A Lawrence-based signs company is reorganizing under protection from the U.S. Bankruptcy Court.

Star Signs and Graphics, 801 E. Ninth St., filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last month, listing assets of $848,182 and liabilities of nearly $2.73 million.

Mike Vickers, Star Signs president, said that while his company already had eliminated jobs, cut expenses and shed other costs to whittle its debt, the filing was giving the company a chance to work through a plan, with assistance from a consultant, designed to make the operation viable.

“We’ve just had a series of bad events, is the simplest way to put it,” Vickers said. “We’ve had about four or five in a row – I won’t go into a lot of detail – but over the past four or five years we’ve had events that have taken us backward.”

Among them: Moving into a new building – the former home of Classic Eagle Distributing, the area’s Budweiser distributor – came in early 2002, about six months after the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

Corresponding investments in equipment ended up adding major costs to the books because business didn’t keep up, Vickers said.

“We geared up for ongoing sales growth that we’d enjoyed the previous decade, and it went the other direction,” he said.

Vickers said Star Signs also sold a branch operation in the Kansas City area, a move that didn’t pay off as expected, and an internal accounting issue compounded the Lawrence company’s financial problems. He declined to detail the accounting issue, other than to say that some records had been destroyed and that it took about nine months to rebuild the accounting system.

A new sports marketing operation designed to handle promotions, advertising and signs for school districts and small colleges – an early client included the Kansas Relays for Kansas University – also failed to take off.

“Every time we’d try to do something to help the situation,” Vickers said, “it went against us.”

Star Signs now has 32 employees on its payroll, down from 40 before the bankruptcy filing, Vickers said. The company had as many as 55 employees a couple years ago.

The company that has made signs for area casinos, regional shopping attractions and the reopening of the Louisiana Superdome now awaits word from creditors and, perhaps, investors about its future.

“We’re trying to fix it all,” Vickers said. “I owe it to everybody to make it work – our employees, vendors and customers.”