Attending an ISA Expo Can Change Your Trajectory

OK Y’ALL, GET READY. The ISA Sign Expo is coming back to the Orange County Convention Center (Orlando, FL) this year. The International Sign Association (Alexandria, VA) has organized annual expos for the sign and visual communication industry since 1947!

And since the early 2000’s, the ISA has alternated the shows between Orlando and Las Vegas as the host cities. Have you attended one? If not, you absolutely should. The wealth of information, equipment and knowledge available to you in three days is outstanding!

If you’ve never been, pick a city (Orlando or Vegas), and make sure you attend one. Soon. Oh damn, this year’s expo is right here in O-Town, April 8-10. Come on!

If you have chosen the sign industry as your particular career path, then you cannot not go. But why? Lemme tell ya…

Besides attending some of the best after parties thrown by suppliers, manufacturers, product rollouts, etc. (which historically, for the record, are awesome), you have access to so many companies that produce what you need to succeed in your business!

And the coolest part is, when you walk into a particular booth, there’s a high probability you’re going to meet the owner of that company. Or at least someone very high-level that wants to make money, just like you do. And a synergy is struck.

All you gotta do is sell the product that their machine is going to allow you to produce. (Of course, you gotta pay for that machine first, but that’s an ancillary topic…)

You do what you have to do to be the best in your field. Which means you have to hook up with the others in your industry also trying to be the best. So let’s break it down.

Information

The educational events at the ISA Expo are crucial. From speed-networking events with national companies that need local installers, to the Wrap Experience featuring interactive demos and much, much more, the information-gathering opportunity is like no other.

Equipment

Everybody who is seriously “in” this industry has equipment. You have a plotter at the absolute minimum. (I was handpainting letters for three years before lettering vinyl was invented. The Gerber IVB — read as 4B for you newbies — was revolutionary!)

Three years later, my first plotter was an HP pen plotter used by draftsmen. Someone retrofitted a swivel blade in place of the pen, so it could cut vinyl: 4 in. per second (compared to 54 in. now), and that thing bit into vinyl like a rattlesnake. It sucked.

But then I went to an ISA Expo in Orlando and I saw all the plotter companies making a better product. And I woulda never known if I hadn’t gone.

Tonight, my wife, Christy, asked me what the most influential piece of equipment we ever bought was (besides the basic plotter, printer, etc., which you have to have). Without hesitation, I said our MultiCam CNC router.

That joint feeds the entire shop. It dramatically changed our trajectory. (If Rick and I ever sell this company, one of us is gonna have a router table up in our garage.) If you have a printer and plotter, and you wanna do more, a CNC is your absolute next step to success.

But don’t take my word for it… Come to Orlando in April and meet some new people trying to get to the same place you are.