Locksmithing is two phone calls, and one of them is ninety seconds long
A locksmith’s office is a box of codes and a book of keys. There are bitting records and key charts to keep for every building you have keyed, landlords who want units rekeyed between tenants and an invoice for each one, a property manager with a list of doors, the van’s stock of cylinders and blanks to reorder, and last night’s lockouts to write up in the morning. Through all of it the phone rings in two very different voices.
The first call is not shopping. She is standing outside a door with a bag in her hand, and she is ringing the names the search gave her, one after another, until one of them picks up. She is not comparing anybody. She is finding out who answers, and the whole decision is over before a second locksmith has rung out. There is nothing to quote her that she is in a mood to read — the only thing worth winning is the ninety seconds.
The second call has a week in it. The house sold, the keys came over a table on Friday, and every outside door still opens on whatever the last owner handed out to a dog walker and a cleaner in 2019. That customer will read a number, and she will read it at nine at night from the sofa. They are not the same person and they should not share a form. NapkinPrice™ runs them as separate services on one account — the lock change asks seven questions and an optional photo and puts a range on the screen, the lockout asks five short ones and the same optional photo, with your trip charge already inside the number, and a master key chart goes down a third path that never guesses a price at all.
Both flows offer a photo — the face of the lock, the edge of the door, or a key that still works — and the lead says whether she has one, so you know to ask for it when you call back. A picture travelling inside the lead is still a roadmap item, and that is why the list above leaves it out.
A missed lockout is not a missed call. It is the next name on the list.
Not answering is not rudeness in this trade, it is both hands. You are at a bench or on the floor with a plug follower holding six springs in a cylinder, and the one thing you cannot do is put it down; or you are under a steering column, or forty feet up a ladder at a closer, or driving. The phone rings for eleven seconds and stops. And unlike every other trade on this site, the person who rang is not going to think about it overnight — she is going to press the next number before you are out from under the door. The one at twenty to nine on a Tuesday, coming in from work, was worth a customer and not a call-out.
| What a missed locksmith call is worth | On the demo account |
|---|---|
| Four outside doors on a house, new deadbolts and levers, keyed alike, one to bore | $877 – $1,072 |
| A house door, later today, whenever you can get there | $89 – $100 |
| The same door, right now, she is standing outside it | $94 – $120 |
| One recovered lock change pays for | 4 months of the bundle |
Once texting is switched on, CallMitt™ sends the caller you could not answer a text that carries your shop’s name, which no text-back is allowed to leave out, and her answer joins the thread her quote is on. The message is picked by the hour and the day — the demo shop’s phone runs 8am to 8pm, so that twenty-to-nine call gets the after-hours version instead of one that says you are at a lock — and every version asks for the two things that decide whether the van turns round: the address, and what she is locked out of. Here is what is already true at 6am tomorrow:
Every call you log, in order, with the hour on it
You log the call and it takes its place in a list you read down at six in the morning — who rang, from what number, at what time, and what was written back to her. Nothing to reconstruct off a phone that shows eleven names and no times.
A blocked message says why it was blocked
When a rule stops a message it is recorded as blocked with the reason written out in plain English — quiet hours where the caller is, an opt-out, a suppressed number. You are never left guessing whether something went out.
Her call and her website quote in one thread
The key is the phone number, so the seven lock-change answers she filled in at nine last night and the call she made at twenty past six this morning are one conversation on one screen, instead of two records nobody ever joins up.
A tally that leaves your own tests out
Every send is tagged with where it came from, and the dashboard count excludes the ones you fired at yourself while setting it up. What is on the screen is real calls, which is the only figure worth looking at.
Where delivery stands today. There is no SMS gateway on our side yet, so nothing we compose reaches a phone; a call you log gets its reply written, checked against every rule and filed in your outbox, where you can read it at six in the morning. The rest is running already: your five messages and the 8-to-8 hours, the weekend, holiday and vacation messages, opt-outs, quiet hours, and the thread that ties her reply to her quote. Two of those rules are for good. Nothing is texted outside 8am to 9pm where the caller is, worked out from her area code, and no setting widens it, so a two-in-the-morning call is logged as blocked, with the reason, and nothing tries again at eight. And a reply that has waited more than an hour is retired, not sent, once sending switches on, so nobody gets yesterday’s “sorry we missed you” after the door is open. The part that answers a forwarded call and texts back is written, deployed and tested over signed webhooks, and it has no number of yours to answer on until your carrier registration clears.
