Steve Hilton didn’t just see the sign that pointed him to his life’s work, he climbed up it. At 11 some nights, he’d scale a 70-foot-high billboard to manually update gasoline prices. When the owner of the company invented a control box to do the same job at eye level, he bought the business.
That was 1981. And the billboard at I-85 and Woodruff Road still stands. Now, there’s a Trader Joe’s, Zoës Kitchen and Starbucks in its shadow and today, the Seattle-based java juggernaut is among Hilton Displays’ 40-plus clients, along with the likes of Amazon, Starbucks,Wells Fargo, Truist, IHOP and Carvana, to name a few.
Those nocturnal ascensions? “That’s what got me into the sign business,” he says of his eponymous company now in its 40th year. Not bad for a guy who didn’t finish college. Before leaving the University of Florida, he sold stereos, one of his first jobs — “I was my best customer,” he says.
At 21, he joined an engineering firm in Tallahassee, Florida, where he was a contract manager and worked on a Department of Defense project to develop an ammunition loading system for the A-10 Warthog (a type of jet aircraft).
By 25, he was determined to work for himself. He considered buying a Computer Land franchise in Charleston and a furniture store. At the same time, he and his wife, Kim, a high school sweetheart and teacher who had earned her master’s degree in special education, wanted to leave Florida.
“I had a 4-month-old son, Brandon, and a wife. I resigned a great job, packed up everything we had, put it in a U-Haul truck and came to Greenville, South Carolina,” he says.
Here, he joined a sign company, which at the time was developing a remotely changeable advertising display. He found the idea compelling enough to borrow money from his father, a retired Air Force pilot, to purchase the distressed company.
“I was so young, I didn’t know how to buy a business. I didn’t do any due diligence,” he says. The first 10 years were extremely challenging while digging the company out of financial distress.
Today, Hilton Displays generates between $35 million and $40 million in annual revenues, company officials say. Some 160 employees work out of a 60,000-square-foot facility only a mile and a half from the center of downtown Greenville.
The manufacturing facility atop Hillside Drive happens to be just up the hill from Willy Taco that in 2016 opened on Laurens Road and whose parent company — Hub City Hospitality — hired Hilton Displays.
“They’re our next-door neighbor,” says Eric Holman, a partner at the restaurant/hospitality group. “They run a good operation there and they’ve got a great shop and do good work.”
A year later, Hub City Hospitality hired Hilton Displays to install signs and a 10-by-18-foot LED display at the FR8yard, the company’s outdoor music venue and beer garden on Spartanburg’s Main Street.
Repeat customers have been a key to Hilton Displays’ growth since BB&T (now Truist) became a customer in 1998 and Bi-Lo in 1992 — the year one of Hilton’s three buildings on Hampton Avenue burned down. The disaster, which Hilton now calls a “huge blessing,” forced the company to move and expand.
David Conners says Hilton’s culture of resourcefulness has remained consistent since he came on board as director of project management in 2005.
“Honestly, what has changed is our focus more on a national level rather than sort of the regional/local,” he says. “It really comes down to just a tremendous amount of hustle that everybody puts in every day.”
Tom Tobin agrees.
“We’re blue-collar to our core,” says Tobin, who joined as general manager in 2009 and took the helm in December 2017 after Hilton sold the company and retired. “We’re all here every day, putting in the work. I’m the company president, but no different than any other team member in the building — we roll up our sleeves, we get it done.”
Sounds similar to Hilton’s first 10 years, when he says he rarely got much sleep.
“You wake up at 2 o’clock in the morning, staring at the ceiling, saying, ‘Oh, my God, what have I done? What did I do? God help me,’” Hilton says. “You know what I’d do at 3 o’clock in the morning? Put my clothes on and go to Hampton Avenue.”
While he assigns considerable credit to Kim for keeping him going, he says of his business’s longevity: “I’m gonna be honest with you, when I pull in the parking lot, probably the first thing I do is say, ‘Lord, thank you, I can’t believe you made this possible.’”
Through the Years
November 1981: Steve Hilton starts Hilton Displays in Greenville
1982: Hilton Displays lands its biggest client to date: Bi-Lo.
1982: One of the company’s original buildings on Hampton Avenue burns down
2011: Starbucks becomes a customer
2005: David Conners joins the company as director of project management; named director of sales and marketing in 2018
2009: Steve Hilton hires Tom Tobin as general manager
2017: Hilton retires, Tobin becomes president the following year
July 2021: Hilton Displays installs a sign at an Amazon Fresh store in Washington, D.C., one of the online grocers’ 12 new brick-and-mortar retail locations
2021: Hilton Displays marks 40th year
Source: Hilton Displays
