Innovation is part of corporate culture at Valley City Sign

[Erik Sine]

Innovation is part of corporate culture at Valley City Sign

by Lynn Stevens | Business Review Western Michigan

Thursday February 26, 2009, 11:38 AM

Photo courtesy Valley City Sign

Project Manager Scott Urbane leans against the 86,000-LED sign for the

FireKeepers Casino near Battle Creek.

The Nottawaseppi Huron Band of Potawatomi last week turned on the latest production from Valley City Sign Co., a 50-foot-tall, 10-ton marquee sign along Interstate 94 at the tribe's FireKeepers Casino.

The reinforced concrete base holding the sign is 30 feet long and more than eight feet deep. It required 80 cubic yards of concrete, according to Scott Urbane, Valley City's account executive for the project.

The massive size was an engineering challenge, but challenge is what the employee-owned sign company seeks. It's a way of differentiating Valley City Sign in a competitive industry.

Innovation in a business that seems as simple and straight-forward as signage has kept the company going for 60 years, and its current management is betting the future on innovative products and services.

"It's one of the larger message centers we've done," said Valley City President Randy Czubko of the FireKeepers sign.

The message boards can be updated wirelessly and could carry live video feeds, he said.

"It's what stadiums use all the time in terms of instant replay," he explained.

Putting it in wasn't as dramatic an installation as the WZZM Weatherball, a three-ton lighted steel sphere atop a 100-foot pole in Grand Rapids. Urbane, who is a licensed installer, was on top of the structure, guiding it into place as a crane lifted it.

It wasn't as big an engineering challenge as the Fifth Third Bank [Nasdaq: FITB] sign on Southfield Towers in Southfield. Each letter of that sign was 15 feet tall and so heavy, they were mounted on a steel floor on top of the 400-foot building. Comstock Park-based Valley City Sign Co. engineered the mounting and figured out how maintenance could be completed.

The FireKeepers sign was built in four sections, each weighing 4,000 pounds, thankfully on the ground. Its framing section -- the part that identifies it as FireKeepers -- was designed and built by Valley City. The message boards -- 43,000 pixels of LED lights on each of the two faces -- were made by a Danville, Ill., component maker, Watchfire.

The sign is lit 24 hours a day. To stand out in sunlight, light levels are very high during the day, and the programmable controller turns down the levels after dark.

"It was a little too bright this past weekend," Czubko said. "It was set automatically to dial down, but it wasn't set low enough, so we had them go in and change the software to, I think, 10 percent intensity."

The Nottawaseppi Huron Band set out to build their casino as ecologically responsibly as possible, so using LEDs that demand 80 percent less power than incandescent bulbs was important to tribal officials. Valley City has other customers for whom sustainability is important, but Czubko said the greatest value of LED lighting is its practicality.

"In the old days, you'd typically use neon," he said.

The 75,000-square-foot Comstock Park plant includes space where the company still makes its own neon tubing. But the physics of neon make it unsuitable for cold-weather applications, he said.

LED technology is more durable in cold weather. Further, it will not only reduce electric demand, but also maintenance. Bulbs last at least 12 years, and going that long between replacements is attractive to Valley City's municipal customers, Czubko noted.

"The reason those things are there is not that we start with the intent we want to be green. What it is: How can we provide a better product at a lower cost, be safer, and reduce maintenance costs? It's that kind of thing that drives innovation," Czubko said.

"All this technology is about value, performance, low maintenance and low cost," he continued. "The environmental impact is a huge plus that comes from it."

Valley Sign Co. was founded 60 years ago and became an employee-owned company in 2006.

"We feel we get a much better work force, a much better attitude, as a result of being employee owned," Czubko said. "With that comes an ownership culture. It's not just a job, it's their company and it's going to be part of their retirement."

Innovation is part of the corporate culture, too. To name just two examples, Czubko cited an aluminum extrusion process for sign cabinets that led to a spinoff as an independent manufacturer. That company is used by sign makers worldwide.

A second is the environmental torture chamber for paint and metal finishes to ensure they perform as specified.

When a customer needs way-finding signage, the company conducts its own traffic studies to see where those directional signs should go.

"We can do more than build the sign and install it," Czubko said.