Good Neighbor Podcast: Bergen
Bringing together local businesses and neighbors of Bergen County
Good Neighbor Podcast: Bergen
Ep. # 98 Signs of Celebration: How LOL Yards Spreads Joy in Bergen County
Imagine waking up on your birthday to discover your front lawn has been transformed into a massive personalized celebration display – complete with custom signs featuring your favorite hobbies and interests. That's the world Ward Blackwell of LOL Yards brings to Bergen County residents, as he reveals on this episode of The Good Neighbor Podcast.
Ward shares how he pivoted from his digital marketing career during the early pandemic when clients were pausing services, recognizing an opportunity in the emerging yard sign industry. With entrepreneurial instinct and SEO expertise, he quickly established LOL Yards as a go-to celebration company without spending a penny on paid advertising.
What makes LOL Yards stand apart is their commitment to personalization. Rather than generic birthday displays, Ward maintains an extensive inventory of themed decorations matching virtually any interest – from chess pieces to video games, sports logos to unicorns. This attention to individual passions creates meaningful celebrations that resonate with recipients of all ages.
The conversation takes a humorous turn as Ward describes some of his most popular adult-focused displays, including the "Holy crap, Mike is 50!" sign surrounded by poop emojis, and the "Fantasy Football Loser" displays that playfully embarrass league members. He recalls surprising his Chinese mother-in-law with welcome signs featuring Chinese characters and his children's photos, demonstrating how these displays create memorable moments across cultures.
Beyond signs, Ward has strategically expanded into small-scale party rentals including candy carts, popcorn machines, and snow cone machines – perfectly positioned to help panicked parents pull together last-minute celebrations. His business philosophy centers on making parents look like heroes while keeping the ordering process simple and pressure-free.
Check out lolyards.com to bring a personalized celebration display to your next special occasion, or to hilariously embarrass a friend turning 50 with poop emojis covering their lawn!
LOL Yards LLC
Ward Blackwell
(201) 918-3305
info@lolyards.com
LOLYards.com
back. This is the good neighbor podcast, the place where local businesses and neighbors come together.
Speaker 2:Here's your host, doug rohan hey everybody, welcome to another episode of the good neighbor podcast, brought to you by the good neighbors, actually brought to you by bergen neighbors media group. I've got a logo behind me that you can't see says bnm. You think I know the name of my own company. But uh, someone who knows the name of my own company, but someone who knows the name of his company, is Ward Blackwell, the owner of lolyards. com. They are a yard sign company and welcome to the show, ward.
Speaker 3:Thanks for having me Doug Great to be here.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so you know when you hear lol yards you're like what does that mean? But it's clear, if you go on your website and you see that it's about, you know happy birthday yard signs and other celebrations that people like to you know tell the neighborhood about. That's basically what you guys are right Like a lawn sign company.
Speaker 3:Yeah it's. We basically go out, we go to somebody's house we usually do it the night before. We set up a massive display in their front yard. It says happy birthday. We try to get a lot of accents and stuff in the signs, like we call it, flair. So if a kid's really into video games, we have video games. Or if they play soccer, we have signs for soccer. We try to set up large displays. We're about four feet tall, maybe 15 to 20 feet long. When I started the business I'd wanted to kind of have the biggest product in the industry to show that, to set myself aside from the competition as well as the inventory, I wanted to have a large amount of inventory for people to choose from. So when a parent calls in and they're trying to do something for their kid and they're listing off their hobbies and interests, we have something to match it, as opposed to I see some of the competition just puts like cakes and stars and presents when a parent calls me up.
