BSG is Back From the Dalles!

EPISODE 15 PODCAST OUTLINE

Welcome

Welcome!

Thanks to our sponsor Formetco! As well as other fans of the show!

Thanks to my remote engineer Chuck - Learn A Note still available

Online classroom for climber certification currently available

                OSHA 10 and 30hr classes

                Qualified Climber Classroom

Live training in the works for February 2027

July is National UV and Firework Safety Month.

Mail and Comments thebillboardsafetyguy@gmail.com

Thank you Danny for listening

Special thanks to Mike, Cimmie, Brian and everyone at Meadow for the hospitality

Announcements and In the News

Interview with Chris Zukin

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:38

Welcome to this episode of the Billboard Safety Guy. This is Jim Pogue. I am the Billboard Safety Guy. This is episode 15. And welcome. Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, whatever time you are listening to this. Very much appreciated that you're going to be listening in. I look forward to your listening in the future. Let me thank my sponsor, Fermetco, before we get too far into this. Fermetco, everything outdoor. Anything you need for billboards, from nuts and bolts to digital to complete, you can call them and talk with them to get the details on how to do it. So they're in Duluth, Georgia. I encourage you if you are looking into getting a billboard or you're already in the billboard industry and you have a special need to give them a call. They will definitely take care of you. As always, thanks to my remote engineer Chuck. Chuck has uh created the Learn a Note program where you can learn to play the piano. And he also has a new game out on uh the Play Store or App Store. I believe it's the App Store because it's just in the uh uh Apple, excuse me, the Apple devices right now, but it is a fish game, and that's about all I can tell you about it. I saw a glimpse of it on Facebook, and I it looks like it's fun, but that's all I can tell you. If you're interested, if you go to Learn Anote and ask him about it, I'm sure he'll be happy to give you the details on it. Um, let's see, online classrooms. We don't have anything scheduled right now, but it's one of things those things that I'm available for. If you have an interest, let me know. And if I get a couple of people, I'll be happy to set up a classroom for either qualified climber or one of the other classes that I'm able to do it for online. And we are currently working on the live class that we do each year at Fermetco, and it's going to be around the second week of February. So watch the calendar on Fermetco. They'll start advertising it probably closer to the end of the year. Crazy. It doesn't seem like uh 2027 should be that close, and yet there it is. Um it's something that I think everyone who goes to one comes away with a whole new perspective on not just safety, but outdoor as a whole. You get the opportunity to interact with other people in the industry as well as complete an OSHA 10-hour course, CPR and first aid class, and complete a qualified climber course. If you have an interest in being the qualifier, we do have a course for that as well. Just let us know what we can do to help out, and we'll take it from there. Uh, we're almost to the end of June, and July is National Fireworks Safety Month. Who who wouldn't have seen that coming? But it's also uh UV safety, ultraviolet safety. And this is one of those times where I can relate to the month that it is because I have recently had to have some skin cancer removed, and I can't encourage people enough to use sunscreen, use uh hat for shade, and other methods of keeping the UV off of you. So keep that in mind. If you need some information, it's easy to find by Googling uh National UV Safety Month, and there's a lot of free tips out there on how to help prevent sunburn and sun cancer. Now, I'm just getting back from my week-long trip to the Dalles. I was corrected on how to say it properly, uh, the Dalles, Oregon, where I got to meet with the folks from Meadow, and they are absolutely amazing. The hospitality that I got there is just second to none. And I want to thank Mike, Simmy, Brian, and everyone there that I met, and just tell them how much I appreciate the feeling of hospitality and and friendship that I had while I was there. So thank you, thank you, thank you a hundred times to everyone. And there's a couple of special people that were there. I was approached by one of the guys that listens to the program named Danny. I won't give his last name, but Danny came up and stopped me and said, Hey, I just want you to know I've been listening to your program since episode one. So thank you, Danny, for being out there. I do appreciate that more than you realize. And there was a young guy there, his name is Isaac. And Isaac and I have met a couple of times at the live classes, and I remember the first time that I met him. I like to go around at the beginning of class and ask everybody's name, who they work with, what company it is, and what their experience is. And whenever I got to Isaac, he told me he was with Meadow Outdoor, and he said, and this is my third day on the job. I was like, oh my gosh, nothing like breaking you in right, getting you here just right on the jump, you know. And um he came back. I think it was about a year or two after that, that he came back and completed the course a second time. And in the meantime, uh Meadow hired him with no experience in the billboard industry, just uh a will to work, and he went out and he proved that he was, you know, a very important member of the team and he was willing to do whatever it took to get a job done, and he expressed an interest in learning. And this trip that I was there, I found out that he decided he wanted to learn to be a welder, and that he had already completed four different certificates in welding. He had already got certified as a welder in four different areas, and he's getting ready to be building his own four not his, but Meadows 1448 stick build that he's gonna do and weld it up for him. And I think that is fantastic. It just shows the character of Meadow to allow you to grow and go uh to however whatever length it is that you choose you want to go. So I am so excited to play this interview for you, and I'm gonna tell you that it's gonna occupy the rest of the time uh that we have today. But I do want to say that if you have any questions, feel free to email me at the Billboard Safety Guy at gmail.com. And with that said, I want to get right into this interview. I hope you enjoy it as much as we did putting it together. And I have the pleasure today of being at Meadow Outdoor in the Dales, Oregon, and it is beautiful here. I love being able to go out and do these types of interviews, and it's a double bonus when I get to do it with a very good friend of mine that I've known for at least 10, possibly 15 years, uh, Chris Zukin. If you listen to the last podcast, I got a little tongue-tied trying to uh identify what his title was, and I just finally said, well, he's just king. He's the benevolent king of Meadow Outdoors. So now that I have him here, I'm gonna let him introduce himself and tell us what his title is, and we've got some questions for him.

