A title

Image Box text

Personal & Professional
Background

I watch over the office staff and make sure our projects are on track as far as the office functions go – quoting jobs for customers, permitting, working up materials quotes with vendors, placing orders, communicating with our field operations, ensuring that jobs are finished properly, and coordinating with accounting to get jobs invoiced. What I do day to day varies widely, but lately I’ve been spending a lot of time communicating with customers and training some of our newer employees.

I’ve been with this company for a little over seven years now. After graduating from college, I was looking around to see what I might do for a living, and I happened to interview with Steve Cupito. The work he was doing sounded fascinating and the company looked like it had a lot of potential for growth, so when Steve offered me a position in the office, I accepted it immediately and I’ve enjoyed being here ever since.

I previously worked in the auto manufacturing industry, where I worked to remove conveyer bottlenecks in the machining department of a rapidly growing foundry producing aluminum wheels. While there, I served on the 401k committee, and so once a month I would be pulled off the factory floor, covered in grease and soot, and go sit down with company management to go over proposed changes to everyone’s 401k’s. So they pounded into my head an awareness of bottlenecks and the importance of thinking about each employee’s long-term experience. Not everything about a foundry smoothly transfers to contracting, though – I’ve learned a lot of what I know on the job.

Company & Culture

In a lot of ways, my role is making sure that information ends up where it needs to go. As we’ve been growing, this has become increasingly important – keeping track of everything is one thing when there’s two people in the office, and it’s another thing to make sure everyone knows what they need to know when there’s seven people in the office.

The product we offer at C & B Signs is more comprehensive than you would get from most contractors. If you come to us with a simple request like, “I have a station that’s in this brand, and I need to move it over to that brand”, we’re a one-stop shop for just about everything you’ll need, from the smallest stickers on the pumps to the install of fascia or new pole signs. We make sure that our work not only matches the scope we promised, but also that it fits the often very complicated brand standards and local codes in play, so we work with jobbers, brand representative, and local zoning to put together a plan that everyone can work with. Then, in the actual execution of the work, we hold everything to a very high standard, to make sure that the final work is approved by the brand.

The best part of being in a company growing as fast as C & B Signs is that there’s always new things to learn, and the team is made up of people who are always willing to pitch in and help each other out. I’ve been here seven years now, and I’m still not bored, which is amazing to me.

For the first ten years or so of this company, Steve worked alone – just one man, carrying out the entire massive load of reimaging an entire gas station all on his own shoulders. Each year, more and more customers wanted what he had to offer, and so he hired Greg Haap to help him. Each year, more and more customers wanted what he had to offer, and so he hired more people. Forty years later, we’re running a large operation that’s grown by word of mouth.

Personal Interests
& Fun Facts

I’m an uncle to one niece, a brother to eight siblings, a child of two-parents, and a brother-in-law to five people, and I’ve had the fantastic good fortune that all sixteen of these people are people I like spending time with. I also like to study old literature in foreign languages. I’m decent with ancient Hebrew, I dabble a little bit in Aramaic, and if I can figure out how to pull some files off a crashed hard drive, I’m wanting to get back into producing an English translation of Jean Astruc’s 1753 Conjectures, which I’ve gotten about halfway done, with help from chatGPT on the harder phrases.

It’s a short one by Antonio Gramsci – “Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” The way I take it is that even when things seem to be objectively bleak, it’s important to keep working away on the assumption that our work will matter. My endorsement of this quote is not an endorsement of Gramsci’s work in the Italian Communist Party.

I can spell just about any word I’ve ever seen, whether I know what it means or not. I wish the rest of my memory worked that way too. For example, I used to work for Hitachi Metals, and I will always be able to tell you that their motto is spelled wa sureba tsuyoshi. I couldn’t tell you what it means, though.

Life is about discovery, and I prefer to do my discovering in the finest state in the nation.