News and Security Alerts

Reprinted from FranchiseHelp.com

Sooner or later, every driver locks the keys in the car or gets stuck at the side of the road with a flat tire. When it happens to you, who you gonna call? 1-800-popalock is the national dispatch number for Pop-A-Lock®, the world's largest full service locksmith service and specializes in door unlocking. "Pop-A-Lock has over 2,000 mobile technicians in the field," reports Pop-a-Lock CEO, Don Marks. "We provide service to more than 4,000 communities across 38 states.”

Pop-A-Lock® was founded by two former law enforcement officers in Lafayette, Louisiana in 1991. They had been opening locked car doors as a public service the old fashioned way for years. But when vehicle locking and latching systems started to get sophisticated, they found the common methods like "Slim Jims" didn't work anymore. Worse, they were likely to damage the car. Still, the officers thought they had a good idea for a business and proceeded to do exhaustive vehicle research and invested in specialized tools that would work with the new locking technologies. The result was the Pop-A-Lock service. It caught on quickly and the company started franchising in 1995.

The service is operated 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Marks says. "Day or night, when a customer calls the toll free number, the call is routed automatically to the local franchise operator. In almost all cases, we reach customers within half an hour. We can unlock a car in a matter of seconds or maybe a few minutes depending on the car. Or we'll fix a flat tire, give a jump-start if the battery is dead, or bring you gas. We are fast and we never close. And there's really no competition. The only alternative is to call a towing company or wait until the next day to call a locksmith."

Customer service is key
Marks says Pop-a-Lock is dedicated to customer service. "We'll never leave you stranded on the road. That is our company policy. If we discover that the car problem is a major one that we can't fix, we'll stand by until additional assistance can be rendered. In bad weather or late at night, customers appreciate that kind of reassurance," proclaims Marks.

Pop-A-Lock is also known for its Emergency Car Door Unlocking (EDU) Program. "We open cars for free if a life is threatened or a child is locked in the car," says Marks. "Those calls get first priority every time. So far, we have rescued over 200,000 children from locked vehicles. It's an important community service, which is why you will often find our number in the 911 section of the phone book along with the fire and police departments."

This is a retail business with the majority of Pop-A-Lock calls coming directly from the general public. But Marks says a significant percentage of business comes from referral services, "from mall security to bars." He adds, "We are also the largest service provider for road clubs like Allstate, Geico, AAA, and Allstate. When your car is in trouble and you call GM, for example, you think it's GM. It's really not. The call has been routed through to us."

The biggest is getting bigger
Marks says the franchise is in the middle of expansion. "We really want to get to 90% of all the metro markets because we have a lot of big referral customers who need us in all states. About 70-80% of our franchisees own more than one unit. Those are mostly people in major metropolitan areas running them like the big businesses that they are. But, this could fit into the smallest market because the road clubs and national accounts need our services even in small communities. We have franchisees from very sophisticated business people to small town car door unlockers. We are just as interested in the small guys as we are in the big guys."

"What we want and what the big national accounts want is universality," continues Marks. "We want customers nationwide to recognize and rely on the technician driving up in the Pop-A-Lock car wearing his Pop-A-Lock uniform and badge. We want them to know that he's going to be there to help in half an hour and he's going to do a great job and they are going to be back on the road in 2 minutes."

Marks says the goal is for Pop-A-Lock to dominate the market. "We offer sustainable, strategic, competitive advantages. We consistently do what others can't and won't such as investing a great deal of money on consumer research. Based on that research, we have expansive training abilities and we know how our technicians should look from the uniforms to the security badges. And all of our marketing is guided by that research, too. That's why we are the largest provider to road clubs and the largest service of this kind anywhere in the world," asserts Marks.

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