When Signs By Benchmark faced the choice of either expanding or continuing to have to turn business away, there really was no choice.

The parent company of the Watertown, South Dakota-based wholesale manufacturer of monument signs, Benchmark Foam, recently expanded its building by 33 percent to 80,000 square feet, allowing Signs By Benchmark to double its space within the building to 20,000 square feet.

“We were basically limited by what we were capable of doing in that 10,000 square feet with the equipment that we had,” says Jacquie Devine, the company’s marketing manager. “We were running three shifts and we were maxing out sales. It was at a point where we were losing business because we couldn’t turn product fast enough with our equipment, with our staff, with our (limited space)."

The extra space afforded by the expansion allowed Signs By Benchmark to add a second CNC router and a new paint booth. The company is also hiring new staff, especially salespeople, Devine says.

Signs By Benchmark employs about 25 of the 70-plus people who work at Benchmark Foam, she says, adding that the sign business has grown to be about 20 percent of Benchmark Foam’s overall revenue.

The parent company’s roots date back to the 1970s, according to Jamie Kakacek, design supervisor. One of its first product lines was an exterior insulation product for foundations called ThermoSkirt that it still manufactures. In the late 1980s the company began using polyureas and other fast-setting urethane coatings, and ever since the company has been spraying coatings over foam and exploring different applications for its products. Today Benchmark Foam’s products include insulation, custom packaging, dock floats and even baseball pitching mounds.

In 1989 the company built its first sign, Kakacek says. Made for a local Watertown company, the sign still stands, and demand for its signs grew throughout the 1990s. In the early 2000s it was decided that the sign division should become its own entity—Signs By Benchmark.

2008 was a milestone year for the company, but not in a good way: Not only was the U.S. plunging headlong into The Great Recession, but the building that had housed both Benchmark Foam and Signs by Benchmark burned to the ground, Devine says. The company’s new 60,000-square-foot building opened the following year and the company started putting more effort into promoting the sign business. An added emphasis on getting the company’s name out there via trade shows was a big part of that, she says.

“Signs By Benchmark really took an upturn in sales in 2012,” she says. “That was when we saw, ‘Whoa, this is significant,’ and we’ve grown since then.”

The company sometimes gets calls from end-user customers—architects or developers, for example—for its monument signs, but Devine says they’re a wholesale manufacturer so they steer those customers to a local sign shop.

She says if she has to put a finger on the reasons for the company’s growth she’ll cite the quality of its signs and the customer service employed by the staff.

“We believe that we have a better quality control program than others in the industry and we back it up by having good communication with our customers, and good follow-up after the sale,” Devine says. “’Did something go wrong? What can we do better next time, for you or another customer?’”