Installation companies that limit themselves to electronics also limit their profit making ability. There is business to be had in physical security, says Mike Lynskey, and he should know – that is how he started!
There is a distinct tie-up between the locksmith and the alarm engineer and most of us discover this sooner or later. I have little doubt that alarm engineers reading this will have been asked to deal with locks and physical security at some time or another, and I know for a fact that locksmiths get asked to fit burglar alarms because that is how I got into the alarms business.

When I joined the family business it was to train as a locksmith and within the month we had one of our customers ask if we did alarms. Up to that point the company had done an odd system or two using DIY kits purchased from a company that had done a presentation at a meeting of the Master Locksmiths Association. But these were only simple domestic battery only jobs and the general thing was to say, "No, you need a specialist".

As time went on more and more enquiries came in and, partly because I had some previous wiring experience, it was decided we would make it a serious part of our field of operations. Within a couple of years we were the biggest alarm company in the area as well as the biggest and best established locksmiths.

Grab this opportunity

Your company might well be facing the same opportunity, all you have to do is see it and grab it.

There is one fundamental point to remember, and that is customer loyalty. When a customer finds your company to be one that they are happy with they will often ask you to provide all manner of other related services, and let's face it only a fool turns away his own regular customers but yet that is exactly what happens every day. The question to ask is "How can I stop turning them away and how can I provide that service for my customer"?

The answer to that one largely depends on how busy you are. If you are up to the eyeballs in work already then you haven't time, but to keep your reputation with your customer and to provide the required service then your best way forward is to get an agreement going with a good local locksmith to pass work back and forth between you – he gives you his alarm enquiries and you give him the locksmithing. This type of gentlemen's agreement tends to work very well provided that both companies are of equal standard within their own professions.

On the other hand you may have room to take on extra work and so it would be advantageous to expand your field. Either way you have to remember that the more strings you have to your bow the more opportunities you have to make a living and more opportunities to keep your customer happy. Remember one golden rule: It is far easier to keep your existing customers than to find new ones, so when the next customer asks if you can fit locks say "leave it to me", and "what are your requirements"?

How do you get started?

It makes little difference to the customer if you fit the locks yourself or you send your local friendly locksmith – don't forget to add a little extra to the bill for your management services – they have asked for help, and got it, and they are usually happy to pay for it. Right, how do we go about it?

  • Plan One – find a good locksmith.

  • Plan Two – do it yourself.

    There's a big snag with Plan One: how can you tell a good locksmith from a drill-happy lunatic – that's difficult, bearing in mind that the average person on the street wouldn't know a good locksmith if one leapt up and hit him in the mouth. OK, so here are a few pointers.

    Only a fool turns away his own customers, yet that is exactly what happens every day. But how can I stop turning them away?

  • On the first job you send them to, go with them.

  • Watch how they "frame up" to the job. Does he have the right attitude? Does he turn up looking reasonably well dressed and with a decent van or does he turn up in jeans and trainers with a scruffy old woolly jumper and a half-smoked fag hanging out of his mouth?

    This may not necessarily make him a poor locksmith but it reflects his attitude to the customer – YOUR customer – and if he cares little about himself you can bet your last quid that he will care less for others. Remember this … he is working for YOU so he is YOUR representative and he is carrying YOUR reputation, don't allow him to drag YOU down.

    Clues in the toolbox

    Next, have a good look in his toolbox. Don't worry too much if it looks a bit of a mess; that usually means that he is busy (as a matter of interest what does the inside of your toolbox look like?) What you are looking for is whether he has the right sort of tools …a reasonable range of good quality wood chisels and a decent set of screwdrivers. Or does he have a tatty mismatched bunch of cheapo stuff that is normally bought at the local "everything for a pound" shop?

    Remember: good tools don't make a good tradesman but a good tradesman will rarely put up with inferior tools.

    If he is fitting new locks take note how he goes about it. Does he look for the best place to fit the lock, does he look for knots in the wood and joints in the door and try to avoid them? If he's fitting window locks does he drill a small pilot hole or does he just bang the screws in with an electric screwdriver and risk splitting the window frame.

    Engage him in "friendly" conversation. Does he think he has given the customer the right sort of advice or has he just taken the lock you have supplied and banged it on the door in the position you have suggested? Ask his opinion. It will tell you a lot about the man and his attitudes. Let's face it, you are also a tradesman in your own right and as such you soon become a pretty accurate judge of another tradesman's abilities, even if you know little about his trade.

    There is one big problem with using the local friendly locksmith – he may refuse to turn out in unsociable hours when the customer is locked out. The alarm trade has a duty to provide a round the clock service to its contracted customers; the locksmith has no such obligation.

    It is fairly common practice within the locksmithing industry to start off working all hours to get a business up and running. Later, when the business becomes stable, they get fed up with having to work unsociable hours, realise they don't need to and start refusing to come out. It's an arrogant attitude but it's quite common in locksmithing, as in many other trades.

    Now it's your turn!

    This brings us to Plan Two. Here is a big fat opportunity for the alarm company. You are already committed to providing a 24 hour service so you have to have a man available who is at the end of a phone and sober. In the light of the forthcoming licensing and the new ACPO policy, that man will also have to be vetted in line with BS 7858 and therefore be of reasonable character and honesty.

    Good tools don’t make a good tradesman, but a good tradesman will rarely put up with inferior tools. Does he have a tatty mismatched bunch of cheapo stuff bought at the local ‘everything for a pound’shop?

