Locksmith Business Plan [What to Include + Free Template]

“If you don't have any vision of what you actually want to accomplish, the odds of you getting there are very slim.”

Those are the words of Chris Hunter, service business owner and founder of Hunter Super Techs, paraphrasing a quote attributed to Yogi Berra. It proves the importance of a business plan for startups and established locksmith businesses. They need it to attract funding, create a growth roadmap, and understand the locksmith industry landscape.

However, despite its importance, a business plan can only be effective if the writer incorporates three key elements that are equally valuable to both the investor and the business owner:

• Market demand

• Business idea feasibility

• A clear growth plan and path to profitability

This guide explores the step-by-step process for writing a business plan incorporating the above elements. We also reveal a business template and how to use ServiceTitan—all-in-one locksmith company software—to accelerate business growth.

To learn more about how ServiceTitan can help you run your Locksmith business more efficiently so that it’s optimized for growth, you can request a demo with our team.

What is a Locksmith Business Plan?

A locksmith business plan documents a company’s goals, the strategy and timeline for achieving them, and the target market. 

Beyond attracting investors, anyone who wants to start a locksmith business must create a business plan as it sets up the company for success. Creating a business plan also helps a business owner understand their target market and devise strategies to surmount potential roadblocks.

Often, people conflate a business model with a business plan. Although both are crucial documents for starting a locksmith business, their application, level of detail, and impact on the business differ.

A business model contains a company’s plan for creating and delivering its services profitably. Conversely, a business plan contains business objectives, an implementation plan, and a timeline.

What Should You Include in a Locksmith Business Plan?

The hardest part of writing a business plan is starting with a blank page. It can be difficult to logically organize your thoughts and decide on the right information to include.

Recognizing this difficulty, we created a locksmith business plan template with the key sections and information logically arranged to facilitate easy understanding.

1. Executive summary

An executive summary is an abridged version of the entire document. Here, you introduce the company, pitch your business idea to the reader, and prompt them to flip to the next section.

Dedicate the first section of your executive summary to revealing your business name, vision, and mission statement. Next, mention your business location, the company’s leadership team, other employees, and a brief summary of their relevant experience.

Although this is the business plan’s first section, it’s advisable to write it last to capture the details in the other sections and write a compelling summary. However, if you find a blank page daunting, draft a placeholder summary and review and refine it once you finish with the other sections.

2. Business overview

This section can be seen as the direct opposite of your executive summary since it’s a more detailed description of the business. It reveals the state of the business (if it’s an established business), the reason for starting it (if it’s a new one), and the goals you hope to achieve.

The business overview typically starts with an elevator pitch—a brief paragraph explaining the business idea and services. Anyone reading it should be able to understand what the business is all about without reading the rest of the document. Here’s what a locksmith business plan elevator pitch looks like.

X is a locksmith company based in Y. This region has multiple homeowners, local businesses, and property management companies struggling to deal with burglaries. X will provide Master key systems, electronic locks, smart locks, lock installation, and advanced security devices to help them cope with security threats and protect their personal assets.

Following the elevator pitch, mention your business structure—sole proprietorship, partnership, or limited liability company—and competitive advantages that separate you from other locksmiths. Then, give a breakdown of your startup expenses, but defer a detailed analysis for the financial plan section.

3. Services

Now is when you reveal the products and professional locksmith services you’ll offer customers to generate revenue. You’ll need to justify your decision using your expertise, the location’s demographics, and the pain points of your target customers, such as security challenges.

Before writing this section, pick between serving businesses (commercial services) and homeowners (residential services). Then, list the services you currently offer and those you plan to add in the long term. 

Here are some examples:

• Mobile locksmith business

• Car locksmith business

• Creating duplicate keys

• Commercial locksmithing

• Installing new security systems

• Security consultations

The last detail to include here is your preferred billing method—flat rate or hourly pricing—and the tools you’ll use to facilitate high-quality service delivery.

4. Market analysis

Running a successful locksmith business is almost impossible without deeply understanding the market landscape. That’s the role of market analysis (or market research).

Market analysis involves gathering data about other locksmith companies, potential customers, and industry trends. Such insights help validate demand and reveal information for outperforming other locksmiths and creating effective marketing strategies.

Market research encompasses three complementary sections: target market analysis, competitive analysis, and SWOT analysis. Let’s explain each one in more detail.

Target market analysis

This involves identifying your ideal customer profile and estimating the total addressable market compared to the number of competitors.

First, identify your target market, such as homeowners looking to secure their homes from recent break-ins and burglaries.

Next, create an ideal customer profile document outlining their demographics, location, income levels, property sizes, etc. Since these data will guide important business decisions like marketing, consult multiple materials and perform surveys to ensure you get it right.

Finally, estimate the total addressable market using data from the United States Census Bureau, industry publications, local news outlets, and reputable market research firms.

Competitive analysis

Make a list of the top five direct local locksmith companies. Identify their marketing strategies, customer base makeup, revenue, and business model. 

The essence of this activity is to discover their successes and learn from their failures instead of starting from scratch.

