Predicting Sign Trends for 2025 and a Question on Poaching

Is paying your employees more than your competition “poaching” when you never have reached out to these people?

Strictly speaking, no, this does not seem like “poaching” to us. Poaching consists of actions by a prospective new employer that directly intend to hire an employee away from another company, as so eloquently presented in our Real Deal, “The Case of the Poached Egg.” That said, you may still want to be careful. If you ever work with other sign companies whose employees you now have, “that opens up a can of worms” to use National Branding (Troy, MI) CEO Bob Chapa’s phrase (see “Hiring & Retaining New Sign Employees“). On the other hand, if your competitors were demonstrably underpaying their former employees, that’s just bad business management on their part.

How do you get customers out of the office when they just want to sit around and talk for hours?

Two ideas come to mind. The first involves simply but politely asking your customers to let you get back to the work you are doing for them. Hopefully, that will alert some clients to the necessity of returning to the job while reminding them they’ll still be on your mind. In some cases, they may miss that cue or feel entitled to your time. However, this direct approach depends on a certain confidence and comfort level with the client. The second is the tried and true fake phone call. You have to be able to really sell this for it to work, but if you cannot be direct and really need to end the customer chit-chat, the fake phone call featuring a quick exit without looking back is worth a try.

What do you think the newest trend will be in 2025?

If there’s a hotter new trend than adopting AI for many tasks in the sign business, we are not aware of it. Last year we posted an online extra, “32 Sign Company Uses for AI.” Our Brain Squad reported uses for concepts and idea generation, art and rendering, writing and marketing, social media and website, and more. From experimenting with creating newsletter content to writing contacts and emails to photo touchup for posting to social media, many sign companies have already put AI to work. A trend which is not the latest but is one of the greatest in terms of what the industry needs in 2025 more than ever, is more sign companies participating in ISA’s Sign Manufacturing Day (see signs.org/events/mfgday), an international event on the first Friday of every October in which shops host local high school or trade school students to learn about their companies and the sign industry as a possible career choice. The sign companies that have participated in the past generally consider it time well spent and even the source of a few new employees. The problem of skilled installers and others aging out of the workforce remains ubiquitous. One of the best ways we at Signs of the Times know of to address the issue is to market the industry to young people. Sign MFG Day does exactly that. Contact ISA for help at info@signs.org.