Job security: A sign of the times

By Melanie Kalmar-Contributing Writer

Merle and Bob Silverstein were two disenchanted middle managers seeking job security when they decided the Fastsigns franchise model could provide it.

It was 1990 when Merle walked away from a career in health care to become a franchisee. Her husband Bob, a chemist with a Ph.D., joined her at Fastsigns of Schaumburg several years later.

For Fastsigns International, the couple’s Schaumburg location was its 65thto open in the country.

Now Fastsigns has more than 500 franchisees nationally and globally. According to its website, the company manufactures temporary and permanent, interior and exterior, custom signs for businesses. Franchisees take customers through the consultation and design phase to production, delivery and installation.

Twenty-one years later, the Silversteins continue to invest in their business and maintain control of their job security. Advances in technology have allowed them to produce more signs with fewer people and double their office space.

“What used to take three people now takes one,” Merle Silverstein said of her staff that has been reduced from eight employees to four, including her and Bob.

She said the most unusual sign her team has ever produced was a faceted diamond for Park Lane, a jewelry company that pitches its wares at in-home parties. Even more memorable for her was the upscale marble sign they created for Helene Curtis, a nowshuttered giant in the beauty products industry.

Since sign buyers search the Internet to find a vendor, Merle and Bob invested a lot of money for top billing on search engines. Soon they will be on Facebook and Twitter, advertising to a market segment that didn’t exist when they started out in the sign business.

Even so, they still market their business via direct mail and the Yellow Pages. They are well-known in business networking circles and maintain a presence at trade shows, always looking for new customers who could utilize their services.

Those services include architectural signs, building identification signs, point-of-purchase posters and vehicle graphics, to name a few. Customers hale from a wide spectrum of industries, such as entertainment, health care and real estate. The key decisionmakers the Silversteins deal with run the gamut from maintenance workers to company presidents. They spend from $20,000 to more than $300,000 on signs, she said.

Gary Solomon, former president of Fastsigns International, once told her, “You get ahead in business by doing the basics every day.” She considers it to be the best advice anyone ever gave her because as much as technology has streamlined operations and expanded marketing capabilities, personal service remains her competitive edge.

“We provide personalized service on each project, whether it is helping the customer through the budget process, deciding on the type of sign they need for their project or helping them develop the design of the sign,”Merle Silverstein said. Her outlook appears hopeful, but the business has its challenges. She and Bob are putting on hold investing in certain technology to further streamline the sign-producing process because it’s costprohibitive, and they are working with a customer base that is apprehensive in the current economic climate. “On the one hand, weaker sign companies have not survived and we picked up many of their customers,” she said.

“On the other hand, customers are not spending as much on signs and are waiting longer before they order. Also,our receivables are lower since there are more credit cards being used today. And our material costs have increased so our margins are lower.” To this day, one inevitable part of business that always stings is losing an account, Silverstein said. But she believes that for every job lost, there are plenty of other good ones to be found

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