Speaker 3:We just had one the other night. They wanted their son to have a chess sign and with some basketball and football stuff in it, so I had the chess pieces that I added, which you're probably not going to find with too many companies out there, and I have various football logos, basketball stuff and you know we got lots of like unicorns and mermaids for for the little girls and we just have a really tremendous inventory list and I think that sets me apart from a lot of people. It makes the parents happy to go in and see something that they can they can match with their child.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean I had, you know, during COVID, one of my son's birthdays, we bought a happy birthday, but it was something we paid for. You know, we actually had the letters and had to set it up ourselves and it wasn't that big and it was something you can put in a box and fold up and I guess you know it said happy birthday. You could put it out every year. It was pretty small and it was kind of a diy thing that maybe my wife ordered on, you know, on amazon or something like that. But you guys obviously go much, much bigger than that. It's. It's funny, you know, you celebrate birthdays. People are celebrating their birthdays. Somebody has a happy 60th. I mean good for him telling the world that dude turned 60. Yeah, you know, I mean usually it's usually when you get to 30, 40, 50, 60, you're not telling the world that you're 60 years old or 50 years old. Hey, good for them.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we get a lot of the slides from the ages like 60, 70 and 80. And they're they're actually big hits, which I wasn't expecting when I first started the business. I'm glad you brought up the do-it-yourself. I actually don't mind when people do that. So generally, some people there's like within a budget constraint or some people just enjoy doing it themselves. They have the product, especially if they have a lot of kids. It's definitely something to take a look at, because once you do it for one kid and you have four kids, you're kind of stuck doing it for them all and it can get quite pricey.
Speaker 2:So it doesn't hurt, that's some extra birthday letters in your, in your house, that you can go set up for every birthday. Yeah, yeah, and you know, and there's other occasions that you celebrate, right, I mean, there could be correct, we do graduation, sweet 16s graduations, the next biggest one, uh, welcome home.
Speaker 3:Baby signs, gender reveals, uh, engagements, weddings. So I've done a lot of signs for various occasions. I even did a sign for somebody just welcoming, welcoming some friends to come visit them. They just have cheesy nicknames for them, so people just visit their friend and they have a big sign in their front yard. Wow.
Speaker 2:Wow, Now is this something. I didn't notice these types of signs until 2020, 2021?. Is it like when did your business come into existence?
Speaker 3:So we started in 2020. However, you hit the nail right on the head there. I don't think most people saw these signs until 2020. However, in 2019, I had seen the signs. I had seen them out there and actually made fun of the business. I was like, who does that? And we had some jokes with me and my wife back and forth and I saw that some people had really liked the signs and that people were ordering them and stuff like that. And then I, and then COVID, hit in 2020 and I run a website. Marketing agency is my full time business. That's. That's really what I've been doing.
Speaker 2:That was going to be my question, yeah.
Speaker 3:And that went upside down really quick in 2020. Within a within a couple of weeks, I had lost most of my clients, not like a permanent loss, but like they needed to shut things down. People didn't. I went out, I bought a massive inventory of the signs and I knew that I could get the website ranked because it wasn't a well-known business and people were looking for them. So I built the website, I got it up and by the time I got the signs to my door, I had already had calls coming in for these things. I barely had enough inventory to get them out, but I was like yeah, I got the signs. I was pushing them out. People were finding me online.
Speaker 2:And the rest is kind of history from there. Yeah Well, sorry to interrupt. So because you have a digital marketing background, how did people find you online? Did you do paid Google?
Speaker 3:ads. So I didn't do any paid Google ads and that's actually one of my expertise but I just kind of did a search engine optimization approach and we posted on Facebook and from there the moms helped share us in the groups because they were happy with our product. So that part of the, that part of the business took off on its own with the social media aspect, which you won't get as much of a benefit from that anymore in the business because you don't see it shared in the mom groups anymore. But it kicked us off when everybody was looking and then about three months in which is really quick for search engine optimization turnaround because there wasn't competition on the internet people were finding me for happy birthday yard signs, yard signs for kid, custom yard signs, custom birthday signs. So they were hitting us for a lot of those keywords.
Speaker 3:They were finding my stuff and I found that really advantageous from the people that are kind of outside the area I was getting like grandmothers from florida and stuff and those they're not going to find in the mom groups. So I was really cleaning up on both ends on the internet and, like I said, all through 2020 into 2021, these were a really hot item. People were looking for them. I don't think if I could, if I went back to do it again that way, I don't think I'd be able to take the website off as quickly. We wouldn't get the social media word out there and it's probably not a business I'd be able to start again today. But we're in a good spot.
