How Much Do Locksmiths Earn?
When you are considering a career, at any age, one of big incentives is the wage you can earn when you have completed your training. There are many high paid jobs out there; solicitors, the police, a doctor, and they all come with years of training. If you believe what you read online, you can earn 60 to 100k a year as a locksmith Leeds after only 3 days of training, ever heard the old saying if it sounds too good to be true is usually is? Well in my opinion locksmith training is no different. I’m not saying don’t do it, I’m saying if your going to do it make sure you have all the facts first.
While there may be the very odd exception to the rule, earning this kind of salary after such a short period of training must be viewed as unrealistic, to say the least. Think about it logically for a minute; if you only had to give up 3 days of your life to them make that kind of money every man and their dog would be training to be a locksmith. The word ‘earnings’ itself is a grey area as they could be implying this is your turnover, and that is a very different kettle of fish. Turnover represents all money brought into the business, not the actually profits after taxes and materials, vehicle costs etc.
This is the kind of blurb that unscrupulous trainers, many of whom have only completed a 3 day course themselves, to entice people in who are looking to train in a new trade. A common target for locksmith training courses is to target obviously target people with money to burn. Often this is people who’ve been made redundant and have a pay out to spend or military people who are leaving and using there army credits to pay for courses. You can’t deny that some locksmiths do indeed make a very good living, but they put in an awful lot of hard work, have good business sense, work very long hours and it has to be said, experience a certain amount of luck when it comes to their clients. Sometimes good things just fall into your lap but 99% of the time you have to put hours and hours of work in to pick up the good contract or repeat work type customers.
It takes a long time to learn the locksmith trade, then you have to establish yourself and earn a reputation so you have a quality customer base and constant referrals. Being a locksmith is not a way of getting rich quick, it has to be viewed in the long term. Its not unrealistic to think you might not make any profit at all in the first year or two.
Think back a few years before UPVC double glazing and everyone had wooden doors and a Yale lock. Now look at the mechanisms behind today’s multi point locks, this shows how much both locks and locksmiths have progressed in recent times. Take a locksmith from a couple of decades ago and ask him, without the relative training or experience to fix a lock on a modern front door and he wouldn’t have a clue.
Your earnings as a locksmith will depend on a number of factors. Are you going to be a general locksmith or specialise in an area such as cars or safes? Are you going to work for a company or go down the self employed route? Do you live in an area where there are few locksmiths so you can charge top dollar or somewhere saturated with locksmith so you have to keep your prices down? Are you prepared to be a 24 hour locksmith to make more money on emergency call outs? Being a locksmith is a very satisfying trade, but not one that will let you retire after a year or two. I don’t want to discourage anybody from having a go at becoming a locksmith, that is certainly not the purpose of this article, but if you are going to take the plunge you need to have the facts and be prepared to put the hard graft in.
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