HISTORY

It was a dark and stormy night...   Yep, I have always chuckled over that famous play on words.  In a way, a play on words is what the art and science of visual communication - for marketing something - is all about. 

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For me, my sales career began as a life and health insurance agent. At the age of 22, I discovered I had the ability to communicate ideas intangibly, logically and memorably through analogies and real-life experiences that occur when a family of 3 loses its sole source of income, like mine did.  My father was uninsured. I was 9.

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I sold a lot of life insurance... quickly. 

All was going fine, until one Sunday morning I was convinced to quit the insurance game, and jump into a whole new career that I had no significant understanding of, and no way to find out how to do it. 

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I entered the sign and graphics industry in 1985

and opened Charboneau Sign and Lettering Company.

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​​​(If you are interested in what the details are of why I walked out of a financially rewarding insurance career after just 3 amazing years into it - I would be humbled and blessed and thankful for the opportunity to share that with you... just give me a call.)

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Around 1989 or 90 marked the shift from the hand drawn, hand lettered sign designs to computer aided sign design.  Wow... a game changer.   In 1995 or so, I began investigating the how and why's of electric sign design. It began to dominate my focus, and fortunately God helped me pick up on it quickly. 

 

I began marketing my services to electric sign shops around the country.

 

I was learning how to engineer the structures and was slowly building a book of knowledge on how electric signs are drawn, fabricated and installed.  That became the resource for my 16 year writing career with S&DG magazine.   Yep, I was blessed to be paid to write about what I do, to a group of sign shop owners who could use my services, and of whom became clients as a result of my articles.  God was very good to me!

In 2017, at the request of my clients whom I designed for, I began training sign designers and sales people on field surveys for electric signs.  I had just published my book and it made the perfect intro class for the sales and design team.  As my clientele grew through referrals, I was able to fine tune the training into a course that I called:

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The Electric Sign Design Training Course.  

 

That class led to me becoming a presenter at the magazines 6 national GPXPO events of 2023.  A two-per-day, live 90 minute unscripted presentation that became a wide-open "anything and everything about electric signs" discussion with me providing answers and analogies to questions from the 100+ designers and sign shop owners in attendance. 

 

  And those presentations opened the door for more blessings.  I was asked to become a contracted trainer to teach the franchisee's designers of FastSigns International (via Propelled Brands).  So, I developed the "Electrical and Attachment Drawings" training class and began via zoom to teach 6 to 8 designers at a time, twice a week.  Oh my, I was busy!

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And then... blah blah blah...

LOL

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Without going on and on, I have a wealth of practical, hands-on experience in outdoor advertising, signage, branding and all things that are part of the company's visual identity.  I teach sign designers the precise disciplines that ensure a successful sign design for readability, visibility and for obtaining the correct response from the viewer.

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Give me a call - lets discuss your project or your design teams

training needs.

 

Sincerely...

Matt Charboneau

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(shar-bo-no)​​​