The Hayes Equipment Story: How Our Ponca City Family Business Started My Career in Digital Marketing

Fair warning: this page is pure nostalgia. You don't need to read a word of it to find a WSK-1 manual or ask about a part. That's all on the support page.

But if you've got a few minutes and a cup of coffee, I'd be glad if you stuck around. Just for old time's sake.

Maybe an old link brought you here, looking for a Honda EU2000i we sold twenty years ago, or a Snapper mower, or a Cookshack smoker. If so, welcome back. Those pages are gone now. Hayes Equipment closed its doors in the fall of 2023. But I didn't want this site to just go dark. It's where my whole career started... so here's the story.

It started with an auctioneer and a Big Chief tablet

My dad, John B. Hayes, was an auctioneer. Our family ran auctions out of a big metal building on the north edge of Ponca City, the John B. Hayes auction facility on US 77. If you grew up around here, there's a decent chance you bought something there on a Saturday. My younger brother, Scott, grew up to be a great auctioneer himself.

I got pulled into the marketing side early. By the time I was 14 or 15, I was writing our auction ads by hand on a legal pad. Dad always called it a Big Chief tablet. I'd drop the pages off with Doris, a nice lady who ran a typing service out of her home. When I picked them up, they came back neatly typed. Just plain text, with a line that said "photo here" wherever I'd scribbled it.

Then I'd drive those ads over to the Ponca City News and hand them through their drive-up window. We ran ads every week, in the papers and in the local shoppers too, like the Shop and Swap and other publications. When fax machines came along, the little papers around us in Tonkawa, Newkirk and Shidler got one before the Ponca City News did. So I kept making that drive.

Looking back, that was my first marketing job. I just didn't know it yet.

Purple Haze BBS: getting found online before most people had the internet

After I returned to Ponca City from down the road at Oklahoma State University, I bought a little trailer house and ran five phone lines into it. That's where I started Purple Haze BBS, a dial-up bulletin board system, in 1994. (Haze with a Z. My name's spelled H-A-Y-E-S. I thought it was funny.)

This was back in the DOS and Windows 3.1 days. We started out on 14,400 baud modems, then upgraded to 28,800, and later to 33,600, which felt lightning fast at the time. The other local boards were text only. Purple Haze ran on Excalibur BBS software, which had only come out the year before, and it made the whole board fully graphical, point and click. The first time you dialed in, you downloaded the Excalibur software to get access, kind of like installing a web browser today. And once you got in, the first thing you heard was a WAV file of Jimi Hendrix's "Purple Haze," turned up loud.

Nearly 1,000 people signed up. Most were from Ponca City and the towns around us, but many dialed in from across the country. They played games together, chatted, sent private messages and traded files. I hosted a huge library of shareware and even Linux distributions like Red Hat. It was a social network before anybody called it that. We even had Purple Haze T-shirts made, with a Nagel girl on the front. I'm pretty sure I still have one around here somewhere.

One year the users organized a lunch at the shelter houses at Lake Ponca, just so everybody could meet in person. I didn't plan it. I was just invited. And at that lunch, they surprised me with a trophy engraved with "Worlds Best SysOp." I still have it.

Purple Haze was one of only two or three BBSs in the area, so I take the "world's best" part with a grin. But it taught me something I still use every day. When people can find you, and they like what they find, they tell their friends.

Hayes Computer: custom PCs, computer shows and Y2K phone calls

The BBS turned out to be great marketing for my other business, Hayes Computer. Our slogan was "We custom build to fit your needs." We sold new, used and refurbished systems, plus parts, upgrades and repairs, right out of the family facility at US 77 and John B. Hayes Road.

I hosted computer shows there too. Vendors from Oklahoma City and Wichita, Kansas, along with another computer builder from Ponca City, set up booths right alongside me. It was kind of a kick watching big city dealers drive to Ponca City to sell parts and new PCs. I still have the ad for one of them: a one-day Computer Show & Sale on Saturday, August 9, 1997, co-sponsored with Abernathy's Accessories.

What did a custom build look like back then? I found an old receipt from January 1998: an AMD K6-233 MMX, 64 MB of RAM, a 4.3 GB hard drive, a 24x CD-ROM, a 56k modem, 3D sound with speakers and a 15" monitor. $1,447.33 out the door.

eBay, PowerSeller status and Todd's Magic Boot Disk

Somewhere in there I found eBay, back when it was brand new. I started selling there in 1996. My account still says "member since April 20, 1998," and it carries 8,131 positive reviews and a 100% feedback rating.

Early eBay was mostly baseball cards, collectibles and a few antiques. But every so often you'd see a lot of computer parts, and that got my attention. Pretty soon I was selling parts there too. When eBay started its PowerSeller program, I was a PowerSeller right from the start. They used to mail me all kinds of stuff: T-shirts, mouse pads, business card holders and award certificates.

My best seller from that era was a 3.5" floppy I called Todd's Magic Boot Disk. Back then, a brand new computer with no operating system usually couldn't boot from a CD. To install Windows from the CD-ROM, you first had to make a boot disk with the right CD-ROM driver for your exact drive, plus the right AUTOEXEC.BAT and system files. Get one piece wrong and you were stuck. My disk had a universal driver that recognized just about any CD-ROM drive, so builders and hobbyists could pop it in and start installing. People bought a lot of them.

Then came Y2K. In late 1999, I took call after call from customers worried their computer might blow up when the clock hit midnight on New Year's Eve. So I'd walk them through it. Set your date to 2000, or 2005, or 2010, and click OK. You could hear the hesitation in their voice. Probably a little wince as they clicked the mouse. And then... nothing. Their computer just kept ticking along like always.

