Alternative Management Advice for Sign Companies

THERE’S MUCH TO BE said for best practice and convention. Their effectiveness has been tested by time and the fierce standards of the marketplace. But one of the great things about business management is that there’s not just one correct answer to a problem. Many paths can lead to accomplishment and the less trodden route may indeed boost your chances of success, because there’s less competition and you will be exposed to new experiences and opportunities.

We present our Alternative Manager’s Toolkit for those of you feeling that the normal way of doing things is getting stale or you are just in the mood to approach a problem or task in a fresh way. The alternatives stem from an understanding that we are all a little different, and we bring our own unique strengths to managing our lives and business adventures. We present five challenges that regularly confront business owners and managers, then discuss the usual way of doing things, a different strategy and a few tips on how to implement each alternative approach.

Challenge/Task: Goal Setting

Traditional Playbook: Most business owners sit down just before the start of a new year and craft beautiful, intricate plans that may include ambitious targets, vast spreadsheets and rigid timelines. They hope that clear goals will direct energy and keep everyone accountable.

The Problem: The real world rarely likes to play along with our expectations. Rigid goals can become obstacles rather than motivators. When circumstances shift and teams feel boxed in, your employees get demoralized or disengage altogether. If progress isn’t obvious, momentum slows. Those audacious goals suddenly seem unrealistic, leading to a sense of failure before the year has barely begun.

The Alternative Manager’s Fix: Ditch the five-year plan. Embrace uncertainty. Adopt a “ready, fire, aim” mentality: launch small initiatives quickly, learn from immediate results and adjust course accordingly. This agile philosophy prioritizes progress over prediction and learning over long-range forecasting.

How to Make it Happen

• Replace fixed targets with adaptive milestones that guide teams without chaining their hands. Instead of that “Big Hairy Audacious Goal,” opt for a really stimulating vague goal, like “foster a kickass company culture.” Spend time working on this goal but don’t measure your progress towards it.
• Focus on achieving fast small wins along the way to build confidence and momentum. Aim to launch or test something within days or weeks. Create an environment where continuous improvement feels more like a flow than a rigid sprint. Use visual cues, like progress bars or team dashboards, to subtly motivate consistent effort and maintain focus without the pressure of strict deadlines.
• Fastsigns of Harrisburg, PA takes a team approach. “We use a service that records most of our incoming phone calls, and I prompt our sales team to review their own customer interactions and coach themselves on how to improve,” says project manager Lauren Cassel. “Before I provide any feedback, I first have them walk me through what they perceive as wins and areas of improvement. Sometimes we share as a group and I let them critique each other. It pushes them to be self-critical, improves the teamwork amongst the sales team and helps me better understand how each salesperson sees themselves.”

Task: Problem Solving

Traditional Playbook: Most managers believe that providing ample resources — money, tools, time or personnel — is the best way to solve problems. The idea is that more resources will enable staff to fix issues faster and more effectively.

The Problem: There’s a saying in business that if you have enough money to fix a problem, you don’t have a genuine problem — you have a resource-allocation issue. Relying on resources can lead to dependency, inefficiency and sometimes wasted efforts. Sometimes, too many resources can dilute focus or encourage spending rather than innovation. Money is also rarely the answer to systemic or long-term issues like cultural problems or ensuring your business’s long-term viability.

The Alternative Manager’s Fix: Use artificial constraints — deliberately impose limits on time, budget or scope — to drive creativity and resourcefulness. Constraints spark innovation by forcing teams to think differently, prioritize ruthlessly and come up with clever solutions within tight parameters, which are often more effective than simply throwing resources at a problem.

How to Make it Happen

• Limit the budget or parameters intentionally, encouraging creative solutions that do more with less. In “17 Questions That Changed My Life,” blogger Tim Ferriss writes: “The question I found most helpful was, ‘If I could only work two hours per week on my business, what would I do?’” Confronted with such a constraint, you may be surprised at the ideas you or your team comes up with.
• Restrict the number of choices available during planning or design to force prioritization and creativity. Create “rules of the game” that restrict the tools or resources that can be used to prompt out-of-the-box thinking. Apply the “Inverse Thinking” technique: Pose questions like, “What if I couldn’t do the obvious solution?” to discover unconventional approaches.
• Dennis Schaub, FastTrack Signs (Bellefontaine, OH), prioritizes speed and simplicity whenever possible. “Not every job needs to be over-designed — sometimes the most effective signs are the simplest ones delivered quickly,” he explains.

Task: Getting Things Done

Traditional Playbook: Most business owners and managers believe that to be productive, they must grind through long hours, hustle relentlessly and stay busy. This “long work” approach emphasizes diligence, persistence and sheer effort, often equating busyness with productivity.

The Problem: Burnout, reduced focus and diminishing returns are common outcomes of relentless grind. Long hours can lead to fatigue and sloppy work, while the underlying productivity may suffer. Moreover, staying busy doesn’t necessarily mean you’re working on the right things or making meaningful progress. It’s not uncommon for people to use being busy as a ruse to avoid uncomfortable actions that would make a real difference.