Try the window for yourself. Twenty to nine is inside it; half past nine is not. Set the clock to half past nine on a Tuesday evening on the example business and watch the same rules record it as blocked — try it on the demo (opens in a new tab) — or open that business’s real dashboard, no signup, at the example account’s own dashboard, then click CallMitt in the left menu and read its five text-back messages and its hours for yourself.
How CallMitt Works Run Your Own NumbersFive questions, answered one-handed, and only two of them move it much
She has a phone in one hand and a bag in the other. A lockout form that asks eleven things does not get filled in, so this one asks five and an optional photo, and puts the answers where you can see them while she is still standing there. Here is the little that actually changes the price.
What she is locked out of
A house or apartment door, a garage, shed or padlock, a car or truck, a shop or storefront, or a safe or a gun cabinet. A pick-one, with the money sitting on the option rather than on the rule — $0, $0, $30, $35 and $130 on the demo. Do not draw a flat-versus-per-unit distinction on a pick-one, because the engine has none: the option she chooses adds its dollars once for the visit.
How soon she needs somebody
Later today, right now at the door, or the middle of the night. She declares it — nothing on our side reads a clock, and a page that told you otherwise would be selling a feature that does not exist. It carries a percentage of the work, 0, 20 and 45 percent on the demo, rather than a call-out fee: a flat amount is added first and is then multiplied by every percentage and by the travel zone, so the figure you typed stops being the figure she sees.
The two things you want to know before you drive
Is a key snapped off in the cylinder, and is it a high-security cylinder — Medeco, Mul-T-Lock, ASSA. Each is a yes/no with your own flat amount behind it, $40 and $55 on the demo, added once for the visit. A third asks whether she wants a spare cut on the doorstep. None of them is a guess you have to make in the van, and all three are in writing before anybody sets off.
Travel zone
Wilmington costs her nothing extra on the demo; Newark, Elkton and West Chester add a flat $25, and anywhere else the shop travels adds $45 plus five percent. On a ticket this size that is a few dollars rather than most of it, which is how it should stay. Zones are made from whole ZIPs or their first three digits, the closest match wins, and one marked out of area gives her a note that her ZIP is outside the area you normally cover, with no price, while her details still come to you.
The options, the yes/no amounts and the percentages above belong to the demo account, not to a Tailgate Office™ price list — you set every one of them in the dashboard and you can move your trip charge without touching your website. What is not illustrative is the band: a house door, right now, no snapped key, no high-security cylinder and no spare, comes back $94 to $120 on the demo. The $89 trip is not added to that at the door. It is inside it, and on the cheapest answers she can give it is the bottom of the range itself — change nothing but the urgency, to later today, and the same call quotes $89 to $100. Take that right-now call out to a ZIP in the outer ring instead and it comes back $116 to $148.
What lands on your screen the second she taps send
The example lock shop we keep has its own website, with NapkinPrice quoting live on it from the real engine, on a page that is not ours. Give it those five answers and the same band comes back; then try the lock change on the other service.
Try the live demo site (opens in a new tab)Three services: a range on two, a walk-through on the third
A doorstep opening, a house that has just changed hands and a master key chart for an office building are three different conversations. Running them through one form is how you end up quoting a keying schedule like a lockout.
Rekeys, new hardware and lock changes — quotes instantly
Seven questions, an optional photo, and a range on the screen. The per-opening rate is the only thing that multiplies; the hardware grade is a percentage on the whole job, and keying the house alike and boring a door for a bolt are added once, because the engine has no rule that multiplies one answer by another. A job minimum sits underneath — $149 on the demo — and one answer raises it on its own: say yes to a mortise lock in any of the doors and the floor goes to $495. That is a floor and not a fee. It adds nothing at all to the arithmetic: two doors on a house, rekeyed, keyed alike, nothing to bore and no rush, quote $247 to $301 with a no and $495 to $545 with a yes — the same sum underneath, with the bottom of the range flattened onto the new floor. Four doors on a house instead, new deadbolts and levers, keyed alike, one of them with no hole bored for a bolt yet, no mortise in any of them and no rush, come back $877 to $1,072, which is the job the drawing at the top of this page works through line by line. We stop pricing at about $3,000, and past that the lead comes to you instead of a number going to her.
Lockouts and emergency openings — quotes instantly
The trip is the business on this one, so it lives in the service base fee rather than on a question: $89 on the demo, added once for the visit, and it cannot be dodged by answering the cheapest thing to everything. A house door, later today, nothing snapped off in it, no high-security cylinder and no spare wanted, quotes $89 to $100 — the trip and nothing else. There is a ceiling here too, and it is deliberately low at $300: past that it is a drilled safe or a lock change rather than an opening, and the honest answer is your voice rather than a number off five answers.
