Chris Davies dropped out of high school to start his sign and lighting business with one truck and a lot of hard work.
Twenty-three years later, Davies has built the business into three companies with a total of 67 employees, with operations in British Columbia, Alberta and Saskatchewan.
Looking back to the early days of the company, however, Davies said he now realizes just how far he's come. One thing he didn't realize early on was the importance of planning and goal-setting.
“The first three years was the hardest I ever worked,” he said. “I really had no direction, I was just running, just trying to do jobs, trying to make money, and it wasn't a focused thing.”
Thanks to some good advice from some of Davies' customers – McDonald's franchisees who knew a thing or two about running a business – Davies started to make short- and long-term goals for his business.
He also took to heart advice about hiring “really good people.”
“I kind of just took whoever for an employee and just threw them on a truck and whatever,” he said. “But once you surround yourself with some really good-quality people, and people who make good decisions and are like-minded with you, it seemed like everything turned around.”
Davies said that acting on those two simple pieces of advice were key to him being able to “work smarter” and expand the company, as well as escape the 10-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week workload he operated under in the early days of the business.
On taking advice: “Everybody hates getting advice, but when you can take advice from people who have been there, done their time in the trenches, you have to put your pride aside to take that advice. … My dad and my grandfather were probably my two biggest influences; they were both super-successful [business] people, but … at the end of the day I wouldn't take their advice. [It seems to make more of an impact] if it comes from an outsider.”
