Spinning Gold: How Max Durovic (B’05, MBA’10) Turned Sign Spinning into a Guerrilla Marketing Empire — and a Cultural Phenomenon

Tyler Cartwright’s winning performance in February’s World Sign Spinning championship had the physicality of a gymnastics floor routine mixed with the precision of high-art juggling and the electric crowd engagement of a WWE match. Flipping, tossing, and manipulating in every conceivable manner an arrow-shaped sign for an audience gathered in the heart of downtown Las Vegas, the 29-year-old from Atlanta beat out almost 60 other competitors to take the title.

The championship is the culmination of the 25-year-old creation of Max Durovic (B’05, MBA’10), founder and CEO of AArrow Sign Spinners, the business he built around his high-octane marketing invention. All of the spinners competing at the event, now in its 17th year, are employees of the company, so it feels a little like a family reunion, says Durovic. “Goldman [Sachs] might have their holiday party,” he says with a smile. “But every year, the better we’re doing, the more fun we can have with this event.”

This was the future Durovic had envisioned for sign spinning at its genesis. In 1999, when he was 16 years old, he and his friend, Mike Kenny, now the company’s COO, got summer jobs as “human directionals” — essentially charged with holding signs in high-traffic areas to alert potential customers to new housing developments or business openings. It was the dawn of the extreme sports era, and Durovic and Kenny lived in the Ocean Beach neighborhood of San Diego — a hub of those alternative, adrenaline-fueled pursuits and host of the previous year’s X Games. What if, they wondered, there was an extreme sports version of what we’re doing? What is the X Games version of marketing? Sign spinning was born.

“Having it be more than a business and actually be a sport and a way to entertain people was always just as much a goal as the business being successful,” says Durovic. It was a good fit for Durovic. He was his high school’s entertainment coordinator and a DJ; he loved being the center of attention. He was also a hustler, determined to wake up early and outwork everybody. The company was built on a simple guerrilla marketing concept, but he started really building the business of AArrow out of his dorm room at Georgetown, guided in part by his experiences in the classroom.

“I received really valuable feedback from my classmates on how to make the business better or tools that I could use to help, say, calculate your profitability and investment criteria,” says Durovic.

He also credits his entrepreneurship professor, Will Finnerty, with critical mentorship. “He was just outstanding at forcing me to take my business plan to the next level,” says Durovic. His entrepreneurship class with Finnerty concluded with a presentation to a group of venture capitalists. “The whole panel loved it, so we won the business plan competition for the class,” he says. “That was a great boost of confidence.”

The three years after his undergraduate experience were a sprint, with Durovic traveling the country and expanding the business to disparate locations, trying to keep up with the housing boom and the resulting rising demand for spinners. Home builder clients in southern California suddenly had work for them in Las Vegas, Phoenix, and Raleigh.

“We were able to open five new cities quickly,” says Durovic. Almost immediately, he was signing six-figure deals and was on track for $1 million in revenue his first year out of school. But he wasn’t set up to enjoy his success. “I mean, I’m 21 years old at that point with seven apartments in my name across the country. I’m doing business in six different states. It was a lot to handle.”

To help accommodate the rapid growth, Durovic deployed a franchise model after entering the MBA program in 2008, which allowed for the businesses to be run regionally. It made sense from a management perspective: recruiting, training, and management are all best done locally — and ideally by more than one employee. It was also a way to preserve his friendships, which made up the company’s core. “I was lucky enough then — and still today — to be running the business with some of my friends from high school and college, and I didn’t want to continue to be their boss, to be honest,” he says. “I thought it would be better — both personally and professionally — if I were able to create a model that allowed them to run with the idea in whatever region they lived in.”

In 2008, Durovic also began to bring his sign-spinning evangelism overseas, eager for global expansion. “I put signs in a surfboard case. I jumped on airplanes. I sat on them for 13 to 18 hours at a time. I showed up in countries where I don’t speak the language and didn’t know any laws. And I would train armies of sign spinners on how to do tricks,” he says. He would stay in the cities for weeks, learning the business licensing process, the local labor laws, and the work customs. “Even if I never got another paycheck again, I would still have those memories of taking sign spinning to a dozen other countries for the first time and just watching people’s eyes go wide. And it really created a way for me to see the world — not as a tourist, but as an entrepreneur.”

