In this video, Frank Rolfe discusses how the billboard business works while driving past a wide assortment of outdoor advertising signs. If you want a quick introduction to the billboard industry, this video will give you a summary of how much money you can make and how the business model works.
Driving Down The Road And Talking About Billboards - Transcript
Look, there's a billboard. And another, in fact they are everywhere all around us is out-of-home media. They come in all shapes and sizes, big giant metal monopole signs, all the way down to small wooden ones. But they all work off the same fundamental business model. And that is you rent the land. And then you rent the ad space. And it's a very, very lucrative arrangement.
Typically, billboards can be built out here to rural area, like the ones you just saw, for low amounts of money, maybe anywhere from $4,000 on a wooden sign, up to 10 to 15,000 on a steel sign. And you can then rent those ads, just like the ones you're looking at right here. Typically, for a few $100 a month. When you add it all together, the return on investment is nearly 100% per year.
But the great part about billboards is are so low management, it doesn't take much to rent and operate a billboard sign. How little does it take? Well, you typically only rent the ad space once or twice a year. And that means you can build a giant portfolio of signs without using a whole lot of your time and effort or capital. If you can make $5,000 per year per billboard, you need only six of them to hit $30,000. 10 $50,000. 20 of them $100,000 a year. That is a pretty attractive business model.
If you'd like to learn more about how the billboard industry works, why not buy our course or even our Boot Camp on the Billboard industry. It's written by myself from my experiences learned in becoming the largest private owner of billboards in Dallas Fort Worth, and the whole thing I did was built from scratch. I did it all myself. On my own time, learning as I went, I developed lots of formulas that allowed me to harness the power of things like that billboard right there to make lots of money, I ended up selling the business for $5.8 million in 1996.
And I am considered the authority on billboards in America, mainly because I'm the only one who will talk about everybody else who builds up a billboard company and sells it. They just kind of retire and disappear. I didn't because I thought it was important that others learned the skills that I learned. Otherwise, all that effort I put out would be lost. So if you'd like to learn the correct way to buy, build, and operate billboard signs that you should definitely consider taking our outdoor billboard advertising course and or Boot Camp because these billboards are everywhere, and they're not going anywhere. And it'd be great to put your name on at least one of them. Talk to you soon!