    With the right training this man could also be taught to gain access to property with minimum damage and to secure the property afterwards. This service could be built in to the maintenance contract for your regular customers at a small extra cost. (No one wants to be locked out so the service is rarely abused). The service could also be extended to the general public (at the right price) and I know from experience that it is an excellent way of picking up new customers.

    The service contract is a source of revenue that most locksmiths miss. Customers leave their locks to wear out and break before anything is done and that usually means being locked out. It's human nature: If a lock gets difficult to turn, do you call a locksmith? No, you use extra force to turn the lock (well, it works if you twist hard enough). Eventually the key breaks in the lock. Now do you call a locksmith? No, you get another key and repeat the operation. Now you have two broken keys and you are still out in the cold. After a lot of careful thought you finally arrive at the solution you should have thought of in the first place – call a locksmith.

    Key-holding opportunity

    Servicing locks is easy and cheap and avoids a lot of the night calls, so why not add this simple operation to your service routine? Most locks survive without maintenance for years so you can remove each lock in turn, one each year, to service them. This will reduce to virtually zero the night call where the lock has failed. Now all we are left with are the lost and misplaced keys, and here we come back to an already established service offered by the alarm company – key-holding.

    By combining lock servicing and a key-holding service we should (according to theory) virtually eliminate the night call-outs, so the prices for this service can be kept to a minimum and therefore make it attractive to a large number of your existing customers. Of course I don't need to tell you that the best way to make money in the long run is to have a lot of customers each paying a modest sum per month into the pot and you having very little work to do to keep your end of the bargain … a bit like insurance, you pay but don't expect to need their services.

    The next problem with Plan Two is lack of knowledge and experience within the locksmiths trade and that could be a big problem. Let's not fool ourselves, we all look down on the "cowboys" who prevail in our industry so we have to avoid doing the same. Experienced locksmiths, in particular, will condemn the man who drills a big hole in the door when it could have opened without damage.

    Information is our first requirement, we need to gain a working knowledge of what lock to fit where and in this case help is at hand with a very useful British Standard.

    BS 8220 comes in three parts – Part One, Domestic; Part Two, Commercial and Part Three, Industrial. BS 8220 is a unique standard in that, as well as informative text, it has drawings of locks, doors and windows. It gives examples of a weak door as well as a strong one and it shows the ideal locations for door locks and window locks.

    The next logical step

    According to theory, a complete novice could go out armed with BS 8220 and make a reasonable attempt at specifying security for his own home. But as we are not exactly novices at security, have been specifying alarm systems for years and are fully aware of the theory of shell (or perimeter) protection, for us the specification of locks is only the next logical stage.

    Gaining the servicing knowledge is a little more difficult, but there are locksmithing courses available in various parts of the country and there has been the recent introduction of the syllabus for a locksmithing NVQ course. Until the new courses get up and running in the local colleges your best approach may well be the Master Locksmiths Association who run beginners courses at their HQ in Daventry, Northants. If you want a short cut then the course that I teach, run by TK Consultants at Wigan, may be a more suitable route. There are other private training provider courses available.

    My personal advice is to avoid franchisers who want you to sign up to a contract to let them supply you with a van and all the tools and stock. They also want a percentage of your profits for the term of the contract. The biggest shock is the price they charge for their services, which can be anything from £10,000 to £20,000. It sounds a huge price to pay but when you consider they supply the van and the key-cutting machines and the stock and the training it soon adds up. The real money-spinner for them is the slice they take off the top of your income.

    Holiday saved by five-minute morticer

    When master locksmith Jack White decided it was time for a change he closed the family business in Croydon and moved to the more relaxed Kent coastal town of Herne Bay. Here he expected to enjoy the summer holiday relaxing by the sea, but a job he had quoted for – a school in the London area – reared its forgotten head and it had to be done during the school summer holidays. The job was to fit outward-opening locks to all ground-floor doors. Set in ten acres of parkland, the college premises consisted of the main school, a junior school building, a sports hall and a gym block. All were single storey, and all had aluminium exterior doors. Jack counted 26 in all – very attractive from a commercial point of view, but it would mean cancelling plans for the beach and putting back work on the house that he and his wife had just bought. Cutting a mortice into an aluminium section, leaving a good clean edge, is not a quick job; it requires skill, accuracy, precision cutting and careful finishing. And that takes time. Worth the risk, even if it only lived up to half its claims Jack realised that his holiday plans might be salvaged, however, when he chanced upon the Souber Tools DBB Morticer – the ‘Five-Minute Morticer’ – in the Aldridge catalogue. Bench Tested in the January 1999 edition of Security Installer, our experts said: “It is manufactured to a high standard and is very easy to use, particularly if the excellent instructions are followed… This morticer, which is reasonably priced, should be an indispensable tool for all regular lock installers.” The aluminium cutter range had a cutter that perfectly matched the Viro 8518 dead latches that Jack had recommended to the customer, and at £136 he decided it was worth the risk even if it only lived up to half its claims. Jack found he was able to more than double his efficiency, fitting up to five locks in a single day. The settings on the morticer remained constant, saving valuable time in setting up each door, and the cutter created exactly the right size mortice, leaving only the corner right angles to be squared off. All the locks were fitted in less than half the time expected – 26 locks in one week – and at the end the cutter was still perfectly sharp and serviceable. But did it cut the mortice in five minutes? “More like six or seven,” says Jack, “but it would be much quicker in wood, and it certainly saved a large part of my holiday.”

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