there sticking vinyl, running the rolls roller, you know, and laying vinyl down, or you could be out there with, you know, your CNC router and your soldering iron and your LED modules and, you know, figuring out different ways to do things. Um, and I just want it to be fun at this point. That's really what it is.

00:36:39Speaker 2: Well, maybe that's a good segue. Oh, yeah. Well, good question, Michael. Is it fun? Are you still having fun? this many years in

00:36:48Speaker 0: 30-something years in

00:36:50Speaker 0: that's what I mean by having fun. So, I would say seven years ago, I just went home one day. It was towards the end of the wholesale stuff. I went home one day and I told my wife, I said, I'm done. And a few of our friends were selling their businesses at the time. And I was like, I think we were, it was probably seven years ago because I was like 44 or 45. And I said, that's it, I'm done. And she's like, you're having a midlife crisis. Shut up and go to work tomorrow, right? And so I went so far as to like build a resume, go interview for some jobs. We do a lot of stuff with like uh NGOs and and schools and education. And I was like, oh, I could be a really good fundraiser and event coordinator for a school. And you know, I went to a small school, a high school and

00:37:29Speaker 0: So, I'll go target some of those people, right? Went and interviewed and everything. And as it turns out, the headmaster of the school that I interviewed with used to own a printing company. And you know what he said to me? He goes, "Don't sell your company." He goes, "You don't want to do this."

00:37:43Speaker 0: He literally said that to me. He goes, he goes, just go back and make your company what you really want to make your company. And I took his advice to heart and I came home and I said to my wife, I go, you know what, you're right. And honestly, I'm so glad we didn't do that at the time because those friends that did that at that period of our lives, they're now unhappy that they sold their businesses. They wish they would still have them, you know. Um, so so my goal really is is make this fun by doing the things we enjoy doing. And listen, all business, I don't care what kind of business you're in, has some job that's a pain in the butt, right? We just did one this afternoon. We have a uh a person that I used to work with in Long Beach Township. I mentioned that when I first started.

00:38:22Speaker 0: So going back 40 years, we worked together. Uh, we did a couple little graphics on her husband's Jeep and I don't do personal graphics on personal vehicles at all unless you're a friend or a family member. And of course, as I always say, every personal vehicle project results in a problem, it always does. We literally just stripped these beautiful matte Control-Tac graphics off and put solid color matte black on so every, you know, listen, you're never going to get rid of all your issues and all of your problematic jobs. But we've gotten good at getting rid of those so we actually enjoy coming to work. So,

00:38:55Speaker 0: Yeah, that's the thing. You have to make it fun 'cause otherwise, why do it? And now I'm kind of at the point where I I I see the next five years of our business being, okay, we're I can certainly keep going with the way we have it right now. And do we then, you know, exit by not selling? In other words, do we rebuild a team here that can maybe take it over and I could back up a little bit?

00:39:18Speaker 0: Um, we have a few friends that have done that with their sign businesses, you know, they've moved to Florida but they still run their businesses here in the Northeast. They have a good strong team. Um, you know, it's kind of hard to sell a business like this, like to say, oh, what is this business really worth, right? It's some equipment and and a list of accounts and some digital files, but kind of like without me and my wife, what is this business?

00:39:43Speaker 0: you know what I mean? Like so for the next person that would come along, you know, I'm a technician owner, right? I'm not a and I'm okay with it. Um, I'm not one of these guys who works on the business all the time. I definitely work on the business, but I work in the business and I enjoy it. And those

00:40:00Speaker 0: businesses are generally kind of harder to sell. You know, and I'm never going to get a million dollars for this business. You know what I'm saying? So it's like, like, I might as well just keep doing it.

00:40:09Speaker 0: So, that's where we're at. We have it at the point where we really enjoy what we're doing. We've got great customers. We've gotten rid of all the the difficult people. We've gotten rid of all the people that are hard to get money out of, difficult pay. Uh, you know, we used to do tons of national install work.

00:40:27Speaker 0: now

00:40:28Speaker 0: we pre-qualify all the national people because a lot of people are a lot of companies are opening in our area as there's so much growth around here and we have a whole script and Kathleen will just tell them, okay, well we require 50% payment up front if you want a site visit done, you know, site survey done, it's payment up front, this is what we charge and generally, right, write that in there, click, you know.

00:40:49Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:40:49Speaker 0: Um and if you if you stick around past that and then we could talk, you know. Um but again, it's really about I I think getting your side business to where you could be happy and enjoy coming to work and not be burned out. The biggest thing is making fun and cool stuff, making stuff you could be proud of, right? Getting rid of difficult customers because there's just difficult people in the world.

00:41:12Speaker 0: uh you can't have that. You know, all that stuff brings you down. And I don't want that.

00:41:17Speaker 0: I I I really don't. And so I'd rather work a little less and be a little bit smaller and be happier. You know, and that's I'm past the point of being like, wow, I need the biggest, fastest this, the the biggest, largest this, right? Oh, it's such a it's such a flex, you know? We've got five Gandy printer. I mean, listen, we had a lot of printers. I I could say, I could tell you what it's like to have two million dollars worth of printers under roof because I paid for it every month, okay?

00:41:45Speaker 0: It's not that important is really what it comes down to. It's really not that important. So, that that's kind of how I'm at with it, you know. You guys talk about the burnout a lot. It's true. Especially after 34 years. Yeah.

00:41:59Speaker 1: it's it's it it waxes and wanes and it's just difficult to manage at times but it's it's great to hear the story of you like coming through it and and are now like on the other side of it and happy

00:42:12Speaker 0: Well, you know what's super cool?

00:42:13Speaker 1: doing what you want to do

00:42:14Speaker 0: super cool has me more energized about this business than ever. And and I have friends who are artists who hate me for saying this. But honestly, for small businesses and small creative businesses like, I know the whole purpose of this episode is to talk about AI, but AI really has me re-energized about being a small business. Because at first I was so against it and totally opposed to it. And about a year ago, a customer came in and he had this drawing for a wrap, trailer wrap, food trailer wrap. And it was completely built in AI. And that was the moment that I said to myself, wow, we need to start paying attention to this. Not that I could use the drawing that he brought for production, right?

00:42:54Speaker 0: it still all had to be redrawn. But I realized right away, if we're not going to get on this and start paying attention to this, we're going to get run over by this. And then you start digging into it and you're like, wow, AI could do a lot of really cool things and break down a lot of barriers for small businesses and give small businesses these opportunities to access all kinds of information and knowledge that normally we don't have those resources for.

00:43:19Speaker 0: It's wild.

00:43:20Speaker 0: So that has me like super reinvigorated, to be honest with you. Like, I'm learning about, I'm like, I'm an old dude, right? I'm 52 and most of our customers are young. Um, which is awesome to see young entrepreneurs coming in. But a 52-year-old guy doesn't have the brain to relate to how 24-year-old to 30-year-olds think in marketing their business and sourcing signage for their business, right? And how they position themselves in the market, and more importantly, how they do business, right?

00:43:50Speaker 0: We're old school.

00:43:51Speaker 0: like we're telephone walk into the front door. Um so we're totally using AI right now to help bring us and and my kids because I have a 23-year-old and an 18-year-old so they help ground me. Um but we're totally using AI to help us become more relatable and understandable and presentable to this younger crop of people that are coming up and starting businesses. And it's kind of cool because you know when I was 22, 23 and starting this business, nobody wanted to give me the time of day. I'd pick up the phone and call somebody to to buy something, get something, they'd be like, ha. Well now, these young people pick up their phones and they're on a web interface and nobody on the other end knows who they're dealing dealing with.

00:44:31Speaker 0: they just know they got an order. And so we need to be those people that can speak that language. That's the next evolution of this business and to be honest with you, there's so many guys my age, guys and gals my age in this industry that are about to get cooked if they don't reinvent themselves. You got to reinvent yourself. This is the biggest time ever to reinvent yourself in the sign industry right now. And it doesn't mean going out and buying printers. You don't need ten printers, okay?

00:44:56Speaker 0: The printers are cool. I love the the the new Colorado, the textured ink, the different layers, the gloss. But you don't need that to become a super successful and continue a business legacy at this point in this industry. You got to be related.

00:45:10Speaker 1: Let me let me ask you this, Rick, like being a craftsman, like making amazing signs, like really cool stuff. How do you square it with like the AI design stuff where it's basically like, hey, if AI has seen it, if it's been trained on it, uh like the models now, they can get extremely close to whatever prompt you provide. It is it is scary and the speed which it happened. Like Mike and I have talked about it on the podcast before, but like we we've been in this race with each other like behind the scenes of like, hey, check this shit out. Look at look at this model. Hey, like at what point is this going to affect your sign business, Mike?

