Expand Vol. 3 No. 8

Pizza, Golf, Signs, and a Big Brand

One of the biggest brands in Phoenix is a sign company that got its start through the hustle of an extraordinary teenager.

In Phoenix, bluemedia is one of the biggest and most visible brands in the area. Not so long ago, at least relatively speaking, bluemedia was being born of the entrepreneurial spirit of one its founders, Jared Smith, as he passed out flyers faster than anyone else for Domino’s Pizza.

As part of his regular duties at the pizza chain, Smith, then a sophomore in high school, was required to deliver flyers around town. “They gave an hourly wage for every 50 flyers you delivered, and I was doing 250 an hour, so I was making about $25 an hour delivering flyers. I hired a friend to help me, we put out a ton of flyers, and blew their hourly P&L for their labor rates, so they called me into corporate headquarters because they also saw a spike in sales,” recalls Smith.

Smith and his friend Jeremy were contracted to do nothing else but deliver flyers. The fledgling company, dubbed J&J Delivery Services, soon had more than 100 “employees” delivering about a quarter-million flyers a week. The flyer business led to an additional print brokering business.

With proceeds from the sale of the delivery business, and fresh out of high school, Smith went into business with Lance Davis, who had opened five skateboard/snowboard shops. Since they needed decals for the boards and t-shirts to sell in the store, they bought a vinyl cutter and a small screen-printing press. After a couple of “extra lame” winters, they sold three of the locations, kept two, and converted them to jet ski shops called Rocket Rentals.

All the while, Smith brokered printing and was approached to do a variety of promotional printing for a golf tournament. “I did some research and found out that there are 300 golf courses in a 30-mile radius. On average, they do about 30 tournaments a year for a total of 9,000 golf tournaments during the year,” says Smith. “We looked for other products we could sell for golf tournaments, and came across digital signs. We bought an HP 2500 and started printing posters. We spray glued the posters to Coroplast, put an H-wire in the bottom of it, stuck it in the grass, and called it a tee sign. We did about $340,000 in tee signs our first year.”

This new lucrative business led Smith and business partner Lance Davis to form The Golf Tournament Group (TGTG) in 1997, and soon partnered with R.J. Orr, who brought additional sales expertise and golf knowledge to the group. Eventually, Smith, Davis, and Orr would add Darren Wilson as a partner to help build the bluemedia brand.

The golf tournament business naturally opened up access to an abundance of corporate contacts who sponsored the events. It became clear that TGTG needed to serve more than just the local golf tournament business, so bluemedia was created in 2000 as a division of TGTG (Blue Media was a term paper Smith wrote in high school about Big Blue, a.k.a., IBM).

Eventually, TGTG would be dissolved into bluemedia as the company became a behemoth in the local sign industry. TGTG’s first office was 900 square feet, plus Smith’s house, which housed the HP 2500. Now, the company operates out of 27,000 square feet of three distinct yet connected buildings. That original 900 square-foot office space is now the company’s lobby.

Big Media

The philosophy at bluemedia has always been basic and rather intuitive – customer service, quality, technology, people, and so on and so forth – but what sets the bluemedia brand apart is the company’s drive to dig deeper into those concepts and employ them effectively and practically.

Smith relates that when he and Davis first researched printing technologies, they didn’t find the technology they were looking for right off the bat. Instead, they found a gap in the market they could exploit to their advantage.

“One of the most important lessons I learned going into it was how difficult it was to place an order for a poster. They wanted to talk to me about CMYK TIFFs, about 100 percent rush charges, what exact paper I wanted, the type of printing process needed, if my file was print-ready or if it needed to be pre-flighted, and so on. Their menu of services looked like a binary programming manual. It was very hard to buy, and I felt like an idiot when I left there. They weren’t rude, but they weren’t helpful, their materials weren’t helpful, and their samples weren’t helpful,” recalls Smith.

Smith took this lesson to heart and it became one of the driving forces of the business. Make the buying process simple and user-friendly. Call a product by a name that means something to the buyer, and make absolutely sure you communicate additional charges so that they’re value-added services.

