Sole trader or a small company? Getting the right locksmith for the people of Nottingham

When requesting a locksmith, often it will be in an emergency and you imagine all sorts of scenarios before the locksmith arrives on site. We can all agree the most important part of it all is that the locksmith who arrives is reliable and the service is to the best of his or her ability, which could lead you into believing a Limited company is sometimes a safer and more honest option than a sole trader. In Nottingham, this is certainly not the case. The locksmith industry in Nottingham is renowned for having some of the best sole trading Locksmiths in the country.

Jake Locksmith NottinghamI’m Jake, I have been a proud self-employed owner of Your Secure Locksmiths for over 11 years, and I want to help you in choosing the correct self-employed Locksmith over a well-advertised small-medium size business, but why?

A good quality, well established tradesman with a few good reviews and recommendations will have the same quality and possibly much better skills than a small to medium sized well-advertised business. Businesses with 7-8 employees or more have a habit of changing staff very regularly, meaning often the quality of the employee doesn’t meet the justification for the inflated price tag plus VAT.

When you call a sole trader, you are usually speaking to the locksmith himself, instead of a phone operator who usually is inexperienced and has none or very little knowledge of the trade and what the job requires. This usually results in a lot of incorrect quoting. Small to medium businesses are often taught to drill locks when you are locked out to get you back in, because it inflates the bill with the extra added lock and often the employee hasn’t mastered the true skill and fine art of the trade this can take years.

Don’t be taken in by mass reviews, if a company has existed during the 1990s a few more reviews are to be expected but they tend to average out if you compare them to the amount of time a well-established self-employed tradesman has been around, but of course reviews are good and a decent self-employed locksmith will have them as well. Also, look out for behaviours like mass advertising on back of buses or mass fleets of vans. It’s all very presentable and looks the part, but remember you as the customer have to pay for it. While small business employees try to impress the boss, a good, reputable and well established self-employed locksmith in Nottingham tries above and beyond to impress you – the customer. In the locksmith industry in Nottingham our well-established self-employed do:

  • get done right!
  • we do return to correct faults if any occur.
  • We do save you a lot of money with minimal overheads.
  • we put our whole built up reputation on the line every time we attend a job and always want the maximum satisfaction and a returning customer!
  • Turn around times are much faster by a mile

How to find your well established Self-employed tradesman?

  1. Open the google search tab
  2. Type in Locksmith Nottingham or keywords to that effect
  3. Completely miss the sponsored ads at the top (they cannot be trusted as it’s a paid position and you will be charged for the privilege x10. They probably won’t have a local accent and will advertise an abnormally low rate to later con you into hundreds)
  4. Scroll to the Local Map Listings, click ‘search more’ and the best self-employed tradesman will appear mixed in with the smaller businesses, ranging from positions 1-9 (the map listings is not a ranking listing)
  5. Call three different companies or more until satisfied, panicking is normal but don’t let it cloud your judgement.

As mentioned, I have been looking after Nottingham’s locking problems for over 11 years, known as Your Secure Locksmiths. I have gained a lot of experience and an outstanding reputation within and around the city of Nottingham.

A lot of my work ranges from domestic households to businesses for emergency or non-emergency requirements such as lockouts, lock fitting or lock replacing. I also have a lot of experience unlocking cars, replacing glass and fitting Anti Snap Locks.

Choosing A Reliable Tradesman off Google, who to avoid and why!

Most people in today’s day and age will use Google as a go to tool to find a local or trusted tradesman, however only a small number of customers will successfully book with a local and trusted tradesman. Through the 90s and the early 2000s finding a local tradesman was much easier because of the aid of companies like Yellow Pages and Thomson Local, however over the years online search engines have slowly erased the need for big yellow catalogues containing mainly local companies.