00:45:50Speaker 1: uh, you know, it's but like, do you like, are you using these tools and like, do you do you have like that conflict of like, okay, like, hey, this is a like cheapening design or, you know, that's that's the biggest argument that I see right now is like, this is AI slop, it's not, it's it's not real design, it's not crafted by a human, that sort of attitude, right? Is that, like, did you have any of that when you started using AI or like, do you still have some of that?

00:46:20Speaker 0: there's and there's a ton of slop. Like you see it on like the Facebook community pages right now. Like you scroll through, right? And like every restaurant, every landscaper, they're like making flyers for like tree service and dinner specials and you're like, Oh, yeah, that used to go to a graphic designer. Now you just speak it into your phone and you get this like soft edge, pastelly kind of look that they all look the same, right? You know, you you know what it is when you see it. But the reality of it is is that stuff is helping those businesses become more successful. And I'll go back to the food truck example and this is the one that really opened my eyes to it.

00:46:58Speaker 0: and I can send you a picture of what he's if you want to insert it in editing. Um but he brought this thing in.

00:47:05Speaker 0: The guy was a cop. He did this whole food truck design, the menu, the icons for each burger, the descriptions, in his cop car at work, in the middle of the night talking to AI. And when he brought this in, and this was only 12 months ago. You know how much has improved since 12 months ago? And when he brought this in, I literally was like, wow, okay, we we we really need to start to pay attention to this because I was of the school of thought that I want nothing to do with AI. I'm not installing ChatGPT. I'm not installing any of these cloud things. I want nothing to do with any of it, right? So in the meantime, uh...

00:47:42Speaker 0: We've started to use it as a design iteration tool. We've started to use it as a design testing tool. We've had we've literally built our own software, like internal software for processes with AI. I mean, it's just made us such a better business and it's made so many of our customers better businesses. And yes, a lot of what comes in the door is absolute garbage. Like you can almost tell now who a new AI user is versus a really good AI user just by what they bring in, right? I mean, if you become a good prompter, you can get far better synthesis out of these AIs.

00:48:18Speaker 0: uh getting good at prompting is definitely one of the biggest things. Um and like there was even a conversation on Facebook earlier on one of the groups about a guy who had this beautiful rendering of this uh metal architectural interior lobby directory in like a doctor's office, let's just say, right? And it had beautiful like, yeah, it had beautiful like uh round uh pol- or brushed aluminum columns and then it had rings around it and it had clearly interchangeable tenant panels and directional arrows on it. And it was so good. And he went on to say about how this wasn't just a single prompt, he actually had a conversation with ChatGPT.

00:48:58Speaker 0: And I was like, you know, that's really interesting because the other day I was driving to Vermont and I had four hours in the truck. I actually had a three-hour conversation with ChatGPT and I couldn't look at what it was generating when I when I uh was driving, but when I got home and I hopped into my office and I looked, I'm like, some of this stuff is actually really good. Right? You can't use it just as it sits, but if you're the kind of person that could take an idea and expand on it and run with it, that's I think where the AI is really like, you don't want to be the sign shop that just takes the AI and just pumps it out through the printer, right? Because that's not really helpful.

00:49:32Speaker 0: But if you could take some of these ideas that this stuff is generating and then you could take the skill and the knowledge of being a good designer and understanding how to execute things in the shop from a fabrication standpoint, man, there's some really cool stuff it's pumping out. It's really, really neat.

00:49:47Speaker 0: and it's only getting better so fast.

00:49:49Speaker 1: How has it shifted conversations with your customers, right? Has it become like instead of playing this game of, hey, I need a sign for my business, okay?

00:50:00Speaker 0: Hey, like, you know, what are you trying to achieve? And then you go through like this 30-minute conversation where you try to like elicit budget and what they're looking for. Is it, has it shifted at all for you guys?

00:50:10Speaker 1: It shifted in two ways. One of the ways it shifted has been super beneficial because it tends to spit out really higher-end looking signage. Um so dimensional raised letters, LEDs, textured backgrounds, like beautiful posts. Sometimes it'll be a monument style sign with brickwork or or rock work at the bottom. And right away they come in with this and they're like, I love this. And I'm like, hmm.

00:50:33Speaker 1: Thanks ChatGPT, you just sold us a $15,000 job. Home run. You know?

00:50:38Speaker 0: Cuz

00:50:39Speaker 1: you know, they walk in and you're like, oh, I'm going to sell them a $3500 post and panel project, right? No, they already know that they want this beautiful sign. And they showed it to everybody in their committee or all of their coworkers and they're like, wow, that would look really great out front. And then they take it one step further and they feed ChatGPT a picture of the front of their business or their condominium complex or their subdivision and it's completely rendered out and and I'm like, oh.

00:51:02Speaker 1: You just did all the work.

00:51:04Speaker 1: All we have to do is just write it up and give you an estimate and take your deposit. And now of course, obviously we still need to hop in Illustrator and we need to do all the renderings and we need to build the shop drawings and we need to get the permits and all those things that come along with making a sign. But they've already essentially pre-qualified themselves. So that's one of the ways. Uh the other way that's been a little problematic, uh and we have a good example of this right now. We have we have a five uh vehicle wrap project going on right now and it's a ownership group of three individuals, one of which happens to be a in the marketing world, more in like print advertising. So they have their own thought about how these should go.

00:51:42Speaker 1: and of course, they're all five different vehicles, so you can't just build one template and have it apply to everyone. Uh, but they have been coming in, we started this project in November, and every couple days they come in with like 10 different ChatGPT renderings. And they come in, we sit at the, and I don't usually sit at the computer with people, but I've known them a very long time, so I'm willing to sit down and spend some time with them. But I finally said to them yesterday, I said, I I think we need to stop with the ChatGPT. You guys need to pick from one of the 30 directions you have, and then we need to sit down and we need to render what you want in Illustrator because you can't, what you have looks good, but you can't really execute it right now, right?

00:52:22Speaker 1: Oh, but it looks like a, you know, and the Ford Transit Connect looks like a cross between a van you would see in Australia, England, Mexico, and the US. It's not even like a real Ford Transit Connect, you know. But it does give you an idea of what some design thoughts are could be. And in their case, there's three or four of them making these decisions. They're not essentially, I don't want to say wasting our time, but we're not designing in a direction that they're the eventuality is they're going to say, you know, we really don't like that. They're coming in with something that they already really like. And we've actually found that to be super helpful.

00:52:59Speaker 1: So, now the other problem that we have found is is that people come in with this AI art and they say, "Can you use this?" And that's just, you know, that's where it comes down to you just have to flat out say to people, "This needs to be recreated," you know. And if you're in the vectorization business right now, it's a great time to be in the vectorization business because a lot of things are needing to be redrawn, you know. And and...

00:53:22Speaker 0: Certainly.

00:53:22Speaker 1: You know, if you're, let's put it this way, if you're a shop with any uh care and concern about your output, you're not going to just print the AI stuff as it comes in, right? Um, but if you care about your output and you want to have your customer be happy and you can capture the nice parts of the AI and meld that into something that's really functional, it it could be a powerful tool.

00:53:47Speaker 1: It really can. Um, one of the ways we found that it works really well is we have a couple customers that were interested in like a mascot style design. Um, you could upload a customer's photo and then say, you know, I'd like it to look like a Shaka surfer kind of guy. And then you could build different body parts, like, you know, have the torso look more muscular, right? Make him look like a surfer's build with big, you know, arm muscles and chest muscles, but make his hair a little bit more wild. And then you can get some ideas. So when you take those bitmap images and you put those into Illustrator and you start drawing over top of them, it just it's a little less pain of your brain.

00:54:26Speaker 1: thinking, how do I want to define the the shape of the chest or the shape of the shoulders or the shape of the hair or, oh hey, that's pretty cool the way the eye and the eyes and the nose were rendered, right? And then you're like, okay, I have a direction to work on. And I happen to like working in Illustrator. I don't do all of the stuff myself, but I definitely hop into some of these jobs and get into Illustrator and dig into it. And that part of it has been kind of fun.

00:54:51Speaker 0: The other thing that is... Mike's a Corral guy, so I don't know if you want to show down here. Yeah, I know.

00:54:55Speaker 1: And I've seen some of the stuff you do, Mike. It is super impressive and super technical.

00:55:00Speaker 2: Oh.

00:55:01Speaker 1: Um, I mean, AI's not there yet, but AI's coming for it. For sure.

00:55:05Speaker 2: it it's a it'll be a how do I say this? Be cold cold day in hell before it can do some of the technicals.

00:55:12Speaker 1: Correct.

00:55:12Speaker 2: Absolutely

00:55:13Speaker 1: No, you're exactly right. And that's what I mean about, that's what I mean about the shop drawings. Like it could make these things that look great. Yeah. But how do you build them?

00:55:22Speaker 2: How do you exactly?