“We have a three-day turn time on all of our projects, and if someone needs it tomorrow we offer an expedite service, so we don’t have a rush charge. FedEx, for instance, doesn’t have a rush fee; they have an overnight service you can choose if you need it. If someone says they offer an expedite service up front, it becomes the customer’s decision instead of yours and they’re shopping your services,” explains Smith.

After all, bluemedia is in the business of developing long-lasting partnerships, and it takes this attitude to the next level by giving back to many of its clients, such as the local sports teams. While producing graphics for the Arizona Diamondbacks, the Suns, or the Coyotes, bluemedia is a season ticket holder and a sponsor.

Again, bluemedia looks for gaps in the market or in a section of the market that will benefit both the client and bluemedia’s brand. Smith is adamant that as a sign company, bluemedia has the capability to run free test ads for their client – branded bluemedia, of course.

“Since we do business with so many transit advertising companies for bus shelters and wraps, we found a number of spaces that had not been sold and weren’t being utilized. So we suggested using bluemedia place holder signs to cover those spaces that weren’t being used, so now we have have 50 bus shelters and 50 bus benches with our brand on it. Now they don’t have outdated, old signage on their spaces, which makes it much more attractive to potential buyers,” relates Smith as an example of proactively promoting the bluemedia brand. “Someone else would pay $70K for that campaign, and because of these programs, bluemedia’s everywhere. There has to be well over half a million in marketing that we didn’t pay for, but leveraged through our ability as a sign company to fill those spaces and make them more lucrative for our clients. You have to find the hole, be proactive, and go pitch it to make it happen.”

Bigger and Better

Through this intense focus on developing client relationships and turning prospects into customers through branding, bluemedia has seen explosive growth since its inception. Starting with only two people (Smith and Davis) in 1997, bluemedia now has more than 50 employees.

From the beginning, bluemedia decided to chase the biggest and most efficient equipment it could to the point that the company now runs an HP-Scitex XL3, an HP TurboJet 8300, an HP 10000, an HP 5000, five Mimaki JV3s, a battery of cold and hot laminators, a Fotoba DigiTrim 62-in. automated digital cutter, a Fotoba TJ8300 inline cutter for the HP TurboJet, a Weldmaster heat welder, an industrial sewing machine, and two Graphtec plotters. The three building house design, sales and installation, finishing, and printing respectively. The layout has been revamped to ensure the smooth flow of product through the process, including an electric cart that ferries goods and even customers with their finished signs to their cars if need be.

“Between Lance [Davis] and myself, our outlook from day one has always been that we have the rest of our mature lives to be wealthy, so we would spend every penny of profit on equipment. We knew that the way to get where we wanted to be was to have the biggest and best equipment to produce signage,” says Smith. “The idea now is to slow down on bigger, and work on getting better.”

Toward that end, bluemedia has created a number of initiatives within the company to do just that, from creating a color management and Epson proofing system that ensures color consistency across of their devices to tightening the company’s standard operating procedures.

But in keeping with the spirit of bluemedia, these SOPs have been renamed and codified as the Same Page document so that the company and its employees don’t get bogged down in a lot of jargon as they navigate the path toward perfecting its processes. This is especially crucial as the company grows.

As part of that, bluemedia launched an exception report project that lasted three months. On the first day of the project, employees were asked to send an exception report on any daily task that did not follow the company’s Same Page document. Smith says they received 35 exception reports on the first day.

As the process continued, the exception reports were broken down by department, and the top ten reasons for creating them were analyzed for trends. During that process any employee could challenge the exception reports.

“We learned more from the challenges than the exception reports themselves,” says Smith. “What the challenges did was bring two people together who were frustrated with the workflow, found exactly what they were frustrated with, and found a better way to do it. Ultimately, we would have a negotiation and change that process on the Same Page document because of a challenge. It didn’t end up in an argument or finger pointing.”

As a result, the exception reports became almost nil, and the exception report process is over, yielding a Same Page document that actually has everyone at bluemedia on the Same Page.