Print & Livery for Builders
A £20 board outside a job for five months is the hardest-working print you own
Exposure you are already paying for and mostly throwing away
A single storey extension is £19,450. A dormer loft conversion, £17,200. A garden room, £12,850. A garage conversion, £5,900. An internal wall removal with an RSJ, £2,750.
Every one of those puts you on a residential street for months. An extension is typically twelve to twenty weeks. A loft conversion, eight to fourteen. During that time a few hundred people walk or drive past daily — neighbours, parents on the school run, posties, delivery drivers, and other homeowners on the same road who are quietly wondering what it cost and whether they could do the same.
That audience is the most precisely targeted one you will ever have. They live in similar houses, in the same area, with the same problems, and they are watching a live demonstration of your work.
A correx site board is roughly £15 to £25 printed, and a set of six gives you continuous coverage across every job you run for a year. Most builders put up none at all, or put up one that has been in the back of the van since 2019 and is now grey and unreadable.
That is the gap this service exists to close, and it is not really about the board. It is about it going up on every job, being legible from the far pavement, and being replaced before it weathers — which is exactly the part that never happens without a system behind it.
The rest of what a builder actually needs printed
Vehicle livery. A full wrap on a transit-size van runs from about £1,800 to £3,000 and lasts five to seven years. Cut vinyl lettering and a logo — which is genuinely enough for a builder — is more like £350 to £700 for the same lifespan. The van is parked outside the job all day anyway, so it is reinforcing the board rather than doing the work alone.
Hoarding or Heras banners on larger jobs. PVC mesh banners are around £40 to £80 for a three-metre run, and on a job with a fence line they cover a far larger area than a board.
A completion pack. Printed properly, handed over at the end: certificates, warranties, sign-offs, maintenance notes. It costs a few pounds and it is the thing a customer shows the neighbour who asks.
Cards that survive a work trouser pocket. Five hundred at 400gsm is roughly £30 to £50. Builders get asked for a card on site more often than any other trade on this site and mostly do not have one.
Something for the professional list. Architects and engineers keep paper. A single well-produced project sheet is more likely to stay on a desk than any email.
The ratio
An extension is £19,450. Our Booked package is £99 a month — £1,188 a year. One extension covers more than sixteen years.
The print arithmetic is starker still. Six boards a year at £20 is £120. If one of them produces a single additional extension across the whole year, the return is roughly a hundred and sixty times the outlay. Nothing else we sell has numbers that look like that, and it is entirely because you are already standing on the street.
What we’d actually produce
A board designed for the far pavement. Large name, a single service line, one contact route. Read at twenty-five metres from a moving car, not at arm’s length on a screen.
A run of six to eight, so there is always a spare. Boards get damaged, taken down by scaffolders and left behind. Having them in stock is what makes the habit possible.
A replacement cycle. Correx fades and cracks. Boards get replaced annually rather than when somebody notices, which is normally two years too late.
Van livery specified against the board, so the two read as the same firm when they are twenty feet apart outside the same house.
A completion pack template and a printed project sheet for handover and for the professional list.
What good looks like at twelve months
- A board on every job, going up in the first week rather than the last
- Six to eight in stock, so nothing waits on a print order
- Boards replaced on a schedule instead of when they become embarrassing
- Van and board matching, reinforcing each other on the same street
- Enquiries that mention having watched the job next door
The mistakes we see most
No board at all. The commonest and most expensive omission in the trade.
A board with too much on it. Six services, three phone numbers and a QR code, none of them readable from across the road. One name, one line, one number.
Faded boards left up for years. A grey, cracked board says the firm is neglectful, which is the precise opposite of what you want said outside a half-finished extension.
Wrapping the van before doing anything else. A £2,400 wrap is a fine thing to own and it is not where a builder’s first print money should go.
The first ninety days
Weeks 1–4. We look at what you currently have, what state it is in, and which jobs coming up will be on a street long enough to matter.
Weeks 5–8. Boards designed and a run produced, plus the handover and card artwork.
Weeks 9–12. Van livery specified and applied, and the replacement cycle set so this does not decay back to where it started.
At ninety days the measure is simple and physical: is there a board on every live job. It sounds trivial and it is the single largest untapped piece of local advertising in your trade.
Where this lands in Gaffer
Jobs carry their start and end dates, so a board going up in week one is a task on the job rather than something you remember on the way past.
Completion packs assemble from the job record — certificates, warranties, sign-offs — so the printed handover is produced from real documents rather than compiled by hand at the end of a build.
And because enquiries record where they came from, “saw the board on Elm Road” becomes a number rather than an impression, which is what tells you whether the boards are working.
Questions builders ask
Do people really ring off a site board? Not usually that week. They photograph it, or remember the name when their own extension comes round eighteen months later. That is how this trade works.
Is a full wrap worth it? Only after the boards, the cards and the handover pack exist. Cut vinyl does most of the job for a fifth of the cost.
Who puts the board up? Whoever is on site first. It takes two cable ties and it is the highest-value two minutes of the job.
What about planning restrictions? Advertising consent rules apply to size and duration in some settings. We keep boards within what is normally permitted for a live contract.
Get your free website review · Bigger outfit? Talk to us
See what we'd do for builders
Put your website in and we'll tell you what's losing you work — speed, mobile, your Google profile, reviews and the pages you're missing. Two minutes, no call unless you want one.