Master key systems and access control — site visit, never priced
Site-visit mode captures the whole spec and shows no number at all, which is the right answer for a key chart that decides who may open what and who may not, or an access control install that touches the fire alarm and the egress code. The service still asks the building type, how many doors the chart has to cover, what she actually wants and whether any of those doors are fire-rated — that last one moves no money, it just tells you whether the fire marshal has to see the drawing. She reads that for a job like this you like to see the building first, and you get the door count, the building type and what she wants before you walk it.
Neither priced service could go live with nothing under it: the dashboard wants a real base fee or a real minimum first, so no customer is ever shown $0. Here the lock change has its $49 call and a $149 floor, and the lockout has the $89 trip as both.
You are handing somebody a key to other people’s houses
That is the whole hiring problem in one sentence. Before a tech carries anybody’s key you want him fingerprinted and background-checked, a gate you run yourself and can stand behind, so the demo job asks whether he is willing straight after it asks his age. The second thing you are looking for is whether he has ever had a cylinder apart, because repinning one is what separates a locksmith from a helper with a drill.
Put “Now hiring — text CREW to your texting number” on the van and the job box. CrewFunnel™ asks seven short questions: is he 18 or older, is he willing to be fingerprinted and background-checked before he carries a key, has he rekeyed a cylinder by repinning it, how many years has he done locksmith work, how far out does he live, can he start inside two weeks, and what was the last job he worked on. Three of those are knockouts — under 18, unwilling to be screened, or living more than thirty miles out — and the rest come back as a weighted fit score.
On the demo the miles from Wilmington carry no weight at all; they only knock out, because a number answer earns more the larger it is, and a weight on miles would put the tech who lives furthest away at the head of the list. The last-job answer is free text and weighs nothing for the same kind of reason: a box anybody types in scores in full. All seven questions have their Spanish version beside the English.
Applying by text needs your own number switched on, so until it is he answers the seven questions on your screening page, where the knockouts and the score are exactly the same; from the day your carrier registration clears, the keyword on the van does it by text.
See how CrewFunnel works
Nobody writes a review from the wrong side of a door
She was on the step at twenty to nine with a bag in one hand and her phone in the other, and twenty minutes after the van pulled up she is inside with the door shut behind her. That is the customer who would write you a review, and she would mean it. Not while the panic is on, though: ask her while she is still out there and it lands like a bill. It has to come once the relief has had a minute to settle, and before tomorrow, when you are a charge on her card and nothing more. The outfit with sixty reviews is not sixty times better than you; somebody there asks every customer, once she is back inside.
HurraBell™ does the asking. Once review requests are switched on, you mark the job done — from the inbox, from your phone, or from your job software through Zapier — and the customer gets one request in your words, with your own Google review link, after a delay you pick: an hour, unless you change it. Three days later, one email reminder, unless the link has been opened or the customer has since texted you, messaged you from your website or had a call logged on her thread.
Review requests aren’t switched on for new accounts yet. When they are, the request goes by email once your Google review link is saved on the HurraBell page and your mailing address on the Account page. A text goes as well where the customer ticked the box on your quote form or visit booking agreeing to a review-request text, and only once your carrier registration clears, the same wait as every text on this site; until then it is email only.
See how HurraBell worksOne recovered lock change covers 4 months
And a lockout you answered instead of missing is a customer whose locks you change the month after. In this trade the small call is how you get the big one.
The Tailgate Office Bundle
Instant quotes on your website, missed-call text-back and text-to-apply hiring (texts go out once texting is switched on), and, once switched on, a review request after every job, plus customers, jobs, estimates and invoices in one place. 30 days free, no credit card, no setup fee, cancel from the dashboard.
Start Free TrialOnly need one of the tools? After the trial you can keep just that one at its own price; the office stays with the Bundle.
Locksmith questions we get asked
Yes, with one choice to make, because forwarding is how the text-back catches a call at all. Your business number stays where it is and keeps ringing. Once texting is switched on for you, forwarding for unanswered calls is set once, with a code the setup guide gives you, and a call nobody picks up in about twenty seconds moves on to your own texting number, a local number registered to your business. A short greeting in place of voicemail says a text is coming, and it comes from that number, carrying your shop's name, so she knows who it is. A ring group or a second phone in the van does not get in the way, because the text fires only when nobody answers, which is the very call you want to catch. An unanswered call forwards to one place, though, so for any given hour it is the answering service or the text-back: the forwarding is your own setting, switched on and off with its code. How delivery stands today is in the paragraph headed "Where delivery stands today" in the missed-call section above, the one place on this page we keep current.