Hayes Equipment: lawn mowers on weekdays, auctions on Saturdays

Auctions kept us busiest on weekends, especially Saturdays. Getting ready for a sale was plenty of work during the week too, but with at least three of us there, we had time for something more. So in 1999, we picked up Snapper mowers as our first equipment line, and Hayes Equipment opened as our Monday through Friday retail store. Later on, we opened a second Hayes Equipment location in Stillwater, Oklahoma, too.

It grew from there. Over the years we sold Scag, Walker, Toro, Snapper, Everride, Dixie Chopper, and finally Bad Boy mowers and Bad Boy implements. We carried LS tractors and Twister mini dune buggies. We even sold Cookshack smokers, which are built right here in Ponca City.

Generators became a big part of who we were. Honda was always our anchor, and we quickly grew to become one of the largest Honda generator dealers in North America. We also sold Yamaha, plenty of MorPower portables, and some Winco, which were good generators even if they never sold in big numbers for us. For a couple of years we sold a lot of Kipor super quiet generators, until we started seeing quality issues we never had with Honda, so we stopped carrying them. And we sold Generac home standby generators, enough to earn a 2003 Exemplary Sales Achievement Award for their Guardian automatic home standby systems.

The awards shelf

For a small dealership on the north edge of Ponca City, we collected a lot of hardware. Bad Boy Mowers named us a Platinum Dealer in 2008 and 2010, a Platinum Plus Dealer in 2011 and 2012, and a Gold Dealer in 2014, 2015 and 2016. In 2009, American Honda gave us a plaque for helping Honda and its customers "realize 50 years of American dreams."

The one that means the most to me might be the last one. In 2020, right in the middle of COVID, Bad Boy named us a Gold Dealer again. The theme that year was "The Great American Comeback." Even with supply drying up, we were still selling mowers... we just couldn't get our hands on enough of them.

Hayes Products and the WSK-1 remote start kit

Selling all those generators gave us an idea. Under the Hayes Products, Inc. name, we designed the WSK-1 wireless remote start kit for the Honda EU3000is and Yamaha EF3000ise generators. We built the remotes ourselves from component parts. Then we had an overseas company produce the controllers, the "brain box" that tells the generator to start, stop and work the choke. Customers bought them from all over the world. We had dealers across the U.S., Canada and Australia.

Getting the word out

All those years writing auction ads never really left me. We put the Hayes name everywhere we could: billboards, booths at home and garden shows (along with our giant inflatable Bad Boy bulldog), and a Hayes Equipment decal on just about every mower and generator that left the lot... but our website was the real growth machine.

hayesequipment.com and the Honda generator pages that ranked nationwide

I registered hayesequipment.com in January 2001 and hosted it with a small Texas company called X7 Hosting. I built every page by hand in Microsoft FrontPage Express and uploaded each HTML file, one at a time, over FTP.

It worked better than I ever expected. When people searched for a quiet Honda generator, like the EU1000i, EU2000i, EU3000is or later the EU6500is, or a Honda generator for construction or home backup, our little Ponca City dealership showed up at the top of Google. Not just locally. Nationwide.

Every time we added a new product line, I built its page the same way, aiming for Google to pick us as a top place to buy. Mowers, tractors, smokers. It kept working. That's when I fell in love with SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Figuring out what people were searching for, then building the page that answered it best, never got old.

My first big website mistake, and the lesson I never forgot

A few years in, I moved the site from X7 Hosting to GoDaddy so we could have a better shopping cart. The new site looked prettier. It was also my first big mistake in the website business.

The move changed every URL on the site. RV forums, lawn mower forums and all kinds of other websites had links pointing to our specific pages, and overnight those links went nowhere. I didn't know what a 301 redirect was back then, much less how to write an .htaccess file on an Apache server to send every old address to its new home.

We lost a lot of the ranking power those links had built up. Worse, people started calling and emailing because the links they clicked were dead. Some of them genuinely thought we'd gone out of business.

That one stuck with me. I've never caused that problem for a client, and I've fixed it for plenty of businesses since. Over the years I went back and redirected a lot of those old links... then lost them all over again when I replaced the site after we closed. With this rebuild, I've put them back for good. If an old link brought you to this page, now you know why.

Saying goodbye to Hayes Equipment

My dad passed away in 2017. We kept the business going for several more years, and honestly, we probably would have kept going longer if not for COVID. The shutdowns choked off supply. We couldn't get enough new Bad Boy mowers and other equipment to cover the demand we had built, or even enough product to justify keeping the doors open.

COVID hit Hayes Products too. The overseas company that built our WSK-1 controllers went out of business. Building them in-house would have cost too much, and we couldn't find another manufacturer who could make them at a reasonable price. So we stopped producing the kits.

So in the fall of 2023, we retired Hayes Equipment and Hayes Products, Inc. It was the right time to move on to brighter territory. We still support our WSK-1 customers, and this site is still here to do that.

Where I am now: Hayes Digital Marketing

After we closed, I went full time with my own agency, Hayes Digital Marketing. Since then I've helped small businesses from coast to coast get found. Barbershops and burger joints. Boutique shops on small-town main streets and large event centers. HVAC, plumbing, septic and roofing companies. Even a truck flatbed manufacturer with a dealer network that stretches across the country.

Most of all, I've become known for party rental marketing. I help bounce house, tent, table and chair rental companies from California and Arizona to Kansas City, Idaho and Florida rank high on Google and in AI search, so they get more paid bookings and keep their calendars full.

It's the same thing I was doing with a Big Chief tablet at 15, and with Honda generator pages in 2001. Find out what people are looking for, then make sure they find you first.