How to run a successful locksmith business
Being a locksmith isn’t easy, and it won’t necessarily make you rich. But your chances of success are better if you know how to run your locksmith business well. Here are a few tips, in no particular order, to help you on your way.
Keep on top of your paperwork
Sadly, running a business requires tonnes of paperwork. We wish it weren’t that way, but it is. One way to make your life easier come tax season is simply to keep proper track of everything you spend, everything you earn, every job you do.
Keep a diary with all of your appointments in. After the appointment, write down in there what exactly you did and what still needs doing. This will help with punctuality, but will also help you plan ahead.
And, what’s more, if you need to return to an address you’ve visited earlier in the year, you can just flick through your diary and see exactly what the problems were at the time. That’ll allow you to bring the right tools and parts for the next job.
Get to know other locksmiths
Other locksmiths might be your competitors, in one sense, but they’re also your friends. They can teach you things, they can help you solve problems, they might give you work, and they might be able to help you out during bigger jobs that you can’t do on your own.
Make friends with local key-cutting shops, too, who might be able to recommend you to any customers who need a locksmith, and who might be able to cut keys for you at mates’ rates.
And you should definitely get to know the people at any local wholesalers. The big guys in London are Aldridge Security in Islington, Duffells in Croydon, and SKS in Berkhamsted. They are an invaluable resource for locksmiths, and they have a very wide range of different types of expertise.
Don’t fully depend on core customers
Every business has its one-off customers and its regular customers. Locksmiths, too. You may do a lot of work for a local school or for an estate agency, and these repeat-customer jobs may take up most of your time.
But you mustn’t rely too heavily on these customers. The fact is that customers come and customers go, and the one-off customers may be an important source of business to keep you ticking over.
You need some sort of strategy in place for attracting new customers, e.g. an ad in a local paper or an internet ad. This will ensure that you always have a trickle of business coming in during times when your primary customers don’t give you much work.
Keep learning new skills
The world is always changing, and so are the demands of our customers. Building standards change, locking products change, and new tools are always being brought out. It’s our job as locksmiths to adapt to the change.
Specialist skills can be quite lucrative. Think about the type of work you have to turn down for lack of expertise. Many lockies find that they have to turn down safe enquiries, or vehicle locksmithing enquiries. Those are the places to look for furthering your skills.
If you work in big buildings, you may find that fire door training will help. If your customers need help with fob readers, maglocks, or other electronic products, maybe look into that.
Never stop learning, because the world won’t stop to wait for you.
Make sure the price is right
Pricing your services and products is really difficult. Figuring out how much your time and skill are worth is a real challenge for everyone, and getting it right is crucial.
The two things to remember are: 1) that you need to eat, you might have a family to feed, and a van to pay off; and 2) that being cheap doesn’t necessarily convince customers to use you. You need to find a price that works for you.
Invest in good-quality stock
Stock in general is a good idea. You need to carry more than the bare minimum of locks with you, so that you can offer your customers whatever they need. But, importantly, you need to have some good-quality stock.
The reason is that good-quality stock gives you an excellent opportunity to upsell to customers. They can either buy the normal product for a normal price, or a superior product for a higher price.
Being able to give your customers a choice is a great way to increase your level of service, and also to increase your revenue.
Join a trade association
If you can, join a trade association, and consider getting accreditations. Metrolocks is accredited by Safecontractor and Constructionline, and we’re members of Interkey. The accreditations boost your level of trust, and many estate agents will insist on you being accredited.
Additionally, locksmith trade bodies often have online forums and regular meet-ups for you to get to know each other and help answer each other’s technical questions.
But above all… be available
Last but not least, make sure you’re available! That doesn’t mean you need to pick up the phone 24/7, but it does mean that you need to be reachable, and you need to respond to calls, voicemails, emails etc.
Us tradesmen get a bad rap, partly because so many of us are poor communicators. In reality, a locksmith’s job is 50% locksmithing and 50% paperwork/customer relations.