In 1996, I sold my outdoor billboard company to Dan Simon’s Universal Outdoor.  Dan Simon  had assembled an enormous number of billboards over a very short span of time. When I met him the first time, he owned about 100 billboards.

A few years later, Simon had increased the number of billboards under ownership to 1,000.  Simon kept expanding exponentially.  The next thing you knew, Simon’s company completed an initial public offering on the stock market. He seemed to be 100% committed to building a giant outdoor billboard company.

You can image my shock when it was suddenly announced that Simon had sold everything to Clear Channel Outdoor. I asked Dan’s number two guy what caused this sudden shift; he told me that it had always been Simon’s goal to sell the company to a bigger player.

Apparently, in Dan’s office was a ceramic pig.  On that pig, Simon glued a slogan to it which said “Nobody Ever Went Broke Taking a Profit”. So his goal from the start was apparently to build the company up, go public, and sell out. Oh well, it was a shorter term goal that we had all figured, but at least he had a clear strategy and executed against it.

An Outdoor Billboard Investment Tip

Benjamin Franklin said “Diligence is the Mother of Good Luck”. That means that the best way to make a success of something is to do thorough research and really understand your deal and all its benefits and disadvantages.

If you’re going to build a sign, make sure that you have a complete understanding of rents, vacancy, potential blockage issues, potential development issues, etc.  Basically, you make your own luck.

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