UKSB Members Vehicles

[TonyDwyer]

Paddy, im with you on this one mate. 😕

for the last two months i’ve been trying to design my own van.
on one hand you want it to look up to date and corporate, but on the other you want it to tell everyone what you can do without looking over the top.

i guess it will just stay white 🙄

[eddie cotter]

nice one paddy 😉 , if you do a plain simple job, i recon most punters will say, is that all he can do!, i was talking to a lad the other day & he looked at my van & told me he didnt like it (:) i asked why! his reply was
it is to fancy & sticks out to much, i laughed at him & thanked him for what i took as a compliment, after all its supposed to stick out,
i get at least two jobs a week from people looking at my van,
so go for it paddy, do the biz 😉

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[Phill Fenton]

Here’s mine:-

I love her so much 😮

[John Childs]

Errrrrr……

Astra Estate. Plain white. All that’s on it is the Vauxhall badge.

[Lee Attewell]

Don’t you just hate it when you’ve got a blank canvas to work on and can’t make up your bleeding mind? I’ve got the same problem myself.

[Steve Broughton]

Heres mine, in need of a good wash an a polish but its been on about 5 years and I’m bored with it so think I may change the design a bit, Eddie do I get commission ? a pint per job (?) I’m gonna be well pished at this rate 😆 😆

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[Steve Broughton]

Close up of the panel, all vinyl with airbrushed effects for the bevels.

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[Phill Fenton]

Here’s a close up of the rear:-

Note the bevelled edges 😉 , UKSG official member logo 😎 and the digital print (Trusty Roland Colorcamm) 🙄

😆 😆 😆 😆

[Simon Forrester]

Nothing special here, just vinyl, done about 3 years ago now and still looking good.

Hope it helps you decide on what to do with your van, we took about 6 months deciding!!

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[Henry Barker]

This is what I ride round in a Chevrolet pick-up, I also have a Volvo estate, as you do in this neck of the woods (actually just about to sell it!)

[Terry Bull]

two here
one for work and one for play

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[Terry Bull]

and

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[Robert Lambie]

is that a ford pop? think thats what they are called.. am i right?

now tahts a excellent advert to run around in is it not? (hot)

[Mike Brown]

…you ‘ol rocker you! 😉

what is it about signmakers – we’re all just lads at heart (oh, and ladesses).

nice van – nice car – nuff said…

more soon

mikethesign

[Neil Kelly]

This is our ickel van AKA Sooty

not an elaborate design just logo + tel + web but after driving it round for over a year with nothing on a massive improvement. spent a bit of time on logo and created it in vinyl to try and give a chrome effect.
Its great to see some fine work on other vans I may have to have a rethink.

Neil…

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[Steve Lamb]

I think simplicity rules when doing any van. Although you may want to keep your logo that took ages to perfect, keep any other information to minimum. When its on the move its hard to see and anyone bothering to notice your van needs instant memorable information. Try and think of a generic one liner that says it all.
Our van is written, we did it nearly four years ago, a little escort. The ald girl is getting a little frail now with 188,000 miles under the belt (been busy!). We have I suppose, had quite a few jobs with the ‘presence’ of a sign business in the area. Funny also that when I started my businesss that there where quite alot of sign companies in the area but very few vans. Our most recent catch with the van was a Polytechnic in London.
Smashing!
I will post a pic tommorow as I don’t have a picture in my wallet.

[eddie cotter]

thats what i call a set of wheels, tell us more about it terry,
i would die for a motor like that, 😉

[Terry Bull]

Eddie …. its an original 1934 model Y the model before the pop
It has been built from a four door into a delivery with the fabrication of a rear door ,rear end is all chrome jag with viva discs up front 3.5 inch
roof chop . Runs a detailed MGB motorand was built over 20 yrs ago

It has pulled my small black caravan to street rod shows all over uk belgium and france
that was when i was regularly pinstriping and lettering cars at the shows
these days it rarely leaves the garage i used it twice last year to go down the pub
wanna buy it ? i should sell it but as part of the family its hard to let it go-
besides what else can i sit in and listen to rock n roll

Thanks for your interest

Heres another pic

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[eddie cotter]

terry, thats an amazing machine, one hell of an advert for any business,
i was often thinking of checking around the net for a repro street rod type of van in fiber glass so i could mount it on a chassis and put a diesel engine in, then i could put the fuel through the books 😉

[Martin C]

My wife wants a Peugeot 206, I’m reccomending a Fiat Multipla. The Pop would seem a good compromise if you want to sell it Terry! 😆

[Innocent]

sorry to buck the trend but !!!!!!!!!!

from my experience the larger corporate customers like to work with understated signage/graphics firms.