Speaker 2:So you obviously you jumped on an opportunity right away and it helped that you could build a website and when you not to give away, you know free advice, because that's what your other business is. But the search engine optimization people were able to find you because you created a website that has words like happy birthday, yard signs, signs, birthday, things like that. That's what search engine optimization means.
Speaker 3:Correct. It's essentially the practice of getting your website ranked on Google so that you show up like number one, number two, number two, number three, showing up on the Google Maps which a lot of people use. So if somebody's sitting down the street and they're typing in happy birthday yard signs and Paramus, something's going to show up on Google If they search Rutherford. We serve most of Bergen County. I go pretty much in a lot of spots in New Jersey. Everything's price dependent on that, but we're found in a lot of spots and the optimization is more or less getting the website found. Google Maps tends to be a better converter for us, just because people know it's a local area thing. They see the map listing, they see the ratings and it's easy for them to interact with and give us a call and email.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, ok, good to know, so yeah. So you mentioned that you were able to pivot right away and take advantage of what you saw very quickly as an opportunity. And now today, because of competition and because of maybe, there's not as a big need as there was or, you know, it was very novel back then to start seeing all these signs on on lawns. I guess that's two of the factors why you wouldn't be able to have that quick success that you had back then. Right A, it's more competition, it's a more crowded space, and B, because maybe it's not as sought after. A, you know, or people know where to go now, so there's not as much of a SEO opportunity that there was five years ago.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I would say so. There's always a chance I could be wrong, but I think you pretty much summed it up pretty well right there. I just wouldn't want to take another shot at starting this again. Covering my inventory, we have like a good $30,000 to $50,000 of inventory. There's no way I could overhead that again and get it started.
Speaker 2:So yeah, yeah. So what was it like? So you so, now it's, you know it's five years in and you said you know you had another, you have another career, you have another job, another, you know business with digital marketing. When did you start that, and did you ever work for anyone else, or did you always, you know, from day one want to go off on your own and start your own business?
Speaker 3:I think from the time I was a kid I kind of always wanted to have my own business and my mom had always brought up the fact she's like you're going to be an entrepreneur when you're older. Because I used to randomly sell comic books out of our house. I'd go to the comic book store, buy some comics, wait a couple months, sell them for a little bit of markup, but I'd never gotten into being an entrepreneur. I don't think I had the capacity for it when I was younger. So I'd finished college, I'd worked for a bunch of people and I just had jobs that I was really not happy at. Like a lot of working people, I was miserable and I always had the ideas in my head I'd love to have my own company.
Speaker 3:I looked at a lot of things that related to the businesses I was in. So I mean, out of college I waited tables, I sold cars and then I started selling Yellow Pages and we know where that industry is right now. But while I was at the Yellow Pages, I was looking at trying to start my own print media company. I'd looked at like some things like the local mailers. I don't think anything really inspired me enough to like sort of take my own risk. And then when I found internet marketing, I'd gotten really good at Google AdWords and from there I was with the middle of just sort of consulting with some clients that have wanted to hire me to go over their business. Before I knew what. I kind of had my own business that I was building on the internet marketing.
Speaker 3:And you know, fast forward, a few years after that I was doing pretty well with it. People had come to me. This is like kind of in the golden age of AdWords. It's not as easy anymore, but people would just say have word in, take a look at your Google AdWords. I'd mess around with it for a few minutes and people get a lot of calls the next day.
