Your Business Deserves to Look as Good as It Works

You might cut the cleanest fade in Trenton. You might cook the best plate on your block, or run the most caring ministry in Mercer County. But the person walking past your door doesn't know any of that yet. All they see is your sign.

If that sign is cracked, sun-bleached or peeling at the corners, a lot of people just keep walking. They never get far enough to taste the food, sit in the chair or hear the message. I've watched it happen to good businesses for years, and it's the reason I do what I do.

Full disclosure: I own The UpScale Tech & Print, the sign and print shop I talk about below. This post is my own view, from my own shop floor.

Bad signage costs you customers you never meet

We've all seen it. The banner zip-tied to a fence that turned pink after one summer. Window lettering lifting at the edges. A flyer with a blurry, stretched logo. A storefront sign that looked fine on opening day and tired by month six.

It isn't just about looks. A tired sign tells people something the owner never meant to say: we cut corners. Fair or not, customers read a faded sign as a faded business.

The research backs up what I see every week. In a FedEx Office survey of American consumers, about three out of four said they had walked into a store they'd never visited just because of its signs. About half said they're less willing to go into a place with poorly made or misspelled signs.

So the sign isn't decoration. It's your first salesperson, and it works every hour you're open and every hour you're closed.

Why we treat this like a fight

When I started The UpScale Tech, I kept meeting owners who'd been burned. They paid for a cheap sign, it faded in a year, and they paid again. Or they had a great logo on their cards and a completely different one on their van. Nobody had told them those things matter.

So we made it our mission to make it easy for owners to look professional, with signs and print that hold up. A few things we do because of that:

We make everything to order, in our own shop. When production stays under our roof, we can check the quality ourselves and turn jobs around fast.
We use materials built for New Jersey weather. Think quarter-inch cast acrylic for storefronts and lobbies, and vinyl rated for outdoor use on windows and vehicles.
We keep your look the same everywhere. Sign, business cards, shirts, flyers, van and website should all tell one story. We design, print and set up the tech, so nothing gets lost between five different vendors.

One recent example: we lettered a box truck for Elevated Heating & Cooling. Their name, services and phone number now ride all over the county on every job. That truck markets them while they work.

You give great service. Let people find that out.

Here's what I believe: most of the owners I meet are already great at what they do. The problem isn't the service. It's that customers decide whether to give you a chance before they ever try it.

Take two minutes this week and do this:

Stand across the street from your business. Can you read your name and what you do from there? Is anything faded, peeling or out of date?
Put your card, your sign and your website side by side. Do they look like the same business?
Ask a friend who's never been in. What does your outside tell them about you?

If something made you wince, don't wait until you feel "big enough" to fix it. Every month you look smaller than you are, you lose customers you'll never even know about.

If you want to go deeper, Marty Neumeier's The Brand Gap is a short, easy read on what a brand really is. And if you'd rather talk it through, book a time with me. We'll look at your sign, your cards and your website together and figure out what to fix first.

— Pierre