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Hi guys, and welcome to the next edition of the Better Sign Shop podcast.
As always, I've got my co host, the Sign Shop Yoda, Mr.
Pete Karunas.
Happy to be here.
Happy to be back.
That's right.
It's been a while.
Yeah.
I forgot how to do this.
Uh, I forgot how to use my microphone, forgot how to use my camera, made
sure all the settings still worked.
You know, this is, I think I got a couple of new cool features where if I go like
this, like it'll, Hey, and I get some really nice fireworks and stuff like that,
but I've disabled all of that for today.
Oh, well, I'm sad.
We're not going to get to see that.
I talked with Michael.
He is in the middle of a terrible sinus infection.
So we're not going to have him today, but we do have a special guest.
I'm a little raspy because my daughters like to cough in my face all week.
So we'll just have to contend with it.
Super excited to be back.
Oh, there's the fireworks.
There you go.
Love it.
Yeah.
For, for all the listeners out there, we did receive all the emails of, okay.
Are you guys saying, Hey, when is the next episode?
Did we just kind of took a nice little summer break that
extended a little past summer?
Yeah.
I mean, it's, it's been a great summer for me.
You know, I've been, I've met some really new people, some new clients, some new
sign shop owners around the country.
I'm, I've had some time to get over, you know, my, my baseball
team, not making the playoffs.
This year now, I'm at the hockey season, so I'm, I'm enjoying the start of
something new to take up my personal time, but, you know, like, look, it's
been, it was great to take the summer off.
We're like, this is a new podcast.
We don't, we didn't want to leave everybody, but we did want to enjoy.
Our summer here, uh, probably not going to enjoy next summer because
we'll probably be doing a lot more podcasts through the summer.
But Brian, what you've been working on, man, what you've been doing
since the last time we spoke,
too much to recount.
Like, I've got a lot of cool things coming out soon that I will share.
We've made some updates to our platform, which are are really nice, but I
don't want to keep our guests waiting.
Too much longer.
So what do you think?
All right, I've been
well, let's bring them on.
Let's let's get this going All right, transition.
All right guys, welcome
back.
We have our very special guests Adam Wald from creative sign design Designs,
I'm sorry Adam is super nice to have you this has been many months in the making.
Yeah for sure Yeah, I want to apologize first and foremost for getting you on
but we're excited to have you here.
And yeah, I make Oh, I'm excited.
I'm excited.
I'm excited to be on the show, uh, after a long hiatus, uh, and excited to, to
share with you, uh, some of, some of the background that I have and some
of the tips and tricks that I can, uh, benefit the, uh, the listeners with.
Yeah.
So before we dive into the topic at hand, which is going to be managing and running
an efficient art department, why don't you give us a little backstory on you and the
company?
Yeah.
So my background, I've been in the, uh, sign industry for 23 years now.
It's pretty much the first, uh, job that I got out of high school.
You know, my friends and I, I was kind of around the fast and the furious
times, if a lot of you can remember that.
And, uh, you know, me and my friends had some fancy cars and, uh, there
was a small speaker shop, um, and a, and a small guy that had a very
small closet that was doing vehicle graphics at the time and, uh,
developed a good relationship with him.
And, uh, he said, Hey, go to the sign company up.
you know, up the street and learn how to, you know, weed and tape
vinyl and lay vinyl and then come back to me and I'll give you a job.
Um, and, uh, you know, I, I ended up staying at that place for about, uh,
five years, um, and, uh, learned a lot.
And that was kind of my first foray into the sign industry.
I, I started without knowing a single thing or even having a
clue about how signs are made or, or that there was companies that
actually did that for a living.
And, uh, it was a small, it was a fast signs.
And, uh, uh, I really like working at that Fastlines because you get a plethora of
different experiences, you know, from, from, from production, installation, the
customer service aspect of things, design kind of in that small, uh, group setting.
Um, and, uh, so for probably the first two years, I just simply laid vinyl and
things of that nature and how I got into the design arena is we had a designer
on staff and, uh, that designer was probably sick of me doing the same thing,
but I was also sick of waiting on that.
Designer to do recuts for vinyl and things like that.
And so I was like, Hey, I'm pretty tech savvy.
Um, you know, technology is kind of a passion of mine.
Uh, why don't you sit down with me and show me how you're doing it?
Right.
And, uh, we had a separate, uh, machine and, um, he showed me how
to do the recuts of the vinyl.
And, uh, that's kind of just where I started in the industry
as far as design is concerned.
I, I took a passion to that, uh, learning how to do the recuts.
And then I was doing my own design work.
And, uh, you know, before, before, you know, it, uh, within three years, I was
a designer for that particular center.
Um, and then, uh, uh, from there, I kind of, branched out and did a
plethora of different things just kind of exploring my, uh, the industry,
uh, within that particular franchise.
I did some customer service work, some outside sales and was trying to identify
like, what would be my career path here?
Sales definitely was not it.
Uh, I could tell you that right now.
Um, and, uh, uh, did a number of years as a project manager, I'm sorry, as a, as a
production manager at a small franchise.
And, uh, realizing that there was only so, so far you could go at a franchise
and, uh, moved on to my first commercial sign shop, uh, was a local commercial
sign shop that did national accounts.
And, uh, that is what really kind of opened my eyes to what a sign company
could be, um, you know, things like pan form faces that a pan from face oven, you
know, giant paint booths, you know, people actually physically manufacturing and
building the signs from, you know, uh, you know, angle and tube and things like that.
Thank you.
My background when I started working there.
I was just kind of a lowly vinyl applicator.
Um, and, uh, uh, those of you that are work in that franchise, uh,
world know that the turn times are much more aggressive than
more of a commercial sign shop.
So, you know, I was running laps around everybody in the, in the vinyl shop
and literally getting all the work done for the whole day for vinyl by noon.
Um, and, you know, uh, had the opportunity from that point forward kind of twiddling
my thumbs for the rest of the day.
Uh, to experience things like, uh, going out on installs and,
um, and, uh, you know, doing service work and things like that.
Uh, but ultimately it kind of got to a point where that company
just couldn't keep me busy in the way that I wanted to be busy.
And, um, I went off and joined a cust a company as in a design role doing
rebranding for petroleum gas stations.
Okay, and this is really where I started to kind of really understand efficiency
as far as design is concerned and how to kind of better your workflow day to day.
