In the last two weeks, he figures he drove thousands of miles, from Salt Lake City to Seattle, Minneapolis to Chicago, from one sign to another for his vocation.
He started his company almost 20 years ago.
“It’s fun,” he said. “I get to travel all over the country.”
He returns home roughly every two weeks for a week or two stay.
Over the years, he’s worked for many of the big national companies such as Taco Bell, 7-11, Mobil, Target and McDonald’s. That’s why he needs to travel from one end of the U.S. to the other on a regular basis.
“I am one of the only companies who does this in the country,” Pagano said. And what he does is cover the nation, cleaning and then restoring older business signs.
He considers his business a “green” company because instead of putting old signs in landfills, as well as spending $18,000 to replace one like the one at the McDonald’s restaurant on 25th Street N.W., companies can restore them for as little as $3,000 and get another five years worth of use out of them. And it only takes about six to seven hours for Pagano to finish cleaning and restoring a business sign.
The normal guarantee for a new sign is a year. Pagano thinks that’s because sign makers want to encourage businesses to continuously buy new ones. But, according to Pagano, there is no reason ever to buy new signs as long as they are structurally intact.
Pagano is almost finished cleaning eight area McDonald’s signs.
But if anyone is thinking of starting a similar business, Pagano does have one word of caution.
“You can’t be afraid of heights,” he said.
For more information, call 800-238-9916 or e-mail to globalsign@verizon.net or visit the website www.globalsignrestoration.com.