Taking sign spinning to Croatia, where his grandmother was from, was a personal highlight. He flew his mother and grandmother over to see a sign-spinning competition that AArrow held in a mall in the middle of Zagreb, the country’s capital. The event was covered by a local news station, which caught the attention of his great uncles. “And so they’re calling [my grandmother], saying ‘Max is on TV,’” says Durovic. “That was like a dream come true.”

The company’s ability to achieve this level of growth was due in part, Durovic says, to its competitive culture. Not the cutthroat type you might find on Wall Street — more of the light-hearted, barb-filled atmosphere of a fantasy football league message board.

“We have a good time with this,” says Durovic, noting that friendly rivalries extend beyond the sales numbers. “It’s also, ‘I got more recruits last week than you.’ ‘My spinners are better than yours.’ Or ‘I got this new contract.’ I also think that my franchisees take a lot of pride in having the best spinner and in their spinners getting featured in major media.” He pulls up AArrow’s digital tracking platform on his screen. “Look, Atlanta just pulled ahead of Phoenix last week.” That will surely require a needling text or email. “I’ve definitely tried to encourage a little bit of healthy competition,” he says.

“The thing that probably has kept so many of us at AArrow for so long —over 20 years for some of the original people — is the culture,” says COO and co-founder Mike Kenny. “I’ve seen a lot of different businesses over the years, and I haven’t seen anyone able to replicate something this authentic.” Kenny credits Durovic and his ability to take mundane activities (like holding a sign) and infuse them with his trademark joie de vivre. “It’s that attitude of ‘We can make anything fun.’ We can make our work conference calls more fun. We can make our key metrics more fun by making them more fantasy football-ish,” says Kenny. “It’s really infectious.”

These days, Durovic is focusing much of his energy on the possibilities of AArrow’s digital platform, which is a relatively new development for the company. A map-based interface allows him to track all of his spinners, which can range from 500-1,000 globally at any given time. And while the number of cities has fluctuated with both economic and even local weather realities (Chicago’s winds, for instance, severely limited its sign spinning season), those spinners are now in 20 U.S. cities as well as Germany and Panama.

The tracking ensures both accuracy and customer service, Durovic says. “It’s similar to tracking your Amazon package or your Uber ride.” The platform’s utility might not be limited to AArrow, either. “The system is so robust that we’ve got other businesses approaching us for the software and the technology.”

The digital advances have made AArrow much more manageable for Durovic. “Figuring out a way to automate the business was really important to us,” he says. “The onboarding, the payroll, the invoicing, the distribution of funds to all the franchisees. We’re just a well-oiled machine.”

The new technology also helps keep him home more — useful with a brand-new baby and a 2-year-old. “Do I have to choose between doing a good job running my business or spending time with my family? No. Now I can do both.”

The cultural phenomenon aspect of sign spinning is important to Durovic, too. It has been featured in Super Bowl ads, pre-game festivities at NBA and NHL games, and even spoofed on South Park. It’s a part of the American lexicon — as much an art form as it is advertising. “That element is not lost on me, and I do take pride in that,” says Durovic. “It’s hugely rewarding from a creative and performance art standpoint.”

But he also wants his business to survive for the long term. Perhaps for his kids, if they want to go that route. Or just to keep the good vibe going. “Listen, I’m a goofball at heart, so the whole thing has been a lot of fun — and I hope I can continue to make it fun for future generations, too,” says Durovic. “Because there are a lot of really serious jobs out there. This isn’t one of ’em. We’re a serious company, but not a serious job.”

That was always the goal. “Our mission when we started the business was to create a company where we could have fun doing tricks with plastic arrows and make money at the same time, all while harnessing that energy to attract attention to our signs,” says Durovic. A truly enjoyable, vibrant job was always going to be a requirement for him, and he loves that he can offer others that same rare opportunity. “Being able to help other sign spinners travel the world while making money is just my way of paying it forward.”

This story was originally featured in the Georgetown Business Fall 2024 Magazine. Download the Georgetown Business Audio app to listen to the stories and other bonus content.