You know, whenever I first started working there, a majority of petroleum
gas station work are components based, meaning you kind of have a brand standard
and you're going to have, you know, multiple different sizes of different
signs or different graphics, depending on the existing site conditions or
even the new build site conditions.
But, uh, for the most part, your parts are kind of interchangeable.
Um, you know, maybe the only thing that might change is maybe the,
the, the width, the linear length, or something along those lines.
And, uh, so whenever I first started working there, we
had a two person design team.
And, uh, uh, it would take us anywhere between six to eight hours
to design a, a, uh, a petroleum gas station start to finish.
And what I mean by that, it would be the pylon signs, all the canopy graphics,
all of the pump graphics, any sort of, uh, Graphics that might be around
the area and those types of things, we would develop that from scratch
and I worked there for about 6 years.
And by the end of the by, by the time what we would do during that time
period is every time we would do a 1 off, we would save it as a template.
So a unique pump.
A unique gas canopy size.
You know, a unique pylon sign, things like that.
We would save it as a template and there would be chances
that we may never use it again.
But there are that 1 off chance that we did use it again.
We already had.
We've already done the design work, right?
We can essentially just kind of pull it.
Verify that the information is correct and put it in our drawing and we're
kind of done so by the time that I left there six years later, we could
turn full sites worth of design work within 30 minutes to an hour.
So, so it was in more than half.
So it was like eight hours.
Yes.
To start with and down to like 30 minutes or less.
Correct.
Obviously all of that's pending on good survey information and
things like that and assuming that the information is correct.
So that particular business, um, much like a lot of national account businesses
kind of put all their eggs in one basket or a couple baskets, um, and, uh, um,
had a couple accounts Go south on them.
And, uh, basically, I saw kind of the writing on the wall that this company
isn't going to survive and in the way that I felt comfortable sticking around.
And, uh, you know, eventually, uh, that business ended up, uh, kind of closing
and I moved on to creative sign designs.
Um, uh, I've been with creative sign designs for 11 years.
I started as a project coordinator at the time and which was essentially kind of
a beginner project manager and quickly within the first two years moved into a
leadership role and I managed our project management team and from there I moved
into managing our product management team and our estimating team and And basically,
for the last 6 years, I have been managing our design team at the organization
and my background has been in design.
My passion's kind of been in design.
You know, I've always kind of wanted to be in this position.
And, you know, 6 years ago, there was a need at the time.
I was actually managing estimating and design and those of you that kind of
Work in the industry, kind of understand how those two can really kind of
collaborate and produce something rather efficient if they're communicating
and collaborating on a daily basis.
Um, so that was kind of the thought process there.
Um, and then we just grew in a way that, um, I couldn't handle the estimating
team, uh, myself, and I had some growth.
Uh, ideas for the design team, and, uh, in 2018, we, uh, developed, uh,
environmental graphic design studio, uh, within our organization also, uh, which
is basically our fee for service business.
So you're, you're, you're a developer.
You're an end user.
Um, you don't really know what you want.
All you simply have is marketing and branding ideas of architectural renderings
of your building, your interior design renderings, and we will basically
come up with everything for you start to finish both interior and exterior
graphics, all the location planning, message scheduling, you know, and some
ancillary items, things like master sign plans, retail, tenant criteria and things
like that, uh, creative sign designs.
Um, we, uh, we are, we are on track to do roughly 28 million dollars this year.
Um, we do, uh, our primary business is architectural custom, uh,
interior and exterior signage.
Gotcha.
What set, what sets us apart is we're, we're a turnkey organization.
Uh, a lot of larger companies either do exterior signs or interior
signs, um, and, uh, we do it all.
We manufacture in-house.
Um, we manufacture all of our own, own interior signs in house, and
we do, uh, the vast majority of all of our design work as well.
Wow.
The quintessential one-stop shop.
Yes.
All right.
Oh, I think it's a lot more than that.
So let's kind of hit pause on that.
Thank you so much for giving us that really nice introduction
here into the eyes of what our listeners are listening to.
Here's what creative designs is all about.
I want to get into your role, though, for a little bit.
You said you're, you know, okay, so you're well rounded.
Started as a vinyl applicator, you know, you know, that, you know, that
business, you know, that side, you're not a business owner, but correct.
I want to 1st, I want to 1st kind of get, I want to 1st ask this question
and then I want you to kind of get into it a little bit, but why with
so much experience with so much, um.
Experience in multiple, multiple different departments.
You've mentioned it just before estimating design project management.
You know, I'm sure you've you can handle all departments.
Why not get into owning your own
place?
You know, the ownership team at creative sign designs.
Um, allows me to develop my personal skill sets and the skill sets of the people on
my team and allows me to develop processes and procedures outside of just not only
my design team, but across the rest of the organization will help financially
back that if I want to play a little bit for lack of a better term, um, and,
and experiment a little bit, you know.
Jamie Harden is the owner of our company and his lovely wife, Melanie, is our is
our vice president of human resources, and they both allow me with the relationship
that we've developed over the past 11 years and some of the sex successes
that we've seen together to develop.
Different aspects of the business and create processes and procedures
that help things run efficiently and things of that nature.
And that's provided comfort for me from an income standpoint and
from a, a job safety standpoint.
And that's, what's important to me and my family.
You know what I mean?
Um, so it's
Sounds like it sounds like, you know, you're comfortable putting on your, your
director hat, your manager hat, having a voice and really being able to collaborate
with such a wonderful ownership team that allow you the freedom to kind of branch
off and explore other opportunities, which, you know, as an owner, you might
not actually have those benefits, right?
You might be, you might, uh, not get those times to, to play around in a, in
a sandbox and explore different things.
New technologies, and we'll get to that here in the future.
So, but I want to bring us back here for a moment now that we kind of have a
little bit of a baseline to what you do.
You mentioned your team, your team, your team.
I want to kind of talk about your team here for a quick second.
I'm very interested as a graphic designer as, and Brian as well.
We love design, right?
Recovering, recovering designer, recovering designer.
Yeah, sure.
Uh, one might say that.
Uh, this is the foundational brick that this entire industry is built upon.
Sure.
Now there, there is sales, there's customer service, right?
There's the survey, there's the production, the fabrication,
the install, the service, etc.
But all of this is built on the foundation of design, right?
That's the element that you can build a business off of.
If you remove that, you know, it kind of like, it's like a house of cards.
Everything kind of falls.
Around it, right?
So I want to talk about your team.