Speaker 3:Now this is like 15 years ago, so the landscape has changed tremendously. On Google ads, I'm a larger SEO business than I am Google ads right now. So that had taken place and I guess that got me into working for myself and being an entrepreneur, which is probably the most rewarding thing I have in my life. It's really taken a lot of tension off of me. It makes me happier, it gives me a lot of freedom Just developing my own products and coming up with my own systems has made me happier than having to always answer to somebody else's product, have to sell their product to a certain way. It only can act like this and in my head I'm like this doesn't make sense to me and I'm not happy with it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. That's a common theme throughout a lot of the people that I interview and I've said this a number of times. If you listen to my podcast episodes, it probably comes up almost every one. But there's a difference between financial security and financial freedom, and the freedom of being a business owner is you have the freedom to fail, but you have the freedom to make mistakes and learn from them and pivot and be able to do what you think is right and if it doesn't work, then you can do something else and test it without the worry of your boss either firing you or admonishing you for taking a risk and it not working out. So I think that's what a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of business owners, like about it. It's certainly not for everyone, because you do have that, that fear of failure without having a safety net. That that's where the financial security comes from, but you know whether you know a lot of us worked for someone else first. It's just learn either what to do or what not to do or what fit your personality the best, and you know those are the ones that tend to love being an entrepreneur, the ones that don't mind that risk, but like the freedom to fail, freedom to try, freedom to be curious and and do things that they feel are the best. You know, strategies for their business is now I guess you could apply. You know, having the yard sign sign, the happy birthday sign, business. Like we said in the beginning, there was a lot of what you did or do as a digital marketer that helped you launch that website. You know, do seo, learn how to leverage, uh, social media to get the business going. So, um, now it's, you know, five years, five years later, our signs. You still see.
Speaker 2:I mean we talked about the basic themes, but you said you've seen some funny ones, like, I guess, you know, when you were saying like they're welcoming their friends, I was thinking of, you know, maybe there's a family reunion, or I have friends that live in Europe and maybe, if they're coming and you know you want to, they pull up to the house and they see a big sign. And you know you want to, they pull up to the house and they see a big sign. I'm sure that most, most Europeans are more humble and they'd probably be really embarrassed if they said you know, hello, christian, willkommen. You know, but I think it's, it's a fun thing, you know it's definitely out of the box, and what other sign like requests have you had that are a little different?
Speaker 3:So I'm actually glad you brought up that, uh, that topic. So I actually think about that all the time Cause I love seeing the post about European seeing American traditions like the red solo cups, or why we decorate our houses at Christmas, and it blows their mind. I'm like I got to know what they think when they see a happy birthday yard sign showing up to an American's house, because they love to bust our chops from from over there. So I'd always love their reaction. I'd love to do a welcome sign for some Europeans visiting, like I would go out and like match things for them or, you know, maybe put the red solo cups, whatever misconceptions they have about Americans. I would definitely put up there.
Speaker 3:And this this past summer my, my mother in law, had come over from China and she loves photos. She loves being in the photos, she loves being in the center of attention of photos. So I'd actually didn't even tell my wife, I'd went out. I bought Chinese letters for my signs that said welcome grandmom, to our house and I put up some various like decorations. I had actual pictures of my kids in the signs and I think she flipped their lid Like she saw the sign and she went nuts. She must've taken a hundred pictures with it, cause it was, it was about her and I think she really enjoyed it and I just I hope it made her day.
Speaker 3:But I was like we're at a risk Cause, like you know, I have the wife and I'm wondering like why'd you do this? For, like you know, but I think I think my wife really appreciated as well. I tend to throw a lot of surprises at her and she dealt with it very well. But you had mentioned funny signs. So we have, you know, a couple that that come to mind real quick, but my favorite one that I do, I've probably done it a dozen times right now we have like somebody will want to embarrass somebody. That's like turning 50. So I go out and I do Holy crap, mike is 50. So I go out and I do holy crap, mike is 50.
Speaker 1:And then I cover the yard with poop emojis.
Speaker 3:So I have about like 20 to 30 poop emojis. We put it all over the yard. That sign's always a big hit. They get a lot of talk from the neighbors. People seem to really enjoy it. I do another funny one fantasy football loser. So we'll go out. Whoever loses their fantasy football team, we go out. We put like pink helmets in their yard, like signs that say you're a loser, and today.
Speaker 2:This is a surprise to the homeowner that their friends did this to them correct.