SWOT analysis

This involves identifying your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. You can represent your findings on a whiteboard or Excel document.

After completing this, outline a value proposition you plan to use in upstaging competitors. Will you offer lower prices? Are you niching down? Or are you adding something to your services to stand out from the competition?

Chris Hunter succinctly explains creating a unique value proposition that resonates with your target market.

“Why would somebody choose you? What makes you better than the other umpteen companies they can call very easily?” he says. 

“By identifying why you're better, whether that's your guarantees or warranties, whatever it may be, it not only helps you with your marketing message, but it also helps your team.”

Speaking about running marketing campaigns, ServiceTitan has an all-in-one marketing platform called Home Services Marketing software that allows users to create, track, and manage multiple campaigns from one tool.

Even better, the software measures campaign performance using generated revenue instead of vanity metrics like calls and clicks. This is important since not every call or click converts into a booked appointment.

ServiceTitan’s Home Services Marketing software achieves such precision using dynamic call insertion (DNI), which assigns unique, trackable phone numbers to each campaign.

This allows the system to automatically attribute each booked appointment to the source campaign, rank your campaigns using generated revenue, and show you the geographic locations generating the most calls.

Such detailed and precise analytics allow locksmith business owners to optimize their campaigns for revenue and identify areas of improvement early.

5. Marketing plan

Your marketing plan details how you intend to promote your services to potential customers, the progress benchmarks, and the metrics and tools for gauging progress.

Start this section with your value proposition and ideal customer profile. This ensures that your marketing decisions and messaging resonate with people who matter most—potential customers.

For your marketing plan to be effective, adopt a multi-channel approach encompassing low-cost digital marketing and offline channels. This comprehensive approach can cultivate an online presence, reach non-internet users, and grow a local presence.

Here are some examples of such channels:

• Search engine marketing

• Search engine optimization (SEO)

• Creative, attractive signage

• Fliers

• Email marketing

• Pay-per-click advertising (PPC)

• Email marketing

• Direct mail

• Creating a locksmith website

The last portion of your marketing plan should reveal the metrics and tools you intend to use to measure the performance of your campaigns. You could invest in premium tools for each marketing channel if you have a large marketing budget. For example, you could use Mailchimp for email marketing, Ahrefs for SEO, Postgrid for direct mail, etc.

However, to save costs and avoid the hassle of switching between multiple platforms, consider investing in ServiceTitan’s Marketing Pro platform, built specifically for trade companies.

The platform has tools appropriate for email, direct mail, and PPC ad campaigns. This allows you to streamline and automate your marketing campaigns across multiple channels from one platform and avoid hiring extra marketing specialists.

Notably, the platform lets you automate reputation management from start to finish.

You can create automated workflows that send customer review requests once a technician completes a job. When a customer leaves a review, the platform automatically notifies you or a member of your team.

The person in charge of the process can log into the reputation dashboard, which collates reviews from 60+ platforms. The dashboard filters the reviews to discover negative ones, and the person in charge can respond to each without leaving the platform.

ServiceTitan’s Marketing Pro platform also has multiple analytic dashboards that track campaign performance using generated revenue.

Managing your marketing campaigns from one centralized platform gives you instant visibility into campaign performance data, allowing you to allocate your marketing budget efficiently.

Pro tip: Combine this section with your sales strategy to cover all bases.

6. Management summary

The management summary is your opportunity to spotlight the people behind the company’s operations and demonstrate their ability to run and scale the business profitably. It also reveals how you plan to structure your decision-making process and allocate authority and responsibility.

Start by creating an organizational chart. Prioritize the key functional units—leadership, operations, finance, accounting, people management, sales, and marketing. 

List the heads of each department and every employee that will report to them. You should detail their qualifications, experience, and certifications to convince financial institutions to fund your endeavor.

In theory, creating an organizational chart may seem applicable only to companies with employees. However, it’s advisable to sketch a preliminary structure. This proactive approach ensures a smooth transition as you scale and hire, with clear roles, responsibilities, and reporting lines for each new team member.

The last portion of your management summary should contain a table indicating the professional locksmiths, back-office staff, and their respective salaries. You should also include how much you’ll be paying yourself.

ServiceTitan created two key tools to help locksmith businesses streamline the management of their business operations and boost employee productivity: Field Reporting software and the Service Scheduling platform.

The Field Reporting software displays business performance using default and custom-built reports. Users can also program the software to deliver performance reports directly to their inboxes at specific intervals—yearly, monthly, quarterly, and daily.

ServiceTitan’s Field Reporting software also has scorecards that provide a high-level overview of employee performance across metrics such as revenue, customer satisfaction, total hours worked, and close rate. You can adjust the scorecard using filters like date, job types, business units, and sales.

This allows you to offer assistance to employees who are struggling and identify areas for improvement.

ServiceTitan’s Service Scheduling platform allows dispatchers to bulk-create recurring jobs, select pre-set arrival windows, or create a custom one according to the customer’s needs. This ensures efficient scheduling so technicians remain productive and arrive on time, boosting customer satisfaction.

Users can also use the Service Scheduling software program to track valuable scheduling performance metrics such as job booking sources and appointments by service type.