I want to talk about your team.
We're all we're all interested in design here.
Tell me a little bit about your team.
How many members are there?
Give me a lay of the land of how many designs you guys pump
out for 28 million dollars.
I'm expecting that number to be quite high.
So go ahead and take it from there.
So, um, we have seven people on our, uh, what, what I would consider kind
of our architectural design team.
That is kind of our day to day, uh, uh, Q design process for
various different projects.
It could be bid spec work.
It could be designed build work from scratch.
Um, it could be national account work.
And then, uh, we have two designers on our environmental graphic design
studio, and those are the more consultative design professionals.
Um, those are the people that are consulting and interacting with clients
directly on a daily basis, interacting with municipalities to find out
what's possible and things like that.
Our, our EGD team would probably do anywhere, roughly 50 projects a year.
Uh, start to finish.
Um, but on our architectural side of things, uh, we are on track this year to,
uh, and, and, and Brian, I know when we talked about this last time, I gave you
some data from last year, but we are on track to do over 5700 design requests.
And what I mean by a design request is it could be something as simple
as a 5 minute revision, but it could be something as elaborate.
Um, and I have a couple of people on my team right now working
on projects that they've been working on for 2 straight months.
Right.
Just because the scale at which that we're trying, uh, the scale at which
of the, which the projects we're doing right now, the complexity, the, the, uh,
the coordination with our senior project management team, the coordination with
our estimating team requires that much detail to be put on the job, you know, on
the drawings to be able to be successful with the installation team and, or when
we're shipping it out to an end user.
So.
So
you said over 5,
000, is that what you said?
700, over 5,
700.
Over 5, 700.
Okay.
I'm going to do the
calculations here.
I'm trying to do the calculations.
And
that is 814 design requests per designer.
You have seven designers, 5, 700 requests.
Correct.
Over 800.
That's a pretty prolific,
efficient.
Yeah, let's break that down.
Let's break that down even more.
How, what is that breaking down per day?
So, per
design, what is it like 251 working days a year?
Right?
Bear with me.
I'm just going to, I'm going to pull up some statistics.
I can't give you, I can't give you necessarily broken down by day, but the
way that we, uh, the way that we, um.
Yeah, The process associated with how we design thing as we use on
architectural design nomenclature.
So we'll we'll do schematic conceptual designs and then we will move into
design development and then we'll move into fabrication level drawings between
those different larger kind of phases.
We have, you know, customer revisions and things along things along those lines.
But just to kind of put it.
Uh, some items into perspective for you.
Let me just and I apologize.
I didn't know we were going to get too far into the numbers, but I do have
the numbers, which is a little bit odd for a more creative person to have.
So bear with me for just a second.
That's true.
That's fine.
Well, you're pulling that up.
I'm fascinated with 5700.
Requests.
I mean, I understand what that means.
That's new requests.
That's revisions.
That's it is, you know, that, that, that's, uh, that there's
two different avenues for that.
Right?
So, uh, I'd like to know if you have, um, and just for our viewers and our
listeners out there to give a little bit of a context here, seven designers, right?
I mean, not a lot of our shops have, or owners have seven
designers, let alone two designers.
Um, You have some that are allocated to certain specific types of designs, and
then you have others that maybe handle a wider range gambit of of design requests
right now, we'll be through that for a 2nd before we get into the number per
day, which to me kind of sounds like you're doing like 3 or 4 requests per.
Day per designer, at least that's what it sounds like to me
at a minimum.
Yes.
Yeah.
Um,
so without really getting into the numbers, I mean, let's agree.
It's like, for design requests per designer per day.
So.
You know, some that that's a lot, that's
crazy a lot.
All right.
That's like, that's like uber crazy to me.
Okay.
So seeing a business like yours and having that department
handle that kind of bandwidth.
Uh, I, I want to first ask you a little bit more detail about
your team and their talents.
So are you hiring the type of designer that's, uh, Experienced, are they
design like, do you have rap specialist?
Do you have architectural specialists?
Do you have a graphic designer straight out of college high school?
Tell me a little bit about your recruiting.
Great question, Pete.
Yeah.
A little bit about your recruiting.
Tell me about how you hire.
Tell me about the type of person you look for.
Go.
So I primarily hire people with, uh, a large amount of architectural
design experience, uh, specifically signed design experience.
Um, We, I have been lucky in the sense that there's enough candidates
available to the market that I haven't had to train somebody that's new.
Most of the people that I hire have this architectural signage design
background, meaning they either come from a background where they've designed.
You know, uh, smaller or large scale interior sign packages, but have a basic
understanding number one of curl draw, which is the primary software that we use
number to understand basic things like, uh, 80 a code requirements, building,
you know, building code requirements and just a very general understanding
of way finding theory in general.
So how to navigate a place and and and.
How to think about how to navigate a place and put that on a sign.
The other side of it is people with this longstanding knowledge of how
to build a sign and have been in the industry from quite for quite some time,
working in various different areas.
Maybe they came from a fabrication fabricator at one point and had
a desire to move into to, um.
Uh, design.
Um, and so they kind of already have this manufacturing background and
they're able to apply that on paper.
I have, uh, you know, the age, uh, span of the people on my team ranges
from, you know, lower 20s up into I have somebody that's, uh, in their
mid 60s, you know, and, uh, but their backgrounds range from having, uh, you
know, different backgrounds, um, but I'm not hiring at this point in time, uh,
people who do not have those experience.
I have enough people kind of in the bandwidth and in the hopper to hire
people with the experience needed.
Okay.
Thank you.
To go down that route.
And, uh, as far as recruiting is concerned, I do, um, almost all
of my own, uh, recruiting myself.
Um, it's a combination of, you know, uh, finding resumes and people
that are interested in on deed.
And just literally simply asking people, what I do is I go on LinkedIn
and I find the people that have the background requirements of what I'm
looking for, and sometimes they're available to the industry and sometimes
they're not, but, uh, worst case scenario, they can say no, uh, best
case scenario, they're interested in talking, uh, and we kind of go from there.
Quick follow up for me really quick just on the type of candidate type of designer.
Are you doing any outsourcing remote designers in your business?
We do not currently, um, we entertain that from time to time.
We are in this transitionary period from an organization.
Um, you know, when you kind of get to this scale, uh, really the
next step is to start developing more of a design engineering team.
Who's kind of on the backend and that production area.