I am sure everyone on this board can come up with stunning, eye catching graphics (given an unlimited budget) but from my point of view, the larger companies work with an ideal of: value for money, quality and service. Who wants your local sign company to have a higher profile than you.

The best advertising is word of mouth and the most stunning van may win you the local day to day work but it most definitley won’t win you those large, lucrative contracts.

I could go on in depth about this subject, but my views are only relevant to me.

My advise is: decide what markets you would like and go get them ! but don’t challenge your customers in the market place.

[John Singh]

Interesting stuff 🙂

I’m sure were all interested in why you have come to these conclusions
You seem to speak from experience and a lot of us lack this experience
So your views might just be relevant to us
So tell us some more! 🙂

John

[Steve Broughton]

quote Innocent:

most stunning van may win you the local day to day work but it most definitley won’t win you those large, lucrative contracts.

All very well in Surrey mate, its about geography, and in my geographic location the number of corporations I can count them on the fingers of one foot 😆 and in my experience cprporations are as tight as a gnats chuff and take forever to pay, no thanks think I’ll stick with my full on, slap in the face van, because I can keep Joe Bloggs the plumbers van till he pays me 😆 seriously though considering what market you want to work for is OK in certain situations but I’ll take anyones money, it all pays the bills, its no good starving to death waiting for BP or Coca Cola to call.

[Innocent]

here I go again, foot in mouth time.

My business strategy is based on turnover ( a 5% margin on 500k is in my opinoin is better than a 100% margin on 10k)

getting the big corporate guys means giving them value for money (they have shareholders that they are responsible to) and (in my opinion) a sign company that has 1 van that looks the “nuts” and the signwriting has a market value of £500+ won’t cut it. Imagine expanding your fleet of vehicles to 100 and then allocating a budget for signing up the vehicles. At £500 each that makes a £50k budget, do the math on companies like securicor who have thousands of vehicles and need to get them done as cheap as possible. The md may love your style but won’t want to spend the money….”thinks about going into the psychology of selling…..nah !”

Don’t get me wrong, doing your van up nice is well worth the effort but targetitng a specific sector of the market takes a lot more thought than a stunning mobile advert.

I deliberatley steer clear of the 1 off jobs as I feel the setup time / paperwork etc is not worth it for the amount of profit I can make.
just my 2 pence worth and i do expect to get flamed for my views.

before you all say it, yes I am an arrogant w***er, but I have been in this game for 20 years and I think I know what i’m doing (some of the time, anyway)

p.s. yes I know my location is good for getting the corporate work( which is high risk / high return) but is equally crap for us regarding the smaller clients as we have hundreds of sign companies within a 50 mile radius all competing for the same work.

[John Childs]

Innocent,

I share some of your views, although I am most definately profit based rather than turnover. With all due respect to you, I consider turnover to be vanity and profit reality.

I too prefer large corporate work for similar reasons, set-up time and paperwork. It may be a function of the way I work, I do the selling, artwork and set-up whilst my staff do the actual work and in practice there is very little more work for me personally in setting up a hundred van job than there is in a one off. Much better for me to set up a big job and then leave them to get on with it whilst I waste all day on bulletin boards, go for a ride on my bike, or whatever.

There is also the accident damage repair work to consider. A thousand van fleet has lots of accidents and as we are invoicing the insurance company, via the repairer, we can charge almost what we like. Our customer never knows but even if they ask, a) they don’t care, they’re not paying and b) I can always explain the extra costs involved in dealing with small orders.

However, I disagree with you on the profit aspect. They are not all the same but generally I find it easier to extract money from large corporates than I do the local plumber. One of the reasons may be that they are spending somebody else’s money but I think it is mainly because they look, perhaps subconsciously, a bit further than just price. They want good service and if we can offer a system that takes work away from them so that, once the deal is set up, they don’t even have to think about van graphics ever again then they are quite happy to pay.

We don’t do big fleets on wafer thin margins. The reason is that if I quote a one off and get it wrong so that we lose £20 on the job then I am happy with that. I have made a mistake but at least it is history and hopefully I will have learned something. On the other hand a £20 mistake on a thousand van fleet is another thing altogether and we might be faced with a years contract with a lot of hard work, only to lose £20,000. It’s not on and consequently, when quoting on larger jobs, I tend to keep marking it up rather than shaving it off.

I also find that getting paid by big corporates is easier than from smaller companies. Generally they have a system in place and stick to it. We can’t buck their system but once we get to know it we usually know to within a few day when we will receive the money. This is in contrast to smaller customers who will hang it out for as long as they think they can get away with it. Also by dealing with the same clients all the time we know who pays quickly and who pays slowly and are in a position to adjust our prices accordingly.

In my opinion £250,000 at 20% is better than £500,000 at 5%. The lower turnover allows smaller cheaper premises, less overheads, and best of all, less staff which, for me, is a major consideration.

