They’ve never worked well at short distances. I’ve heard it’s because it’s a Voxel based system, so the small cone area of the first ‘lit’ voxel isn’t a big enough percentage of the first voxel to light it up.
Have you tried just putting a PointLight in the I (or the center) of the VIP sign?
You could, but from the first image I thought you just wanted all the letters lit up. A PointLight would just light up the letter like the SpotLight would do from a distance.
You could also move the attachment in the light back about 10 studs and increase the Range of the SpotLight accordingly.