And those people are really using things like AutoCAD and
solid works and things like that.
It's kind of going beyond just the general, uh, limitations of, of Corel
draw, you know, those pieces of software.
Um, uh, so.
At some point in the future, we're going to shift in that direction.
You know, once we get to that, from an efficiency standpoint, there's a lot of
efficiencies as far as, uh, fabrication is concerned, but when you start going
down those, uh, uh, paths of AutoCAD and SolidWorks, the efficiency from a design
standpoint starts to trail off a little bit because something that you could put
together in a matter of a couple hours in CorelDRAW, Could take you a week
or two to put together in solid works.
And now your fabricators are going to love you because they have cut, you have
cut sizes, they have all the angle, you know, they have a full bill of materials
and things like that, but, uh, you know, we have to turn and burn with the
volume of work that we do right now.
Well, I love it that you are a CorelDRAW firm.
That's right.
Everybody that's listening, that's viewing out there that has watched my
video on CorelDRAW versus Illustrator versus Photoshop, whatever you want to do.
It may not work for you, but this software is very powerful for the type
of shop that you want, you may want to become when it comes to sign design.
The software that I believe in, I design everything in CorelDRAW.
So I could, I could apply for a position with your firm and know and jump right in.
To your environment and not skip a beat.
So if he would have you Pete, if he would have you,
if you would graciously accept my resume, yes, I would be your base designer.
Mike's
a, Mike's a CorelDRAW guy too.
And unfortunately, Adam, he couldn't, he couldn't make it today because
he's got a terrible sinus infection.
That's fine.
I think one of the things that stood out to me of what you just said, and like,
how many times have you heard this, Pete?
It's hard to find good people.
I can't find good people
to work in my shop.
Every Tuesday and Thursday.
Yes, approximately at 8 30 in the morning.
Yeah.
I mean, what I would say to those people personally is you're not looking for them.
You're waiting for them to come to you.
That's yeah, that was
gonna be my point.
Exactly right.
I just heard you say you're going out and hunting these people.
Yeah, I don't put an ad.
I don't put an ad out or anything like that.
I go and I prospect the exact person based on their background that I want.
And then I and then I go from there.
And that's that's that's what I tell everybody.
I'm hunting after that person.
Wow.
I am finding the skill set that I need on my team and then I go after that person.
That's a very unique approach.
Definitely something that a lot of our viewers and listeners here
can take, uh, take away from.
If you're a shop that you're looking for a graphic designer, if you're,
if you just fired a graphic designer and you need somebody to replace that
person, it's so easy to get sucked.
To the remote designer, you know, outsourcing your work.
It's so it's so easy to go down that rabbit hole, but you
need somebody in your shop.
You need a player.
You need a voice.
You need somebody that can be your guiding light in this in this business
that we call the sign industry and.
There might be a different way about going after that person.
And just like you said here, Adam, it's more of a, I want you approach.
You're the type of person that I want working for me.
Instead of putting an ad out and, and fielding and farming resumes, you're going
after a specific type of person based off.
I'm assuming you're using LinkedIn for something like, Yeah, it's, it's,
it's, it's between LinkedIn and, um, you know, there's a pay tier
of Indeed, you know, where you can.
Be quite a bit more specific about your search criteria.
And, and then I essentially, once I find the person's name, I do some
research on LinkedIn and I'll typically reach out to them on LinkedIn instead.
Um, and that's kind of my process.
Um, and it's worth the very minimal cost, uh, for Indeed to, to at least
explore it for a month and, and see what kind of net benefit you get from being
more aggressive and trying to reach out to those people that you want on your
team, rather than, you know, put out an ad and get, and field a bunch of.
People that may never actually be qualified to do the job.
All
right.
Well, that's a huge takeaway.
That's a huge takeaway for our, our listeners.
So Brian, go ahead.
What's,
what's the average turnover for you and your art
department?
It's pretty low.
Um, you know, I, I am, I am going through, I have one person leaving
me right now, but, uh, as far as across the organization, um, it
is probably the lowest turnover outside of our current sales
team.
Amazing.
Low turnover, a very specific type of hunting recruiting strategy for
a 28 million operation that has a seven designer design soon to be eight
designers on your team, on their team.
Amazing.
So tell me a little bit more about your prophecies.
I let's dive into that side of this coin here a little bit.
Tell me, tell our listeners how.
Inquiries come in.
Walk us through your workflow.
You're so involved.
You were involved in the sale side, and I'm sure you understand
how that side of that coin works.
So kind of walk us through the beginning and the front end of
your workflow for your business
or you.
Yeah.
So, so, um, the way our current company works is it kind of depends
on the type of business that we're getting in at any given moment in
time, where I'll kind of lead the conversation is more on our design build.
So our customer doesn't really have anything right?
They might have some brand assets.
It's.
They might have some architectural renderings of a building that might
have some existing photos of a building or existing photos of some signs
that they might want to, to revamp.
We have a fairly elaborate process, a fairly elaborate process,
but it's lean at the same time, because if it's too elaborate,
people aren't going to follow it.
Right?
And a lot of the processes and procedures that I'm going to describe
to you today don't work without buy in from the whole organization.
Right?
I can't just be creating and developing design team processes without
interaction from the other departments that have to interact with that team.
Right?
So a lot of what I'm going to describe to you has been thoroughly discussed
with our sales, our director of sales, our director of project management, our
production teams and even installation teams to develop a process that we feel
like works best for our organization.
So as far as going through the process, we, we, uh, from start
to finish, we use smart sheets.
Um, for a queuing system.
Um, and, uh, I have developed a, a simple way to queue our
tasks, uh, for the entire team.
It also lets me develop metrics for individuals and for by different
phases that I described earlier on in, in, uh, our conversation, uh, but
essentially our account management team and our project management team have
a digital form that they can fill out.
Um, and as they submit that digital form, it basically goes
into our design teams queue.
Some different, uh, uh, uh, criteria that are on those forms is, you know, the,
the, the customer name, the address, the, uh, the, uh, a very brief description
of the scope of work, because that's not really where we're describing
what the designer needs to do to do the value potential of the project
or a budget that might be in mind.
For that particular project, and then we have the account manager involved
and then who might who might request because it could be an account manager,
or it could be a project manager.
That's requesting that particular design.
Uh, task to be done, so I guess people are asking, well, why do
you need all that information?
Well, this is where some of the automation as far as a smart sheet comes into play.
