Why do You Need a Sign Anyways?
For any business, a sign is a welcome mat, an invitation for people to connect with us, to engage with us and to give us an opportunity to present our products and services.
Company signs can be as simple as a painted placard or as complex as a digital message center or brightly illuminated pillar. The trick is to put the right sign in the right place to accomplish your particular business objectives.
Start with Your Goals
What type of company signs you choose depends upon the impact you hope for it to have on your business. Questions to ask yourself:
- Do I need foot traffic to drive my business?
- Do customers, employees or suppliers need help finding my business?
- Are you trying to develop or enhance your brand?
Depending upon the answer to those questions, you might need a single business sign or an entire corporate sign package.
One or Multiple Signs for Your Company?
As with many things, "it depends". In many ways, it is synonymous with having a conversation with someone that you’re going to interact with. Imagine saying "You’re driving down the road and you’ll see a large sign with multiple panels highlighting our plaza. Once you turn in, you’ll see a sign that points to the right to guide you to where we are in the plaza. Once you arrive at our section of the plaza you’ll see the sign over our individual building. When you walk into the building you’ll see a directory sign that will tell you how to get to our space.
Turning that "conversation" into a company signage plan works something like this. Depending upon the number of businesses in a plaza or business park you might need a pylon sign with multiple tenant panels or a monument sign with the name of the park or your business. You then would need a sign on the building, which could be a cabinet sign or a custom channel letter sign. Within the building you’ll need a directory sign and probably some wayfinding signs. And don’t forget the many small signs highlighting exits, elevators and more. The final plan will list and spec each of these important and purposeful business signs.
The Execution Plan
Once you have your signs list and designs finalized it will become time to move on to operations. There are a number of things that have to happen in order to get all of the signs for your business in place and working for you:
- Permitting – every municipality has its own sign code and permitting process governing sign size, placement, lighting and more. This process can take several months if variances are required, and on occasion revisions to the signage designs are required.
- Sourcing – depending upon the sign type, size, materials, etc. it can take weeks to months to pull together the materials and manufacture each of the signs in your corporate sign package.
- Operations & Planning – a variety of questions have to be answered and resources assigned accordingly, for example:
- If the sign is illuminated, is there power available where the sign is going to be installed?
- Is there access to the infrastructure to which the business’ sign is going to be mounted?
- Are there hours where the business cannot be disrupted, that have to be worked around when the signage installation is going to take place?
- Is there a particular deadline that must be accommodated…for example a "grand opening"?
