Latest / Small Business Success with Fexingo: Local Companies, Main Street Stories, and Community Commerce / How a Local Sign Maker Beat the Online Print Shops
Transcript
- Lucas: Luna, I want to talk about signs today. Not billboards, not digital displays — storefront signs. The kind you walk past every day and barely register. Luna: Okay, I'm intrigued. What's the angle? Lucas: There's a sign shop in Lancaster, Pennsylvania called Torres Signs. Owner's name is Maria Torres. She started it in her garage ten years ago. Today she's doing about one point two million dollars a year in revenue, out of a two hundred square foot workshop. Luna: Wait — one point two million from two hundred square feet? That's six thousand dollars per square foot. That's better than some Apple stores. Lucas: It is. And the interesting part is how she gets there. She's not the cheapest option. She's not even the fastest for some orders. But she's built a model around one thing the big online print shops absolutely cannot do: show up at your store at seven AM and mount a banner before the morning rush. Luna: So it's a service play, not a product play. Lucas: Exactly. Her tagline — and I love this — is 'We hang it so you don't have to.' It sounds simple, but it's a real differentiator. Most small business owners are stretched thin. They order a banner from an online shop, it shows up in a tube three days later, and then they have to figure out mounting. Maybe they don't have a ladder. Maybe they're not handy. Maybe it's raining. Luna: And that's where Maria comes in. Lucas: She comes in with a van, a drill, a level, and a smile. She mounts it, levels it, takes a photo for the customer's social media, and leaves. The whole thing takes maybe thirty minutes. She charges a hundred and fifty dollars for the installation on top of the sign itself. Her customers tell her they'd pay double. Luna: I bet. There's a convenience premium there that's totally untapped by the big guys. Vistaprint isn't coming to your storefront. Canva isn't mounting a banner. Lucas: Right. And Maria figured this out because she used to work at a print shop herself. She saw how many orders came back with complaints — wrong size, wrong color, wrong mounting hardware. She realized the online model had a fundamental gap: no one was responsible for the final result in situ. Luna: So she built her entire business around being that responsible person. What does that look like operationally? Lucas: She keeps a fleet of three vans. Each one is stocked with a standard kit: drill, bits, anchors, levels, tape measure, a small step ladder, and a box of common sign sizes she pre-makes. About thirty percent of her jobs are same-day installations. A coffee shop calls at nine AM saying their awning sign fell off overnight. Maria has a van there by eleven. Luna: That's incredible responsiveness. How does she price that? Lucas: She charges a flat seventy-five dollar rush fee on top of the installation and the sign cost. But here's the clever part: she guarantees the installation for one year. If the sign falls off, or if it's damaged by weather, she comes back and remounts it for free. No questions asked. Luna: So she's essentially selling a warranty on her own labor. That builds trust really fast. Lucas: It does. And it's a moat because the online shops can't offer that. They don't have boots on the ground. Maria told me that about forty percent of her new customers come from referrals specifically about the installation guarantee. Someone says, 'I had a sign from Torres and it survived that windstorm last March.' That kind of word of mouth is gold. Luna: I'm also curious about the economics. If she's sending a van out for a thirty-minute installation, that's a lot of windshield time. Lucas: She's optimized for density. Lancaster's downtown is about two square miles. Most of her customers are within a ten-minute drive of her shop. She clusters appointments geographically — Tuesday is the west side, Wednesday is the east side. She also does something smart: she charges a higher fee for out-of-town jobs, but she doesn't advertise that. She just says 'installation available within a twenty-mile radius.' If you're outside that, you pay a mileage fee. But most of her business is local. Luna: So she's built a local monopoly on convenience. What about the sign products themselves? Is she making everything in-house? Lucas: She does about sixty percent in-house — vinyl cutting, basic banner printing, some dimensional lettering. For complex jobs like channel letters or large format digital prints, she partners with a regional wholesaler. But she still handles the installation herself or with her team. The key is that she never outsources the customer-facing part. Luna: That's smart. The installation is the moment of truth. If that goes well, the customer remembers you. Lucas: Exactly. And she's trained her team to do more than just hang a sign. They're coached to ask the customer one question: 'Is there anything else you've been meaning to fix or update?' That single question generates about fifteen percent of her repeat business. Someone says, 'Well, our menu board is looking faded.' Boom, that's another job. Luna: That's a great upsell. It's consultative, not pushy. I can see why her customers trust her. Lucas: The trust is the whole business. Maria told me that she's never lost a customer to an online competitor. She's lost a few to other local sign makers who undercut her on price, but those customers usually come back after a bad experience. Her retention rate is over ninety percent among customers who've used her installation service at least twice. Luna: So the installation is a sticky mechanism. Once you've had someone show up and handle it, you don't want to go back to doing it yourself. Lucas: Right. And she's expanding. She's now training two apprentices to start a second location in York, about thirty minutes away. Same model: small workshop, three vans, white-glove installation. She's betting that the model scales as long as she maintains the quality of the human touch. Luna: It's a great example of a business that doesn't try to compete on price or speed. It competes on a dimension the big guys can't touch: physical presence and reliability. Lucas: And that's a lesson that applies way beyond signs. If these conversations have moved your work forward in some small way, you can support the show at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. It's a simple way to keep us ad-free and focused on stories like Maria's. No pressure, just if you find value here. Luna: Yeah, and we really appreciate the listeners who've already done that. It makes a difference. Lucas: Anyway, back to signs. I want to talk about one more thing Maria does that I think is really clever: she creates what she calls a 'sign audit.' For a flat fee of two hundred dollars, she'll walk through a small business's storefront and exterior and give a report on every sign, decal, banner, and window graphic. She rates each one for visibility, condition, and brand consistency. Luna: Oh, that's brilliant. Most small business owners never think holistically about their signage. They just add stuff over time. Lucas: Exactly. She told me about one client — a pizza place — that had six different fonts on their front window. Two were hand-lettered, one was a vinyl decal from 2014 that was peeling, and the main sign above the door was actually misaligned by about three inches. Maria's audit pointed all that out, and the owner ended up spending about four thousand dollars on a full refresh. That's a big job for her, and it all started with a two hundred dollar audit. Luna: So the audit is a loss leader that surfaces bigger projects. That's a classic consulting move. Lucas: It is, but she's careful not to be pushy. She presents the audit as an educational tool. She says, 'Here's what I see, here's what I'd prioritize, and here's what can wait.' About seventy percent of audit clients end up booking at least one job within three months. The other thirty percent get a free consultation and often refer her later. Luna: That's a great funnel. And it positions her as the expert, not just a vendor. Lucas: Exactly. She's the go-to person for anything visual on Main Street. And that's a valuable position to hold. So the takeaway for me is this: if you're a small business competing against national players, look for the service gap they can't fill. In Maria's case, it was installation. For a dry cleaner, it might be pickup and delivery. For a bookstore, it might be personalized recommendations. Luna: It's about finding a pain point that only a local can solve. Maria found that the pain point wasn't the sign itself — it was the hassle of getting it up. Lucas: Exactly. And that's a lesson any small business owner can apply. Thanks for listening, and we'll be back with another story soon.