Today’s podcast guest Justin Powell talks about founding Huntington Billboards in the middle of the 2009 great recession and growing the company to 1,800 displays over 13 years.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 35:29 — 48.8MB)
Some of the highlights.
How did you enter the out of home business?
I graduated from college. I was 20 years old… I made a big list. I called it my new venture checklist. Everything from restaurants…to insurance companies, on and on and on…my cousin and uncle actually came to me and said Justin there’s this billboard down on 75. That seems like a fair business. Why don’t you buy that. It was an on-premise sign and I couldn’t purchase it for off-premise advertising but that got me thinking…
Talk about your first location
I found my first location in this town of New Carlisle and very dear landowners who are friends to this day…It was 8′ by 20′ and a 2 pole structure and cost three times more than it should have and then I spent the next two months knocking on doors trying to rent it.
Small Signs
I tie everything back to numbers…We are going to build the minimum size sign to derive the best returns. A log of times an 8′ by 20′ sign will do just as fine as a 12′ by 24′ if the location is close enough to the road and the visibility is good.
How do you find winning locations?
CISD. We desire to build billboards on curves. That’s the C. On intersections. That’s the I. And then the S is speed. Lower speed. If we can get billboards along roads that are 25 mph or 30 mph…And then the last one is Demand…As we install locations we have a weathervane as to what the market can bear and where we have demand…
Growing Pains
About the time I got to about 70 billboards my occupancy rate was atrocious…It was 40% or something. It was absolutely awful because I was doing everything. I would have nice clothes on and talk to an advertiser and then I would change out of my nice clothes in the car and change into climbing gear and change out a vinyl and then I would chop down trees. I would do land leasing. I would do everything. My little sister at that time – Jena was 17. She looked at me and said “Hey Justin, why don’t you let me take over sales. And I’m like yeah sure. She became a partner in the business. And then my brother, he was 16. He came to me and he said, Justin, I think I can build these things for you. Let me do that…On that foundation we continued to build and build and build. We got to about 500 billboards and my sister Jena got elected as State Representative…So we hired a General Manager at that point…things have transitioned a bit.
Digital Billboards
We had not done digital until the end of 2020. We had some really good locations that needed to be converted…End of 2020 we built our first two signs. We learned a lot from them. And then in 2021 – last year- we put in 22.
Whose automated platforms are you connected to.
Vistar, Blip. Blip to me is fascinating. It’s a very fascinating platform…Whether it’s Blip or any of the other services that we use, it’s like one ad or two ads for a day and they’re paying you $20, or $50 or $100. It’s where our industry needs to go…It’s found money. It’s money we never would have gotten. I think about movie releases…it’s reminder advertising…
Whose signs
We use Formetco. Formetco has done a very good job for us. They look nice and have been very reliable. Formetco seems to know what they are doing…All of the nightmares I thought we would have…we haven’t had.
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