Business Spotlight: Hung with Care

It’s midsummer, and the owners of Creative Outdoor Lighting have Christmas on the brain.

“We just sent out Christmas cards for renewals,” co-owner Brian Ranft says of the 100 holiday customers who will receive hand-signed cards promoting the Christmas in July offer for early bookings.

Amid Independence Day celebrations, Ranft and business partner Joe Lomosi shifted their focus to another holiday during the company’s busiest time of year.

“It seems weird,” Ranft says. “There were fireworks going off around us, and we’re signing cards.”

For two to three months at year’s end, it’s crunch time for hanging holiday lights on homes and businesses, and scheduling is key. After all, the Nixa-based company hangs over 200,000 lights a year, along with wreathes, garlands and other decor.

The efforts in the hot months are designed to spread out the workload at a time when everybody seems most rushed.

“We get calls the week before Thanksgiving from people asking for lights up by Thanksgiving,” Lomosi says.

Perhaps best known for giving Park Central Square its sparkle at Christmastime, Creative Outdoor Lighting derives most of its business in architectural accent lighting. Designing lighting systems with fixtures, wiring and transformers is Ranft’s bread and butter, having studied theater design and production at the University of Central Missouri.

“It’s a specialization, to some extent,” he says of the trade that’s best applied working alongside homebuilders or landscape architects. “You go to your medical doctor, but you don’t want him working on your teeth.”

The profit switch
Since acquiring the business together in 2011 from Bryan and Brandy DiSylvester, Ranft and Lomosi are applying their unique expertise in design and accounting, respectively.

“He does the designing, and I tell him about the costs, whether it’s good enough or not to make a profit,” Lomosi says, laughing, but only partly joking.

The friends who met working at Domino’s Pizza in 1997 both have entrepreneurial blood running through their veins.

Lomosi says his goal was to be self-employed 10 years after graduating with accounting and computer information systems degrees from Missouri State University. Ranft had similar aspirations, after building a 14-year career with Domino’s where he spent the latter part consulting with brand franchisees.

“Instead of talking about it, we needed to do something,” Lomosi says.

Through Kingsley Group Business Brokers, the duo found the listing by Creative Outdoor Lighting and jumped at the opportunity. Ranft and his wife were living in St. Louis at the time.

“We made the transition down and bought a house and business on the same day – and a car the day before that. We were committed,” Ranft says.

Having assessed the business model, the partners quickly targeted holiday lighting as a profit center. It worked.

The company was just scraping along, but under Ranft and Lomosi, Creative Outdoor Lighting doubled revenue and turned a profit in their first year.

Annual growth has slowed since, and last year the company finished with $308,000 in revenue. Lomosi projects 10-15 percent growth this year, while maintaining a roughly 5 percent profit margin.

“The chart is trending in the right direction,” he says, noting the partners are reinvesting in equipment, inventory and vehicles for future profit gains.

The price to shine
Architectural lighting represents 60-65 percent of business, while holiday jobs are 30 percent and growing, and the newer special event lighting category comprises 5-10 percent.

Holiday clients include Reliable Chevrolet, Chick-fil-A and Hy-Vee. KY3 Inc. came on board last year, and Ranft remembers weather complicating work at the television station.

“When we put KY3 up, we were shoveling a foot of snow off the roof just to get around,” says Ranft, who’s known to climb a ladder and hang strands. “Of course, three days later, it was all melted.”

Creative Outdoor Lighting employs five full-time, and hires up to 10 seasonal workers for holiday jobs.

With roughly 370 active customers, the company charges based on the number of lights or by the foot. On the landscape jobs, Ranft says a 15-light package costs $150 to $400 per fixture, and the holiday lighting jobs start at $400. Customers purchase lights up front, then pay for storage, maintenance, reinstallation and removal – and they avoid the headaches of untangling lights and checking for burned bulbs year after year.

The lights are custom designed, measured and fit to the house, and each has a diagram to tell installers what strands go where. Above its office in a Christian County industrial park, 17 gray plastic tubs are labeled “Park Central Square.” They’re stacked eight high along other clients’ tubs up to nine rows deep.

This Christmas will be Creative Outdoor Lighting’s third year decorating Springfield’s public square with roughly 42,000 lights. The 30-foot tree brought in as the focal point gets 15,000 multicolor minilights and 250 feet of garland alone.

Urban Districts Alliance Communications Manager Laura Head says the downtown community improvement district funds the festive decorations each year. In 2013, the group spent $6,000 with Creative Outdoor Lighting, and Head says the CID board might expand the displays this season.

“We’ve really made an effort to have a visible impact as opposed to just doing a tree and a couple bows,” says Head, who in April moved to UDA from English Management. “That’s always been a popular thing during the holidays. We want to be on that list of destinations for people to enjoy the holiday decorations.”

Even with all the expertise, it doesn’t mean the owners’ houses are the first or most lit houses on the block.

“Last year, my house was done Dec. 23, I think,” Lomosi says, laughing. “We were last on the list.”[[In-content Ad]]