Some Days You’re the Dog; Some Days You’re the Fire Hydrant

LET’S TAKE A quick detour from creating your signshop’s value proposition to focus on the less predictable real-world issues that we owners and managers face every day — the unforeseen problems and opportunities.

Stroke of luck. Chance. Karma. Ghost in the machine. Bad break. Fate. Serendipity. Providence. Destiny. Happenstance. Coincidence. Fluke. Windfall. (See how good I am at this ChatGPT thing?)

As signshop owners, we must not only contend with issues occurring daily and within our control. We have to leave some bandwidth to deal with totally unexpected, out-of-the-clear-blue-sky situations, too.

These black swan events can be either good or bad (on rare occasions, both, like that massive job for the high-profile new customer with tons of moving parts and an impossible deadline). As owners, we are forced to think creatively and act as competent problem solvers to work these circumstances to our advantage.

For the happily unexpected situations, we are the dog, yay! We can shine when our competitor has let them down. Or by offering options our client has never seen, or cost-savings solutions to benefit their bottom line — perhaps fresh ideas their prior vendor never shared with them — or by providing professional, prompt responses and communication. Let’s make hay while the sun shines and demonstrate our value by charging a confident and robust price to compensate ourselves for going the extra mile. We will undoubtedly earn every extra penny.

For the “uh oh” situation, we all of a sudden become the fire hydrant, boo! Our supplier sends us the incorrect substrate for a rush job. The client sends a 72-dpi .gif for their new building wrap. The vinyl you just loaded into your eco-solvent printer feels like it’s been stored in the basement of the local aquarium. The deadline you agreed to just got moved up by three days. The inkjet head on your brand-new flatbed just decided to flatline. Been there, done that. These are the days you wonder if that job as a Walmart greeter might be a better career move.

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How can you deal with these hobgoblins in our sign world?

Price for them, of course!

You all buy car insurance, right? Property insurance? Liability insurance? Think of proper sign pricing as “fire hydrant days” insurance. Some jobs you won’t need the extra coverage, so you can bank that as a premium against the jobs that end up being more costly than expected. Yes, the “easier” jobs will subsidize the “ickier” jobs (little known technical signshop terminology). The goal is to pay attention to those straightforward jobs, see what they have in common, build your processes to capture more of those qualities, and hopefully the majority of your jobs will be simpler and profitable, giving you a bit more cushion when the roof inevitably comes crashing down.

I can’t emphasize enough that your signshop’s wellbeing is wholly dependent upon your financial solvency, and you can take big steps today to protect that by beefing up your pricing.

You need to invest in an umbrella to keep you safe and dry on those fire hydrant days.