Mark Powell, production manager at The Sign Shop, part Plymouth Community Homes Services, explains its transformation into a commercial operation.
Heard of The Sign Shop in Plymouth. Not many people have, but that’s about to change because this one time department of Plymouth City Council is taking on more and more commercial work and expects to become much more visible now that it has the support of a business development manager that understands its need to reposition.
Mark Powell, who heads up the operation, has seen 20 years of change since he was recruited in 1993 as a replacement for the one and only signmaker employed to produce all the signage required by Plymouth City Council. “At that time I’d just finished a sign work and creative lettering diploma and it was just me in the sign shop. There was a B4 plotter and four typefaces with which I had to produce street and highway signs,” he explains.
“There was a PC that had been bought to link to the plotter but it hadn’t even had the dust cover taken off, so getting that up and running was the very first step towards any kind of automation. But the manager of the council’s joinery department was my boss and when he saw the Gerber Edge being demonstrated at a Local Authority Sign Making Association meeting he was impressed and in 1995 we bought one. It had a 300mm print width and we got jobs putting graphics across a fleet of refuse lorries, and on a couple of buses, applying them in these 300mm strips!”
By 1997 the operation had bought a second Gerber Edge but, as Powell recognized, “it wasn’t cost effective doing vehicle graphics in 300mm wide strips.” Now the attention turned to inkjet and the Oce Arizona. “We got a letter from the bus company we’d worked with saying that they would give us more work if we could do it more cost effectively. So we used that to convince the council to fork out on a new printer and in 2002 we got funding and traded in one of the Gerber Edge’s to buy the Arizona 90. At that time it was one of the only large-format machines around, but it didn’t quite suit our working so in 2004 we traded it in for a Gerber Elan.”
The department had opted for a model using bulk inks but as Powell explains there were issues with that bulk system – though not on the particular machine he used – which led to distributor Spandex ceasing to support the bulk ink systems. “We had ours on a five year lease/purchase deal so at the end of that we traded it in for a Mutoh ValueJet, which is what we operate now together with a Gerber CAT UV flatbed that we bought a couple of years ago along with a Sabre router.”
Those machines are now filled and operated by a team of four full-time staff and Powell, who points out that various changes in The Sign Shop’s structure and ownership have impacted on its growth and changing focus.
“When I first started I was working in the back room of what was the council’s joinery shop, in a space about an eighth of what we have now,” he says, standing in the spot that until The Sign Shop moved into it in January this year, was the garage body shop for Plymouth Community Homes Services. “This move has been our biggest investment to date and reflects how we’ve changed and what we’ve become,” he says. And what The Sign Shop has become is part of the aforementioned Plymouth Community Homes Services, with a remit to grow its external work.
Powell explains: “In about 2009 Plymouth City Council realized it wasn’t going to meet the Government Decent Home Standard by the given deadline, and that the Government would provide more money if its council houses were owned by a housing association. So the council effectively turned its housing department into a housing association known as Plymouth Community Homes, and no longer attached to the council.
“The Sign Shop had been part of the council’s manufacturing services, in turn part of council housing services, so when that department was hived off to become a housing association, we went with it. But Plymouth Community Homes was a not-for-profit organization, which meant we at The Sign Shop wouldn’t be able to do any work commercially. So Plymouth Community Homes Services was set up, which meant that we could take in external work.”
Now 70% of the work going through The Sign Shop is external, though its biggest single customer is still the housing association to which it belongs. “And oddly  enough the council is now effectively an external client. They didn’t really know much about what we did when we were an internal service – they probably use us more now!” laughs Powell.
“Because we’re no longer reliant on council budgets we’ve been able to invest more. The Sign Shop, like the other three Plymouth Community Homes Services operations (windows, metal fabrication and joinery) has separate monthly accounts which feed back into centralized manufacturing services accounts, which in turn are part of the housing association’s. So any profit gets ploughed back into local homes. But, as of this year we have an ‘Open for Business’ five year plan, whereby the manufacturing service operations all have their own commercial profit targets. So we will have to set about increasing our external workload.
“That’s good for us because we are now about 70% through the housing association signage task handed to us when we transferred from council ownership – which was really to replace all the previous council housing signage etc. with the new association’s. There are still some blocks of flats that say they are council owned when they’re not anymore, so there’s still something of a job to do but there’s only so much demand for our services from housing.”
Powell proudly points out new branding administered across The Sign Shop and its vehicles etc. to better position it for the road ahead. “It took a while for the housing association to realize that The Sign Shop needed to strengthen its branding if it was to be commercially viable,” admits Powell, who has been pushing to make the operation more visible to the outside world. “But we now have a business development manager who understands that not just our operation but all the manufacturing service departments, need to push themselves forward. It’s all down to awareness. We’re acting as a commercial operation that has been around for a long time (and has the support and knowledge where needed of the joinery and metal fabrication departments) but that’s effectively new to the marketplace.”
Â