00:55:23Speaker 1: How do you execute them? How do you fit them to templates? How do you uh calculate square footage for a storefront for a percentage to make sure you're within the local zoning regulations? Like the the AI, the ChatGPT will tell you, you know, in this town, in this zone, you can have this percentage of storefront. That's great.

00:55:40Speaker 1: Okay, go ahead and draw that. And it's like, uh, we don't know what to do now, right? Right. Maybe it'll get there at some point, but people still need to make the drawings that make the signs and build the files that run the routers and run the printers and install and fabricate, like, you know, that stuff's still going to be out there.

00:55:58Speaker 2: there's there's too much nuance. I mean, that's yes. You know, it's the same thing that has always been good for me as a as a sign designer is it's not difficult to design a a picture of a sign that looks nice, right? But it's very difficult to design a sign that looks very nice, but you can also build because there are so many physical limitations to how you build a sign, right? On top of permitting and and you know, what you can do by code and wind load and soil conditions.

00:56:30Speaker 2: So, yeah, I mean that's it it those connecting those dots are are it's it'll be if it can ever do it, it'll it'll be a miracle, I think. But yeah, I I I don't think it will. And I don't know if you guys are on you're paying too much attention to some of the Facebook sign communities right now, but there's a there's a guy right now who's kind of flooding some of the Facebook communities with AI sign design work. And he's got beautiful renderings that he's posting up there that he's doing in ChatGPT and then a quote-unquote technical drawing, which is basically just like a line drawing of of the

00:57:11Speaker 2: and it's it's clearly obvious that this guy is is having ChatGPT do the renderings first and then trying to come back and backfill the the technical side of it. Zero, I mean, and nothing that he's designing, these renderings are beautiful. Not a single one of them is buildable though. Yeah. You know, and and there's no, you can't, you can't work backwards like that to, you know, to to figure out how to build one of these signs that are just totally structurally impossible to build. So it definitely creates a lot of challenges. I mean, I get, I get a lot of these drawings too from my clients that are like, you know, this is what my client wants. I'm like, well, shit. Okay.

00:57:48Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:57:49Speaker 2: I mean, yeah, anything is buildable, right? Like there's very few things are not possible in this world or in the sign industry. It all comes down to how much money do they want to throw at it, right? Just like you said, like it's great, it's a great sales tool because it's always going to throw out something that's extremely complicated and high-end and and going to be, you know, challenging to fabricate and I'm I'm curious, I'd be really curious to know if there are if you see an increase in in revenue or sales or, you know, profit over over time from that. If if it actually does, you know, my...

00:58:23Speaker 1: Funny you bring that up.

00:58:24Speaker 1: We're tracking that. We're actually tracking, uh, we made a tag in, I don't know how Kathleen did it, but she's tracking it somehow. Because she figured out real early on, uh, she was like, "Oh, you know, we should start to pay attention to how much of this stuff comes in as AI," and then we can go back and pull those orders. And on a whole separate side note, I'm really big on auditing projects. Uh, I don't do it every week, I do it every month, and I don't do every project, but I do pull some key projects. Uh, because we've been at the point where we've made no money. So I don't want to go back there.

00:58:59Speaker 1: Um, but to that point, what is the impact on AI on how much we are making? And are we making sure that these projects that come in with AI are too difficult to build and therefore our formulas for estimating aren't really appropriate and maybe we need to tweak those formulas a little bit? Um, I've even brought up the conversation here internally about maybe if it's an AI project, we need a separate pricing table. Essentially, like we need to take some of our products and some of our materials within ShopFox and just tweak those up a little bit.

00:59:34Speaker 1: or do we, I have an old school friend who's been in this business for three generations and he calls it a G and A item, grief and aggravation. Um, you know, like a line item, you know, and so uh, and and he's so old school that when he was in business he actually had in his, I think he used, you know, QuickBooks or something back then, it actually said G and A factor and he would just tell his customers, you know, this is a difficult job to make.

00:59:56Speaker 1: This is what we're going to do. Um, and to your point, Mike, some

01:00:00Speaker 0: Some of these things that come in just are not buildable. Yeah. You know, or or they might be buildable but they're not going to be beneficial to the customer. They're not going to pay a return, they're not going to be readable, they're not going to get noticed. You know, hey, it looks pretty, but if it's not functional, I took your money and you didn't get any benefit out of it. That to me doesn't make sense.

01:00:19Speaker 1: Right, right. Yeah, there's a lot of like human factor that it can never replace. Like, you know, if you that's a south-facing wall that's going to get a lot of sun and if you use a, you know, too glossy of a finish, you're not going to read anything. Like AI doesn't know that. Very few people know that.

01:00:33Speaker 1: I mean, that's something that you learn by experience. Um [Beep]

01:00:37Speaker 0: Yeah, well here's a good example. Like we we build signs here that go in in New Jersey, a coastal New Jersey, so salty, moist, damp, and we build signs that get installed in Vermont. You cannot build the same sign for New Jersey as you build in Vermont and expect the same performance in the environment. You can't expect the same installation in here it's mostly sand and gravel and there it's rocks and dirt. Right. You know, these are the kind of things that the AI isn't going to really know about.

01:01:05Speaker 1: Um.

01:01:06Speaker 0: This is why you need the human touch.

01:01:07Speaker 1: Right, but you know, it's like the I guess it's it's not a new problem though, right? Because long before AI came around, like we've been seeing junior entry-level graphic designers fresh out of school who have taken taken jobs at the high-end brands, right? That are are mocking up flat out atrocious

01:01:24Speaker 1: designs and and unbuildable designs and and and everything like that. So, I I just like you said a minute ago that like you don't think it's you you think overall it's going to be good for business in general, which I 100% agree with. And my my stepdaughter, bless her heart, she's 18 and she's kind of a she's full of piss and vinegar and she wants to take on the world and she she's a she fancies herself an artist, so she's very very anti AI, right? But what I've been trying to get her to

01:01:54Speaker 1: understand is exactly what you just said, that this it it opens up a whole world of capabilities and possibilities for small business owners who otherwise just flat out don't have the money to do better marketing, right? Like most small business owners aren't graphic designers, they can't do this stuff themselves. They can't hire a professional photographer to come in and do product photography. They can't hire, you know, they can't afford a $20,000 website. Now all of a sudden all of this stuff is within reach of them. I don't think it's really going to take that much work off of professionals' plates. It's going to weed out people that suck, like you said.

01:02:33Speaker 1: But these people that are using ChatGPT to make flyers for their small business or, you know, hack out a one-page landing page for their their their business, they were never going to drop a bunch of money with a professional anyway.

01:02:47Speaker 0: That's exactly right.

01:02:48Speaker 1: and they were going to put something out there that sucked, that was really terrible looking, that didn't do them any good, and that just was visual pollution in the world, right? So now, and I'm not saying that like everything that ChatGPT creates is good. I mean, a lot of it is still absolute garbage. But it's it's better garbage than what you would have some receptionist at a nursing home cranking out in Microsoft Paint or Word, right?

01:03:12Speaker 1: So it

01:03:14Speaker 0: It better. Let's take that one step further. Let's take that one step further and how that benefits directly the sign business. So you have a tree care guy or a landscaper, right? And he's just starting out, he's one guy, a mower, a trailer, chainsaw, whatever. He does up that, his wife does up that AI flyer, throws it in the community groups, starts to get some calls. Because let's face it, those things do get noticed. And he was never going to come buy something at that point because he doesn't have the money. Right? He doesn't have the resources, but he knows he needs work. So he goes out and he gets work because he's getting attention. Now all of a sudden he starts doing jobs. Six months go by, now all of a sudden he buys a truck. Well, now all of a sudden he says, I bought a truck. Maybe I need to get the truck lettered.

01:03:52Speaker 0: So then he finds his way into a shop like ours or any sign shop, right? And then he gets a truck lettered. And then that first truck turns into, you know, now I'm going to go buy one of those chip box trucks, right? With the the whisper chipper in the back. And now I'm at a bucket. And now I should turn this thing into a billboard. So now all of a sudden you're going from a $400 truck lettering job to you might be able to sell this guy a $3,500 chip truck wrap. And this is a guy that never would have gotten to that point if it wasn't for the fact that he started with that AI flyer. Right. And this is what I mean by taking down these barriers of entry. And if people want to help evolve their businesses, they're going to, you know, we just need to accept the fact that some things are going to have to be AI.

