After Scott Bell graduated from the Harbert College of Business, he and his brother, Neil, started Bell Media to focus on the underserved need for digital billboards in the south.
HCOB: You started Bell Media right after graduating fromHarbert — can you tell us about that decision and how you got your business off the ground? Bell : Beginning in my junior year at Auburn, I went to the entrepreneurship program, where we had to start working on business plans and the whole strategic planning processes. And I was really interested in digital billboards — I began seeing the digital roadside billboards pop up around 2006, 2007 for the first time. My brother, Neil, who grad- uated from Auburn in 2001, was in the billboard business, working for one of the largest companies in the industry as well as building some of his own billboards, so I already knew a little about that market. As I started looking into it, I realized that from a govern- mental perspective, you could not build billboards in the Auburn area, but they were allowed in Columbus, Georgia.
So, I started learning about the legal aspect of the billboard business there, asking a lot of questions — how do I lease property and how do I permit a billboard, etc. And I started traveling my senior year over to Columbus to begin leasing property and permitting property to build billboards, relying on my brother to help guide some of those initial transactions. HCOB: So, you were already “in the business” before starting Bell Media — when did you form the company and what was your process? Bell : Yes, that’s right. After I graduated, my brother and I started Bell Media in 2008 with the focus on digital billboards. It was obvious to me that Columbus was an underserved market and that the main competitor, a nationwide company, was not investing in digital billboards. I assessed that there may be a two- or three-year window
of opportunity where we could get in and establish a digital billboard net- work around the city — build and own something that would create value and continue to generate recurring revenue using tangible, hard assets. And over the next seven years we expanded our footprint to other markets in surrounding areas. HCOB: How did you fund your ini- tial operations — where did you get the money to lease these properties, purchase the permits and build the billboards themselves? Bell : The year before we started the company, I had secured some lease agreements and some permits to build billboards, some of which I came to realize weren’t in very good locations. So, I sold those for $7,000 apiece, which gave me enough to live off for the first six months. I held onto a handful of other leases and permits I felt were more promising. With those in hand, we inves- tigated funding sources, and settled on a mezzanine financing lender that offered
Scott Bell, right, sold the outdoor profile of the Bell Media business to Link Media, keeping the indoor advertising portion as they moved into the online advertising space.
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