The Story Behind Our Success

The Powerhouse story started over 14 years ago when Senior Partner ,Mike Murphy, purchased a portable retail sign company including the patent rights to the proprietary signage system. Mike contacted long-time personal friends David Hargrave and Brent Teeter who were busy building impressive careers with companies like Smithkline-Beechum, Burlington Northern Railroad and Motts.  Although Brent and David had honed their experience in the retail industry via large companies, Mike knew they had the entrepreneurial instincts and work ethic to help him jump-start this new technology.  Mike handed the partners control of the Dallas-Fort Worth, Shreveport and Tulsa markets for the sign distribution.

The partnership bolted out of the gates quickly building a healthy book of customers with their incomparable service.  As the sign business grew, so did awareness of a huge need for other types of retail services including inflatable balloon advertising. At the same time, the portable sign business was seeing a decline due to new city beautification initiatives so they turned to focus on other opportunities. In 2004, an inflatable balloon manufacturer approached Mike Murphy with a huge challenge. Complete a 4000 store national rollout by installing 12 foot tall inflatable advertising balloons on the roof of every Burger King in the country.  Powerhouse Retail Services was officially formed and once again Mike called on Brent to immediately organize and deploy for this project to deliver a huge national roll-out project for Burger King.  Powerhouse Retail Services then brought Spongebob Squarepants, Darth Vader and Shrek inflatable balloons to life with 3 separate roll-outs for over 4000 stores each.  Many other national retailers were now recognizing Powerhouse as an industry leader in retail services and were presenting them with many different national projects including lighting, sign maintenance, survey and many other projects.

Fast-forward to 2011, Powerhouse now employs over 700 team members servicing national projects with the same passion and commitment to excellence the company was founded on.