Do New Sales Fit Your Sign Business Model?

IF YOU KEEP UP WITH US, you know we have been in this biz for 40 years (back when you hand-painted signs). I grew up in my dad’s body shop, fell in love with paint, and sprayed my first car at 14 (back before you could wrap them).

In 1993 we became one of the very first signshops in the nation to offer wraps. However, much to the chagrin of my partner Rick Ream, we never truly got away from paint. (Don’t tell him, but that was never my intention.) So we still paint cars, trucks, boats, motorcycles, you name it. Don’t get me wrong: We are not a body shop. We don’t do collision work at all.

Instead, we do crazy $35K paintwork on offshore race boats, a $10K paint job on a ’69 Camaro and airbrush magazine-featured motorcycles. We are not a production paint shop and are very selective on jobs we accept. I mean, my badass lead painter René Mendez has been with us for 25 years, and he is anything but a run-of-the-mill auto painter. He’s a next-level artist who just happens to work in catalyzed urethane coatings.

So when one of our Top 10 clients, who has been on that list for two decades, asked us to take over the painting of their vehicles, we had to make some decisions…

Here’s the background. The client is Truly Nolen Pest Control, one of the largest such companies in America, founded in 1938 in Miami by Truly Wheatfield Nolen — yep, that was his real name. The company has expanded globally with a franchise model. So when they call, we listen.

We have been doing their vehicle graphics on their famous “VW Mouse Cars” featuring big round ears and a tail sticking out of the trunk for years, but they have never gone for wraps. Their “Truly Yellow” is a PPG trademarked color, so paint it is.

Period.

All of these years they have had Maaco paint their cars. They deliver them to us already yellow, we install the die-cut vinyl graphics. Easy. Only problem was Maaco. Cheap paint, overspray on everything and six different shades of the “trademarked” color.

Of course, Truly Nolen was only paying $1K per car. (You get what you pay for.) This year, they came to us and said they were sick of Maaco’s quality, and wanted us to be a one-stop shop. Receive new cars, paint them yellow — all the same shade hopefully — and install the graphics: 150 cars per year.

A Top 10 client wants to double/triple the revenue they spend with us… What to do?

You want the added business but it has to fit your business model. We damn sure ain’t doing $1K paint jobs, so that’s the first subject discussed. We’ll use higher-quality paint, we won’t paint onto the tires and the vehicles will be the same color. But we can’t do our typical $7K paint job!

We’re also not a production shop so we won’t be as fast as those cowboys over there.

Truly Nolen agreed to a higher price. They also agreed to our request to revisit the process as we go along. If we are not making money, we raise the price. Period. No other way around it.

The first month they dropped off nine Priuses. Second month 25 Corollas. Third month 23 Frontiers. Our parking lot is full. We’ve hired two new painters.

So far so good. But it’s backing up our 40-ft. pressurized spray booth, previously reserved for the 50 gal/month of Matthews Paint we spray on signs.

Hey Rick, how do you feel about adding a second spray booth…? Come on man, we only live once, right?

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