The new owners of Signwave Australia have seen sales skyrocket in the 12 months since they bought the business with growth of 13.3 per cent in 2014 and a December quarter increase of 24.4 per cent. The results come after several years of low to no growth for the 17 store group prior to its purchase by the Aussie trio of Linda Sultman, Dean Rowland and Leo Baker. And the company is predicting the growth trajectory will continue in 2015, saying it will achieve a 15 per cent growth figure. Two centres – Hawthorn, Melbourne and Ryde, Sydney – outperformed the rest of the 17 franchisees with more than 60 per cent growth in sales, with a further six Signwave stores reporting more than 20 per cent increase in sales during 2014. Speaking to Australian Printer, Linda Sultmann, Signwave Australia general manager, says the success of the business, which her and business partners Dean Rowland and Leo Baker took over last year, was due to its focus on rebranding, all of which was done online.

Linda Sultmann

“We brought the franchise and used the digital platform such as pay per click, search engine optimisation, social media advertising and electronic mailing to increase our brand marketing, which dramatically increased our market contact.” “We could see the results immediately with the number of customer visits to our website and our social media pages. Sultmann says understanding how the digital platform works is crucial to get brand awareness; she says ‘things like Facebook is very important and a cheap way of getting growth in sales and exposure’. “I definitely had to educate myself first though, and I am 53-years-old so it did not come naturally to me. But I knew that the demographic of this channel was young and so to communicate with them I had to figure it out.” “By strengthening and improving individual areas of performance – such as systems utilisation, client service and staff management – not only do you achieve higher sales and greater profitability, you build a commercial enterprise that is an attractive proposition for future buyers,” Sultmann says. The trio attribute that notably improved results to four key strategies they focussed on in 2014: increasing centre volumes; improving owners’ discretionary profit and lifestyle; increasing brand value and improving franchise partner satisfaction. “As former store owners, we really understand the importance of franchise partner satisfaction and have worked hard to provide knowledgeable and responsive support to the group as well as focusing  on some centres that have required extra input and training,”  says Leo Baker, franchise operations manager.

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