Today, if you wanted to book a local locksmith, for example, most of you will go onto Google and type in the search bar specific keywords to narrow down your searches to local companies, for example “Locksmith Nottingham”. Then you would click search and expect only local companies to appear in the results, but unfortunately you will get more results of companies pretending to be local, these companies will generally appear on Google in the sponsored listings which companies will pay a lot of money for the privilege.

This has an impact on you as the consumer because you will get passed down the costs of multiple different expenses, such as the cost of the click which can range from averagely 50p-£20.00, the cost of the subcontractor doing the work, company which is usually 50% of the total bill and then you also have to fund a call centre. In the locksmith industry we call them “49ners” or “nationals” – they will advertise for £49.00 making you believe you are getting a cheap deal but once they arrive at your property the cost of the work increases dramatically and often leaving you paying 4 times the amount of which you would if you had booked a genuine local locksmith.

Where can you find sponsored listings?

Local listings can be found right at the top of the page once you’ve clicked search, this is a paid privilege to appear at the top giving them the best chance of the customer clicking and enquiring first. They then proceed to book you in by offering an unbeatable quote which just isn’t sustainable for the company. What they are giving you is a “call out fee” – a fee for them just to arrive on site and take a look without touching a single tool.

Companies with massive marketing budgets usually try to go in as many local towns as cities across the country, making everybody believe they are local to you but in fact they are probably local to London or other high-end cities, they have no knowledge of the trade and rely on any subcontractor who is struggling for work to carry out the job often with little knowledge of the trade themselves.

So where can I find a local tradesman?

Often you will find local tradesman in the map listing section of Google, although some companies find a way to even advertise there.

Once on the map listing section of google you must then do your homework to find the best suited genuine local trades person to you. The genuine local tradesman is usually a sole trader who lives in and around the city/town local to you and often advertises a mobile number or puts up photos of himself carrying out local work. Customers often get confused with big fancy websites and photos of multiple work personnel and vehicles. This creates an image of a company doing well which makes you believe that the job you will get will be a fair price and the work will be carried out to the best standard it possibly can be, don’t be fooled!

The best person for the job is the genuine local tradesman with experience in his own area and no bosses or office personnel telling him ways to save money and cut corners, often the people in the office are novice to the trade and carry no experience.

Experience cannot be brought, it must be earned through hard work and multiple jobs completed by an individual.

Even in a panic situation you must remain calm and never call the first person that appears in the search bar and instantly instruct the work to go ahead, not before trying for another quote first at least, always call 3 different people in the map listing section if possible.

The local tradesman will usually answer the phone and you can talk to the same person you will be dealing with at your front door. Always ask questions about pricing and if they are genuinely local, if you call the local tradesman in Nottingham and the person you are calling picks up the phone with a London or a Newcastle accent then maybe its best to avoid them.

Always look at previous reviews and try get recommendations. A lot of people will also advertise in the map listings as local which is not allowed by Google but companies still find a way, often they subcontract work at 50% and advertise once again in multiple cities, why pay the extra 50% when you can just find the one man band that is excellent at his job and 100% local, they are out there but its down to you as the consumer to find them as sole traders don’t usually have big budgets to advertise which in turn they often appear slightly lower in the local map listings usually 3rd position or less.

In the locksmith trade watchdog has caught a few of the non-local national companies ripping people off, the episodes are worth a view.

One more consideration to make why searching for your local tradesman is to avoid bigger companies in the area with 4 or more employees as once again the cost usually gets passed down to the customers and waiting times are usually much longer. In this situation often there is a person in the office controlling the engineer’s movements and advising on site what to do with no or minimal trade experience for example: in the locksmith world these companies will often be drilling locks rather than picking them because they have a lack of experience and usually trained in house very poorly as the rotation of new staff is quite a big task for them to keep up with. Let the bigger companies keep to the council contracts which they are better equipped for while the local sole traders stick to residential and commercial property visits.

Always go with the genuine local sole trader who takes pride in his job not only are you saving costs, but you are also keeping a local family with food on their table.