How we work

A few screens first. Then the rest.

Nobody should commit an entire estate to a signage system they have not watched somebody use. The sequence below is how these projects actually succeed, and each stage has something written down that has to be true before the next one starts.

Delivery

Five stages, each with an exit condition.

Slower to sell than a subscription you can sign up for online, and considerably less likely to end up as screens nobody updates.

Discovery

1–2 weeks

We sit with the people who will publish the content and the people who will look at the screens. We come out with the screens, the content types, the people who need access, and what has to be true for this to be considered a success — written down.

Design and build

Per project

The system is configured, and anything specific to you is built. Because the software is ours, "it needs to work differently here" is a piece of work rather than a request into somebody else's backlog.

Pilot

2–6 weeks

A small number of real screens in a real location, publishing real content, used by the people who will own it. This is where we find out what the requirements document missed.

Rollout

Per site

The remaining screens, in stages. Groups, permissions and content governance stop being settings and start being how the thing is used day to day.

Support and change

Ongoing

Someone who knows the system answers the phone. Changes are quoted and scheduled rather than filed and forgotten.

The room

Who needs to be involved.

Signage sits awkwardly between departments, and the person who wants it is rarely the person who can approve it or the person who will run it. Naming them early is most of the project management.

Whoever will publish

Marketing, internal communications, a branch manager, a facilities coordinator. The most important person in the project and the one most often absent from the meetings about it. If publishing does not suit them, nothing else matters.

The budget holder

Wants to know what it costs to run, not just to build, and what happens in year three. We would rather answer that on the first call than have it discovered later.

Brand or marketing

Owns how it looks. Usually reassured by the fact that templates hold the design and branches only fill in fields.

IT

Network access for the screens, where the system is hosted, how people log in, and who patches what. Bring them early — they rarely object to a system that is described honestly, and they always object to one that arrives as a surprise.

Facilities

Where screens can physically go, power and network points, and who is on site when something needs a hand. Also the person who knows which wall gets direct sun at four o'clock.

Your installer

If you already have one, we work with them. If you do not, we will help you find one and stay in the conversation — without marking up their invoice.

The measure

Is it still current in six months?

That is the only success criterion that matters, and it is the one most signage projects never write down. Screens working is a low bar. Screens showing something that was decided this week is the actual outcome you are buying.

So the pilot has a test attached to it, agreed in writing before it starts: the people who own the content publish to it themselves, without us, for a defined period. If they do not — if it quietly reverts to somebody emailing us a PDF — the pilot has failed and we need to change the system, not push it out to another forty screens.

We would much rather discover that on six screens than on the whole estate.

Commercials

How this is bought.

Discovery: Fixed price and short. You come out of it owning a written specification, an estimate and a list of open questions — which is useful to you whether or not you continue with us.
Build and pilot: Fixed price against that specification, with the pilot's success criteria agreed before it starts.
Rollout: Priced per site once the pilot has told us what a site actually costs, rather than guessed at the beginning.
Licensing: By site, by estate, or a licence you own outright. We will offer the alternative to per-screen subscription rather than making you argue for it.
Support: An availability target against a stated measurement, response and restoration times, and a named person who knows your deployment. Not a badge on a website.
Changes: Quoted and scheduled. Small changes should not need a new project; large ones should not be agreed in an email thread.
Exit: Content, layouts, schedules and configuration exportable in ordinary formats. Source escrow on request. Hardware is yours.

Before you commit anything

The cheapest useful step.

Send us photographs of the screens you already have and whatever is currently on them, plus a sentence about who is supposed to be updating them. That is genuinely enough for a first conversation.

We will come back with what we would change, what it would take, and whether the problem is really a software problem at all. Sometimes it is a content-ownership problem wearing a technology costume, and no amount of new software fixes that — but knowing which one you have is worth more than a demonstration.

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