01:04:32Speaker 0: So take what's AI and take what is made in your shop and do the absolute best you can do with what's made in your shop and I say to my customers all the time, go ahead and use AI for that. You know, let's let's do it. Because honestly, if like I have a car wash customer, he's got five five locations. I don't need to be laying out flyers that he's going to run a special on Friday. I mean, listen, if you want to pay our shop to do that, that's great, but that's a waste of your money. I would much rather you save that money, have AI build those things, you build up your subscription base and then you say, hey Rick, you know that that uh four by eight ACM sign that I have at that location out there,

01:05:09Speaker 0: I want to turn that into a really nice dimensional sign and I love those backlit channel letters you just did for, you know, Thai table or Jetty. Okay. Now all of a sudden I can sell them a $10,000 sign. That's where we're, that's what we're saying. Like I see that as how we it could benefit us.

01:05:25Speaker 1: Oh yeah, totally.

01:05:26Speaker 1: And also, you know, like your your lawn care guy who AI helps, you know, springboard his business a little bit. You know, every small business has competition and all competition has to keep up with the competition. So you you get you get one lawn guy who's wrapping all the trucks and then the other guy's gonna be like, well, shit, we're gonna do that. I gotta do that too.

01:05:44Speaker 1: and then the next guy does too. And it just snowballs from there, you know. I since since AI, you know, since this all became so accessible to people, like, you know, like you guys said earlier, like we're seeing so many of these AI generated images and blog posts and articles online and everything, right? And like it's easy to get annoyed by it on one hand, but on the other hand, you have to think I I I try to look at it as like these are people that want to create something, that have ideas in their head that they need to get out, right? And like God, we all know what that's like. Like the three of us, I'm assuming Rick's the same way.

01:06:20Speaker 1: like I know Brian and I like, you know, shit, we'll pull all-nighters all week just to get the idea out of our brain, right?

01:06:28Speaker 2: It's a virus.

01:06:29Speaker 1: It's

01:06:30Speaker 0: That's totally true.

01:06:31Speaker 1: So, I think it's so cool that now there's this tool that that allows people that that don't have, I mean, there's definitely a a bad side to this coin. I mean, there's two sides to this coin for sure, but I think it's amazing that there's now this tool that allows people to get their ideas out of the brain and into the physical world somehow, right? Yeah. Whether the, you know, whether the outcome or the output of that is slop is is is kind of beside the point. It's it it's a skill thing almost at this point more than anything else. I mean, you can hand somebody a circular saw, doesn't mean they're going to be able to build you a house with it. They might cut their arm off.

01:07:06Speaker 1: But like it it the fact that anybody with the time and patience to learn how to write a good prompt can now create something that they formerly could not and put it out there in the world, I think is is an amazing thing that we should all be more thankful for and not look at whatever it creates as the finished output, but just as a starting point to to run with, to to really make something amazing. And there's there's money to be made there if you if you if you don't stop at, okay, it output it now let's just go, you know, and take that as just, okay, this is where we start.

01:07:45Speaker 1: Now how do we monetize it? I mean, what an amazing time to be alive.

01:07:50Speaker 0: No, it really it really is. And I mean, even as someone who's a creative person and been designing since I was in college and even high school, sometimes I prompt things and I look at it and I say, oh, I never would have thought of that. That's a neat idea. Now, that doesn't mean I'm going to take that whole design, but I might see a tiny little smidge of something in it that it's output. Maybe it's the way it's like a tail on the end of a letter or maybe it's the way it's structured a shadow or something. And I'm like, oh, that's pretty neat. That's a neat panel shape, right? Like, so that's something I wouldn't have thought of. And you know, take that little portion and integrate it.

01:08:25Speaker 1: the speed of iteration too now. I mean like, you know, if you're trying to hack out a logo design or something like that and you're sitting in Illustrator, you could spend, if you're like me, like you'll have 400 variations of of one logo.

01:08:37Speaker 0: Dude, look at my... Do you know what I mean?

01:08:39Speaker 2: Shut up, dude. I don't I don't even I don't even dabble anymore.

01:08:43Speaker 1: my art boards are just like, Jesus, that's that should vomit right now. Mine are the same way. But you know, like doing that, it's part of the process and you have to trust the process and go through it, but at the same time it's very time-consuming and sometimes it can get very frustrating and you feel like, I am just totally spinning my wheels trying to get to something that I know will work. Where AI, brainstorming with AI, whether it's design or whether it's writing or whatever, speeds that process up so much and helps you get to the meat of whatever it is you're trying to find that you you you kind of you don't jump over it, but you kind of expedite the the shit work that you you have to go through to get to

01:09:23Speaker 0: That's a great way to put it.

01:09:25Speaker 1: Yeah. And like, who cares if AI's doing this? Like the the shit work in in the middle there. Like, I don't care. I don't want to do that. I just want to get through it.

01:09:32Speaker 0: So have you guys ever heard of the 10-80-10 rule of business management? Uh, you know, it's like where the it's like the founder has the idea and comes up with the first 10% of it, turns his team into it, the team runs 80% of it, and the guy and the founder runs back in and the last 10% packages it all up and finishes up the thing and, you know, not that they necessarily want to do that to put their name on it, but just for a business to be more efficient in their operations.

01:09:59Speaker 1: I've always heard that.

01:10:00Speaker 0: Steve Jobs. Almost the same.

01:10:01Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, very similar. Yeah. This is almost the same, right? Like you're you're starting out, you have an idea in your head as a designer, and then you have some heavy lifting that has to be done in the middle as far as the ideation and the evolution, and then you're coming back at the end and you're tying it all together. So maybe it's not ten eighty ten, you know.

01:10:18Speaker 1: maybe the ratios are a little different, but there's that stuff that happens in the middle, that meat and potatoes work. It what how cool would it be if you could get something that's really great for your client and instead of your artboard having 50 things on it, your artboard has five things on it and you pick one out of the best five. Right.

01:10:35Speaker 1: you become so much more efficient and in the end your your client is going to have a better outcome and again better outcomes for our clients means more successful clients means more inbound referrals means more of the kind of work that we want to be doing.

01:10:49Speaker 1: And that's really what it comes down to.

01:10:51Speaker 0: And ultimately, hopefully, it means better looking signs out there in the world too.

01:10:57Speaker 1: That's what I mean. This is exactly it. You know? Yes. No ugly stuff. I actually had some shirts made for our crew.

01:11:04Speaker 1: They say no ugly signs. I made I made I made good design matters, no ugly signs and no bad designs.

01:11:12Speaker 1: And um let's just say that I was overruled by a few people in my family and said that's inappropriate for our company brand. So they're at the bottom of the line.

01:11:23Speaker 0: I'm stealing it.

01:11:24Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, I mean it's true.

01:11:26Speaker 1: I I just don't want to make ugly stuff and it it's a disservice to it's a disservice to our clients and our community to make ugly signs, to make bad signs. You know, you go into these towns like, you know, take a take like a beautiful mountain town in in out west.

01:11:42Speaker 1: Steamboat Colorado, Kalispell Montana, whatever. Beautiful signs in the town. That helps elevate the entire community. And I want to do the same thing on Long Beach Island. I want people to come to LBI and be like, wow, there's some really cool businesses here. I got to stop and go in there.

01:11:57Speaker 1: you know, and and it's become a little harder because of the internet now and everyone has their heads in their phones instead of like looking around while they're driving. Um, but those first impressions still matter. And, you know,

01:12:08Speaker 1: I get people that come in all the time and they say, I want to look like this company, right? A company we've made something really cool for. And I say all the time, I'm like, listen, it's not just me that made that happen. It's them as company owners saying

01:12:22Speaker 1: we want to put the extra effort into our appearance and our brands and all these little minutiae items that go into it, not just say, oh, throw up a set of channel letters, right? I mean

01:12:33Speaker 1: we we have some clients who have done border tubing and they've changed the color of the border tubing on the building four times until it was just right. But you know what? On a on a Wednesday night in January when every other business on Long Beach Island is closed

01:12:48Speaker 1: these people have tables full. You know what I'm saying? Like and in the summertime they have lines out the door. And this is what's really important is that these it's not just us as the sign designers and the sign makers

01:13:00Speaker 1: it's getting the client's mindset to the point of, hey, this is a team approach here, and maybe you're not looking at this the right way. You're looking at it of just, oh, I got to spend three grand and buy a sign, right?

01:13:13Speaker 1: So here's a great, this is the best example I can give you of this. You go into a new restaurant, you didn't make the signs. You go into the bathroom. They've got gorgeous Restoration Hardware sconces, Toto toilets.

01:13:26Speaker 1: beautiful vanities, right? The whole thing. You know that it's like a hundred thousand dollar bathroom. Then you say to the wife, Hey, what did the bathroom look like in there? And she's like, God, that's one of the most beautiful bathrooms I've ever been in. And you go out to the dining room and there's like five tables full.

01:13:41Speaker 1: And then you go outside, you look at the sign and it's like a flat panel ACM sign and it's like vinyl stuck on it. And you're like, oh, right? This is what I'm talking about. Right there. That's like, you know, the after...

