Updated for 2011, this guide covers how to estimate, warranties and quantity discounts, an estimate form, design and engineering fees, service and installation hourly rates, a letter footage chart, and ...
When a huge sign company folds, waves, as well as ripple effects, follow.
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By all accounts, few saw it coming. On January 9, ImagePoint, a 65-year-old Knoxville, TN-based quantity-sign manufacturer, closed its doors. A former ImagePoint manager told me only five or six people had prior knowledge. Gone were 270 Knoxville jobs and another 180 at the ImagePoint branch in Florence, KY (near Cincinnati). A January 10 article in the Knoxville News Sentinel spawned 90 online comments from ImagePoint managers and other employees, as well as unpaid installers.
Yet one observer claims the closing could easily have been prevented, but Wachovia spurned an offer from Navigation Capital, an equity firm, according to its founder, Larry Mock (an ImagePoint board member). In his January 11 blog, entitled “Why Wachovia Deserved to Die,” Mock said Wachovia (which was being acquired by Wells Fargo) liquidated ImagePoint’s assets even though “Navigation (and others) offered to put in $10 million of equity and $3 million in a standby debt facility.” He also wrote, “[Wachovia] bounced the checks the company had issued, [ImagePoint] thinking it had $6.5 million in available funds.”
ImagePoint retained 50 people to close out current business and the liquidation process. Meanwhile, some high-level skills wouldn’t be idle long.
An ImagePoint manager asked rhetorically in the Knoxville paper, “Why would another company buy ImagePoint when they could wait a week and just hire the talent that they wanted? Why take on $52 million in debt?”
The morning ImagePoint closed its door, Blair Companies Inc. (Altoona, PA), a $440 million firm (of which approximately 20% is signage-related), began interviewing key ImagePoint personnel.
“By the end of the first day, we’d decided to seek out and hire three to four key engineering people,” said Philip Devorris, Blair’s president and CEO. Even though Blair only sought “A” players, “we expanded our list to 30 to 40 within a week,” he added. The 40 people hired included “key engineers from the Florence plant that designed and prototyped the vast majority of ImagePoint’s products over the past 15 years.”
Additionally, “We’ve established a large office on the ground floor of ImagePoint’s former Gay St. office for Blair’s Knoxville Business Unit,” Devorris said.
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