SPEAKER_01 9:00

Thank you, Jim. I am not the king. I am the general manager of Meadow Outdoor Advertising and the uh CEO and president of J.R. Zucan Corporation. Um We are uh a billboard-only company based in the Dalles, Oregon, and we operate in Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and California.

SPEAKER_00 9:20

And that we were been joking about this the whole time that I was here. Um I was talking about some of my presentations and I didn't realize how close Washington was. And I asked, you know, well, do you are you interested in any of the Washington standards? And Chris said yes. And I was like, well, how close are you to Washington? Well, he's got a thousand by thousand mile radius on his plant. So it more than encompasses Washington, Oregon, California, Idaho.

SPEAKER_01 9:50

And and our office in the Dallas is built literally ten feet from the Columbia River. And when we look out, as we're looking at right now, out my office window, we see Washington on the other side. So that's how close we are to Washington.

SPEAKER_00 10:03

You know, the safety guy's not always that bright. I do want to get a uh a start. If you're not familiar with Meadow Outdoor or Chris Zukin, then uh I think that this is a good opportunity for us to uh let him tell us how his family got started in outdoor advertising. I absolutely love this story because it was not like they just saw it as an investment right away and jumped off into it. But I'm gonna let Chris tell the story of the evolution of where they started and where they are now.

SPEAKER_01 10:36

It's a it is a great story. We actually started as an advertiser. So um my dad um decided to get into the amusement park business in the uh early 60s, and he built an amusement park south of San Jose, California called Frontier Village, kind of patterned after Frontierland and Disneyland. And my father was a promoter. Um he promoted that amusement park with a uh kids' TV show on Saturday morning. Uh he advertised our radio newspaper, and he rented billboards from Foster and Kleiser for about six months to a year. When he decided, wait a minute, I can build my own billboards. And he did. So he built eight or ten billboards around San Jose advertising Frontier Village. So on the side reading the traffic headed for the amusement park, obviously there was an ad for Frontier Village. On the other side of the billboard, he sold it to the motel down the road or the the um restaurant, what have you. And when it rained on Saturday, nobody came to the amusement park, but the motel kept paying their billboard bill. And dad realized I'm in the wrong business. So in 1967, I was 17 years old. Dad bought a little billboard company in Merced, California by the name of Cleveland Outdoor. It had been started by a man by the name of Ron Cleveland. Um, and I would go over there in the summers during high school and dig uh holes for two post IBM poster panels, back to back 30 sheets. That's how we got started in the business.

SPEAKER_00 12:10

Wow. Wow. So you started out as the most basic level that you could start at. Digging holes. Yeah. Now, did you ever work in any other position outside of billboards from that point?

SPEAKER_01 12:23

Um I did. So I I went to uh college um and I got out of college and I vowed I would never work for my father. So I uh was gonna go do my own thing and and uh conquer the world. I went to work for a metal coatings, an industrial metal coatings uh company in Eugene, Oregon. Did that for five years. And in 1981, uh my dad called and said, Hey, Chris, I'm looking at buying a little billboard company in the Dalles, Oregon. Would you consider um coming over? I said, Yep, I'm ready, Dad. So um my wife Judy and I moved to the Dalles on January the first, nineteen eighty-one, and we've been running this plant for 45 years.

SPEAKER_00 13:02

That's awesome. And another factor about this is your brother's here. Yep. You have a granddaughter working here. Yep. A daughter working here, I believe.

SPEAKER_01 13:14

Well, she doesn't work here, but she sits in. So I have a yep, a brother, uh, a granddaughter, a son-in-law, and uh and we try to keep our family um if if not working in the business, we we want them to understand the business. So we have a family meeting every year. In fact, it's next week, Jim, down in uh Las Gas, California. And we spend three days just telling them about the business, looking at the balance sheet and the PL, but also uh explaining you know what our plans are for the next year and our five years or 20 years, and uh, we really want them to understand this business because they're all shareholders and they're all gonna be on the board directors someday. So yeah.

