How I Made A Million Dollars In The Outdoor Billboard Business - Outdoor Billboard University
I started building billboards straight out of college, with no knowledge of what I was doing and not much capital to work with. All I had was the desire to make money and an almost equally powerful fear of failure. Starting from scratch, it took me almost a year to find my first location. And even then, nothing came easy since I had absolutely no idea how to rent the ad space or build the thing. But I “endeavored to persevere”, as Teddy Roosevelt would say, and I was able to stick with a pace of building two billboard faces per month for about 15 straight years. At that point, I had 300 billboard faces, which made me the largest privately owned billboard company in Dallas/Ft. Worth. And I did that despite the fierce competition – there were no less than 60 billboard companies operating in Dallas at that time. Every ground lease and every advertising lease was virtually hand-to-hand combat to obtain.
Through industry consolidation, the number of competitors out there has been reduced by about 80%.
In most markets, there are now only three or four billboard companies as adversaries, instead of thirty or forty.
Billboards have become one of the strongest media options for advertisers, whereas just a decade ago, it was considered the weak sibling to television, radio and newspapers. The advent of the internet destroyed those giants, but left billboards unscathed.
The amount of traffic and readership passing billboards increases every day, as does the length of time the cars are stuck in front of signs, due to the endless back-ups on most of America’s major highways and roads
This leads to higher advertising rents – which have already been going up an average of 10% per year.
And small towns across our country are growing into thriving markets that are well served by outdoor and will become the next major cities.