Sign Shop Profile: Montreal Neon

by all | 2 December 2015 12:28 pm

By Peter Saunders
In the 23 years since Montreal Neon was founded by Linda Dupré and Carlo Paolucci, the company has grown substantially from a 464.5-m² (5,000-sf) sign shop to, today, a newly built 5,760-m² (62,000-sf) facility, with plenty of room for further expansion on a 16,723-m² (180,000-sf) lot. The company has become well-known by retail and hospitality clients for designing, producing, installing and maintaining large-scale pylon signs, channel letters and directional signs.

Taking over
Dupré and Paolucci met and began dating in 1989. A few years later, while Paolucci was working as director of sales for a retail store, Dupré was hired by a small, local sign company to check over its books and accounts before it would be sold as ‘Enseignes Neon 1992’ to a new buyer.

“I was working there as an accountant’s assistant,” she explains. “After six months, the new owner was no longer interested in staying with the business. When he decided to close down the shop, Carlo and I jumped at the opportunity to become entrepreneurs, as it was a dream we had long wanted and often talked about.”

So, Dupré approached the new owner—who by that point was renting out the space—and offered to buy his signmaking equipment, which included a Gerber router table and a crane, among other items. She and Paolucci took over the business in 1993 and renamed it Montreal Neon, a brand that has stuck ever since.

“I felt ready to run the company, but at the time, I was just 23 and Carlo was 22,” she says. “We used our own money and also had to get a special, government-guaranteed bank loan so we could buy the equipment and take over the lease.”

Growing the business
Paolucci’s role focused on operations, production, sales and business development, while Dupré handled finances, administration, human resources (HR) and working with suppliers.

“You have to enjoy what you do,” says Dupré. “We’re very passionate about this business, even though we had no idea beforehand we would end up in the sign industry!”

When they took over the business, it had five employees handling custom jobs and catering to clients within the Quebec market. All of those employees stayed on with the company as it grew to take on national sign programs for retail and hospitality businesses and, eventually, to focus on the U.S. market, too.

“We grew together,” says Dupré. “Now we’re a big family, with 75 employees. And we’ll still be like a family even when we reach 150 or 200. Our employees are very close to us.”

Similarly, the company’s relationships with its clients grew in scale over the years.

“We would reach out to retailers for opportunities and once we started working for them, they were impressed by our work and would refer us to other clients,” says Palucci. “And we’d start out just working on one project, but as a customer’s business grew, we would grow with them, becoming their approved sign vendor. A lot of our growth has been with the same clients over the years.”

“Customer satisfaction is at the core of our business,” says Dupré. “We believe in keeping strong and trustworthy relations with everyone involved in our business, from our employees to our suppliers and to our customers.”

Changing with the times
The shift from custom jobs to major programs was facilitated by expanded infrastructure. After the initial lease ran out, Montreal Neon moved down the street in 1995 to a 790-m² (8,500-sf) space, nearly twice the size of the old location.

“When we started, I would say 80 per cent of our efforts were in manufacturing and 20 per cent in pre-manufacturing preparation,” says Paolucci. “Our strength was in customization, as we had neon glass blowers creating large signs. Today, the ratio is more like 50:50 because there’s so much more emphasis on service, including getting sign permits and signing agreements with landlords. Automation has helped reduce manufacturing time on the shop floor, but given all of the ‘milestones’ you need to hit before production, each sign really takes about the same amount of time. In other words, pre-production has compensated for production!”

“We make sure never to let our clients down,” says Dupré. “We contest permit application refusals, for example, which often means going to municipal meetings at night to represent our customer’s perspective. It’s a lot of work and most sign companies don’t do it, but it’s part of our approach for building long-standing relationships with our clients.”

Indeed, project management has become a major focus for Montreal Neon. Today’s ratio of staff is also nearly 50:50 between sales/project management and production.

“With large projects, for example, we tend to send a supervising team to work with local installers, such as in Las Vegas,” says Paolucci. “We’re very hands-on with installation and we also offer maintenance contracts. It doesn’t mean every single job goes absolutely smoothly, but it does mean we can resolve any challenges as they arise. So, having project managers has really been our strength in terms of providing a turnkey operation.”

For some of its retailer clients, for example, Montreal Neon has engineered a custom framing system that makes signs easier to install on-site.

“Our project managers know our major clients’ standards inside-out,” says Dupré, “so it’s because of the type of clients we serve that we need our project managers. Our service doesn’t stop when the sign is sold.”

“Our customers see us as a leader in the sign industry and that’s because of our dedication and emphasis on service,” says Paolucci. “Large corporations depend on suppliers like us. We get the job done right and one time, so they continue working with us.”

