The Book Every Business Owner Needed and Matt Wren Wrote
The Story
Matt Wren has been selling, surveying, and studying signs for nearly 24 years. He knows why a burned-out bulb can cost a business customers before anyone ever walks through the door. He knows that adding ten feet to a sign’s height can increase revenue by 11 percent. He knows that 95 percent of drivers consider gas station signs critical. And until recently, he was the only one who had written any of it down in a cohesive book.
Here’s Your Sign: The ABCs of Optimizing Your Signage is that book. And the fact that it didn’t exist before Matt wrote it is precisely why he did.
“I was looking around for books about signs and the sign industry, and there were very few. In fact, I couldn’t find one. There were some about engineering and pictures of signs, but nothing about the strategy behind signs, how effective they are, how they’re the least expensive investment you can make on your property.”
The Curiosity
The idea of writing a book didn’t start with signage. Matt had a completely different book concept in mind when he first connected with a publishing company. He was ready to move forward with it until he went to hear a speaker talk about gold medalists.
The speaker’s point was simple: when you hire, surround yourself with people who have done it before and can do it again. Gold medalists. When Matt heard that point, something shifted.
“The story I was going to write before, it wasn’t what I was a gold medalist in. I’ve worked in the sign business for about 24 years. That’s where I’m a gold medalist.”
He told his wife that same day. He was writing a sign book.
The pivot made sense for another reason, too. A few months earlier, Matt had gone looking for resources to sharpen his own expertise and found almost nothing on the strategy side of the sign industry. No books on why signage works. No frameworks for business owners trying to make smarter decisions about their storefronts. The gap was obvious. Someone needed to fill it.
The Effort
Matt isn’t new to the idea of putting words into a physical form. In second or third grade, he wrote a story and handed it to his teacher. She was so taken with it that she laminated the paper book and brought it to a teachers’ conference in Pennsylvania. That moment stuck with him.
Years later, he spent seven years compiling interviews with his late grandfather’s children and friends, ultimately presenting a biography to his grandmother on her 90th birthday.
But writing a book for an industry audience is a different thing entirely. The self-doubt is louder, and the stakes feel higher.
“You will have thoughts like, ‘Who am I? Will anyone ever read this? Does anyone care? There are millions of books. Why this one?'”
Matt didn’t avoid those questions. Instead, he worked through them, and he credits the structure and support of the publishing process for making that possible.
The Solution
When Matt connected with the team at ShareYourStory.com and its publishing arm, Streamline Books, the experience stood in sharp contrast to trying to do it alone. He had worked on books for years without ever bringing one to completion. This time was different.
The process was guided from the beginning: developing an audience, shaping the message, working through editing, and figuring out exactly who the book was written for. None of that happened in isolation.
“There’s no way it would have happened without them. It still took a year and a half, and a lot of people think that’s a long time, but when you’re writing a book, that’s not long at all. I had been working on similar books for years, and they never came to fruition.”
For anyone considering working with a hybrid publishing company, Matt’s answer is clear: find people who have done it before. Find your gold medalists.
The Journey
The book is built around an ABC framework: Attract an audience, Build your community, and Create a legacy. Each letter gave Matt a structure for organizing nearly a quarter-century of field knowledge, client stories, and signage statistics into something readable and actionable.
The research he gathered was striking even to him. Beyond the revenue data, he found that a well-placed sign remembered by a customer once was enough to make that customer bypass multiple competitors to find it. He tells the story of a man with a flat tire who drove 30 miles to a shop, passing three tire stores on the way, simply because he remembered the sign from a previous drive.
“I tried to write the book so there are interesting stories and unique anecdotes to bring to the surface how cool signs are, how impactful they are, and sometimes we don’t really think about them, but they’re all around us.”
Listen to the full episode here.
The ROI
Here’s Your Sign: The ABCs of Optimizing Your Signage is now live on Amazon, and Matt’s plan for how to use it is already in place. Rather than sending thank-you cards to his clients, he plans to send thank-you books with personal handwritten notes. After nearly two and a half decades of clients teaching him, delighting him, and pushing him to be better, the book is his way of giving something concrete back.
For business owners looking for signage tips or anyone in the sign industry searching for a framework to make their work more strategic, the book fills a real gap. That’s not just Matt’s opinion. It’s the reason he wrote it.
The relief he felt finishing it mirrors what he felt completing his grandfather’s biography years ago: a fire that had been burning quietly inside him, finally out.
What’s Next for Matt Wren
Matt is based in Utah and operates in the sign industry full-time. His website, heresyoursign.com, serves as the home for the book and will expand to include photos, sign stories, and resources as the project grows.
The book is a natural extension of how he already lives. For anyone wanting to understand how business signage strategy actually works, from attracting an audience to building a community to leaving something that lasts, Here’s Your Sign: The ABCs of Optimizing Your Signage is the place to start.
