Marketing Advice Growth doesn’t happen by accident


Colin Sinclair McDermott, aka The Online Print Coach, educates on how to allow time for strategy when the pressure starts to mount.


Y


ou reach the end of yet another week. You are exhausted. You’ve been


the first to arrive and the last to leave, spending every waking hour resolving issues, chasing production, and putting out fires. But when you look at your actual


business growth, or your pipeline for next month, nothing has moved. Does this sound familiar to you? When


I hear this in a coaching session, it really hits a nerve with me because I have been there myself. I talk to lots of sign and print business


owners who are trying to grow, but are not achieving their targets. This is often because they have no clear and purposeful structure to their working day. They invariably jump from one urgent problem to the next and then wonder why growth isn’t happening. This is because most of their week


is spent reacting. In the sign industry, this is an incredibly easy trap to fall into. The nature of the work is urgent, and there are a hundred things that can cause problems and demand your time. The install crew might be stuck on site and need you to make a decision. The vinyl didn’t arrive. The client changed the artwork five minutes before it was scheduled for printing.


| 60 | January/February 2026


When you are surrounded by that


much noise, the first thing that gets dropped is the strategic work. Quotes get delayed. Systems don’t get built. And business development? That is nowhere to be seen. I can help you fix this by encouraging one fundamental shift. Move from being reactive to proactive. Growth doesn’t happen by accident, it happens when you create space for it. Here is how to do it.


1. The non-negotiable daily plan You cannot run a growing sign business from a to-do list scribbled on a scrap of paper. You need a default diary. This means blocking out time for specific tasks before the week even starts. Give yourself a set structure. It might be to check production at 8am and clear your inbox by 9am. Don’t let the noise of the day dictate your schedule.


2. The 30-minute BD rule This is the biggest game-changer. Carve out 30 minutes every single day for business development. Make this non-negotiable and do it at the same time every day. In that time, don’t check emails or answer the phone. The only calls you should make are pure sales. Lapsed clients, follow up on quotes you never got an answer


to, or reach out to new prospects; 30 minutes doesn’t sound like much, but over a month, that is ten hours of pure sales focus.


3. Build “firebreaks” into your day We know that in sign making, things go wrong. If you pack your diary back-to-back, one delayed install throws off your whole day. Start scheduling “firebreaks”. Empty blocks of time in the mid-morning and mid-afternoon. If an emergency happens, this is the time to deal with it. If it doesn’t, you can get ahead on your work. I promise that if you do this, you will


start to see results very quickly. Those panicky moments will fade. Quotes will be sent out on time and, most importantly, the all-important pipeline will soon begin to fill up again because you are actually generating new work. You cannot fit a 3m sign into a 2m


van. In the same way, you cannot fit growth into a schedule that is already full of chaos. If you want to scale, you have to stop flying blind. You have to take control of your calendar. Because if you don’t fill your day


with high-value actions, someone else will fill it with low-value problems.


www.signupdate.co.uk


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