01:13:52Speaker 1: And so it it's definitely a combination of us as designers, but also clients understanding the importance of really good design and nice signs and tie it back in, generating those AI renderings can really help those people realize that.

01:14:08Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, yeah.

01:14:10Speaker 0: you know, something that you're yeah totally right. Like my with with my design business, one one of my biggest, if not my biggest, I think selling point for my work is the effort that I put into

01:14:25Speaker 0: the renderings and the presentation, right? speaking specifically about conceptual drawings, but you know, this applies to everything, technical drawings too.

01:14:32Speaker 0: but a lot of the work that I do is conceptual pre-sale design work for sign companies that are trying to sell the project to a client, right?

01:14:41Speaker 0: And I I kind of have a personal rule where I I flat out refuse to cut corners on those drawings. I I put a lot of effort into making sure they are beautiful drawings, that the renderings are insanely accurate, beautiful, photographic, like it looks like a professional photographer took this for the the cover of Architectural Digest, right?

01:15:04Speaker 0: like what one sign company might do on a single eight and a half by eleven sheet of paper, my presentation could be fifteen pages long. Which is almost... You're going to get the job. Right. But it's almost overkill, right?

01:15:17Speaker 0: But my clients tell me that like when they put my drawings next to in a bidding situation where their customers, you know, getting quotes from two or three different sign companies, they say literally never do they lose the job. And it's strictly due to just the quality of the presentation.

01:15:34Speaker 0: it it amazes me in this industry how few people understand that. That like just the quality of the drawings. Like it could actually be a shittier sign. Like the design could actually suck more. Like yeah.

01:15:46Speaker 0: drawing drawing A could be one page really crappy drawing but the sign could be a really a work of art. My drawing could look like absolute crap as far as the sign but the presentation blows people's minds. They buy it every time for more money.

01:16:00Speaker 0: I don't understand why people in this industry just can't figure that out. Like it blows my mind. But AI is like, at this point, there's zero excuse for not doing that. There's there's zero excuse for putting out a shitty drawing in this industry at this point. I mean,

01:16:14Speaker 0: And sign companies if you're listening, we may get hate mail for this, but like, fire your designer if that's what you're doing. Because you're losing the game and you don't even realize it. The amount of money that you're leaving on the table by not leveraging some of these tools to to step up your presentation game.

01:16:29Speaker 0: I mean, we're in the video industry.

01:16:31Speaker 1: Yeah, totally. A few this is a great real life example. So a few years ago we were bidding on a welcome sign package, uh six welcome signs for a town. And I had a friend who was on the committee and they said, listen, you know,

01:16:43Speaker 1: we can't show you the other drawings, but I can tell you that they're uneventful. I said, okay. So we spent a decent amount of time putting these drawings together. We actually went out to each location and rendered the sign in each location on the photo.

01:16:58Speaker 1: and not just dropped it on. I mean, I'm talking like we integrated it with the existing landscape and made it look like it really belongs there. Right. And submitted like a 12-page thing.

01:17:07Speaker 1: And as it turns out, our price was actually only like for the whole package, was only like thirty-five hundred dollars more than this other company. Uh, and we wound up winning the job, which was really cool. Uh, but in the end, I did get to see the other drawings that these people submitted.

01:17:21Speaker 1: and it literally was like, it was a nicely designed town welcome sign on a white eight and a half by eleven piece of paper. No background, no scale reference, not even a line that showed where the ground was, like nothing. And I literally thought to myself, I didn't have to work that hard. Yeah.

01:17:36Speaker 1: But, but no excuses. In today's day and age, you could take that eight and a half by eleven white background piece of paper and upload it to ChatGPT and say

01:17:47Speaker 1: Please generate a rendering for me in whatever any town USA I want a a a mountainous alpine background or I want a beach community background or whatever

01:17:58Speaker 1: And in 30 seconds, you'll get this beautiful rendering that's perfectly capable of being a sales tool right back at you. Yep. This is what I'm saying. If sign companies aren't doing this, and if you're in my local market and you're one of my competitors, just stop by the shop because I have a great relationship with everybody.

01:18:13Speaker 1: I'll be happy to run you through it because I think this is elevating all of the work and this has the potential to improve everybody's ugly signs. You know, there's a lot of ugly signs out there. And they're not doing these businesses any good. Yeah.

01:18:25Speaker 0: And let's be let's be honest, it's nobody's fault that those signs are ugly but sign companies.

01:18:30Speaker 1: Yeah, it's true.

01:18:31Speaker 0: Our industry is entirely to blame for that because we accept it because we're okay with it because we don't, I'm going to get on my soapbox again because we don't realize that we're in the marketing industry. Yeah.

01:18:40Speaker 0: So many people in this damn industry who think that we sell ACM and aluminum and paint. Yes. And our customers give a shit about that. No. They don't. No. Not at all.

01:18:51Speaker 0: But if you give them no other alternative but red Helvetica and white DiBond, and everybody else in your market gives them the same thing and nobody's trying to elevate what we do, then yeah, every every sign's going to look the same.

01:19:02Speaker 0: no signs are going to work for their clients. Nobody's going to ever want to spend any more money on a sign because they think that's what a sign is. You know, I mean we're this industry just loves to shoot itself in the foot every time it turns around.

01:19:14Speaker 1: Well, here's a turnaround. This is exactly like when the 4B came out, right? Like people were hand painting signs. This is this is a huge analog to the 4B coming out, to the Gerber Edge coming out, to CNC routers, uh solvent burners, right?

01:19:28Speaker 1: It first comes out and you're like, ooh, I can automate this. And like you said, six-inch red Helvetica. And remember the 4B, it would have like Helvetica, Avant Garde, and Brushstroke. Right, right, right. Six months, right?

01:19:39Speaker 1: And every sign in every town in America you could go to would be like, oh, there's a sign guy in town with a 4B.

01:19:45Speaker 0: Somebody got a four-leaf clover around here?

01:19:46Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. And so, but from there, people figured out how to essentially hack that, right? And there were always a couple minds in the sign business in those towns where somebody said, ah,

01:20:00Speaker 0: That's helpful, but it could improve my work by taking some of the meat and potatoes off my table so I could be more creative. Right. And the AI AI is the exact same thing. And this is what I'm saying, if you're in the sign business right now, you should be energized about this. You should be learning all about this. Like, get off of Facebook, get off Instagram, get off of TikTok, go learn how to work AI. Because it'll change it will change your business. I mean, and besides the design side of things, we have AI in some other...

01:20:29Speaker 1: gonna be my next question for you man is like besides design like how are you how are you using these things

01:20:35Speaker 0: like. So, one of my Achilles heels is I know where everything is in my shop. But if I'm not here and my guys can't find something, like I like things to have places, right? And some and a lot of the boxes in the shop on the shelves that have things are are labeled, you know, and lettered. But there's an awful lot of small parts that we have in this business, right? Like LED modules and stuff to solder stuff and wiring connectors and and cable mounting systems, right? And brackets and hall brackets, all this stuff. So, we used uh, I actually used Claude to build a beautiful database of bin locations out in the shop, and it's completely searchable on anyone's phone.

01:21:15Speaker 0: you scan the QR code that's on the bin and it pulls it right up and you can either see what's in that bin without even opening it or if you know you want something you can type in what you're wanting and it'll say go to table one two three or four or wall section one two three or four and there it is. And it's funny because my wife hadn't really seen too much of this so she came in the other day to to help with some painting on some dimensional stuff and she's like, where's the uh where's the navy blue latex paint? I said, don't ask me.

01:21:42Speaker 0: I said, go out to the wall out there. And she walked out there and she comes back into the office and she goes, "When did you do that?" I said, "Oh, I don't know, a few Saturdays ago when I was here doing something." And she goes, "Why didn't you do that 20 years ago?"

01:21:56Speaker 0: I said, I don't know, I guess I just decided, you know, AI is so so we have the whole paint shelves out there. So the first step was was like organizing everything by color and type of paint, right? And interior, exterior, whatever. And then QR coding it and then getting that into this whole database that Claude helped us build. And now you want to, if you want a can of Benjamin Moore, I don't know, Classic Navy, it'll tell you exactly where it is out there.

01:22:20Speaker 2: So you're telling me that it's possible to have a functioning inventory system in the sign industry?

01:22:25Speaker 0: Oh my god, I never thought I would have it. and you could buy an ER Yeah, I mean, it's possible. Yeah, it's possible. Imagine that.

01:22:34Speaker 0: And here's the thing, the whole reason why we built this is because this software that runs our business doesn't have any inventory or any bin locations or anything like that. And I've asked about this so many times about integrating it. Even my CPA has asked about this. Why don't you keep inventory?

