Brrrr

"Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds" is a quote that is generally applied to postal workers in the United States. Tonight it applied to Special-Delivery4U!!! We had a set up in Germantown tonight. Sheri and Ashley went to do it in -24 degree windchill. Yes that is 24 degrees below ZERO. That is really really cold. Hopefully the dinos will not freeze. LOL.

Some small things.

Wow, I hope I never ever get another computer virus again!!!!!! We got one that was so bad it was locking the computer up before it could even start. This computer had a ton of information on if for our business so it was really a major concern for us. Fortunately we have some friends are "Computer Guru's" and were able to help us get up and running on the kids computer. That lasted until Christmas time when we found a new computer system under the Christmas tree. But we still had the problem of stuff on the "bad" computer. Turns out that something we did with the hard-drive while it was installed in the temporary computer seemed to clean it up. So I was able to get some of the important stuff off of it. I will be working on cleaning it out completely in the next couple of weeks. Lesson learned? Have a back up. Another thing we found under the Christmas tree was a 320GB external hard-drive (Thanks Russ!!!). So now everything gets backed up routinely.

We have had a great year so far!!! I know that we are only 6 days into 2009 but we have already done 2 yard card displays and have 3 more scheduled for this weekend. This is a huge increase over last year! We have had to make a change this winter season though. We are not able to include the light and extension cord because of the ground being frozen.

Don't forget to check out the count down clock for lawn greeting month on our site. www.Special-Delivery4U.com

Flamingo Rods

I should have blogged about these before and I am sorry that I didn't. Better late than never as they say. So what exactly is a flamingo rod? To truly understand them you need to know that most 3D plastic flamingos come with two legs and they are a pain for a flocker to have to hold them and put the legs into the ground so that flamingo will stand tall for the world to see. Here is a picture of what a normal flamingo looks like.


As you can see there are two legs going in different directions. Add to that the fact that the legs are not attached to the flamingo very well and you have a problem. I can't tell you how many times we were in the process of setting up a display and one of the legs would fall out of the flamingo. Or worse bend as we were trying to push it into the ground. It would often take us 15 or 20 minutes to put up a display with flamingos.

(Picture from FlamingoRod.com)

Now that all of our flamingos have the flamingo rod installed it is much easier to do a set up. No legs falling out or getting bent. It is as simple as pushing down on the flamingo or the rod. One really cool feature of the flamingo rod is the flamingo will spin on there. Giving it a life like quality. We also like the fact that there is a bend at the top of the rod which makes pick up easy too. Simply pull up at the bend and it comes out of the ground.

If you own flamingos but they don't have flamingo rods you need to get them. They will save you time. We all know that time is money so you are saving money as well. Go and get them right away.

Not just for beginners.

As a member of the Lawn Greeting Association we were given access to a new e-book that has been developed for the lawn greeting industry by Jane from Phoenix Storks. First let me say that I wish this e-book had been available 2.5 years ago when Sheri and I started looking into the industry. It would have made our research so much easier. We researched for over a year before we finally made the decision to start our business. As it turned out we were able to purchase an existing business instead of starting from scratch.

With the e-book we would have been able to go into business much sooner than we actually did. There are a ton of resources in the book that any one interested in starting a lawn greeting business should have at their finger tips. In the year of research that we did we still missed some of things that Jane shares in the e-book. It is a fabulous e-book at a reasonable price.

It covers everything from the money making potential to how to market your new business. Jane talks about how to deal with competition (the lawn greeting industry has an interesting perspective on competition) and some tools and hardware you should have on hand during a set-up. She breaks down industry terms into easy to understand words. There are over 50 links to industry resources in the link section alone. That is not counting the links that are throughout the rest of the e-book. After reading this e-book if you don't have the knowledge and tools to start a lawn greeting business then you were sleeping through it!!

We have owned our business for almost two years now and I still learned from Jane's e-book. There are some marketing strategies that she shares we will be implementing in 2009. Which is why I titled this post "Not just for beginners." Even if you have been in business for years you can still learn something from this e-book and you will have bunch of resources all in one place already organized for you.