No One Likes Change

Joel Haluck has been in the sign industry since 1992. He started with an S-10 pickup, a ladder rack, and some hand tools. Then he moved into a small storefront where he made fast-turnaround vinyl signs. His next advancement was manufacturing and installing electrical signs. Now, 32 years later, Joel has seven trucks, and his company (Signstat) occupies a 22,000 square foot building on 2.5 acres south of Pittsburgh, PA.

When Joel initially began doing installations, raceway signs were steel boxes with neon letters and heavy transformers. “I’m not exaggerating,” Joel told me in our interview, “it was nothing to have a three- or four-hundred-pound raceway sign. You had to have a crane to lift it.” Through the years, Joel has accumulated a fleet of large aerial trucks with sufficient lifting capacities to hoist two installers plus signs weighing several hundred pounds.

Then things began to change. “We started to realize that a lot of these signs we put up now are very light weight. And we were looking at these trucks that are heavy, heavy-duty trucks. They’ll do a lot of work, but do you need that? That was the big thing—do we need that for what we’re doing? There are, as we all know, times when you need a truck like that. But more often than not, you need a truck like this (he pointed at his Van Ladder). So, for us, we started to analyze it and really sit down and think about it, and say, you know, ‘Why are we spending this much money when we don’t have to?’” When Joel couldn’t come up a good answer to that question, he decided to buy a Van Ladder.

For the first few months, his installers were skeptical. “A few of my guys were hard sells on this truck. When we first got it, it really didn’t go out all that much because, like I said, we have our installers and the crews were like, ‘Ah, I’m not taking that,’…Nobody likes change.”

Then Joel hired a business advisor to help him evaluate his pricing structure post-COVID. He wanted to determine the cost of operating each of his trucks, considering service, maintenance, fuel usage, vehicle depreciation, vehicle replacement cost, insurance, salvage value, and whatever else bean-counters think to consider. What Joel discovered through this exercise was that his cost to operate the Van Ladder was nearly half that of his bigger trucks on a per mile basis.

With those numbers dancing around inside his head, Joel decided to lead by example and use the Van Ladder himself. Here’s what he said, “You know, it has made a believer out of me after running it, because I still go out on the road and run these trucks. A couple of my guys weren’t believers in the beginning, but once they started seeing me take it and put up raceway signs, especially raceways under ten or twelve feet—I mean you can take it up there, and I was amazed myself. I put it on the fork system with those brackets to hold it, and it’s like a no brainer. You just go up, and it’s so easy to position. I was impressed with that. I put the sign up, and I really didn’t need anybody else, other than the sign was a little cumbersome to get it on the forks. Other than that, I was putting it up while the other guy was wiring. He was doing his thing, and I was doing mine, and we got out of there a little faster. You didn’t need the two guys to hold it. Even if you put it on a jib boom in the other truck, you’d still have it swinging around. You always need to have a hand on it. But with this, when you put it on there (the platform), it’s staying. That was impressive.”

Joel’s lead installer, Brandon, was one of the skeptics in the beginning. “When we first got the truck, I was hesitant on it because it’s a one-man basket. We’re used to two-man baskets. There’s more room. But after using it, I changed my mind. It’s got a lot of attachments, it’s quiet, it’s smooth. It makes a two-man job into a one-man job.”

I asked Joel what percentage of their installations are currently handled by the Van Ladder. “Right now, I would guess we’re at about fifty percent. It keeps going up. Guys are starting to realize it’s a lot easier to take this truck. The other big thing about this truck is this box. Putting things inside of it, you’re going to jobsites—we’re in Pennsylvania—you’re going to jobsites in the wintertime and your signs get all the road grime on them, whether they’re going inside or outside, they’re getting all this road grime on them. With this, when you put them inside the box, they’re just as nice as when you put them in there. You know, you don’t have all that clean up. And the other thing is, in the wintertime, we’ve done faces inside this box. We’ve stood them up, peeled the vinyl, put the new vinyl on, and it was no big deal to do inside while it’s raining or doing whatever outside. So, there’s a lot of advantages just to the box itself.”

As time has gone on, Joel and his team have discovered other positives about the Van Ladder. “One of the things all the guys love is that it’s quiet. When you go out, and you’re running this truck, you can actually say, ‘Hey, throw me up a nut or a bolt,’ and the guy hears you on the ground. You’re not yelling over the truck. The other thing is, customers appreciate it because the truck isn’t running outside their door with all the diesel fumes or gas fumes, depending on what you’re running. And you know, every time a customer opens the door, the truck is real loud and they hear it. When you’re doing installs in plazas, that’s a big deal.”

Another pleasant surprise for Joel was the battery life. “We just did a McDonalds job, and we were running this truck all week. We were at a hotel, and it wasn’t getting charged, and it ran that whole week, no problem at all. The battery voltage didn’t drop down to where it needed charging. I mean the boom is going all day, and the engine is shut off. So that’s part of the savings on this truck.”

Perhaps this blogpost should be called No One Initially Likes Change. In an airplane, altitude changes are often accompanied by turbulence. It’s no different in business. If you want your business to soar, you need to constantly assess your reality, especially when making capital investments. If your current reality supports changing the way you do things, it’s best not to ignore it. Although change is difficult in the short term, think of all the times you’ve looked back and said, “Why didn’t we do this earlier?”