Speaker 3:Yeah, because they they're not expecting it. And then they got the sign in the yard and they have to leave it up and be embarrassed and take a picture with it. Um, one of my favorite signs that I'd done that, I guess had gotten some attention around various towns and actually from some like uh, some athletes. I have a friend and he really hated Taylor Swift and the Kansas City Chiefs dynamic. Like he was just vocal about it online. He was like annoying everybody online but like, oh, taylor, taylor Swift, that like just you know the typical guy stuff, just excessively vocal about it.
Speaker 3:So somebody encouraged me to go out to his yard. I put up a Go Chiefs sign with pictures of Taylor Swift all over the sign and he has two young girls. They came out. They love the sign and he had a little embarrassing moment, you know for a minute, but overall he appreciated it. I know he had some UFC fighters come out and take pictures with the sign. A couple guys from the NFL come out and take pictures with the sign. He has a connection with them. It's through him. It had nothing to do with me at that point.
Speaker 3:But, he had them come out and do that and we posted some pics and that was a big hit.
Speaker 2:So people love it, so you can do licensed characters, then you can do a. Spongebob or you can do try not to.
Speaker 3:We have a secret menu that you know they're. But you know, you got to figure. Certain things are trademarked um, I don't know if taylor swift's gonna get upset if I have a picture of her for a sign that I do for a goof every now and then. But you know we'll.
Speaker 2:We'll see when time tells yeah, I mean, I used to work in um in, uh, ip licensing for nickelodeon. So if you were using spongebob or dora the explorer on the lawn and and I saw that I might make a call and say, hey, do you have the rights to use spongebob? Are you licensing that from us? So yeah, uh, you know, like when I was in times square there were so many of these characters that would dress up in costumes and harass people for photos and to pay them, and you know a lot of them were dressing up in Marvel comics or Nickelodeon or Disney, and you know they didn't. It wasn't a Disney sanctioned or Nickelodeon sanctioned characters. So they, they ran afoul. Yeah.
Speaker 3:I think we can all agree. When we're walking around Times Square and we see our kids pulling to go towards them, we're all agitated.
Speaker 2:So yeah, yeah. This is not disney world, where you're going up to cinderella.
Speaker 3:This is some who knows what in a costume what's in those costumes and I don't want to know most of the time they really like go after my kids and I'm like I don't come over here because I don't want to give them, like the five months for.
Speaker 2:So somebody so for a birthday, if your daughter's into you know, whatever frozen or whatever you don't, you don't do like frozen signs and things like that.
Speaker 3:Now, you can always call with requests and everything to see what we have. Like I said, we have some some secret menus and stuff like that that I don't have in my regular inventory that I put out there. It's always good to ask questions. I always start off with my customers like hey, what is your child into? Are there any birthday themes? Let me see if I can match the theme. Are they into anything in particular? I'll go through a series of questions and, before I know it, the parents gushing with tons of stuff about their kid, which is why I like weird items like chess. I actually have a bowl of spaghetti and meatballs because one of the parents was like oh, my kid is obsessed with spaghetti and meatballs.
Speaker 2:Oh well.
Speaker 3:It's weird, but I bought the sign and then that sign's been out like a dozen times. We're like you got a spaghetti and meatballs sign. My grandmother loves making them Like and it's just funny couple of random boxes of cereal. We had done some customized work for Kellogg's, so I have some Kellogg's items like Eggos and stuff like that. We've done work with our employees.
Speaker 2:Nice. So what are the areas that you work in? Like if I live in New Jersey, and obviously you guys are coming to set up the sign, so I'd imagine you have a certain radius that you like to work within.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it does get tough and we want to keep our pricing very fair. But I usually do give everybody a price so we can go anywhere in New Jersey. It just depends if you want to pay it and, shockingly enough, I've had people that pay me a few hundred bucks to go down to Manalapan. You know, it's like an hour away from me.