01:22:49Speaker 0: Oh, our software doesn't do it. And not to not to rag too much on Shopvox because we it's not perfect, right? And we've had so many different pieces of software here over the years and we've been on Vox since 2013 now. So we have so much data and so much information in there and it allows us to run our business in a way that it fits our lifestyle. So sometimes I want to work at 10 o'clock at night. Sometimes I want to work from Vermont or I want to work from Florida or Kathleen wants to work from home or my wife wants to log in wherever she's at, you know. And the reality of it is is it allows us to do that. It allows us to check proofs, send proofs, do all that stuff whenever, wherever.

01:23:28Speaker 0: And I've looked at a whole bunch of the other things and a lot of the other things that are out there have good components, um, but they're just not all as put together. There's definitely some things I don't like about, you know, maybe the future of where Vox is going, like the credit card processing thing, the new company wants to do and all that stuff, but you know, I I think it'll get evolved. We we we did actually start building our own, like everybody else with AI. Uh, we have a full we do have a full proofing engine built, which is pretty wild. Uh, it functions just like Shopbox's proofing engine.

01:24:01Speaker 0: Um, I have it presently running in like a small GitHub repository, but the next step to scale it would be to sign up with like AWS or something like that and deploy the databases. Uh, it's kind of cool to be like an old mind and be learning about this stuff. I never would have thought I would learn how to code. Um, but AI has made us all coders. My son's way into it. I mean, he he codes all kinds of stuff and you know, these these I'll say young kids, you know, these 20-something kids that are into gaming and computers. And he came in one day and he's like, "What are you working on?" And I showed him and he goes, "Oh my god." He goes, "That's pretty cool actually."

01:24:36Speaker 0: you know, it was pretty and so the fact that you can, this is another thing about tearing down barriers to entry, right? for small businesses that don't have resources or have ideas and want to execute them, this is a great way to do it. So, from a non-design standpoint of AI, we're using it to help our shop run better as far as like organization, you know, we're using it for our own internal marketing. I mean, I'm not saying you can just cut and paste the copy that it spits out, but man, it spits out some really good copy, but more importantly, being an older person and I say older, I'm 52. I'm sort of out of touch and I mentioned this earlier, right?

01:25:14Speaker 0: Look at this.

01:25:14Speaker 0: I'm sort of out of touch with a lot of these younger entrepreneurs. And those are the people that are starting businesses and sign businesses want to connect with people when they're starting businesses. You want to build a relationship with them from the ground up. And so, AI has allowed us to speak a language that we don't speak as 52-year-old owners of this company, and to speak a language and present ourselves to some of these younger people and be relevant.

01:25:40Speaker 0: and and again, you can't copy and paste everything, but some of the ideas that it spits out about how to present information and how these younger minds think and make decisions is completely different than how people my generation do. You know, we would pick up the phone or we would go into a business and talk to the owner and look at the samples on the wall, right? And now all of a sudden these young people, they think about like hero sections and callout boxes and CTAs and hooks and all these things that people my age never ever had as far as like buying decisions. But if you're going to be a relevant business nowadays, these are the things you got to do. And if you're in your 50s and you own a business, you better learn about this stuff.

01:26:19Speaker 0: And so AI has been incredibly helpful for helping to bring us and our marketing message into the relevance of today's day and age and getting us in front of these younger, you know, entrepreneur minds. They think totally differently.

01:26:34Speaker 0: They really do. They they make decisions differently. they take cues

01:26:38Speaker 1: What are what are some of the insights that you would share with other the there's a whole audience of of like 50 plus, I'm assuming.

01:26:45Speaker 0: Yeah, I will say, I will say this in the last episode, uh, Mike when you were on your soapbox, I think I think it was you that said, God, if you don't have a website, you are cooked, right?

01:26:55Speaker 2: And by the way, I know Grant.

01:26:56Speaker 0: Yeah

01:26:57Speaker 1: That was probably me.

01:26:58Speaker 0: By the way, I learned that cooked actually can be the opposite of how I'm using it there. The young people say, "Did I cook?" you know what I mean?

01:27:04Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:27:05Speaker 0: cook

01:27:07Speaker 0: [Human Sounds]

01:27:09Speaker 2: Did I cook is a good thing. Am I cooked is a bad thing.

01:27:13Speaker 0: Yes, exactly. Exactly. [Laughter]

01:27:16Speaker 0: And so to that point, to that point, what we've learned through ChatGPT is that, you know, we were very early adopters of the web. Uh, in 1996, before I was even done with high school, I had a website for typistries.com. I mean, I think I might have started in 1994. Wow. So, you know, we've been out, we had a website called bowgraphics.com. We were the first company in the US to sell bow lettering online. You know, and and then the big guys got attracted to it and cut our price by 50% and I said, we're not going to do this anymore. But the point is is...

01:27:52Speaker 0: We've been doing stuff on the web for a long time, but there's been this accelerated evolution of how you need to present your business on the internet that has moved so quickly in the past, say, 12 to 18 months that like we're in deep into a major website rebuild right now. I mean, we have a website that's pretty, but the reality of it is is ChatGPT has made it very obvious to us that it's highly unfunctional, right?

01:28:19Speaker 0: It looks great. There's a bunch of pretty signs up there.

01:28:22Speaker 0: but we're not connecting with the people we need to be connecting with because we're not displaying that information visually with with the cues and the hooks and the decision-making prowess that these younger folks actually work with. And if it wasn't for ChatGPT, we probably wouldn't have figured it out, you know. And being a marketing person, it's kind of like the thing where you're like, oh, some of your own marketing is the hardest to do. Uh, I mean, every truck wrap that we've ever, every truck wrap, this is the biggest joke in my shop, right? Every truck wrap that we've ever had, we must have put 30 drawings on the walls, right?

01:28:55Speaker 0: We have one truck.

01:28:57Speaker 0: I think it's it's an 05 GMC. It's been a great truck, right? And I would probably don't even want to get rid of it. But I think it's had 30 wraps on it because we just put it on and peel it off and put it on and peel it off. And some of it we've used for training. But the point of it is is as as a marketer, your own stuff is so difficult to create and so difficult to curate because you really you feel like you want perfection. And really perfection is an enemy of any progress. And so if you can dial up ChatGPT for your own marketing as a sign shop owner, again, you don't have to copy and paste it, but take some of the ideas it's giving you.

01:29:32Speaker 0: while

01:29:33Speaker 1: about getting to good, not to like perfect, right? Especially again, that speed of iteration. And for me, that's the part that has like drawn me closer to the AI. It's like I I

01:29:45Speaker 1: I told Mike this the other day. I was like, this is like the best drug ever created because it feels productive and like you are like you're capable of producing something. Um and like stuff that previously went unseen.

01:30:00Speaker 0: finished or didn't get done or like, hey, I needed to do this, but you know, even you take like our podcast transcripts of putting together a description for YouTube, like generating a thumbnail, like all this all this stuff that's tedious about actually producing a podcast that that you don't see behind the scenes or that you don't see if you just consume the podcast. It takes up hours of time to do that stuff.

01:30:24Speaker 1: and now like and that's probably probably why you haven't had as many episodes, right? Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's probably a big part of saying, oh wow, we got to do another episode.

01:30:33Speaker 0: 100%

01:30:34Speaker 0: where it's just like, yeah. I built up this whole production of like, hey, this has to look great and then it starts getting in the way and getting in the way and you you skip one week and then you skip the next week and by the time you look up, it's been six months or a year.

01:30:51Speaker 1: And then you get people like me saying, "Hey, should we do an episode?"

01:30:56Speaker 2: The flip side to that though is it can also provide zero guardrails, so You could be like me.

01:31:06Speaker 2: I'm trying to rebuild my client portal app that I use to manage all my jobs. I'm now on like the fourth iteration of it. You know, I I finally had the spring for the Claude, the $250 Claude Max.

01:31:19Speaker 2: Just so I could keep building versions of this app for myself. So, you know, if you, you know, there's a, you got to strike a balance with it, you know, like you got to know when to hit the brakes and just like accept it and move on too, which I'm still trying to figure that out.

01:31:36Speaker 0: set up screen time on your computer

01:31:38Speaker 0: [Speech]

01:31:41Speaker 1: I mean, I I just think it's probably the greatest. I mean, of all, you know, I've been in the sign business for a long time now. And I remember when we got the the Gerber Edge. I was like, this is the greatest thing ever. We got the router.

01:31:52Speaker 1: This is the greatest thing ever. We got the first solvent printer. This is the greatest thing ever. We got the flatbeds. This is the greatest thing ever. This is going to change this industry. And I don't think there's anything that's going to change this industry and improve this industry and improve outcomes more than any piece of hardware that you could ever buy in your shop. But what AI can do for your business.

01:32:12Speaker 1: It's wild.

01:32:13Speaker 2: Hundred percent agree.

01:32:14Speaker 1: So, it's it's a great time to be... Listen, I I am energized and fired up about the sign business because of all this stuff. I I could do this for another 10 years, no problem. which is crazy. I'm going to do something for 44 years. Wow, that's pretty nuts.

