Business View Magazine - March 2016

64 Business View Magazine - April 2016 Business View Magazine - April 2016 65 cept of franchising its sign and lighting services. In early 2011, it had launched its first franchise location. Currently, the company has 45 franchisees, covering 80 territories in the United States and Canada. Young says the goal is to have 300 North American franchise territories open by 2019, with further plans to go in- ternational. “We’re going to focus on English speaking countries to start,” he says. “We’re working on some potential deals in Australia and the United Kingdom and we’ll get more aggressive with that development as time goes on.” Sam Fisher is YESCO’s Vice President for Business Development. He is focused on building the sector’s largest, self-performing network of sign and lighting services, so any one of the company-owned locations or its franchises can respond to a client’s needs. “It’s a YESCO employee, it’s a YESCO uniform, it’s a YESCO truck, doing it the YESCO way,” Fisher says. “We are completely unique. No one else is doing what YESCO is doing. On the sign lighting service side, we break our efforts into two components. We’ve got the local busi- ness opportunity – repairing the local sign owners, like McDonalds, which is a franchisee, or a mom and pop shop - and then we’ve got a national component and we enter into contracts in that venue, where we’ll take care of a thousand Bank of Americas, or six hundred Star Bucks locations, and we’ll utilize our company lo- cations and our franchise locations to handle that sign and lighting repair.” Fisher says that YESCO considers itself more of a “pe- ripheral player” in the franchise space – it’s not fast food, or retail, or quick serve – and it mostly finds its franchisees within the existing sign and lighting indus- try. “We gravitate toward folks or organizations com-