The difference between big companies and small players is that one never sees the opportunity and the other takes advantage of every opening. Yet sometimes the small player can start to act like a big company and completely ruin their advantage. In this Billboard Mastery podcast we’re going to review how never to have a “big company” attitude.
Episode 116: Don’t Get Complacent Transcript
When I got into the billboard business, I was an absolute nobody. I knew nothing. I had no billboards, I had no experience, I had no resume. I had zero. But I did have a couple advantages over my large company competition. One was that I could move very fast. I didn't have any committee of decision makers I had to go to. If I felt that that deal was a good deal, I could sign it right there on the spot, and I didn't have to ask anyone's permission. Secondly, I had the ability to be creative because I had to be creative by necessity. I was trying to compete in an arena where I was the most poorly equipped of anybody. So I was always looking for locations that others didn't bother to look for. I was trying to find new creative ways of finding locations, of buying signs, of renting the space. And that's a typical mark of the small person who's just starting out or maybe owns already a handful of billboards. Those are their competitive tools. And that's why often the largest billboard owners in America started out from scratch and, like David and Goliath, ultimately overcame the opponent. But the problem is sometimes even small players become complacent. This is Frank Rolfe of the Billboard Mastery Podcast. We're talking about real life methods not to be complacent. You don't want to be the big company. You don't want those big company attitudes. Those are not good things to have around if you really want to be successful.
So let's start off with speed. Now, if you look at any of the large billboard companies out there, they started with just an individual. And that individual understood the necessity of moving fast. So if they saw an opportunity, they jumped on it immediately. If they saw it on Friday at 3:00, they didn't let it go until Monday because they knew the old adage, time kills deals, and the fact that they slow down, they might lose the opportunity. But another part of that is simply the fact that when you start out and you're small, it's all your money. But someone at a big company, well, it's not their money. They don't see any of it. They get paid the same, other than maybe some small bonus, whether they produce anything or not. That's what you're seeing right now in the U.S. government with this entire DOGE program, Department of Government Efficiency. The government has wasted billions and trillions collectively of dollars, apparently because nobody cared. It wasn't their money. If it had been their money, none of that would have ever existed.
So even as you grow in Stature, as a billboard owner, you must never forget the value of the dollar. And you must always be listening in the back of your head to the mantra of Chainsaw Al Dunlap, the corporate raider of the '70s; he had a six-word mantra. Sell, sell, sell, cut, cut, cut. And you need to never forget that. You need to understand that every billboard you bring in creates more money to your bottom line. And every dollar that you spend is a dollar you get to keep in your pocket. And that's a mentality the big companies do not share. They do not know. It's foreign to them. And that's why they miss out on so much stuff. That's why you can see all those vacant signs in a row on some highways in America. It's not because there's no advertisers who want that space. It's because they don't really care. The space is maybe harder to sell there. They don't want to have to make the calls to get it done, so they just let it drift away. Now the other issue you have with the large billboard company is that they don't have to be creative, they don't actually have to grow at all. Back when there were plentiful open locations in America, back in the '80s and the '90s, back when I got my start, you would think those billboard companies, the large ones, they would just dominate, they'd be getting all the locations, right, but they weren't. It was a heyday for small startup people. And it makes no logical sense except for the simple fact that when you've got a steady paycheck, you don't think outside the box, you don't really care to get aggressive because it doesn't really matter to you. And it all filters back on the same issue. It's not their money.
So all the time you would see locations that would come and go and they would do nothing to get them. The number one time you'd see that was as cities expanded. All the time cities would be pushing their boundaries out. They'd be annexing more land and as they annexed, they would be rezoning the land to commercial and it would be on the highway. And it was very obvious that there were locations there, but they didn't do anything about it. Or there'd be a new highway built, but they never bothered to do a thing about it. When they built Interstate 20 east of Dallas, I was the first guy out there getting leases before the highway was even built. The Department of Transportation in Texas gave out all of the granular detail of exactly where the highway would go. So I simply got one of the maps. I found the owners of the land on both sides of the highway. I started pitching them, building billboards on them before the highway had even been formally announced to the public. What do you suppose happened? By the time the highway got built, small operators such as myself already had all the locations. And when the big companies came in, they couldn't find anything. All they could do was try and buy the locations from the small guys who would beat them to the punch.
Creativity also extends just to even how you negotiate with the property owner. Maybe they want a higher percent than the big companies willing to get them. Maybe they want more bonding. Maybe they want something special. I would steal a location from a big company simply because the advertiser wanted to advertise on the billboard for the first two years. It was not a strange request. The sign was in the apartment parking lot of an apartment complex, and the apartment wanted to have the signs used for the first two years to help lease up their space. Now, I couldn't afford to let them have it for free, so I gave them an extraordinarily low rate for both sides of the sign for two years. It all worked out great. It gave me steady income for the day it was built, and then two years later, it gave me the ability to readjust to market rents. It also made the bank happy because they knew I had that steady advertiser when the sign was first built that wouldn't let them down.
The bottom line to it all is don't ever be a big company, even if you become a big company. No matter how big you are, you never want to get into those really bad behavioral patterns of losing your competitive nature, of being slow and procrastinating, or losing your complete sense of creativity. Now, the top companies in America today are not the big companies. If you say, who is the best in this market? It's rarely those large ones. It's smaller groups that actually employ the sense of urgency, the sense of creativity, and the sense of really trying hard to be the best that they can be. This is Frank Rolfe of the Billboard Mastery Podcast. Hope you enjoyed this. Talk to you again soon.