The Alternative Manager’s Fix: Adopt the mindset that busyness can be lazy thinking. Focus on smart work: prioritizing high-impact tasks, eliminating distractions and working efficiently. Being strategically mindful and avoiding indiscriminate action lead to faster, more effective results with less wasted effort.

How to Make it Happen

• Identify the few tasks that will have the greatest impact and focus on them. Constantly ask yourself, “What’s the most important thing for me to be doing right now?”
• Limit your working hours so each hour counts more. One easy way to do it is to erase a day from your schedule: Don’t pencil in anything for Fridays. “A few times a week I just disappear from the office, just to get away for 20 minutes or so,” says Rocco Gaskins of Abco Signs (Pennsauken, NJ).
• Avoid multitasking and minimize distractions during important work. Let your staff know when the door to your office is closed, it means “Do not disturb.”
• Lighten up. Levity encourages people to take risks and come up with more imaginative ideas. A happy staff will be more productive, healthier and less likely to leave. Signarama River Cities (South Point, OH) allows their staff to decompress by playing “SIGN,” a game similar to basketball’s HORSE. The occasional break “has helped tremendously!” says owner Heather Kincaid.

Task: Focus

Traditional Playbook: Most sign company owners are stout believers in keeping focused: knowing their niche, perfecting what they do best, streamlining operations and sticking to proven territory. This laser-like approach is seen as essential for success, as well as avoiding the dilution of your attention and resources on less-important areas.

The Problem: While focused effort can indeed lead to mastery, it can also blind you to new opportunities. Over-focusing on your core might cause you to miss emerging trends, innovative ideas or adjacent markets that could unlock new growth. It risks stagnation in a rapidly changing landscape. Also, we’re wired to appreciate the novel. Without learning new things and being exposed to fresh experiences, life can become pretty dull.

The Alternative Manager’s Fix: Instead of solely honing your core, adopt a mindset of continuous experimentation: small, low-stakes tests that allow you to explore new directions and see where they might lead. Running deliberate, quick experiments isn’t about abandoning focus but about being open and adaptable, allowing your business to evolve and discover new opportunities organically.

How to Make it Happen

• Set aside small-investment resources for experiments outside your main area of specialty. Test new ideas or markets in quick cycles. Use customer feedback and data from these experiments to inform whether to expand, pivot or abandon new initiatives. “In regards to equipment, we routinely look at every new thing we see and evaluate what it would bring to our business. It has taken us in unique directions by doing so,” says Todd Sallas, Coastal Signs & Graphics (Slocomb, AL).
• Encourage a culture of curiosity among staff; regularly explore “what-if” scenarios and low-cost experiments. Involve diverse voices and disciplines in testing ideas, increasing creativity and reducing blind spots. Find a way out of the echo chamber to think differently.
• Adopt the mindset of the scientist: It’s not a failure; it’s “data.” View setbacks as valuable learning opportunities, analyze what went wrong and repeat the experiment. A crucial question to ask yourself about experiments that don’t turn out well is, “Am I failing differently each time?” For all our talk here about experiments, what we are actually talking about is learning. Fail the same way over and over, and you’re clearly not learning.

Task: Improvement

Traditional Playbook: Most managers believe in identifying weaknesses — whether in their skills, team members or processes — and then working hard to fix them. This often involves training, coaching or restructuring to shore up deficiencies, with the aim of creating an all-around competent, balanced organization.

The Problem: Constantly fixing weaknesses can be draining, costly and ultimately ineffective, because many weaknesses are hard to improve beyond mediocrity. It can also divert attention from areas where you could excel and make a real difference. Over-focusing on weaknesses can also foster a negative mindset or a sense of inadequacy among your employees and even yourself.

The Alternative Manager’s Fix: Focus on what you and your team are naturally good at and leverage those to drive excellence. Instead of wasting time trying to dramatically improve weaknesses, accept that some areas will remain average. Build a business based on peak strengths, where talent and passion naturally thrive, and weaknesses become less critical.

How to Make it Happen

• Identify and cultivate core strengths in yourself and your team: What do people naturally excel at? Look for signs of what they enjoy doing, pick up quickly, volunteer for and what gives them feelings of accomplishment. Celebrate and amplify existing talents rather than obsessing over shortcomings.
• It’s A Good Sign (Dallas) formally states a “commitment to a kind workplace,” focusing on their team’s strengths and staying open to opportunities, while standing firm on a “no blame” culture when something goes wrong. “I’d rather my A-player team have the chance to grow and learn than be stifled by a culture that refuses to innovate and learn,” says owner Gayle Goodman Lynch.
• Replace traditional, backward-looking annual reviews with regular, informal conversations focused on immediate priorities, performance, and how strengths are being used and developed.
• Consider outsourcing, finding a technological solution or accepting mediocrity in less-critical areas. Use strengths-based coaching to elevate performance in key areas rather than fix everything. “We use tools and automation to create structure, but we empower our team to make decisions and take accountability within that framework,” says Tricia Samuel, D10 Signs + Graphics (Kirkland, WA). “That balance allows us to move quickly without losing control. I also place a strong emphasis on transparency — our team understands how their work ties into the bigger picture, from estimating through installation.”