It is recorded as blocked, with the reason, and that is the end of that message. Texting runs 8am to 9pm where the caller is — read off their area code — and there is no setting on our side that relaxes it, so at two o’clock nothing is sent to her at all. Nothing re-attempts it at eight in the morning either: a blocked record is final by design rather than by accident, and no job anywhere goes back and re-queues one. And a message that did queue and then sat is retired rather than delivered once it is more than an hour old, because a "sorry we missed your call" that lands the next afternoon does more harm than silence. So say it plainly: if you advertise round-the-clock lockouts, a text-back is not your night shift — a human is. What this gives you at six in the morning is the list — who rang, at what time, and why nothing went out — so the two o’clock caller gets a call back from you before she has finished ringing round.
It stops pricing and hands you the lead. Each instant service can carry a ceiling. On the demo the lock-change service is set at $3,000, and twelve openings in a rental building on Grade 2 hardware with one still to bore for a bolt goes straight past it: she gets a plain "this one is bigger than we can price online" note and your disclaimer instead of a number. Two things are worth knowing about that number. It is tested against the midpoint before the range is ever drawn, so it is a decision about the job rather than about the top of a band, which also means a published high end can sit a little above the figure you set. And the lockout service carries its own, deliberately low at $300: past that it is a drilled safe or a lock change rather than an opening.
You can, but the customer has to say so, because the engine cannot. The pricing engine reads no clock at any scale: not the hour, not the day of the week, not a callout after midnight. The only thing it knows about time is a seasonal date range that repeats every year, which is why this demo carries no season at all: frozen cylinders in January and the moving season in July are reasons people call, not reasons to charge more, and a date range would charge on every mild winter day for good. What the form can do is ask. Urgency is something she declares, later today, right now at the door, or the middle of the night, and the answer carries a percentage on the whole job, 20 and 45 percent on the demo lockout. She picks it herself and its cost is inside the range she is shown, though the option itself carries no price. A flat night fee is the thing to avoid: a flat is added first and is then multiplied by every percentage and by the travel zone, so the figure you typed is not the figure she gets.
On a lockout the range is almost beside the point, and that is worth saying out loud on a page that is trying to sell you a quote widget. She is not comparing prices. The number matters only enough that she is not afraid of it, which is why the form is five questions instead of eleven and why your trip charge sits inside the band rather than appearing at the door. The work the widget is actually doing here is capture: her number, her address, what she is locked out of and how soon, on your screen, with the hour on it, while she is still standing there. The lock change is the one where the range earns its keep — she reads it at nine at night, and the disclaimer under it says the final number comes once somebody has seen the doors and what is already in them.
Yes, because she picks what she is locked out of. On the demo a car or truck adds $30 to the $89 trip, and right now at the door adds 20% on the work, so a car lockout on a Wilmington street comes back $126 to $160, or $147 to $187 with a spare key cut while you are there. The spare-key help text tells her a car key with a chip in it is not that, and is quoted once you know the year and the model.
It does, on the lock-change service. Six doors at $95 each, keyed alike for $35, with the $49 call inside the number; the building question then adds $160 for a rental building with doors in common, or $45 for a single rental unit or condo. With no rush, that is $733 to $895 for the building and $629 to $769 for the unit on the demo, and the lead tells you which it is before you load the van.
It works, and it works best if you stop asking the software to be the night shift. Every call that reaches the log is stamped with the hour, and the right message for that hour and that day is the one picked: the after-hours one at twenty to nine, the weekend one on Sunday lunchtime when Sunday is a day you close, the holiday one on Christmas Day. Between 8am and 9pm where the caller is, quiet hours do not stand in the way of it. Outside that window the call is recorded and the reason nothing went out is recorded with it, which is what you want a phone system to do at three in the morning instead of nothing at all. The five messages are yours to write, so the after-hours one can ask for the address and say whether you are actually turning out tonight, and the genuine emergency identifies itself instead of going to the next name.
About fifteen minutes for your five text-back messages and your hours. About an hour for the five lockout questions and the seven on the lock change, your trip charge, your per-opening rate, your travel zones and the two ceilings. Then a minute, once review requests are switched on for your account, to paste your Google review link on the HurraBell page and your mailing address on the Account page. Each priced service needs its base fee or minimum before it can go live. Your own texting number cannot go live until the carriers have approved your registration, and catching a missed call by itself waits on that same number. No onboarding call, no setup fee, no contract: all four tools for $199 a month.
Also cut car keys, or fit access control? The other trade pages and the compliance page are a click away, and for anything else, ask us.
Answer the door she is standing outside at twenty to nine. Quote the lock change she books the month after.
Set it up tonight. Free for 30 days, no card, no setup fee, cancel from the dashboard.