Those customers have included retailers like Ikea, Garage, PharmaPrix/Shoppers Drug Mart, Winners and HomeSense, movie theatre operator Cineplex, shopping mall developer First Capital Realty and hotel operators like Marriott, Choice Hotels and Holiday Inn.

In fact, in 2009, Montreal Neon was one of only five Canadian sign manufacturers approved to build new outdoor illuminated signs for the global rebranding of 3,200-plus Holiday Inn locations (see Sign Media Canada, November 2009, page 24), using light-emitting diodes (LEDs) to replace neon and fluorescent lamps. The nature of the project was fitting, as despite its name, Montreal Neon has also shifted largely to LED-based signs.

“We had four neon craftsman at the peak of demand,” says Paolucci. “Today, we only need one, but we’re glad to have him because he’s one of the best in Canada and he still enjoys it. Our neon department mainly produces smaller signs these days, typically for a single client program. LEDs have really taken over and to meet our customers’ specifications, we continuously work with our LED manufacturing partners to develop new, unique colours.”

Another major project was the expansion of Montreal-Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport in the early 2000s, which Montreal Neon was involved with for six years.

“That gave us more ‘institutional’ exposure,” says Paolucci.

A family affair
Dupré and Paolucci married in 1999, the same year as Montreal’s next move to a 2,369-m² (25,500-sf) facility in Laval, Que. They have five children.

“When I was six or seven years old, I told my mother one day I would own a company and have a big family,” says Dupré. “If you have objectives, you just have to make them happen!”

Running the business together, they have continued to handle very different roles.

“I love the everyday challenges of dealing with our suppliers and assisting our employees,” says Dupré. “Even though I also enjoy speaking with our customers, I don’t tend to handle sales, so Carlo has more exposure to our customers.”

For this reason, their official titles switched over time. At the beginning, Dupré was president and Paolucci vice-president (VP), but today they are reversed, with Paolucci serving as president and Dupré as VP of finance. While these titles are important for representing the company’s structure, however, they are not used much in the office.

“We don’t encourage the use of job titles, as they can create extra ‘walls’ between employees,” says Dupré. “You won’t see them listed on our office doors. Everyone here knows what they are supposed to do, but are also free to express their ideas.”

Moving on up
By the time Montreal Neon took over its current building in July, the move was long overdue.

“The last five years in the previous building, especially, were painful,” says Paolucci. “We could no longer be efficient there.”

“That building was way too small,” Dupré explains. “It was costing us so much just to move everything around, which didn’t make sense, so we gathered our employees’ opinions about what was needed in the next facility.”

They spent long months looking for a suitable space that would meet these needs, but never found one—so they finally decided to build one.

“This is new construction, but it took us a few years to realize we needed that,” says Paolucci. “We’ve invested in a lot of new equipment because now we finally have space for it, with a much more efficient workflow.”

“It wasn’t cheap, but we went over the numbers with our bank and our accounting firm, which have supported us over the years,” says Dupré. “They have always understood where we want to take the business.”

Among the additions are: a dedicated 20 x 4.9 x 6.7-m (65 x 16 x 22-ft) painting booth, strategically located between the metal-forming and -finishing departments, with X-, Y- and Z-axis controlled chairs on man lifts that allow operators to paint large pylon signs from any angle; an Accu-Bend system for producing channel letters; larger overhead cranes to lift and move large signs across the facility; a larger MultiCam Canada computer numerical control (CNC) routing table to handle up to 20-m (65-ft) sheets of material; a custom-engineered, semi-automated system for loading those sheets onto the CNC table; and sandblasting units enclosed in their own department, with dedicated air intake.

On the HR side, meanwhile, the new building offers staff a larger cafeteria, a gym and an outdoor terrace.

“This building has made a huge difference,” says Dupré. “Our people are much happier now in this layout and with our inventory management system. Instead of moving signs around an inefficient space, they’re producing. They sing and have a smile on their face as they work. And with this amount of land, we can grow rather than move again. This was the best investment we could have made.”

Branching out
Also, earlier this year, they launched a sister business, M Signage Solutions, with a sales office in Chicago, Ill., to help further develop the U.S. market for their products. The office is currently run by two sales/project managers, but the plan is to hire more project managers in Chicago to work more directly on sign projects for U.S. clients.

“This will make things easier,” says Dupré. “We had a contact in Chicago and the timing was right. Our next step will be to open an office in Toronto to deal with our major clients’ whose head offices are based there.”

With all of this expansion continuing, it is no surprise Dupré and Paolucci’s next goal is to double the size of their business again.

“We’re not old yet and we still have a lot of passion for this business,” says Dupré.

Source URL: https://www.signmedia.ca/sign-shop-profile-montreal-neon/

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