So, basically, as a designer, as as a task is assigned to, you
will get a notification via email.
You'll also be in the queue day-to-day.
And you could sort by your particular job, and you also get updates if I decide
to change the date or there's updated information, you'll get a notification
regarding what that, that what information changed during that time period.
Uh, but also on the backend as we complete that particular task.
Uh, anybody that is in that requested field on that Smartsheet will then be
notified that the job is complete also.
So, and it's all real time too.
Any questions on that so far?
No, I like smart sheets.
I'm familiar with it.
Yeah.
I haven't dove into it very deeply, but I know some people who have.
Yeah.
I mean, we, we, we decided on smart sheets as an asset because
it creates a lot of flexibility for us to do what we want to do.
Right.
Now, does the, the whole organization use Smartsheet as well, or
just your department?
So as of right now, our, our project management team, our permitting
team and our production team all use Smartsheets currently.
Uh, we are Gotcha in the process of looking at some other solutions.
Uh, but that is what we all currently use.
And it's primarily just because of the customizability.
Uh, we are a very report driven organization, very metric driven
organization, and allows us to do all that stuff in an automated way on the back end.
So, you know, like I said, I can, I can break down the quantity of those.
Uh, different design requests by individual, uh, uh, design
phase, and then break that down by individual designer by design phase.
Also, I just set that all up at the beginning and now it just kind of does
the work for me in the background.
Um, so that's kind of the initial kind of request process.
Now, this is where.
From an organization standpoint, we start to get into, um, and a lot of, a lot of
people can kind of relate to this is okay.
Well, how do you manage the quality of the information that's coming in?
Right?
I think it's very important for anybody in the role that I have at
an organization, or even smaller organizations that just have an
individual designer to you to understand.
review the information as it's coming in, right?
So, uh, uh, I am reviewing every single design request as it comes in.
What I'm trying to do is I'm trying to set that designer up for success
when they actually get to it.
So there's various different things that I'm doing.
I am reviewing the quality of the request and making sure it makes sense.
Because what good is a design request if you can't even understand what
you're supposed to do there, right?
And what I'll do is I will connect with the person that requested it, get
clarification, and either have them rewrite the design request so that it
does make sense, or I will rewrite it in a way that I feel like is going to make
the most sense to my designer, right?
I'm also reviewing any assets that might be submitted during that design request.
Pieces of artwork, You know, making sure that if there's custom fonts
that might need to be used that I'm downloading them, or at least providing
a description of where that designer might be able to access them via Adobe
fonts or one of those types of things.
And then, uh, if it does happen to need vector artwork, we handle
that a multitude of different ways.
If it's something rather simple, we'll recreate it ourselves.
If it's a more corporate brand, and I know that they probably have
the logo somewhere, I'll kind of push back on the requester to go
get the actual vector artwork.
Um, and then if it's something elaborate and our customer just can't do anything
with it, and I feel like it's going to take our team, you know, anywhere between
an hour or two hours to recreate, I basically outsource the vectorization.
I like to think of my design team in the same way a lot of sales teams
think of their salespeople, as what can they generate per revenue hour.
And, uh, you know, if I think of a designer that could produce 5 million
worth of designs in one year, that's an X amount of a value per hour to me.
And if our client isn't paying that amount to do that vectorization, then
it's better off that a vectorization company does it for the minimal
cost that they can do it for.
So, um, don't tie
up your team on stuff.
That's not right.
Right.
Um.
So once I've basically identified that the information is either of a quality
nature, um, and or in or provided assets required to successfully do that, I
will then go ahead and schedule it.
And I aggressively schedule my team.
I push them every single day.
Obviously, with the volume of work that we do, I have to.
And a lot of what you have to do is you have to learn your strengths and
weaknesses of the people on your team.
What are they good at?
What are they quick at?
And then assign the work according to that, right?
Um, so like, for the most part, um, I can, I can schedule my team
within the hour kind of thing.
So if, if I have a designer that I'm like, okay, I think this particular job
is going to take them roughly six hours.
They're working eight hours a day.
There's two other jobs that I know I can squeeze in that are going to take them
anywhere between 30 minutes and an hour.
I'm going to go ahead and schedule those jobs for that, for that same day.
Right?
Um, so that's how we start to be very aggressive with our turn times too.
You know, the vast majority of our work is turned around within two, two
business days from a design standpoint.
There are, there's obviously different circumstances where the project is
larger, uh, but across the different, um, uh, uh, phases of design that we do, we
turn most jobs around within two days.
Uh, and that could be a fabrication level drawing, a conceptual
drawing, or what might be.
So as a designer, as you're getting that notification and now you're starting
to work, how do you work efficiently when you get that information?
Well, we've created a lot of assets at us as an organization.
You know, we do, like I said, we do interior and exterior signage.
We have developed a lot of sales, um, tools that also help
the estimating, uh, process.
Um, because a lot of what I, what we find is a lot of the time while
customers are very involved in what their signage looks like.
People just want to get to a number so they know how much
they're going to have to spend.
So, so, so we've developed a lot of assets and tools to help get to that number.
And, uh, it's in the form of basically templates.
So we have interior signage templates.
It might not be exactly what the client wants, but we've done enough interior
sign jobs to be able to, to, to develop, you know, some full design packages
of all the sign types that might be required for different market segments.
And, um, And, uh, they have materials sizes on them, things like that.
So our sales team could sell that number.
And then what it does is it puts guardrails from a design standpoint on the
types of materials, the sizes, things like that, that they have to design with them.
Right.
So that's one of the tools that we use to help kind of the sales process
be a little bit more efficient and then provide us essentially kind of an
outline scope of work as far as materials and sizes that we can design within.
And then, uh.
Just collective creative assets.
Everybody's been in that scenario where you're kind of burnt down.
You're like, Oh, my gosh, I got to do one more option for this.
And I just I just can't think of anything right.
Um, what we do or what we try and do is we try and collect assets
that weren't used in the past.
So.
For the most part, most of our conceptual design schematic designs
are, um, we do three options, one selected, and then those other two
just kind of go by the wayside, right?
So what we try and do is we try and collect those options and potentially
utilize them on other jobs that might be applicable and using different
finishes and things like that.
We also have a lot, have a lot of, uh, inspirational, uh, assets, um, for
interior signs, exterior signs, and things like that to help, uh, inspire the design
team to create something unique based on, uh, what other, um, you know, uh, other
inspirational images, things like that.