Speaker 3:However the general business if you want to have an affordable price. I'm in Ramsey, I'm sorry. I'm in Rutherford and we have a 15 minute radius from there. You got to figure after that it's going to start to get a little bit more jumpy on the price. Now I have a business partner that I've been wanting to mention here. His name's Mark. He was my account rep with the website marketing business and I just kind of grabbed Mark like hey, I'm gonna start another business, you wanna go Habsies on it. And Mark's kind of happy-go-lucky. He's like yeah, sure I'll go. He didn't even really question it too much. We, we split the business, so he's out of Ramsey. So figure, you can do about 15 minutes of Ramsey without having the price go up a lot. He goes into some parts of Rockland.
Speaker 2:County. He has inventory. He keeps inventory with him. Yep, where are you at?
Speaker 3:Okay, Consider it like two separate locations. And then we do have another one in North Carolina that I have a friend running down there and I have my own inventory and we sort of divide everything up. When we get down to Paramus and Ridgewood we start to divide up like I kind of take Paramus and Ordell and River Edge, he kind of gets Ridgewood and Hawthorne and Glenrock, so we sort of meet in that area, but in no way is he going to want to go to Montclair, where I'll go to Montclair or I'll go to Secaucus and maybe Fairfield as well as probably like as far as I'll go with a fair price. The reason for the pricing to keep in mind is that that's four trips. So if I'm going 15 minutes on the drive, that's an hour just driving right there. So somebody doesn't consider it a big deal. But when they switch it to a half an hour, now I'm I'm two, two hours just on the commuting drive, which is an hour to set it up.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Drive there drive back and then an hour in the middle to set it up.
Speaker 3:And then we got to, and how long do people keep the signs, the industry standards generally. One day I give everybody a second day marks out a out of Ramsey. He may be a little bit different with it. He's busier than I am down in Rutherford. So I usually ask somebody if the birthday's on Thursday and they're having a party on Saturday. I try my best to work with them. As long as I don't see the inventory going out, it's always best just to ask. I try my best not to give surprise pricing or add-on pricing, anything like that, a lot of the competition. You know they might give you three decoration pieces but if you want more you got to start paying more for it. But most of the time I'm two days. You know you'll probably get a third day out of me. When it starts to get to four or five days I might have to straighten it up and then there's some increased pricing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, then there's some increased pricing. Yeah, whether we do our best, whether it could affect how the signs you know, the lifespan of the sign, right? Yeah, so, and you have that. So you mentioned some of the cool things to do. There's extras like light up signs, solar lights, inflatables, like inflatables are those the things like I see people put out for christmas?
Speaker 3:uh, so the the inflatable is like one of those like flappy arm guys that you might see at a bar sale place.
Speaker 2:I have one of those.
Speaker 3:I add that on. Sometimes the kids really get a kick out of that. My son went nuts when he was three. When he saw it he came out, he ran around a sign, he ran around the flappy guy. One of the things we pivoted in our business is from that, the flappy arm guy. I added a bubble machine. We got into some very light party rentals because I found a small portion of my business was last minute. Dads and I'd get a call on Thursday like I got to get something for my daughter's birthday. The balloon person's booked out. Can you do something? Like I said, I carry a massive inventory so I can usually do something the next day. So I found that having these little add-ons like I have a candy cart, dessert cart, I have a popcorn machine, a cotton candy machine and a snow cone machine- that can be like.
Speaker 3:Hey, you know, I can get you a mini party in your backyard, you can set up real quick so they might get my candy cart, throw the cake on it, they might get the snow cone machine or popcorn machine, and it really helps me make dad look like a hero in the last minute, cause this is usually something that takes planning. I'm not a party rental company, so I'm not booked out months in advance. I have the inventory there as like a backup, so occasionally when.
Speaker 3:I do get that, that panicked person that forgot something or they might have to move their party from the outside park to inside. I can go get them like a popcorn machine to bring inside.