SPEAKER_00 13:55

And that's very interesting, too. I I mean I think the the family aspect is awesome. It it's something that you lose when you get into these big corporations. There's they there there's no accountability to the people that work for them anymore. They're just as another widget, so to speak. And here it is a family enterprise. And I I really like the fact that if you look at your footprint from where you were this morning, you gave some numbers from 1989. 1981. 81. Yeah. And uh you look at the number of boards that you had and the number you have now, yeah, you have not grown in a way that you have handicapped the business. It's like each move, it was kind of like, well, can we afford to do that now without it impacting us? And I think that's one of the most amazing things about the growth of Meadow that I see.

SPEAKER_01 14:50

Well, we uh one thing about my father that he taught uh uh me and my brother Mike is yeah, he was very risk adverse. And we really didn't make a big investment until we were 99.9% sure it was going to be a good one. And um so we win it out the the the not so great ones and and and and did the ones that we knew were gonna be profitable.

SPEAKER_00 15:14

Awesome, awesome. Um this is the Billboard Safety Guy program, so I have to ask we since we met day one, you have been a huge champion for safety. Yeah, and not just, I mean for me, but as a representative for it in the industry as well. And I'm just wondering if you've always been that way, if it's something that was ingrained in you when you were working for your father, or is some there was there something, an event or something that occurred that made you think about it that you said we've got to do something to create a better, safer workplace? I have not always been that way.

SPEAKER_01 15:52

Uh when I first when we first bought this plant in uh the Dalles, Oregon, I was um on the installation crew for the first uh six months. And by installation, in those days, we painted on uh 12 foot by four foot by 12 foot wooden sections, hand painted those in the shop, took them off the wall, put them on a flatbed, took them out to the site, took the old sections down, roped the new sections up, and double-headed nailed them into the stringers. So I was up and down the ladder and pulling up ropes. And uh the first week that I was working, the uh guy who was showing me the ropes said, Here's the safety equipment. It was a safety belt and a four-foot uh rope lanyard. He said, We don't wear these because if we actually use them and we fell wearing this, it would break our backs. I said, Okay, I won't wear it. So I didn't. Um that changed. Wow. That changed when um I was the general manager and we had um uh we've got several four-post I-beam billboards, and our guys were switching out some faces, and one of the guys was climbing over the top of the I-beams along the top of the sign and unhooking every time he did it while a NoSha representative was watching, and so we got hammered with a fine. And I had never really thought deeply about safety until that time. So I decided this is not going to happen to me again, and I dove into what are these regul what are these regulations? How do I uh how do I maintain and operate a sign like that without violating the requirements of OSHA? How do I do that? How do those two things mesh? Because it's not always um evident or obvious. And through that research, the more we thought about that and talked about it, um the thing that really happened, Jim, was we started a safety committee, which was all of our crew guys. At that time, we only had four of them. So we'd meet uh every other month, and one of the exercises was what is out there that's unsafe that needs to be fixed? And we'd start doing a list. And I don't remember which one it was, but there was something that had to be fixed. It was gonna be a $10,000 bill. And so, well, let's let's do that one. That seems to be a real tough one. So we went and spent the money, got it fixed, and the crew, you could see it in their eyes, it's like, oh, these guys are putting their money where their mouth is. They're not just making a list of what's wrong and then stick it in the fix-it someday file. They're actually fixing it. So from that point forward, what once they drank the Kool-Aid, I drank the Kool-Aid, and now we're all in the same boat. We we we eat, breathe, and sleep safety.

SPEAKER_00 18:32

That's awesome. And I I have to uh say that the guys that I've had the pleasure of teaching in some of the classes that I have done, they come in hungry. They they want more knowledge, they want to know how to protect themselves more. And just like in the meeting today, you know, it reflects it in your zero accidents and uh this the postings that you have that you put up each year for the OSHA 300 log, you know, they must be stellar because I know there's only one or two minor things that have ever occurred here, and that's amazing. That is awesome. You've got 50-ish people, number 42 employees. 42 employees working here. If you were to do the math and look at it from what they call the empirical level for accident rate, you would expect there to be at least one accident every three years. And you guys are sailing way past that. So I applaud you on everything that I see. Oh, thank you. Just awesome. We try hard. Now, everybody talks about the cost of safety and how expensive it is to have a safe facility. Have you experienced any cost savings with regards to having a safety program?