I like the fact that you are like constraining the design process,
because that's really like, Hey, when I look at design, like that's a
challenge in signage, is it like you're.
You're only limited to what you can build, basically, and unless you
like design is like, it works best when you're constrained to something.
So, like, when I was in the print shop, like designing a T shirt
take me like 20 minutes, right?
Because it's like, Hey, I've got a 10 by 14 area and it's
got to be 1 to 8 colors, right?
But with signage and especially the type of work that you guys do where it's.
Everything interior, everything exterior, like there's a lot of decisions
that have to be made there just for
every sign.
Yep.
Yeah.
Well, essentially what I'm trying to do from managing the team is I'm trying to
take the scenario where a designer is sitting there trying to figure out what
they need to design and they can actually spend the time designing it, right?
Um, so they have all the assets.
They have all the inspirational, uh, uh, uh, imagery or, uh, you know, interior
design, mood boards, finishes, things like that, that they need to, to, to be
able to just go in and start designing rather than sitting there and, and,
and really trying to figure out what they need to design to begin with.
And, and that's kind of been my motivator of, of, of.
Developing a more efficient team by reviewing those documents ahead of
time to prepare them for success and knowing that they can open up the design
requests, all the assets are going to be exactly what they're expecting.
And they can just move right into design.
Gotcha.
Now, like some of these templates that you've developed,
like, are you including that?
When you schedule that request or they're like going and hunting that down.
Like
we have, we basically have it as a, a, a global template that everybody
kind of knows about our sales team is using it when they're doing their
account take us on the very, on the very front end of the project.
Um, and, uh, and then our design team will essentially know that it's.
The available asset that was used during that time period and to
design within those constraints.
Right.
Gotcha.
So like, what does the, what's the day to day look like for
you guys within the department?
Like, is it, I
mean, it's pretty chaotic as you can imagine.
Um, you know, it, it is, um, it is, uh, lots of manipulating the schedule.
Um, I am, I am.
In the schedule all day, every single day.
Um, and I, I basically have some, uh, conditional formatting that allows me
to visualize things as they come in.
And, uh, you know, depending on the scale of what the request is, you know, as
of right now, and really kind of since March, I've been basically designing
all day, every single day, just because of the volume of work we have going on.
But, uh.
If, if it's something rather simple and I can keep the rest of my designers out
of it and have them working on the more elaborate, longer scale, longer term
projects, then I'm going to do it myself.
So I, as that information comes in, I'm immediately reviewing it.
If the assets.
Or the information isn't clear.
I'm immediately getting with the person that requested it.
So I can attack it right away, right?
We attack our design queue on a daily basis.
And, uh, you know, if you spoke to the people on my team, sometimes, you know,
it's, it's a little overwhelming for them, uh, but, uh, they do a great job of
staying ahead and, and, uh, in my opinion, from a creative standpoint, if you can
stay ahead and you don't have this burden of just this backlog of design work to do,
you can be your most creative and, and, and, and produce the best quality product.
And that's what, that's what we're trying to do.
Yeah.
One question I've got that's came up a lot for our folks that are,
they do everything like you guys do.
How are you juggling?
Like this, this request is going to take 20 minutes and I've got 12
of those that need to go out in the next six hours versus like, Hey,
this project is a longer project.
That's going to take.
A couple of weeks to get all the assets, but we've got to make progress on it every
single day to make sure that we hit the
timelines.
I think it's, it's, uh, obviously this is where kind of manipulating the schedule
and having a team that is on board with potentially doing other people's work.
I think in a perfect world, everybody wants to be able to
start their same project and.
Um, but, uh, you can imagine with the volume of work and, and, and the
complexity of custom signage that that's just not the way that the real
life, you know, the real world works.
So, you know, I have, I have a particular designer right now.
That's been working on a 2 month long project.
And it's essentially kind of just, uh, on call for lack of a better term, waiting
for information from the field to be able to attack because we have a very.
Tight schedule to get the job done so I can't put her on
any large project right now.
So she just basically fills in smaller things from time to time.
Quick revisions, quick schematic designs and things like that.
As she's kind of waiting on that larger piece of information and I
have essentially kind of cleared her schedule and any projects that
I would normally have her work on.
I've basically either delegated to the rest of the team or I'll knock them out
myself, depending on the complexity of it.
Gotcha.
Yeah.
So having, well, you guys have seven designers, but essentially
like a, like the six man on a basketball team or something.
Yeah.
That's
smart.
Um, what's, uh, do you have any other like tips and tricks that you would like?
Like what, what would your advice be to somebody who maybe has one or
two or three designers, you know, they've got a small design team,
which is, I, that's probably the
average.
Yeah.
I mean, I, I per, I personally think that developing assets
ahead of time is one of the key.
Differentiators, um, for our particular team to be able to be
successful and efficient, right?
So we have developed, um, design manufacturing standards for a lot of the
common side types that a lot of people are using an architectural side edge.
You know, your flat cut out letters.
What are our tolerances?
What kind of thicknesses?
What kind of studs are we going to put in different
thicknesses and things like that?
Um, channel letters, pile on signs, monument signs.
Having a standard to start with, in my opinion, is the best way to Uh, manage
the fabrication level drawing process, which tends to take a little bit longer
than some of the other processes are concerned and having buy in from your
manufacturing team or in the cases where you might be outsourcing fabrication,
developing and coordinating with them.
And I promise you, you're out your wholesale customers or your wholesale
manufacturers are going to be interested in that because they're the
net result of what you're producing.
Right?
So if they have their own section views and things like that, that you could be.
Borrowing from them to include in your drawings.
It's going to only gonna make their shop more efficient.
Also, right?
The other thing, um, also is communication across the whole organization.
Um, like I said, none of the processes and procedures that I that I'm
describing to you today work unless you have buy in from the sales team.
The account management team, or even if it's not a team, if it's just a
sales person in general, you know, developing a good workflow between
design and sales is a key part of your process and the growth and development
of your, of your sales team and the growth and development of your design
team, your design team understands why sales, you know, the types of.
Assets that a sales team needs to be successful from a sales standpoint,
then it's kind of perfect harmony from a, from an efficiency standpoint.
Um, and then on the backend, if your production team is collaborating,
providing feedback on specifications that we're including, uh, or not including,
and, uh, uh, can help us fill in that gap and create a better standard so
that we don't either keep making the same mistake, or we're creating a more
streamlined design environment, um, then it's beneficial for everybody as well.