01:32:28Speaker 0: Absolutely. Well, that I mean we're closing in on like 90 minutes and I'm trying to be respectful of your time and you know, my wife of not not putting me on a Dateline episode. Um, you know, we always try to cap the show off with like the future. So, you know, you want to go another 10 years, but you know, specifically, what are you guys working on now? You know, what's the next six months, the next year look like? You know, what do you see five years from now?

01:32:56Speaker 1: So one of I think one of the biggest things that most sign shops totally missed the mark on, we're even guilty of it. Like I said, we've had a website, a presence on the web since 1994. Um, but young people nowadays do all of their buying, make all of their buying decisions and do all of their research on mobile devices. And so we all have to become better at being accessible and interfaceable and sellable through mobile and web. And it's got to be responsive, it's got to be fast, it's got to show up in all the search engines.

01:33:35Speaker 1: ChatGPT and the other AIs are great at telling you where you're going wrong on this to fix it, and whether you want to fix it yourself or you want to hire a web developer, uh, as a third party or contractor, an employee, whatever, there's so many resources nowadays available that we think we have no excuse not to make our business way more digital. And listen, you're never going to have an add to cart button for a ten thousand dollar monument sign, right? There's just way too many variables. But you can be the place where if people have spent so much time on their phone sitting on the, you know, this is how business owners operate, right?

01:34:11Speaker 1: they're they're laying in bed on their phone researching their next thing that they need to do or sitting on their couch or having their coffee or sitting on their flight, whatever it might be. Uh, you got to be that ever-present place. And you know, I I have to laugh because someone came in the other day and they're like, "You don't have any phone numbers on any of your vehicles." And I go, "No."

01:34:31Speaker 1: How can you not have any phone numbers? I'm like, no, no phone numbers.

01:34:35Speaker 1: And and do you not want to talk to people? I go, no, actually we welcome people to call us. In fact, if you hop up on our website, there's a button right on there that says call now that you could click that your mobile device will call us. But I want to get you on my website. I want to get you on my blog site. I want to get you on my social channels because we are in a visual business, right? If people don't see the cool stuff we make and they don't start thinking, oh wow, I need that for my business, how are you ever going to connect? And so the internet, you know, there's no more yellow pages, right? There's no more like community magazines. I'd even go one step further and and pull that Gary V playbook that says like social media is dead.

01:35:13Speaker 1: You know, the days of throwing a post up about your business are over and done with. Like it's interest media. He's not wrong about that. And so I see it as, you know, we're not in a position where we're going to go create a bunch of interest content out in the shop like running around wrapping vehicles and because who's really going to watch that?

01:35:31Speaker 1: Right.

01:35:32Speaker 2: All right, yeah.

01:35:33Speaker 0: Yeah, we were...

01:35:34Speaker 1: Yeah, we would.

01:35:35Speaker 1: But the reality of it is is that there's other ways that we can get in touch with those people and connect with those people besides just being on social media. So we're all in on this uh tooling up the blog site, making sure we're getting tons of content posted on the blog site, retooling the website. I I don't know when the episode's going to come out, but it might come out before the new website's ready, which might be embarrassing, but you know, sometimes as business owners, we deserve to feel a little bit of discomfort to help push us to the next spot. Um, and I think that's really where you need to be in the sign business nowadays. You know, obviously having your truck wraps, that's super important. You know, graphics on your truck, having a nice sign in front of your business, having a nice lobby, but nobody comes in anymore.

01:36:16Speaker 1: They they hardly ever, it's only older folks that come in. All the young people, sometimes these these clients that are spending ten, twenty, thirty thousand dollars with us, we will have facetimes, we will email, we will have phone calls. We don't meet face to face and sometimes until install day. And they're like, "Oh, nice to meet you," you know, which is wild. I never ever thought we would be conducting business that way. And as an older person, that's been a big adjustment.

01:36:39Speaker 0: So, don't be afraid to get The amount of business that goes through text these days is wild. insane, yeah.

01:36:45Speaker 1: Yeah.

01:36:46Speaker 0: because of my wife is the same way. She's like, I if I can't do it on my phone, like I I don't want to do it. And like she's not young. Well, I mean she's she's beautiful, right? I'm going to get myself in hot water now, aren't I?

01:36:58Speaker 1: We should wrap this up.

01:37:00Speaker 0: [Human Sounds]

01:37:03Speaker 0: I mean, we're we're both 40-ish, so like, you know, but she does everything via text or, you know, that that sort of thing. Like she if she can't buy a photo book online

01:37:15Speaker 1: Yeah.

01:37:16Speaker 0: She loves doing that stuff. I mean, certainly a photo book is a far cry from a sign, but

01:37:21Speaker 1: But people but people are buying signs online. They really are because their time is valuable. Listen, if they can get their Walmart order or their Amazon order delivered, they might not realize that we can't deliver a a monument sign or a beautiful set of channel uh three-dimensional wall sign or channel letters by pressing buy here, but they still expect that level of interaction and they're going to go with that company that presents that out there in front of them. Um, and you know, listen, we got to evolve. You know, evolve or die, baby. So, you know, it's just it's and and listen, I'm in my 50s, you're in your 40s.

01:37:58Speaker 1: Imagine the buying decisions and buying pathway of these entrepreneurs that are starting businesses in their 20s. They don't ever go to any place of business. It's all right here in front of them. So, be that guy that's right in front of them.

01:38:12Speaker 2: Yeah.

01:38:13Speaker 0: Great advice.

01:38:14Speaker 2: That is really good advice. Yeah.

01:38:19Speaker 0: Um, Mike, any parting questions for Rick before my wife slaughters me?

01:38:25Speaker 0: [Human Sounds]

01:38:27Speaker 1: I see her in the corner of the frame right now.

01:38:29Speaker 0: Yeah, yeah.

01:38:30Speaker 2: I can feel Ashley's eyes just burning a hole through you right now. Um, you know, I I do. And this is something that, and this is, I hope this doesn't like launch us into a complete other like tangent for another hour.

01:38:44Speaker 1: And this is another episode.

01:38:45Speaker 2: Yeah, it reminds me of...

01:38:47Speaker 2: And this is not an AI question necessarily, but it is about we've been talking a lot about young people in the, you know, starting businesses and and and everything like that in general. Um, I'm curious your take on the state of the sign industry in general right now, related to the age, the general age of those of us who are doing this. I see a um kind of a wave of retirement coming with a lot of old-timers in the industry, especially, you know,

01:39:17Speaker 2: the guys that are fabricators and welders and electricians and and journeyman installers who, you know, have been doing this for 30, 40, 50 years and are, you know, they're 60s or early 70s now. When when when this wave of of craftsmen and technician retires, what do you see backfilling that?

01:39:37Speaker 1: That's actually a huge problem. Um, and you know, obviously you got the whole Mike Rowe approach to like people being blue-collar and whatnot. But that's a the the relation here is it's a huge problem for us around here because new home construction, because we're in a tourism coastal community, is on fire. And it's been on fire for every year that I've been in this business. But what that means...

01:40:00Speaker 0: business people that want to work in the trades, they go to work building these houses. They're making fifty, sixty, seventy dollars an hour. If you're a good carpenter, eighty dollars an hour is not unheard of. There's no way any sign shop and and those are the that's the skill set, right, that's needed to build nice signs. But no sign can be priced and be sellable paying a guy eighty dollars an hour to be in the shop fabricating signs. It's just not going to happen. I don't even think Dizzy would pay that kind of money for signs. And so that is a huge issue and to try to work to combat that, we work with the local high school.

01:40:36Speaker 0: Um, I served on the school board, part of my community service because I believe it's, we didn't even get into that, but I think it's really important for business owners to be involved in their community and give back to their community.

01:40:47Speaker 0: Um, but we work with the shop teachers at the high school and they don't necessarily have a school to work program per se, but they have an early dismissal program and then all of those staff members over there know what we do here, so if they identify a student that they think would be a good fit, uh we've been super lucky to get some students over the years to come in here and out of all five of the students, the most five recent students that we've had, they've all gone on to start their own businesses. Not all in the sign business, a couple of them became electricians, one a plumber, but they're all working with their hands.

01:41:21Speaker 0: Um, and what happens is is people come into the sign world and they're like, wow, this is a little bit landscaping, this is a little bit carpentry, this is a little bit cabinet making, right? This is a little bit graphic design. Everybody thinks it's all graphic design. It's really just a little graphic design and then every other single trade, whether it's electrical, fabrication, welding, painting, you know, you name it.

01:41:43Speaker 1: and paid the worst.

01:41:44Speaker 0: Yeah.