These data insights help locksmith companies identify scheduling inefficiencies and optimize for faster arrival times to complete more jobs daily, increasing revenue.

7. Financial Plan

This section is a critical element of every business plan, considering the importance of a healthy financial state to every business. Additionally, every business idea remains a dream without a financial investment to cover startup expenses.

People starting a new business can begin this section with a breakdown of everything they’ll be spending on—labor costs, business licenses, general liability insurance, locksmith licenses, equipment purchases, and utilities. List their respective costs and add a markup to items like inventory exposed to price fluctuations.

Conversely, established businesses can begin with a financial statement detailing their income, profits, and expenses. This statement reflects the company’s current financial position and is helpful in creating budgets and making near-accurate financial projections.

In the next section, established and new businesses should include five-year projections for the following financial elements:

• Balance sheet

• Cashflow 

• Break-even analysis

• Profit and loss statement

• Pricing strategy

• Income statement

Recognizing the importance of a stable financial position to trade companies’ success, ServiceTitan created the Customer Payments and Contractor Payroll platforms. Both platforms help locksmith businesses to streamline their financial operations.

The Customer Payments platform empowers field techs to accept multiple payment methods using their tablet’s built-in camera (for check and credit card payments) and a BBPOS (business beyond the point of sale)-powered Bluetooth swiper (for card payments). 

Back-office staff can immediately access every on-field payment to clarify your company’s financial situation in real time.

ServiceTitan helps field technicians increase their conversion rates by providing flexible payment options.

Furthermore, ServiceTitan’s Customer Payments platform automatically reconciles electronic and cash payments and deposits them into your business bank account in 24 hours. No more standing in long queues or waiting days for payments to clear. This makes it easy to maintain a stable cash flow and accurate accounts.

ServiceTitan’s Contractor Payroll platform automatically updates technicians’ drive time, vendor runs, and wrench time to their timesheets. Employees can clock in and out on the platform, and the time automatically reflects on your dispatch dashboard, helping dispatchers know who is available for new jobs.

The platform also allows you to create custom payment structures and track each project’s profitability. This ensures that employees receive fair compensation without putting you out of business.

Both platforms allow users to manage their finances without rummaging through mountains of paper documents or tracking items in a spreadsheet.

Pro tip: empower your technicians to invoice in the field with ServiceTitan’s Invoice Generator.

8. Operations Plan

The operations plan covers how you plan to run your business and the strategies you’ll execute to accomplish the goals you mentioned in the other sections. It details the people responsible for each task, deadlines, and success benchmarks.

When writing this section, start by outlining your long-term and short-term goals. Remember, the two should be interconnected, with each short-term goal leading up to the long-term. 

For instance, your long-term goal is to sell X service contracts by Y years. A great short-term goal that can help you achieve this could be reaching out to X number of customers and prospects daily.

After outlining your goals, here is the other information your operations plan should cover:

• Tools, equipment, and materials

• Service delivery process

• Recruitment plan

• Daily business operations

9. Appendix

This last section contains essentially any additional information and links to supporting documents—referenced resources, data sources, carts, tables, permits, and research studies. Also, avoid placing any important information here since people will likely skip it.

If your appendix extends beyond two pages, add a table of contents to enhance readability. However, always try to keep it brief and to the point.

Why Write a Business Plan for a Locksmith Company?

“If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.”

That’s a quote attributed to Benjamin Franklin, and it perfectly depicts the importance of writing a business plan. It provides clarity and creates a trackable success roadmap for your business.

Chris Hunter’s experience running a business without a business plan emphasizes the importance of writing one. 

“We didn't have a plan. It was, ‘Let's just keep doing what we're doing and hope we get better.’ It was just a bunch of hope.”

Once he updated his plan, his company grew from single-digit profitability to double-digit profitability.

Below are five reasons and benefits for writing a locksmith business plan.

• Proves your idea is viable, which helps to attract investors and convinces financial institutions to lend you money.

• Reveals potential roadblocks, helping you create a plan for overcoming them. This reduces the risk of running a business.

• Identifies emerging trends, allowing you to create offers and strategies to get ahead. You can use this to create a plan and messaging to stand out.

• Communicates business goals and objectives to team members. This keeps everyone aligned and focused on the same goals.

• Helps you set daily and long-term goals. These will serve as success benchmarks and give you and the team something to work towards.

Over to You

With this knowledge and our template, you can create a locksmith business plan from scratch.  Your business will be more likely to succeed when you do so.

Chris Hunter states, “The best companies out there, the ones that are highly performing, they're all doing this [creating a business plan].” 

“If someone's not doing this, it's never too late to start. Don't be intimidated by it. You don't have to be perfect the first year; you just need to get started. Every year you do it, this thing can get even better.”

Invest in comprehensive locksmith software like ServiceTitan to manage and streamline your business operations. Take advantage of the tool’s multiple tools to grow your business.

ServiceTitan is a cloud-based software streamlining key business processes like marketing, accounting, and job management. Join thousands of contractors nationwide already using the platform to grow their revenue.