Lessons in growth: How print signage business Easy Signs doubled its revenue despite the pandemic

How do you build a culture of innovation in your business, and keep change as a constant?

For print signage business Easy Signs — which disrupted the on-demand signage space with its online ordering system, cheap prices, and exceptionally fast turnarounds — it’s all about processes and instilling the right culture in your team.

And co-founders Adam Parnell and Andy Fryer have been validated with their results.

In the last financial year, Easy Signs earned just shy of $23 million in revenue.

The figure is almost double its $12.3 million result in 2018, which was an impressive 125% growth over a three-year period. In that same year it placed 26th in the Smart50 list, after winning the Smart50 Top Innovator award in 2017. At the time, it had 61 employees, and it now has around 90.

In an industry like printing — which has undergone a decade of consolidations, closures, and tough times for most small operators — Easy Signs’ growth goes completely against the grain.

Going through a ‘V-shaped’ loss of revenue when the pandemic first hit, the company bounced back quickly in the second half of the 2020/21 financial year, with $13 million of its yearly revenue coming in 2021.

During the worst of the pandemic, Easy Signs’ revenue was down 70% from its expectations — making its final revenue count even more impressive.

Innovation as a function in the business

Easy Signs growth is due in part to shrewd business decisions, but more so in the repeatable systems and processes that allow it to add new products for customers efficiently.

When building up the company, the team identified fabric signage as a gap in the Australian market, with most businesses buying directly from China and subsequently dealing with the long lead times of freight.

But when Easy Signs wanted to add fabric signage as an option for customers, it wasn’t just a matter of ordering the materials and buying a new printer — the business needed to hire a team of people to get it done.

It also needed to build an online system efficient enough to compete on pricing with Chinese products, which had the advantage of much lower staff wages.

In the print industry, as with other manufacturing sectors, new equipment generally has a high capital expenditure, with the need to hire skilled operators to run them.

The machines alone cost close to $2 million, and that’s not including the internal software development required.

Much of the equipment has a working life of five to seven years, so Parnell and Fryer finance the purchases on four-year loans, allowing them to be paid off with a runway at the end where they have no repayments.

While some SMEs have anecdotally reported issues of securing finance from banks, Parnell and Fryer say it’s been fairly smooth since they passed the two-year mark.

“If you can get over that bump, and they can see steady revenue, they’re usually very, very willing to lend against the equipment,” says Parnell.

Achieving unmatched delivery times

Early on, Fryer and Parnell made the decision to bring all of Easy Signs’ software development in-house.

“The online portal is our business. And so being able to make that the best in the business was important to us,” says Fryer.

“We knew we wanted to build out our own job management solution to time with all the hardware and software that we used through from the website all the way to shipping. We thought the only way to do that properly would be to build up our own strong team.”

As a result, the company hits its lead times 99% of the time, and whenever a product doesn’t reach the customer on time, it’s flagged and discussed in a weekly meeting with management.

By working out how each went wrong, they stamp out mistakes. Brainstorming how to eradicate the problems in a group has also helped to create a culture of perfection.

Consistent customer experience

Parnell and Fryer both agree that you need defined processes married with a strong culture to build consistent customer experiences across your business.

At Easy Signs, the customer service team shares a communal inbox, which makes it harder for things to fall through the cracks as they can with personal inboxes.

“That lack of transparency can turn into reduced customer service levels. A single system that employees are always plugged into is scalable, and ties into the consistent experience for the customer,” says Parnell.

If you’ve got one team of people responding to customer emails in five hours and another group replying in 20 minutes, it’s an issue of culture. That can only be worked on over time.

Fryer adds that it sometimes takes brute force to build the right culture, and speed up the teams with multiple-hour turnarounds.

“It’s just ‘come on guys, don’t take your foot off the gas now. Get it done, and then you can take your foot off’. It takes repetitive encouragement to get the culture there, but then everyone embraces it.”

And when you achieve that consistency, the effort pays off with new customers.

The co-founders note that most of their new business comes from word-of-mouth, but when marketing, they get the most value from Google Adwords,

They put the bulk of their marketing spend there with some additional resources to Facebook.

Collecting reviews as proof-of-quality

Every customer receives a link to third-party ratings site Trustpilot after they’ve received their orders, which Easy Signs does not have control over.

Still, their consistency is impressive. 

From 6,995 reviews, 90% are five stars, 6% are four stars, 2% are three stars, while less than 1% of all reviews are lower than three. 

Its customer service team responds to each review, good or bad, to help deepen the connection with the customer. When it’s bad, they clearly explain what the circumstances were for any other customers that might be looking, apologise, and clear the air.

And every review under three stars is sent directly to management. 

For online businesses that don’t have a face-to-face or over-the-phone element of customer service, it pays to be more active wherever your customers are talking about your product.

So what can you do?

What Fryer and Parnell achieved with on-demand signage printing can be applied to plenty of other products that are partly locally manufactured, ordered online, and delivered.

There’s a world of services where you reach out for a quote or you send an enquiry, and either don’t receive a response at all or it comes in days later, with Fryer using the examples of curtains or roller blinds.

“You can shoot off five emails for a quote, two companies will reply quickly, one will reply a day later, another in four days, and the last you’ll never hear back from. That’s really sloppy, and leads to opportunity for others,” says Fryer.

If there’s an online element to your business, your first priorities should be speed and consistency to build the confidence of your customers.

While it’s hard to build everything perfectly from the start, Fryer and Parnell recommend building the customer-facing parts of your system first, and making sure they look and feel perfect.

If it’s a mess on the other end, you can fix that after you’ve won the customer’s business. As you keep bringing in new customers, each new order becomes more efficient and profitable.

“If you can keep paying the bills and survive, you’re there for another day to battle again and get bigger and better. You can make more smart decisions over and over, and it compounds,” says Parnell.

With Easy Signs, its customer service team used to be able to process 10 orders a day per person, on average. That’s now 30.

“It’s a massive productivity gain with the development cost paid back 10x times,” says Parnell.

But it doesn’t just pocket the profits — a lot gets passed on as savings to the customer, which Easy Signs sees as a further investment in securing more of the market.