At FASTSIGNS’ annual conference earlier this year, the sign franchise announced its Project of the Year award winners, FASTSIGNS centers that completed ambitious and impressive sign projects. This year’s winner was FASTSIGNS Missoula, Mont., with an overhaul of the University of Montana’s Lodge Dining Center—a project that included ADA signage, wall and window graphics, lit and non-lit channel letters, a “neon” sign, and more. As if the number of components involved didn’t make the project challenging enough, the size of the facility (38,000 sq. ft.) and short time to complete the project (60 days) made it all the more so. But it all ran smoothly and came off—generally—without a hitch.

FASTSIGNS of Missoula owner Todd Taylor is a University of Montana alum and had worked with the university’s special events teams on football and other sporting events and concerts for 17 years. He got involved in the dining center redesign project thanks to a relationship with a contractor who worked with another sign company that proved reliably unreliable, so Taylor and his team jumped in and finished the projects.

Fast-forward a year, and FASTSIGNS Missoula again came to the rescue. “I got a phone call while I was in Indianapolis at the FASTSIGNS Sales Summit from the same contractor and they said, ‘We have a problem. Another sign company that we work with has dropped the ball on three four of our projects and we need some help. Most importantly, we need to be able to get a school opened in three weeks.’ And they had no ADA signage for the brand new school.”