How Sign Pricing Software Puts Money Back in Your Shop

I joined a sales demo on Google Meet and found a dozen employees seated in front of a zoomed-out camera, with the owner standing behind them. His introduction: “The only reason I’m here is my staff said they’re going to quit if we don’t get organized around some software.”

I said, “Hi, I’m Craig. Nice to meet you.” Then I admitted that was a first for me.

Most sign shops don’t start looking at sign pricing software because a calendar reminder told them to. They start looking because something broke. Change is uncomfortable, so we kick the can down the road. The problem doesn’t go away, though. It usually gets bigger, until one day the owner decides enough is enough.

Our founder, Joe Arenella, ran a sign shop for years before building SignTracker. He hears the same objection I do:

“Sign shop owners would always say, I’m just too busy to implement it. The reason you’re too busy is because you don’t have a centralized system that’s organizing all the workflow. It’s probably not because you have too much work.”

Every Shop Has Its Own Bottom

At the ISA show, a father and son walked up to our booth. We’d spoken with them a year earlier. It was a long conversation with lots of questions and lots of research. This time the father skipped the questions. “We need to sign up for SignTracker.”

I asked him, “Why today?”

His answer stuck with me. “With all this AI and how fast everything is moving, I feel like the train is leaving the station and I got left on the platform. I’m handing this business to my son. I want systems in place so I don’t get pulled back in, and so he can put his stamp on the technology side while I support him with what I know about the business.”

We got them signed up.

Every customer takes a different road to SignTracker, our shop management and estimating software built specifically for sign and wrap shops. Usually it starts with a “Houston, we have a problem” moment. Employees are frustrated. All the details live in the owner’s head. Quality of life slips. A costly mistake goes out the door.

Why Pricing Is Where Most Sign Shops Hit Bottom

There’s one common thread in almost every one of those stories: pricing.

In most shops, one person controls pricing, and they keep it in their head. I asked our newest customer how he prices. “It’s all in my head,” he said.

“How does your staff price when you’re not there?”

“They can’t.”

“So you’re getting text messages on vacation?”

“Exactly. That’s why we’re talking.”

He focuses on vehicle wraps and installs. He assumed his pricing was too complicated for software because the platforms he’d looked at forced rigid pricing structures on him. On a live demo, I showed him how SignTracker could follow the way he already prices and capture every cost along the way.

There’s another layer to this, and I’ll be honest about it. Many owners are in a bit of denial about their true costs. If you look hard at what it costs to produce a sign, you may find you’re not making what you thought. Plenty of people would rather not know.

How to Price Signs Using Your True Labor Rate

One owner priced everything from a spreadsheet someone had passed along from a sign franchise. She sent it to me. It was the most convoluted thing I’ve ever seen.

We built a quoting template together for one of her standard products in SignTracker: a printed aluminum sign with an option to drill mounting holes. As we added up the options, she said, “I don’t charge for drilling holes. There’s no material. It’s a hole.”

“There’s labor, though,” I said. “What’s your shop labor rate?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never thought of it that way. I price based on what the market will bear or what my competitors charge.”

Market pricing tells you what customers will pay. It doesn’t tell you what the job costs you. So we set a shop labor rate of $100 an hour. Drilling took her 15 to 20 minutes, so we used 15. That’s $25 of labor per sign.

“How many of these do you sell a year?”

“Probably 400 or 500.”

That’s $10,000 to $12,500 a year she’d been giving away. “Okay,” I told her. “You just gave yourself a $12,000 raise.”

That’s what pricing from true cost looks like. It’s rarely one big fix. It’s dozens of small labor and material costs, or material waste, that never made it onto the quote.

You Don’t Have to Do This Alone

Here’s the human side. Adopting shop management software is scary because it makes you look critically at your business. You don’t have to do that by yourself.

When you sign up for SignTracker, we start with a formal onboarding call. We size up your shop and how much help you want. Some owners say, “Point me in the right direction.” They want the videos, the help center, and the how-to guides, and they’ll reach out if they get stuck. Others want hand-in-hand guidance through every step.

Either way, we don’t charge for onboarding, and we don’t cap it.

A new customer told me he was leaving his previous software after buying an existing shop. When he asked the vendor for additional training, they quoted him a fee. I explained that’s not how we operate. We build relationships with our customers, and they stay loyal because we act as a partner, on the technology and on the business side.

Build Your Pricing Cookbook

During onboarding, we build a cookbook together.

