CYANMAGENTAYELLOWBLACK

C5Herald-Banner Saturday, MarcH 31, 2012

THE FUTUREH e r a l d i n g

B u S i n e S S & i n d u S t r y

By Caleb SlinkardHerald-Banner Staff

It’s not unusual for individu-als to get into a rut working the same job day after day. What is unusual, however, is someone doing something about it.

Shelly Corrales, owner of Express Signs in Greenville, had a career as an educator for almost two decades before tak-ing on the challenge of running her own business.

“I worked in education for 18 years, and I decided I wanted to own my own business,” she said. “This one happened to come up because I’d done some business with the previous owner.”

Corrales took over the busi-ness without any previous experience working with signs or computers.

“I knew nothing about it, and the previous owner worked with me for a month,” she said. “For about a year after than I called her every day.”

But Corrales soon learned the tricks of the trade, and has an organized and efficient sys-tem in place, thanks in part to her one employee, Jarred Donnenwerth.

“I’m very organized, and Jarred is great,” she said. “I shoot things through from the computer, and he is already taking care of it.”

Corrales does everything from signs and banners to T-shirts and car wraps. For larger T-shirt order, she sends her work to a printer in Terrell.

“We do a lot of banners because we have a four-foot printer,” she said. “I prefer to do my own artwork, but some-times it’s faster if people send me their own. We do a lot of shirts with our heat press, and we do partial wraps on cars.”

Coralles’ customer list is long: she provides signs for Celeste ISD, Quinlan ISD, and the Hunt County Sheriff’s Department, whose cars were partially wrapped by Coralles.

“When people see their art-work on the final product, they think it’s cool,” she said. “Every now and again, someone is dis-appointed, but we try to make everything almost perfect.”

While the economy has hurt most businesses in the United States, Express Signs has not been strongly affected.

“There are more signs in the world than people,” she said. “The economy hasn’t really affected my business because

people always want to adver-tise, especially when they’re not doing well. There are some slow months, but usually it’s pretty steady.”

While Corrales is very busy with the current size of her business, her dream would be to expand it one day.

“It would be great to have a bigger space with more employ-ees and a garage, since we do a lot of work in the heat,” she said. “Right now, I’m so busy I can’t do it all. Sometimes I have to turn people away, if they’re wanting something done imme-diately.”

The risk of beginning her own business was one that Shelly didn’t take lightly

“I’m not a risk-taker, so doing this was a big risk for me,” she said. “Depending on your cir-cumstances, sometimes it’s good to take a risk and change your life. Sometimes you feel like you’re in a rut and you get up everyday and do the same thing. If you are wanting a life change, it’s a good idea.”

PrOFile On

Shelly CorraleS

Small business owner sees signs of the times

caleB Slinkard / Herald-Banner

Shelly corrales stands next to examples of some of the various signs she can create.

corrales works at her computer, where she accepts orders, completes artwork and prints banners.

5