This is going to be the final episode for the Sign Dawgs, and it's appropriate that we are doing this episode on I20 Animal Medical Center in Arlington, Texas.
Every day we look at signs. Some are beautiful; others, not so much.
For a business-any business-a good sign is crucial.
So where does a good sign come from? Who creates these tantalizing works of art?
In the Dallas–Fort Worth Metroplex, it's done right here by the people at Signs Manufacturing-the people we call the Sign Dawgs.
Hi, I'm Glenn Kman. I am the hospital administrator for I20 Animal Medical Center.
We are a 24-hour emergency and wellness hospital.
We have eight doctors on staff with 52 support staff members.
We do everything from general wellness care to emergency care, walk-in, boarding, and grooming.
So many years ago-gosh, a long time ago, back when this was gray, not green-I was out at a job site in Arlington for a brand-new animal hospital.
At that time it was a pile of dirt-literally.
I went out and had to get some measurements for the city; there was some argument over property lines.
I stepped in a puddle, and I remember that to this day.
Well, this day has rolled around, and this customer is back.
They're still in business, and they're doing really well.
This time we're going to add an electronic message sign by the side of the freeway, because it's a whole lot less expensive to have your own electronic message sign than it is to rent one of those billboards by the side of the freeway.
We have been in business for over 40 years.
Our medical director, Dr. Cindy Welch, has been here for 32 years.
We are one of the only emergency hospitals in the Arlington area.
Our closest emergency hospital that helps us when we aren't available is over 10 miles away.
I20 Animal Medical Center is a previous customer of ours.
We did signs for their building, but they've always had a visibility problem, because the sign on the building can really only be seen by one direction on Interstate 20-the main highway through that area.
That was sort of a problem because they were only getting 150,000 cars a day instead of 300,000 cars a day.
So they wanted to put out a sign by the street-a programmable LED sign-and if you've seen Sign Dawgs episodes before, you know that those are gold for a business.
Here we go, looking into Arlington and seeing what we can do for a programmable sign.
When we're talking about the sign for I20 Animal Hospital, there were some considerations that came up, and mainly those considerations are driven by the regulatory environment of the City of Arlington.
What they would like to do is put a large sign out by the freeway up on a pole-like a billboard-and the city said, "Yeah, no, absolutely not. We're not going to allow that under any circumstances."
"Oh, you want to do a variance?" "Yeah, no-uh, not going to happen."
So instead we had to scale the whole thing back to what the city would allow, which is a relatively small sign.
Monument signs are still good. We like monument signs.
They still have lots of visibility; people, when they're driving down the road, tend to look toward the road more than they look off to the sides.
So anytime you put a sign out by the road, you get a lot of visibility.
We're going to do a monument sign. It's going to be low, with the digital portion on the top and the nameplate across the bottom.
The reason we did that is that the city would allow the sign to be bigger if it were lower to the ground rather than up on a pole.
By putting the permanent signage underneath the electronic message center, it became the spacer off the ground that keeps the bugs and stuff out of the sign, and we were able to make much more efficient use of the space.
We do offer online booking for appointments, and you can schedule with one of eight doctors to come in and get your annual wellness care.
We do everything from heartworm prevention to rabies and other needed vaccines, as well as general surgery such as spays and neuters.
Any commercial developer will tell you that location is critically important, and they will look at the growth in the area and around the area to determine how valuable that location is.
Arlington-specifically South Arlington-has a lot of growth moving south into Mansfield and that area.
The traffic that they are going to get around their business, and the number of people around their business, is just going to grow more and more and more.
So capitalize on it while you can.
Put in that monument sign. Put in that digital sign.
This is a great move for I20 Animal Medical Center, and it will really help their visibility in that community.
We have been wanting a digital sign for our hospital for quite a number of years.
When I did some research online, I found that Signs Manufacturing was one of the top companies in the DFW Metroplex that does that.
I really liked their showroom and their setup, as well as their attention to detail and their willingness to work with us for whatever our needs are.
This is one of the first dozen EMCs-or LED signs-that we have built using our new ventilation system that was developed by us.
