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Tell us about your business
ALS Locksmiths was originally founded in February 2015 by John Williams and was taken over in September 2022 by two employees : Daniel Cleeve-Evans and Mark Pouncy . Backed up by over 100 years of accumulated experience in the industry , the company prides itself in offering a reliable service with a fixed price policy to reassure their customers of no hidden costs .
The company has seven locksmiths working for it who have experience ranging from two to 34 years in the trade . With eight full time employees , they also have a shop West Street , Fareham , in Hampshire , and cover the whole of the South Coast . At the time of writing , they have they have 454 Check-a-Trade reviews and a proud score of : 9.94 .
How did you get into locksmithing ?
This is a question we always have to ask ! It ’ s so inspiring for other locksmiths , Daniel commented : “ Personally , I joined the trade while at school , working Saturdays and holidays for Centre Security
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Ltd . My brother already worked there and got me a ‘ foot in the door ’. Mark Pouncy joined Access Key & Lock in 2005 after trying working in a couple of other trades and has continued from there .”
What ’ s this * New * Safe Photo Wall ?
There ’ s always something new in business , and , indeed locksmithing . Daniel told us : “ We ’ ve always done a bit of safe work : removals , installs , servicing etc , but in the past few years , we ’ ve built a great working relationship with
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a number of high-end safe distributors . This has resulted in a substantial volume of work and the sector has been really growing for us ; allowing us to expand our area of coverage and also now means we are limitless on the size and weight of the safes we can handle . We have recently created a ‘ photo wall ’ which shows all our recent work and helps us display our capabilities to any suppliers that visit our shop . Our plans for this year are based on carrying-on doing what we do best and keep-on growing the company .” |
What is a typical day like in your business ?
It ’ s great to hear that no matter what business you ’ re in , it always starts with a cuppa … Mark commented : “ The shop and office opens at 8:30am and the kettle goes on before anything else ( an industry standard we have , reluctantly , grown to live with ).
“ Then the engineers are given their jobs and stock for the day ( if they hadn ’ t already received it the day before ) then we hopefully don ’ t see them for the rest of the day . We usually keep at least one engineer fairly local , to cover any emergencies that come in . Then the usual day to day frantic life of running a business comes into play , this coupled with running the shop , booking in jobs , replying to emails , answering the phones etc , myself and Daniel are kept busy throughout the day .
“ The shop and office then close at 5pm which is when the 24 / 7 out of hours service kicks-in which is operated fully by myself and the on-call engineer ( s ).”
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