Since 1996 The Queens Pennysaver has been serving the south Queens area. The local neighborhoods Of Ozone Park, Howard Beach, Woodhaven, Richmond hill was were we started. This hometown localized advertising is targeted to your audience. Now years later the way our customers do business is changing and so are our services. We now offer services that are changing with the time.

S SISTERS, they grew up sharing a childhood home, their friends – and the occasional sibling squabble. But Linda Burke and Debbie Schneider also believe they shared a destiny in business. When it finally happened this past summer, it was with a flourish of energy and spirit, in a small storefront on Crossbay Boulevard in Ozone Park. And it happened just a few miles from where the sisters grew up in Howard Beach before moving, as teenagers, to Long Island. The sisters’ 4-month-old venture, The Queens Pennysaver, is not only a realization of their long-shared belief that their vocational lives were as intertwined as their private ones: It also rekindled the dream held by their late uncle, Anthony Schneider, to provide a small community weekly publication in which Queens businesses and area residents could communicate through advertising.

Within a few weeks after the presses started rolling at their printer, Burke, 36, and Schneider, 33, who live in East Meadow, were serving a home-delivery market of 24,707 residences in Ozone Park, Howard Beach and Lindenwood. Another 5,000 copies are bulk-delivered personally by Burke in her second-hand Subaru, to laundromats, supermarkets, bakeries, optical stores and other high-traffic locales on Jamaica Avenue in Woodhaven. “We all do a little bit of everything,” Burke said. That takes in a broad range of activities from hawking the ads, to hands-on paste-ups of pages and even marketing the publication in the community, through contests and other promotional events. Activities like these are designed to raise the young business’ profile on the busy commercial Queens thoroughfare.

Lately, that’s meant everything from a decorate-the-pumpkin contest to a challenge at writing captions for cartoon snowmen – with all contestants’ entries displayed in the front window. And capturing attention is just as important, said the sisters, as capturing ads. Ads provide revenue, but attention gives them a presence in the community. Not long after launching the first issue on Aug. 30, Burke and Schneider were joined by two longtime friends who were former colleagues years earlier in the photo developing industry: Kathy Cali, 33, of Westbury, and Deborah Grodzicki, 26, of East Meadow.

The staff soon grew to include a longtime friend of the Schneider family, Joann Pollizatto, 50, of Uniondale, who works part-time answering phones when she’s not at her salaried job, as an office manager for a chiropractor. Because each weekly issue costs between $3,000 and $4,000 to print and deliver, along with other incidental costs, the staff is not necessarily paid in the conventional manner, if at all.  So far the only steady earnings go to two part-time ad sales representatives who work on commission. When ad sales don’t pay the week’s expenses – which is often – personal savings accounts do.

But the sisters are thinking bigger. “We already have plans to expand,” Schneider said. They’re looking to expand further in Woodhaven as a natural second market within the next year. For now though, the only thing not in short supply is spirit. “Oh,” said Pollizatto, smiling, “of course we get paid working here. We get our payment whenever we see another issue come out.”

For now, then, these young women necessarily live lean and mean for their dream: Burke, who is separated from her husband, lives with her two young sons and her mother, Lorraine, in East Meadow. Schneider and Grodzicki also live a low-cost life, as roommates in an apartment in a house owned by a friend. And like Pollizatto, Cali has not quit her day job. She works for an industrial cleaning company. “You work so long for somebody else, when you know you have the drive to be in it for yourself, you eventually have to do it,” Schneider said. Her savvy in salesmanship eventually took her out of the photo industry and into automobile sales, where she remained for a number of years until this past summer, when she jumped into partnership with her sister. Burke worked in photo lab management and had run a housecleaning service part-time before starting the pennysaver.

“I would not do this for anyone else,” Cali said, “but we’ve all known one another for so long, and I know this can work. You can give someone else these four walls, a computer and a fax machine and they are not going to come up with something like this.” Their benefactor also sees the uniqueness of the young entrepreneurs and what they’re creating. He is the sisters’ father, George Schneider, a veteran real estate broker whose agency Schneider Real Estate is a fixture in the Ozone Park area. And Schneider, who recently vacated the space in his building at 108-14 Crossbay Blvd. to move a few blocks away, donated the space he left behind to The Queens Pennysaver. George Schneider’s older brother, Anthony, donated the dream.

Anthony Schneider, who died in February, was the publisher and prime mover of the short-lived Queens Mirror – a fledgling paper born in 1963, the same year as niece Debbie. “I am sure he would be smiling at this,” George Schneider said. “And if I am going to invest, why not in my daughters?” Other friends and family members are also investing, in their own way: Lorraine Schneider made up a gift basket used as one of the prizes for a recent contest; and another longtime friend, Marcelo Bancalari, also of East Meadow, fine-tuned the computer software the sisters use to produce some of the ads. In addition, on some of the pennysaver’s 24 pages are small columns written by local people – a nutritionist, a psychic, a photo technician. “We have a big support system,” Burke said.