01:41:45Speaker 0: and that's that's one of the biggest problems is that, you know, you have to, I think the industry, my hope is is like I'm getting a little older here, right? And so I can't push a squeegee as effectively as I used to push a squeegee. My body starts to hurt a little bit. I certainly don't really like ladders anymore. I have no problem being up in the lift. Um, I don't really like being on roofs anymore. And so my point is is I'm hoping that this is this is actually something that I'm hoping in the future maybe I could get a little more involved in the industry and help to cultivate a pathway.

01:42:19Speaker 0: for new folks to, you know, actually want to work in sign shops, maybe someday own sign shops, because it's really difficult to get good help. Really difficult.

01:42:28Speaker 1: that's yeah, that's a really amazing cause for sure because yeah, I mean I this is something that I lose sleep over.

01:42:36Speaker 0: Totally.

01:42:37Speaker 1: It's a foot.

01:42:38Speaker 0: This is why we all work so many hours to get things done and push things out the door because it just needs to be done.

01:42:44Speaker 1: Right. Yeah, and if you step foot in any like bigger, especially any electrical sign shop that's doing some, you know, real heavy fabrication, you know,

01:42:52Speaker 0: They're all old minds. Go out in the shop, they're all old dudes.

01:42:54Speaker 1: there are very very few people under the age of like 40, 45 and before. Yeah, and like, that's terrifying if you think about it because when they retire, this industry could could literally grind to a halt.

01:43:07Speaker 1: Yeah, like that's not an exaggeration. And that that's something that I it just it feels like nobody's really like thinking about or or putting a lot of, you know, effort into, um, fixing or or solving. And it really, it really worries me and I don't know how we're going to recover from that when it when that wave kind of hits, but

01:43:27Speaker 0: without without getting on a whole separate hour-long conversation, some of the ways shops, especially the bigger shops are handling it is by outsourcing and and overseeing it. And I mean, we have a couple long-term clients that do beautiful mall work and and big huge packages, nationwide packages, and it's all imported now. And some of the quality of it is amazing and some of the quality of it is garbage. But I will say of the imported stuff that's really good, it is phenomenal. And some of these factories are just turning out work that and you go watch their videos and who knows, maybe they're all setups, right?

01:44:06Speaker 0: But there's tons of young people working on these factory floors in these foreign countries making beautiful polished letters and 3D welded letters and and and faces with inlays and multicolors and you're just like, wow, that's a

01:44:19Speaker 1: Are you are you talking about the sign factory?

01:44:21Speaker 0: in uh that's one of them. There's a there's a couple in China. I've watched a bunch of them. Yeah, it's wild.

01:44:25Speaker 1: A client turned me on to them and and I I've got to see some of their work firsthand and it's absolutely as good as it gets. Like I've never seen craftsmanship like that before.

01:44:34Speaker 0: It's unbelievable.

01:44:35Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I mean it's, you know, that goes back full circle to the whole outsourcing question, but yeah. I mean that's, I mean what a shitty position to be in that that's our only alternative is that when when all the old-timers in the industry retire, we just got to outsource it to China.

01:44:48Speaker 0: like terrible. That's a that's a terrible spot for the sign industry to be in.

01:44:52Speaker 1: Right. It's a terrible spot for the, I mean, not to go political, but that what a terrible spot for the whole country to be in. I mean, like, yeah. Call the quality question aside, like, what happened?

01:45:01Speaker 0: See, what I think what I think the presentation needs to be is is, you know, the sign business has been great to our family. Listen, it's been a lot of work, right? Um but it's been fun, it's been rewarding, it's been financially rewarding. You know, we don't make a ton of money, but we've had a great quality of life, a good balance between work and being able to travel and, you know, live in a nice community and raise our kids and be be flexible in our schedules.

01:45:26Speaker 0: People that start in the shop, you know, they could someday become owners, right? Whether it's this shop or any shop really. And I think that needs to be communicated that being in the sign business is a pathway to changing other people's lives, right? Dan Antonelli's comment. He's completely right about that. Like everything we make changes the lives of the business owners and their employees. Um so we have a huge impact on your community. And you know, you can make a pretty decent living and have a lot of flexibility.

01:45:55Speaker 0: So, you know, listen, if you want to get in the sign business, this is a great time to get in the sign business. Reach out to me. I'm not going to talk to you about it. Let's go.

01:46:03Speaker 1: Yeah, no, it's it's like it's still an honest living. Like it's it's like honest livings are are I always think of that meme of like kind of the old fat farmer. Like it's it ain't much, but it's an honest living.

01:46:14Speaker 0: On days when I go to Rotary, I promise I wear a collared shirt. On days when I'm in the shop, I wear a hoodie, okay?

01:46:21Speaker 1: I'm wearing actual pants and a shirt right now, but normally I'm in jeans.

01:46:26Speaker 0: [Human Sounds]

01:46:28Speaker 1: or bunny suit, sometimes that happens.

01:46:30Speaker 2: bunny suit, yeah.

01:46:32Speaker 2: Uh, I can't believe I talked you into that one, but um, no, uh, Rick, I can't thank you enough for for coming on, man. I know we we circled this one for a long time and we've had a conversation of like, hey, let's do this episode for yeah.

01:46:46Speaker 1: Don't be strange to see you here back too because I think this is really really a good conversation and there's more.

01:46:51Speaker 0: I'm super stoked to be here and I think the future of the podcast, like I I I don't think you guys realize how much of an impact you have on shop owners. Even someone like myself who's been at this a long time, like I said, I I've learned by listening things I never would have thought of to other episodes. Plus it's just great to hear other people's stories, like that that guy Raz, how I built this, right? You know, like it's just amazing to hear people's journeys in the sign industry because there's so much potential and so much opportunity out there.

01:47:18Speaker 1: Well, I think there's a there's a lot of value in just solidarity with people who walked a mile in your shoes, you know, and it's it's a hard industry.

01:47:24Speaker 1: It really, really is. And just talking shop with people and and just hearing that you're not alone and other people have faced the same battles that you have. Because when you own a business and you're you're you're you're in the shit, like you feel like you're the only person on the planet that's ever ever gone through this, right? Yep.

01:47:39Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm the only person that's ever had it 3:00 a.m. and covered in CET ink trying to place a print head.

01:47:45Speaker 2: We've had what, three guests on the the podcast where their shops have burnt down.

01:47:51Speaker 0: Hey, don't put that out there. That's one thing we haven't had, okay? And I'm a firefighter too. No, don't go there.

01:47:58Speaker 1: Yeah, but like no, but seriously, like sometimes it's just like we need a community of people to not not just talk about all the technical stuff and this is how I do this and this is how you do this, like but just like, yeah, man, my shit burnt down and it sucked and I almost lost the house for it, you know. Like sometimes that's really, we need that more than anything else. So, yeah, maybe we need to have you back and tell us more.

01:48:20Speaker 2: Yeah, we could we could talk more about working next to the drug distribution ring.

01:48:25Speaker 0: Yeah.

01:48:26Speaker 2: That's that's a first for the podcast.

01:48:28Speaker 1: Yeah, how do you make a sign with cocaine dust in the air? That's great. Your productivity must have been through the roof, man.

01:48:35Speaker 0: That's right.

01:48:35Speaker 2: That's right. Yeah. Well, Rick, thanks again, brother.

01:48:39Speaker 0: No

01:48:40Speaker 2: If you guys want to check out Rick's work, uh it is typistries.com.

01:48:45Speaker 0: Yeah, actually, hop over to uh to signaday.com too, which is like our sister site. Signaday.com. Yeah, and what it is is it's a daily photo blog since we love signs. Uh, it's just like short pumps of little projects and stuff. We actually just finished re-skining that site and talking about the importance of being on the internet. And hopefully by the time this episode comes out, the typeastries.com will be done or at least better than it is now.

01:49:10Speaker 0: So, just chat to me.

01:49:12Speaker 2: It's like a big face LED sign. I see.

01:49:14Speaker 0: Thanks. That was a fun one. We had so much fun building that.

01:49:17Speaker 1: That's a cool idea. I'm gonna check it out.

01:49:19Speaker 0: Yeah, thank you so much.

01:49:21Speaker 2: Alright. Well, that's it for this episode of the Better Sound Shop podcast. If you're interested in being a guest, hit us up at hey at bettersoundshop dot com. Give us a little bit about your story. That's it. We'll catch you on the next episode.

01:49:34Speaker 0: Thank you very much.

01:49:36Speaker 1: Great meeting you.

01:49:37Speaker 0: Likewise

01:49:38Speaker 1: Take care, guys.

01:49:39Speaker 3: If you liked this episode, make sure you hit subscribe to get all the latest episodes and check out our website, bettersignshop.com. Get free resources and helpful tools on growing your shop. Thanks for listening.

01:49:54Speaker 0: [Music]

Evolve Or Die // Rick McDonough of Typestries

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