SPEAKER_01 19:50

100%. You know, uh uh besides the obvious, not having an employee get hurt and and having to uh get that employee healthy, we have. And uh a great example is our uh workers' comp uh insurance. Here in Oregon, it's safe, uh S-A-I-F. And we um I'll tell you a quick story. That's okay. So one of our guys was out uh in the Dalles uh posting a vinyl by himself, and uh a uh a white car stopped, he didn't see it. White car stopped and and watched uh Noah work on this billboard for about 20 minutes and then came into my office and uh he was our safe officer, our SAIF officer who was doing a quarterly um uh interview with me about our our premium. And he told me that he watched this guy for 20 minutes and he was perfect. He was tied off 100%, he was never not tied off. It was a stellar performance, and he and this employee didn't know anybody was watching him, which is exactly what you want your safe guide to see. So uh he told me, I think I'm gonna be able to get you a discount on your workers' comp. And by golly, he did. I think we saved like $4,000 that year.

SPEAKER_00 21:00

Wow. That's a good thing. Yeah, a lot of these consortiums like that that the smaller business get in offer a fairly substantial reduction if you'll just put together a safety program. Right. And it's funny because people look at the price of safety based on the cost of a harness or a lanyard and not what they're gonna save on the other side from an insurance perspective. Right. So that's a big plus.

SPEAKER_01 21:26

And even more important, you you just want your people to go home every night, you know, back to their wives and kids and homes, safe and sound and unhurt.

SPEAKER_00 21:35

You know, it it's funny you say that because I had a a bit of a reputation when I was with one of my previous employers and um I uh was the result of some people losing their jobs because they weren't working properly or they weren't using their safety equipment. Right. And I held a meeting in one area where the group at A whole was very upset that I had caused a friend of theirs to lose her job. And I walked in and said, I know you're angry, and I know you're angry at me, and I'm fine with that. Because if it means that he is seen walking down the street a year from now healthy, I'm fine with it. But if he fell and got hurt and I did nothing, or killed, and I did nothing, I couldn't live with myself.

SPEAKER_01 22:24

100%.

SPEAKER_00 22:25

And then everybody kind of understood where I was coming from. You hate to be the heavy, but sometimes it's necessary. Agreed. So I'm gonna we we played an interesting game today where people were given these bizarre questions to answer. I kind of have my own version. Oh, and I'm gonna ask you, it's kind of vague and nebulous, so you've got a wide border on things that you can say. Um being in the industry as long as you have, do you have any closing thoughts on the future of Meadow or the future of the billboard industry as a whole? Uh, the direction you think we're going, what should we avoid? Anything like that? Sure.

SPEAKER_01 23:08

Um as far as Meadow, um, you know, we are we're having a great time right now. There's a renaissance in, I think, outdoor nationally, but certainly where we're operating, we're hitting on all eight cylinders, and we're having, we're actually we're having fun. It's a lot of fun to be successful. Um, and I think we're very traditional. You know, we are a 100% bulletin plant. We don't have any more, we don't have 30 sheets any longer. We have digitals, but the rest of our inventory are static, traditional static billboards. And I believe that um digital is great. We love our digitals, but statics will always be our bread and butter. They'll always keep the lights on and uh keep the doors open. Uh we at Meadow, we intend to continue to grow within our footprint and build. We've got a three, three-man real estate team that's out there looking for new locations all the time. That's the funnest part for me is building new billboards. Um, as an industry, uh digital, digital, digital. You hear a lot about that. I'm I agree with all that. Programmatic, I'm not so sure if that works for us. Uh we have a different model. You know, we sell our digits on 12-month contracts. So we don't usually have a spot out there that we can sell to somebody for four weeks. Um, but I'm, you know, that works for other people. This is this works for us. I'm not saying that's what everybody should do. Um, I think the industry is, again, is is poised really well right now. Um we're we're the you know, in real life, that whole thing, where we're the only me advertising medium that is out there that people see and can touch and they know it's real. Uh I think we're the future is bright, Jim.

SPEAKER_00 24:48

I couldn't agree more. I mean, if you look at the way billboard advertising has done over the years, traditionally you'll see peaks and valleys, you'll see where it'll hit a slump for a while, but it always seems to come back twice as much as what it was when it dropped. So it's one of those things I think that if the players out there do all the right things, and I I'm not saying this just because I'm sitting in your office here in the Dells, but I think Meadow checks every box as doing the right thing when it comes to business safety, uh, the work-life balance that you have with people, the true concern you have with your employees and the way that they are part of your extended family. Um I'm just gonna say if somebody is looking for a job and they want to go to one of the best places that I've ever seen, go to the Meadow website and see if there's any careers that you uh could match up to here. That's awesome. Thank you, Jim. Anyway, well, I appreciate the time and I hope everyone enjoyed this. And I look forward to future interviews with you, maybe, and some of your other folks to get your take on different things within the industry. We'd love to do that. With that, this is Jim Pogue, the safety guy, and I will talk to you on the next edition.