And then the other thing that I would say is.
One, one other differentiator for us is, uh, you know, Jamie and Melanie
have allowed our design team to purchase things like stock photo
subscriptions and things like that.
And, uh, you know, those are just kind of the, the, the, the spicier ways
to, to, to enhance and embellish, you know, your, your kind of basic boring
interior sign, uh, project that, that most people are just doing kind of one
color backgrounds, you know, one color tactile copy on, you know, we have
the ability to go in and out of these.
You know, uh, stock photo websites and get.
You know, textures and different vector art, stock vector artwork and
things like that, and apply them to our designs to really embellish them.
Um, and we've, I've created a couple of assets to, to really show our design team,
how, you know, here's how we were doing things in the past, you know, in the past
with just kind of basic solid colors, and here's how you can really transform
a design using some of these very basic embellishments that we are able to pull
from these, uh, different assets that we can, that we have unlimited access to.
Yeah.
Nice.
Um, I think, I think we actually had, what was the.
Was it communication breakdown, Pete?
Like, one of those episodes that we had, like, the biggest drop is usually
the handoff between departments, and it seems like you guys have mastered it.
Like, what are the specific things that you guys are doing to facilitate
that communication across departments?
So,
um...
We do we do a number of different things.
Number one.
I basically coach my team that regardless of how simplistic the design request
that's been written to you is I want you to call the person and verify that
that's exactly what they want, right?
Um, so that helps break down some of the initial assumptions,
regardless of how simple it is.
And, uh, you know, we're talking on a regular basis with the people
that are requesting these designs.
Um, and I don't know if I share this with you, but yeah.
The vast majority of our design team is remote, and so we are interacting
with our sales team and our product management team, you know, through
teams calls and on a regular basis.
I mean, I make 40 or 50 calls a day to people to get clarification, just
make sure I'm on the right track from a design standpoint, because we are
reading and interpreting something that's something that somebody else Throat.
Right.
Um, and it could be something as simple, you know, I, I had a conversation on
just a very basic 18 inch by 24 inch aluminum sign on a post and panel
sign this morning, and I was like.
Are you sure this is how you want this to look?
And I could share my screen and get feedback in real time
from that particular person.
And, you know, got the confirmation that yes, that's exactly what I'm looking for.
Now I can close out the design request and send them the proof and I'm done.
Right?
So that's 1 aspect of it.
The other aspect of it is when we get into some of the larger projects or some
of the more complex projects, we have a project kickoff meeting and that's where
we have an opportunity for our project management team or a project manager
that's been assigned to the project.
Representatives from the production facility that might be involved in
the manufacturing of that, uh, the estimator that estimated the project
and then the assigned designer to basically sit down together and say,
how do we want to accomplish this?
Right?
And, uh, it could be in the form of here are the value engineered options that
were offered during the estimating period.
Um, or here are some technical difficulties that we might
experience during this process.
And we need to we need to work together to develop solutions to
make this actually successful.
Um, and we've started to do that quite a bit more on on the vast
majority of our larger projects.
And we've seen a lot of success.
Um, it gives production an opportunity to communicate how they might want to build
something that might be different than how a designer might want to build something.
Uh, so they get a say in the process and then it.
Furthermore, it's creating buy in when that job actually hits the shop floor.
They're not blindsided, but some wild manufacturing method that they've
never heard about before, right?
It also gives an opportunity to identify materials and or manufacturing methods
that we want to proceed with, but we don't have the capabilities internally
to do and decide where we want that capability to go to from, you know, from
an out plant standpoint, uh, to outsource that particular manufacturing method.
So I think those two areas for us is one of the key for us.
Parts of trying to prevent news communication.
Um, but I would say just the key takeaway in general is just the collaboration of
the person that might be requesting that.
And in those cases where you don't have that kind of buffer zone of
somebody requesting that getting on a team's call or a zoom meeting with the
client and just saying, hey, look, I.
I want to make sure that we're on the same page or, you know, just a
simple email of like a, of a, of a screenshot of the proof or whatever,
uh, just to make sure you're on the same, the right path with the client
before you kind of finish that thing.
I think you might've mentioned the remote thing to me previously.
I forgot to include that in my notes, but is that part of the reason why you can
like go out and hunt these specific people
as well?
It is.
So, you know, like I said, Melanie and Jamie have been.
Very trusting in my, uh, methodology as far as recruiting is concerned.
Um, we've had a lot of success for, with it.
And, uh, while where I live, which is in the Tampa market, uh, the Tampa, Florida
area, there is a ton of sign shops.
I think, I think the last time we looked, it was probably, it's probably
well over 200, 200 sign shops.
Uh, there's a plethora of different people to, uh, choose from, but not
with the very niche type of business that we're involved with right now.
You know what I mean?
I can find, uh, you know, a plethora of different people to do, um, you know,
vehicle wraps and things like that.
But, um, the, the, it starts to get a little bit nichier when you
need somebody to build a monument, uh, signed from scratch, uh,
on, on, uh, you know, in Corel.
Sure.
Absolutely.
So as we try to bring this one to an end and I feel like we could
probably talk for hours, man.
Oh, for sure.
Just like a fountain of knowledge about the, the industry.
But you know, like I, I've been watching AI over like the last six months and like
things are like starting to go at a way faster rate than what I thought they were.
Are you guys leveraging any like AI day to day or anything like that?
Do you have plans to like?
So, so I, I mean, for the first time with some of these new features, um,
and I was on the beta for, for Photoshop and Illustrator where they started to
integrate some of the generative AI.
Um, I found like actual useful purposes for the AI.
Um, and that is essentially, you know, when you're doing like wall graphics
or something like that, and your client is providing you like kind of a low
resolution JPEG and you want to blow that up to the best of your ability.
Number one, to, to try and.
You know, create a vector version of that to clean it up a little bit, but just
kind of fill in that gap of area that you're trying to, to, to, to fill in.
Right.
Um, and also when you're trying to edit photos and things like
that, and you're trying to get very complex objects out of it.
Um, I've found the generative AI tools to be absolutely mind blowing for
their ability to do stuff like that.
And I know Illustrator has just started to dabble in it, and uh, I haven't personally
had any, uh, useful success with it.
But, uh, you know, uh, Illustrator has come a long way from some of
the initial betas, even when they had kind of some of the initial
measuring tools and things like that.
