Sign Pro Hosts State Rep’s Final Business Tour
- Anthony Angelillo
- 2 days ago
- 3 min read
State Representative Chris Poulos made a final stop on his tour of Southington businesses last Monday at Sign Pro’s Plantsville headquarters. Peter Rappoccio, the founder and president of the company, conducted the tour, which also included Kirti Patel, Connecticut’s Chief Manufacturing Officer, and Matthew Pugliese, Deputy Commissioner at the state Department of Economic and Community Development.
Poulos calls the idea behind the visits “smart economic development,” with a goal of learning what makes a company like Sign Pro work and recreating those conditions so that businesses and jobs can be kept in the state.
“I want my kids to be able to come back to Connecticut and live and work here,” Poulos said.
Rappoccio started Sign Pro in 1990 from a bedroom in his parents’ house. The company moved from New Britain to Plantsville in 2014 with 22 employees. It now runs out of a 40,000-square-foot facility located near I-84 at 60 Westfield Drive; the facility has more than 70 employees and is powered by a rooftop array of 890 solar panels.
Sign Pro is also a family business: Rappoccio’s wife and two sons work for him. He said the drive they have cannot be taught.
“You can’t teach that,” Rappoccio said. “It starts from the roots.”
The company designs, builds, permits, installs and maintains signage and vehicle wraps. Rappoccio said keeping the entire job under one roof is the point.
“It’s our job to make our client look good, not just with signage, but with the job and the project,” Rappoccio said.
Much of that work never leaves the building, as Sign Pro does all of its own work on jobs within a 250 mile radius, rather than subcontracting.
Rappoccio said it pulls close to 200 permits a month through two full-time expediters, without a single legitimate code violation in the United States or Canada.
After M&T Bank acquired another banking chain, Sign Pro made and installed new signs at 156 branches statewide, doing all the work in-house. That scale, Rappoccio said, is why clients hire one shop instead of several.
“You don’t want 156 different sign shops doing it,” he said. “Every green will be different, every orange will be different.”
For bigger jobs, like Hartford Health Care’s rebranding, Sign Pro updated signs at 492 different sites in about four weeks. They were able to switch one group of locations to the new name overnight.
Sign Pro’s client list mixes national names, including ESPN, Travelers and Uconn, with local companies. Rappoccio said his account with Planet Fitness grew from a single store into 40 to 60 jobs a year.
The work that Sign Pro does is more familiar than people may realize. Sign Pro built the streaming ‘DUNKIN’ cup on the scoreboard at Dunkin’ Park in Hartford, put up the 19-story illuminated sign that tops the Cadence tower in the Hartford skyline, and made the bee sculptures and colorful panels for New Britain’s Beehive Bridge.
The Beehive job started with a handful of panels, then grew into more than 1,500 custom pieces, each with a different shape and fit.
During the tour, questions of hiring and training came up repeatedly – a point of concern for state officials who have sought to draw more young people into manufacturing jobs.
Rappoccio said he hires for attitude and teaches the rest. He said Sign Pro recently hosted a workforce forum led by a military veteran to bridge the gap between its older and younger employees.
“If somebody wants to learn it, we want to show it to them, because that’s our future,” Rappoccio said.
Commenting on the visit, Poulos said every stop is meant to send him back to Hartford with something useful and he expected this to do the same. As for Rappoccio, his ambition is simpler. He said the company is less focused on getting bigger and more on getting better at what it does, while making clients happy enough to keep them calling back.
