80 Years and Still Building: What Running a 26-Person Sign Shop Teaches You About Growing a Trade Business

Dan Verboski didn't grow up dreaming about signs. He left the State Department in 2017, looked for a business to buy, and ended up in Tyler, Texas taking over a 72-year-old sign company he knew nothing about. Leon Signs is now 80 years old and Dan runs a 26-person operation making custom, large-format lighted signs for banks, churches, restaurants, and national rollouts across East Texas.

In this episode:

• Why 87% of Dan's revenue comes from repeat customers and what that says about how to protect a geographic moat
• The "blessing and curse" of being a specialty trade business — high inbound, but nearly impossible to scale fast because every hire takes years to develop
• How Leon Signs tells customers their confirmed install date within days of signing and hits it 95% of the time
• The 4-year, 9-month warranty call — a simple touchpoint that keeps customers close right before the relationship would go quiet
• Why Dan almost lost people he shouldn't have when he bought the company, and what he would do differently
• EOS and how a 10-year vision connects to a 90-day sprint for an 80-year-old trade business
• What people get wrong about manufacturing and the trades — and why "you'll be poor" is the wrong assumption

Connect with Dan on Linkedin (https://www.linkedin.com/in/danverboski/) & check out Leon's Signs here (https://www.leonssignsinc.com/)