I know how all this must sound to those of you who are just starting up or struggling to make a living in poorer and less densely populated areas and whilst I would be the first to admit to a certain amount of luck most of what I have acheived has been through hard work over many years. Don’t feel restricted to your own area. Few of the end users of my work are within fifty miles of our premises and I had to go looking for them. If I can do it then so can you.

[Henry Barker]

I tend to go along Steve’s line of thinking Innocent.

What’s the old saying “variety is the spice of life” I would never want to go near a fleet of hundreds of vans….that’s to much like working in a factory.

I too gear myself on profit rather than turnover. I guess it depends on how many people you have working for you and your goals in life.

I really wanted to do something creative after so many years trucking round Europe, and 11 years ago thought the sign business would be the right move.

My experience with larger companies is slow payment and why put all your eggs in one basket. Alot of people here got a bloody nose living off the back of the likes Ericsson as the IT industry nosedived, and I am sure there are many others like that, look in the UK in the Midlands everytime a car maker moves or pulls out of the UK, at all the smaller feeder companies.

I have more than enough work make a good living, give good service to ALL my customers and really enjoy what I am doing and drive a loud looking Chevy pick-up. Have corporations, down to small one man bands, don’t own a suit have long hair and a beard, people tend to judge me on my portfolio rather than my “corporate image”

But as Steve says “geography”, and I am an Englishman in Sweden, maybe people here are not quite so conservative in their thinking.

Flamed….no, its always interesting to see how others think, we are all succeeding in different ways and levels of satisfaction. I enjoy coming to work because I get a kick out of what I do.

[Steve Broughton]

Henry 😉 😉 top fella !!! 🙂 Work to live not live to work.

[John Childs]

Henry, you make a good point about it depending on employees and to service large corporates you need them, and once you have them you’ve got to keep them working profitably.

In my situation I am happy to take on hundreds, or even thousands, of vans for the simple reason that I’m not doing them myself. 😀

For the same reason I wouldn’t do a £100 job on a Saturday morning if I had to do it myself. That £100 job is probably £50 profit of which Gordon Brown wants £20 of it in tax and another £5.50 National Insurance leaving me the princely sum of £24.50 for my efforts. It’s not worth spoiling my weekend and I’d rather have the time off. However, if that same job can be done by an employee and leave me £20 profit then I would be happy to take it on.

[Innocent]

i totally agree with that John, sounds like we have a similar outlook (apart from the turnover bit) but the way our group is set up turnover is a better way of going as the group turns over around £30 million, that gives us major buying power and very cheap finance deals not to mention the 90 days interest free credit from our major suppliers. We can afford to take on the larger jobs and not worry too much about our margin, 5% is ok if push comes to shove, 30% is much better. Also we don’t worry too much if we loose a bit on a job, it hurts but (in theory, anyway) the other group companies support each other.

I wouldn’t bother doing signs if it meant that I still had to actually make them myself, thats what I employ staff for. I think I am more valuable to my company when I’m on the golf course or entertaining clients. The misses doesn’t quite see it the same way and says i’m a lazy git, lol

[John Childs]

Ah well Innocent, 5% of £30 million is a whole different sum altogether. 😀

[Lorraine Buchan]

very interesting debate, but we all have to start somewhere, and the big corporate companies are not going to go for the anonymous signmaker who arrives out of the blue.

Currently my business is trying to attract a more stable kind of work, work that is coming in every month that we know we will have month in month out. This work is great but I personally don’t feel you can do this excluively at the cost of the smaller one offs. What happens if your monthly work dries up, they pull out and go else where or they go under.
Your left with your basket empty and a reputation for not wanting the one off jobs.

Turn overs are great, the big companies boast turnover but whos to say that these big companies turns over £30m a year but are in the red by £20m a year British Airways is a clasic example, fantastic turnover figure yet they are in the red every year too! I’m personally far more interested in profit and the more profit I can make with the least amount of expenditure/overheads/cost etc. the better

[Nicola McIntosh]

hi folks, heres my attempt, at my own truck!

Nicola

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[Henry Barker]

nice looking truck!

[Steve Broughton]

Yeah Henry thats nice, well done Nik and on that note I’m thinking of changing mine …………………. for a 1973 bay window VW panel van, yes I know very “Surfs up dude !!!” but all the modern one are ugly as **** and I fancy something a bit quirky and odd, I could also lower it, big alloys, 2 litre Porsche engine etc. etc. Anyone got an outline for one ????? 😀

[Sparky]

Call the Doctor somebody, poor old Steve’s finally lost it 😀 😀 😀

Whatever posseses you to consider a ’73 VW van, for gods sake man, buy something sensible like a ……… errr……….. ’83 Bova Coach 😎 😎 😎

😉

Anybody got any god ideas for grafix ???

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