About Excel Sign Systems
Excel started in a rented bay on Foundry Road in 1987, building canvas awnings and painted wall signs for businesses on Marren's main street. The name on the incorporation papers was Excel Sign & Awning. The awning half of the business was retired in 2004, and the company has been Excel Sign Systems since.
How the work changed
The first fifteen years were storefront work: painted panels, gold-leaf window lettering, neon, and a great many awnings. Two things changed that. The first was the shift from neon to light-emitting diodes through the 2000s, which turned illuminated signage from a specialised craft into a fabrication and electrical discipline, and rewarded shops willing to invest in bench testing. The second was a run of healthcare work starting in 2009 that pulled us into wayfinding, where the hard part is not building the sign but deciding what it should say.
Wayfinding is now the largest single share of what we do by contract value. It is also the part of the business that looks least like sign-making: a good interior programme begins with a walk of the building alongside the people who staff the front desk, and a list of the questions visitors actually ask them.
People
Dale Hartwick founded the company and ran it until 2019, and remains chairman. Priya Raghunathan, who joined as an estimator in 2003, has been president since 2019. Marcus Oyelaran runs fabrication and has been on the shop floor since 2007. Janine Kowalczyk is our senior project manager and handles the multi-site school and healthcare programmes. Tomas Ferreira leads survey and permitting and has spent more hours in Ohio zoning hearings than anyone should.
Thirty-four people work here. Six are installers, eleven are fabricators, four are in the paint and finishing department, and the rest are split between design, estimating, project management and the office. Our average tenure is a little over nine years, which in this trade is unusual and is the thing we are most deliberately protective of.
How we sell
We do not employ commissioned salespeople, and we do not cold-call. Work comes from architects and general contractors we have built for before, from facilities managers who inherited our signs and needed a change, and from clients returning for a second or third building. That model constrains how fast the company can grow, and we have accepted the trade.
We also decline a fair amount of work, usually for one of two reasons: the schedule cannot be met without subcontracting the fabrication, or the design cannot be built to last in the specified material. In both cases we would rather say so during estimating than discover it during installation.
Credentials
- Ohio contractor registration 41-08822
- UL 48 listed fabrication shop, file E198447
- General liability and workers' compensation certificates available on request
- Crane and aerial-lift operators certified to current standards, recertified every three years
Read about our project process, the materials we build in, or our warranty terms.