Speaker 2:That helps them out and give them something for their kids. That's cool, that's, that's smart, you know. It's like look they, it's a little bit, it's convenient for them and a little bit of money for you, and it's an easy thing to uh, to offer as an extension of what you already do. That's very cool. So, um, and we're running out of time, but I wanted to just real quickly go back to your other business and you mentioned like during COVID, I had a 60% drop in revenue from April to May. I work two months in advance when I'm publishing my magazine, so in March we're putting the May issue together.
Speaker 2:And all these businesses, local businesses that got shut down, they're like well, doug, I can't advertise these businesses, local businesses that got shut down, they're like well, doug, I can't advertise. So, luckily for me, once June came around and the real estate market started to really heat up a lot of my business just like in economic indicators, the housing market drives a lot of other businesses, so home improvement and where that kind of trickles down from there. So things turned around pretty quickly, but at the time it was very scary. The sky was falling. So did you find the same thing initially, when things looked all doom and gloom, but then within a couple of months, when there was PPP and SBA loans and then a lot of people who weren't traveling or spending money on summer camps had money to spend, that advertisers then saw that they needed you.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I pretty much went till about the fall, I believe, before I started seeing things come back to. Just let me know that I have some light at the end of the tunnel. Like you know, one of my businesses was a car service and a friend of mine, the owner, Tim O'Reilly from a better car and limo, from a better car and limos. You know, I just I didn't want to see him go through that and it's like you know, here you have COVID and a guy that's so dependent upon the business. It's like people like that had to pull stuff. I had all my other contractors just stopping and, like I said, I was instantly upside down. I didn't even know what to do with myself. And then, getting into the fall, like September, October, I started to see people turning stuff back on. The car service was coming back, which was great because that was like a huge indicator to me. I remember that one in particular because I was like, wow, this guy's getting leads and he's getting business right now. This is huge.
Speaker 3:Then the contractor started hitting People were having some work done to their homes. My guys were calling me like hey, there's some business out there, I need to do something to take care of it, and it really gave me a lot of hope and gave me a lot of inspiration to try to find other products and things for my clients to get out there. Because, like everybody you know, like you said, your magazine was in April and May trying to struggle a little bit. Like everybody, we just wanted to have some sense of reality that what we've done with our entire life we have a purpose and we're not going to lose it. And what am I going to do for a job at this point if all the jobs are dried up too? How am I going to reenter the workforce? So you're just stuck.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. Well, one of the things about being successful in business is resilience having that grit and resilience to be able to make lemonade out of lemons, and just learn to find a way when you have no choice. You got to find a way, and I think that's a testament to what you've been able to do, Ward. So let's go. How would people contact you know, when you have no choice, you got to find a way, and I think that's a testament to what you've been able to do, Ward. So let's go. How would people contact you if they're looking to put a sign up? You know, in their lawn what's the best way to reach you.
Speaker 3:So we have. We have a website and it's simply lolyards. com, which stands for laugh out loud, so lolyards. com. From there for laugh out loud, so L O L yards. com. From there you'll quickly see our phone number. There's a contact form. We try to keep it as basic as possible.
Speaker 3:I want people to to not feel trapped getting into our website. So simply you know a name, a phone number or an email address and the date and the location of the party, we can start to get you some pricing and work with you. Again, that was something else I set aside from my competition where everybody was like an order form right away. Not everybody wants to get trapped into an order, but you'll see the phone number, you'll see a messenger on there and you'll see the contact form. All those are great ways to get a hold of us. I encourage people just to ask questions. It's not a hard sell business where I'm like a car salesman. I'm going to try to track it. I just want to know where the party's at, when it is and what I can do to help you out.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's great. So, Ward, thank you very much for being a guest on the show today and it's been great having you. I love, I love hearing the stories and you know the signs are pretty cool because you've done a lot more than I thought that I've seen around the neighborhood. So it's very cool. And just bear with me for a few seconds. We're just going to have Chuck is going to say goodbye and then you and I will be right back.
Speaker 1:I appreciate your time, matt. Thank you for listening to the Good Neighbor podcast. To nominate your favorite local businesses to be featured on the show, go to GNPBergen. com. That's GNPpbergencom. That's gnpbergen. com, or call 201-298-8325.