Owning billboards is unlike most every other business. In this Billboard Mastery podcast we’re going to explore the unusual lifestyle of most billboard owners and review the reasons for this unique style of business.
Episode 129: The Billboard Owner's Lifestyle Transcript
I used to be the largest private owner of billboards in Dallas-Fort Worth. And I had a really unusual lifestyle. Because owning billboards has always created a very different style of living. You have an entirely different life than others in other forms of business, other forms of investment. There's nothing quite like being a billboard owner. So I thought it would be interesting to go over what the lifestyle of a billboard owner is like. This is Frank Rolfe, the Billboard Mastery Podcast. We're gonna explore the different attributes of how owning billboards impacts your life. So the first observation from being a billboard owner is that if you get enough billboards, it can afford you a nice degree of luxury because billboards are a very lucrative industry. There have been a couple billionaires forged out of the billboard industry, people like John Kluge, Arte Moreno, other people that started with nothing and just went out and started building billboards and got in a sufficient scale to be worth a lot of money. So there's no question that one thing about billboard owners are they typically have a nice house, have some nice cars, have a nice quality of living.
So financially, it's attractive. But another thing that's really unique about billboard ownership is the relation between you and your time. Now, even when I was up to 300 billboards, 80% of those billboards renewed annually. That's because I've always been a big believer that you want to select advertisers, handpick them, the ones that your billboard will be very successful for, so they want to renew year after year. And because I had this amazing renewal rate of 80%, only 20% of my signs had to be re-rented annually. So out of my 300 signs, only 60 required any effort to get them reoccupied. So I was able to manage a lot of accounts, a lot of business, without a lot of time spent. Most every other business, particularly in the advertising world, is completely unlike that. If you had a radio station or TV station, you have to go out there constantly beating the streets trying to get advertisers. It's terrible. I don't even know how they do that. And every other business out there also does not have anywhere near the degree of renewal that billboards do. Now, why do billboards have so much renewal? It's because a billboard well positioned with a good ad on it pulls enough customers in on a monthly basis to more than pay for itself.
Advertisers only stick with things that make them money. We all want to make money, and so do advertisers. And they're not gonna spend X dollars a month with you unless they get Y in money back in the door, and Y must be greater than X. And billboards traditionally can do that. And that's why you don't have to do that much rerunning of your signs typically on a regular basis. Another factor is that billboard leases are very long in term. The average billboard lease is a year. Sometimes you can get big advertisers to go up to three years. Rarely would you ever take any advertiser that's less than six months. And that means you only have to rent the sign once, and you can ignore that thing other than checking on it periodically to make sure the lights are working and such. But you can ignore that thing for a full year and nothing bad will happen. So from an advertising perspective, billboards don't require a whole lot of time spent. And then comes the actual management of the signs, their actual operation. Well, the only thing that happens with billboards that you have to actively make sure is going on is that the lights are working.
And, of course, you have to send the invoices out and collect in the checks, but you don't write a lot of checks. You pay insurance, property tax, electricity, cost of creating and installing the ads, and the ground rent. But there's only typically five categories of checks you have to write. So it doesn't take a whole lot of management time to operate billboards, that's for sure. And it's a happy business. Most of the time what you're doing is you're providing ads to people who like them. And there's very little stress. It's not like being a doctor, where the patient might die. It's not like being the bottler of some drink that, you know, you might screw up and poison people. Billboards, pretty much customers are happy. Landowners are happy. Everyone is happy. It is a generally happy business with not a lot of stress. So overall, it's a lucrative business, which doesn't require a lot of time, doesn't create a lot of stress, leads to kind of a happy existence. So what's the key takeaway then? Well, the key takeaway is that billboards are a pretty fun thing. But you might say, well, gosh, I don't think I have the capital or the time to build it up to my full-time job.
What about doing it on a part-time basis? Well, this is one area where billboards really are very successful because you can adapt billboards completely around a day job without much difficulty. A lot of billboards are rented by simply putting on the sign, sign for rent and a big old phone number, waiting for people to call you. The billboard acts as its own salesman, reaching thousands of potential customers a day who may call off the sign. Or you might do a large direct mail campaign to all the businesses at the next exit down or next couple of exits down. But you can do that at night. And once again, you're just waiting for people to call. If anyone called you, surely on your lunch hour, you could call them back. It only takes five minutes. Then comes meeting with the advertiser to do the creative. Typically, the advertiser doesn't really want to meet with you that bad. You might have the manager of the McDonald's or the Outback Steakhouse. They've got other things to do. It's not management intensive with time. They're not wanting you to come over and camp out there. Again, you could go there on a lunch hour. Or you could often just go by there on a Saturday or Sunday.
You could go by maybe after hours. Many of those businesses work their own strange hours, particularly things that are open all night, like hotels and truck stops. Those owners, typically, or managers, don't even get there until much later in the day. But it's a business that you can definitely maneuver around your other commitments. And on that note, it's also a business that allows you to spend more quality time with your family. Because again, because the hours of operation are so unique, you can hit all your kids' sporting events, all their school functions, and still be right on top of everything because it's something you can do on nights and weekends. In fact, just driving and checking on your signs is best done at night to see if the lights are working. Not during the day. During the day, it's a waste of drive. You can't see one of the biggest attributes, which is whether the lights are on or not. The bottom line to it is that the lifestyle of a typical billboard owner is very pleasant. It's very adaptable. It can work around your schedule. It's something you should definitely investigate.
This is Frank Rolfe, the Billboard Mastery Podcast. Hope you enjoyed this. Talk to you again soon.