So, uh, I'm confident that at some point they'll have some real practical uses
for it, but currently I haven't found a particular practical use as far as AI,
at least in what we're doing currently.
Gotcha.
Yeah.
Like, Hey, what are your thoughts?
Just like, you know, being a student of design and like
a lifelong lover of design.
Like, what are your, do you have concerns on AI?
Like,
I don't, um, I think if we were probably more in the graphics world
and things like that, um, and a good chunk of our business was more on
kind of that printed graphics world.
I, I, I might be a little bit more concerned, just more from a design
standpoint, but, uh, with the complexity of things, I mean, I, I
would, I would, um, Some AI tools to be able to develop the ability to,
you know, uh, space out angle and a monument sign and stuff like that.
Like this, I want that right now.
You know what I mean?
Um, so until it gets to that point or like, you know, you, you get some
of the bigger companies, like, um, you know, or you get like a bigger
company, like AutoCAD or solid works.
And, you know, one of those companies starting to integrate some
of that into what they're doing.
Um, so you're not having to build some of that stuff from scratch, you know, then
we'll probably take a harder look at it.
Yeah, that kind of lines up with my thought.
Like, you guys are like, so far on the like, specific, specific, like,
niche scale that it's like, yeah,
he just, he just poked the bear, you know, he just poked the bear.
He just, he just put everybody, every 1 of those companies on high alert
and said, get your AI shit together.
Yeah.
And, and,
and, and, and, you know, I, while I love corral, I wish they did
more development in that area.
They, they tend, they tend to.
They tend to not play around as much as an, you know, as much as
Adobe does, you know what I mean?
You know, uh, but, uh, I, I wish they would integrate something, you know, a
little bit more futuristic like that, but I don't foresee that anytime soon.
Yeah.
And for the work that you guys do, especially like on the fabrication
side, it's like, I wouldn't trust the AI enough to like, maybe, maybe give
you a concept to like look at and design off of, but yeah, like it's still too.
Too much of an estimate or a guess on
everything.
Knowing how long it took CorelDRAW to come up with a Mac version after
saying that they would never have a Mac version, I'm pretty sure
that that's like 20 years away.
Sure.
So, so the one, one last final thing, and this is one of the reasons,
Bryant, why, why I reached out to you from the last automation.
Um, and, and, and we didn't really talk about automation, although we talked
about AI, but I just want to cover this piece because I think it's a pretty big
game changer for a lot of organizations.
And, uh, you know, my company would probably kill me if I told you this, but.
Bear with me for just a second.
So one of the things that you guys complained about last time, and this
is specific to interior signs is having to type all the signage out, right?
Yeah.
Manually.
You don't, you're wasting your time.
So most of the time you have some sort of document, an Excel spreadsheet,
a word doc, something along those lines that tells you the messaging
for those particular jobs, not going to tell you the particular.
Um, plugin, but there is a plugin for Corel that allows you to tie an Excel
spreadsheet to very individual pieces of your drawing in Corel and have it type
everything out for you automatically.
So you don't have to typeset anything ever again.
We'll have to look that up and put it in the show notes, Pete.
Yeah.
So we can't get Adam killed, obviously, but
so basically you got 1700 signs.
You can basically make Excel spreadsheets by individual sign type, assign those
specific messages to a type field, um, and corral draw and then just click a button
and it'll type out everything in the same font, the same height, the same message.
You can even have a drop down a line if you want for those sign types that
require a multi line, a drawing set.
Um, so that, that to us has basically saved a three person hiring, um, for our
design team from an efficiency standpoint.
Yeah.
That's really nice.
I didn't know those tools existed.
And I used to have, um, when I would do, uh, booklets and things
like that in the print shop.
Uh, we had tools like InDesign and there was a couple of other like specific
built tools that would do variable data overall, but I didn't know they were
never available in illustrator, which is what I was in 90 percent of the time
anyway.
Yeah.
I mean, you're, you're on the right track, uh, as far as that's concerned.
Um, there's just, there's a particular plugin suite, um, that, uh, that, um,
is, is I believe fairly well known.
Um, and, uh, there's a particular tool within that plugin suite
that allows you to do this.
Um, and it's a pretty big game changer.
Sweet.
Adam.
Wow, man.
This has been a great episode.
Um, a good episode for Pete and I to get back in the saddle.
We appreciate you coming on.
Um, yeah.
What's the future for you guys?
Like, what's the future for you?
What's the future for creative
designs?
Yeah, I mean, so we're sorry.
Yeah.
So we are, we, we continue to grow.
Um, you know, we are, uh, we were tracking to be 28 percent ahead of
where we were this time last year.
We are, we are, we are growing our, our national account sides of
the side of the business as well.
And, uh, uh, you know, we continue to, uh, look to expand outside, you know, we, we
do business all over the United States, but we continue to, we want to continue to
expand from a shop standpoint outside of, uh, you know, all over the United States.
And that's kind of where we're headed right now.
Um, as far as design is concerned, probably the next steps are, are,
are that more design engineer.
Uh, position that I described earlier in the business, you know, where somebody
that is doing more detail work, um, right now, kind of it's spread across
the rest of the whole entire design team, uh, but having really a department
that's dedicated to doing, you know, fabrication level detail, um, and details.
Uh, so those people that are on my, uh, regular design team that are
more creative, don't have to worry about those types of things anymore.
And, and bit more utilizing things like AutoCAD and Solid
Works in our shop day to day.
Nice.
Yep.
Love
that.
Pete, any closing questions, arguments, comments?
You kind of took the wind from my sails there.
This is a great, this was a great episode to jump right back on the saddle here.
Adam, uh, I'm, um, I'm submitting my resume to your shop here today.
Okay.
I look what you guys got going on.
I love that.
You're.
You're involved with some really interesting tools, smart sheets.
I'm familiar with it.
I think it's a great tool, a collaboration tool, team communication tool.
Love, love that.
You have some automated in your alerts, notifications and built in your system.
I wish more and more people would.
Take a page out of that book, but thank you again for jumping on here
and giving our audience a little bit of a sneak peek into what their shops
could eventually be by just learning a little bit about what you have got
going on there at creative design.
So just
want to say, I appreciate you guys having me on.
Yeah, absolutely.
Excellent.
All right.
That's a wrap.
All right.
Thanks, guys.
All right.
See ya.
That's the episode.
I hope you enjoyed it.
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