• Ingredients are your materials.
• Cooking steps are your labor rates and production time.
• Add-ons are the extras you sell, like double-sided printing on a coroplast yard sign.

You don’t need to load every material on the market. As Joe puts it:

“You don’t have to have a billion materials in the system. Just have the materials that you use, and the labor descriptions and labor rates that you use, that feed into a template for the products you make.”

Once that data is assembled and imported into SignTracker, we turn it into quoting templates. Those are your recipes assembled into a cookbook. Your sign pricing software then works from your real costs instead of from memory or a spreadsheet.

This is also where I’ll give you a little tough love. We need you to capture every hidden cost, including the ones you’ve never accounted for before. Without true cost figures, you can’t know whether a job makes money. Sometimes that’s painful. We can’t change the past, but we can draw a line: this is how we priced before SignTracker, and this is how we price now. Every cost of producing the job gets counted.

A Simple Sign Pricing Formula (With an Example)

You don’t need a complicated spreadsheet to price a sign correctly. Most sign pricing comes down to three ingredients: materials, labor, and add-ons.

Sign price = (material cost + waste) × material markup + (production hours × shop labor rate) + add-ons

Here’s what each part means:

• Material cost + waste: What you pay for substrate, vinyl, ink, and hardware, plus an allowance for misprints, offcuts, and damaged material. If you don’t account for waste, you pay for it out of your margin.
• Material markup: What you add on top of material cost. Every shop handles this differently. What matters is that it’s consistent.
• Production hours × shop labor rate: Every minute someone spends designing, printing, trimming, drilling, or installing. Your shop labor rate should cover more than wages. It needs to account for rent, equipment, and the profit you want to earn on every hour.
• Add-ons: Options the customer chooses, like double-sided printing, grommets, stakes, or rush service.

Example: 8 double-sided 18″ x 24″ coroplast yard signs from one 48″ x 84″ sheet

Line item	Calculation	Amount
Materials (printed coroplast)	$1.00 per sign × 8 = $8.00 + 14% waste	$9.12
Material markup	$9.12 × 2	$18.24
Labor (setup, print, trim)	10 minutes per sheet × $100 shop labor rate	$16.67
Add-on: double-sided printing	$0.25 per sign × 8	$2.00
Total		$36.91 ($4.61 per sign)

Two details make this example work. First, waste is based on the sheet layout. Eight 18″ x 24″ signs leave a 12″ x 48″ offcut, which is about 14% of the sheet. Second, labor is priced per sheet, not per sign. Setup, printing, and trimming take about the same time whether the customer orders one sign or eight, which is why quantity price breaks work.

These numbers are only an example. Use your own costs and rates. What matters is that every line is accounted for. Remember the drilled holes: an option with no material still has labor, and labor always has a cost.

In SignTracker, this formula lives inside your quoting templates. You enter your materials, labor rates, and markup once, and every quote calculates the same way, no matter who on your team builds it.

Sign Pricing Software That Fits the Way You Price

When Joe Arenella, a former sign shop owner, built SignTracker, he made a deliberate decision to build in pricing flexibility.

If I look at how 10 different customers price banners, I’ll see 10 variations. There are common themes, but shops account for waste differently. Some price roll-fed material plus printing costs, others use a printed unit price per square foot. Good sign pricing and estimating software should follow your method, not force you into its own. That’s one of the first things people notice when they move to SignTracker from a more rigid platform.

What Quoting Looks Like After Onboarding

Once your quoting templates are built, quoting gets simple.

Start from a template and adjust it for the customer. The full menu is there. Check what the job needs, remove what it doesn’t, and you have a quote.

You can also clone quotes. Save a customized version for a repeat customer, or use a quote from one business as the starting point for a similar one. It works like a cheat sheet built on your own pricing.

Most importantly, pricing gets out of your head. Anyone on your team can build a quote. If you want a safety net, set up a status that requires owner approval before a quote goes to the customer. Your team quotes, you stay in control, and your vacation stays a vacation.

So, Are You Too Busy to Make More Money?

When a shop owner tells me they’re too busy to get organized, I ask a different question.

Are you too busy to make more money? Too busy to be more profitable?

The drilled-hole story didn’t take a new machine, a new hire, or a new market. It took an hour of honest costing and a quoting template. Most shops have several of those holes. Finding them pays for the time it takes to get organized.

https://youtu.be/p-kbfT6zeEs