We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Oliver Lawless a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Oliver, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Let’s kick things off with your mission – what is it and what’s the story behind why it’s your mission?
Back in July of 2012 we were planning on having a birthday party for my son and we wanted a Nerf battle party. I searched around and could not find anyone that could help us to run/set up the party. At that point I realized there was a big opportunity to help getting kids and adults outside to exercise and play more! The concept was easy, we would make it more accessible for anyone in our area to just call us and we would take care of the event and or party with little or no effort on their part. Our mission was therefore to make parties great again!

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
Being a Veteran who worked as Military Police for many years I know how to set up and run strategic battle drills. This folds in very nicely to our dart party battle plans. We are a full service mobile dart war event and party provider in the Houston and surrounding areas. Since our founding in 2012 we provide event/party planning and execution for large events (to date the largest 300 players which is now a yearly event for one of our clients) and small birthday parties. When you book a party with us you not need to worry about the two hours (standard) that we take over and run the event. We include all of the equipment, music and hosting of the party for the two hours. We also provide customization services for Nerf guns and can modify/paint the gun to your specifications, generally 3 color camo, modified to shoot farther with a name included.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
Covid has been very hard for many business’ including ours. To be more resilient we boosted our production of custom guns to provide extra revenue to keep us in business.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?
You need to be very cognizant of your clients age/habits. Our fist large party was for an international school which had 200 participants. At this event we had to pool together all of our equipment (at the time) and also add some foam swords for the mix. The party was not our most successful as the students were high school age and were not very receptive to instruction for the games. It was held on a football field which turned out to be VERY windy causing our bases to get blown around. There were many lessons to be learned. Currently now for big events we set up a formal meeting with the client prior to the date to get a better understanding of the players and what games and music we should play to keep them interested. Since then we have bolstered our equipment up to having ~200 sets of normal guns and more machine guns/snipers to use. Now for events we bring extra sand bags/nails to hold down the bases from getting blown away.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.yardwar.com
• Instagram: @yardwars
• Facebook: @yardwar
• Twitter: @yardwars