The air comes in the front toward the bottom, and it's ejected out the front at the top.
A nice benefit of that is we can completely surround our LED signs and still have perfect ventilation in our signs.
Plus, the air that it pulls in is not the same hot air that it pushes out-which is exactly what happens with most of those LED signs out there.
When they frame it up, they push the hot air out the back and then pull in the hot air from the back. We don't do that.
We're not recirculating the same hot air in the sign, just continuing to build up 150° heat in that sign.
We pull in cool air and blow out hot air.
Our prescription diets are top-of-the-line diets by either Purina, Royal Canin, or Hill's.
These diets have been researched for years. They are the most recommended by veterinarians.
We have things that help with weight management, urinary issues, kidney issues-there are many different diets for pets, as well as diets for pets that don't have issues.
Some companies tend to just push the product to get the check, and then they just wash their hands of you.
At Signs Manufacturing, we put a lot of focus not just into building your sign, but into making sure that the sign is advertising you properly.
It's drawing the proper attention, and with an LED sign you have to take a lot of consideration into what kind of messages you're putting up there.
If you're putting a lot of really tiny text and it's all black and white, you're really doing yourself a disservice.
One of the beauties of this type of sign is you can flash up color.
You can have all kinds of images pop in-faces, you know. Your eye is drawn to a face.
If you've got eyes looking at you, your eye is drawn to that face.
There are tricks-if you're in the marketing business, you know them.
Most sign companies aren't in the marketing business; these marketing tricks that you can put on that sign will help make your sign a lot more effective than if you just put a bunch of scrolling text on there.
We're going to incorporate color in the initial slides that we put up on their sign, because we always set them up with initial slides.
We're also going to make sure that their nameplate that's there on the bottom is not just lit up with SolarBrite LEDs-which we always want to do-but that it's got color in it to draw the eye.
We are a 16,000 ft, state-of-the-art hospital.
We have 10 exam rooms.
We also have on-site boarding and grooming, as well as an ICU boarding area for pets that are 10 years old or older and need medical care.
We also offer an in-house pharmacy, so we are able to fill prescriptions here, and we are able to sell prescription diets.
All right, let's talk for a second about LEDs.
Electronic message signs are lit up using LEDs.
One of the problems that LEDs have is that they are literally sorted by eye when they're manufactured and the dies and all that are applied; they don't all match each other.
They literally put them on a board and have a worker look at them and go, "Oh, that one matches that one," and then they put them in a box-and they do that to sort out the entire batch of LEDs.
How does this impact us and our business in signage?
It means that if we order a batch of electronic message center boards, and then six months later we order another batch of electronic message center boards, they will not match.
How have we dealt with that?
We went into our software design process and created-essentially-we put rheostats on the boards, which allowed us to control the voltage to the individual LEDs.
Then, in the software, we can go through and dial it back or dial it up for the various colors-the reds, the greens, and the blues-and we can do that to tune the boards.
It's still not going to be a 100% perfect match, but we can get it close enough that your eye is not going to notice the difference.
We have the electrical. We have the data run. We have the whole pre-drilling inspection done.
We have the hole drilled. We have the pole set. We have the concrete set.
We have the city inspection of the hole and the concrete done. Now we get to install the sign.
We're hoping that with the new digital sign we'll be able to inform the community of more of what we do.
For years and years, I20 Animal Medical Center has been known for taking emergencies.
We are more than just an emergency hospital with our wellness care, grooming, and boarding, and we want to really highlight those services for the community.
The sign has been installed. The electrical is hooked up. The data is hooked up.
The final inspections with the city are done.
The training has been completed with the customer on site to show them how to program their sign.
Now all that's left to do is sit back and enjoy it.
Thank you for watching this final episode of the Sign Dawgs.
We appreciate you and everybody else out there for all these years of viewership.
For the last seven years we've been doing the Sign Dawgs show, and we've really enjoyed it, but the time has come to move on.
All great things come to an end.
We really appreciate your viewership, and we hope that when our next project comes around you find us again-or we find you.
Rel.
