Redgate Locks runs two vans out of a unit in Sheffield and serves two customers who have almost nothing in common. One is locked out at half past eleven at night, rings whoever answers first, pays and is never seen again. The other manages forty rented properties, changes the locks between tenancies, books three weeks ahead, and has been calling the same number since 2021.
Strategy is the work of noticing that those two are not one market, and that a decision made for either of them is wrong for the other. It is also the work almost nobody finishes, because finishing it means saying out loud which of the two the business is not for.
What one customer leaves behind, worked out in full
The emergency call-out bills £95. The van, the fuel and the hour cost £22, so the job leaves £73 behind and then it ends. The landlord's lock change bills £68, because it was booked rather than urgent, and costs the same £22 to serve, so it leaves £46. On those two lines the landlord is the worse customer, and that is where most of these sums stop.
The second half of the sum is the half that decides everything. What a customer is worth is profit per job times jobs a year times years they stay. The landlord books twelve lock changes a year and has been on the books for four. £46 twelve times a year for four years is £2,208 from one landlord. The locked-out tenant is worth £73, once. One landlord is worth thirty emergency call-outs, and the two are won in ways that share nothing.
That figure is the ceiling on every decision under this page. A firm that knows a landlord is worth £2,208 can afford to lose money for a year winning one. A firm that thinks the job is worth £46 cannot afford a stamp. Redgate spent 2024 advertising to the £73 customer, for the reason everybody does: the £73 customer is the one already searching.
The people who are cheapest to reach are worth the least
Reaching the tenant costs almost nothing, because the tenant is standing in the street with a phone, typing the thing they need. Reaching the letting agent costs a year of turning up, invoicing properly and being reachable on a Thursday afternoon in February. The market prices attention roughly right, which is the part that stings: the queue you can join today is the queue everyone else could also join today.
This is why where your effort actually returns something is a later question than it feels. The cheap channel is cheap because it reaches the cheap customer, and no amount of skill in it changes the £73.
Positioning is the sentence that costs you work
A positioning line a competitor would happily also say is not positioning, and most of them are. Fast, reliable, fully insured is painted on the side of every locksmith van in Yorkshire. It survives the test that matters only if the firm across town would refuse to print it, and every firm in Sheffield would print that one gladly.
Redgate's line, arrived at in March 2025, is that it does not take call-outs after six. It loses the £73 job every evening. It is also the only reason a letting agent believes the van will be free on a booked Tuesday morning, which is the whole of why them rather than everyone. A position that costs nothing has not been taken yet.
The order, and what happens when it is run backwards
Worth, then who, then what to say, then where to say it. Forwards, each answer narrows the next one until the last is nearly automatic: once the buyer is a letting agent with forty doors, the choice of where to find one is a short list and money is not on it. Backwards, the channel is picked first and every later answer has to be bent to fit a decision made while knowing nothing.
Redgate ran it backwards through 2024. An account was opened against the phrases people type at midnight, £1,900 went out over eight months, and the lockouts arrived exactly as promised. The landlord list did not move, because nothing in that eight months was aimed at a landlord, and nobody noticed because the account was reporting on the thing it had been asked to buy.
The order
Four answers, and only the last can be given without the others
Each answer narrows the one above it, which is why this is drawn as a staircase rather than a list of tasks.
- 01What one customer leaves behindProfit per job, jobs a year, years they stay. Three numbers and one afternoon with the invoices.
- 02Which customerNaming one gives another up. This is the step firms stop at, and stopping here looks like being busy.
- 03What to say to themA line the firm across town would refuse to print.
- 04Where to say itThe only step that can be taken knowing nothing, which is why it is the one that gets taken first.
The staircase says nothing about how long a step takes. The first is an afternoon. The second has taken firms a year, because it means turning work down.
Where this stalls: the segment nobody will give up
People stall at step two, and they stall there for a reason that has nothing to do with skill. Naming who the business is for means naming who it is not for, and that second half is a decision to earn less money this quarter. So the answer comes back as everyone who might need a locksmith, which is not an answer, and the work carries on looking finished.
The metric that keeps it looking finished is reach. Reach counts the people who could have seen it, not the people who did, and it goes up whenever you speak to more people less precisely. It is the only number on this topic that rewards refusing to choose, which is exactly why it is the one that gets reported. Redgate's reach in 2024 was the best it had ever been.
What to open in 2026
The free floor is two things. Google Analytics 4 shows what happened on the site; it replaced Universal Analytics, which stopped processing data on 1 July 2023, so every tutorial older than that is describing a product that no longer exists. Google Search Console shows the queries people actually typed to reach you, and it replaced the keyword data Google removed from analytics in 2011. Google Trends, free and without an account, answers whether demand is seasonal, which for a locksmith it violently is.
None of the three knows what a customer is worth after the first visit. That number lives in the invoicing, and the afternoon spent pulling it out of there is worth more than any dashboard, which is the argument measuring it, so decisions are not guesses has to keep making.
Six clusters, and the two that come first
Start with learning what the people you want actually do, because the £2,208 above came out of asking a letting agent how they had found their last locksmith, and the answer was a recommendation from a plumber. Then take the positioning decision, which is the one with a cost attached.
After those two, the stages, and the fact nobody moves through them neatly gives the counting frame, and it is worth reading for its second half rather than its first. The channel choice follows, then deciding what to spend before someone asks, which is the £2,208 turned into a monthly figure. Only getting attention on a date you chose stands apart, because a date is a constraint the other five do not have.
All of it sits under getting what you make in front of the people who want it, and the neighbouring problem, for anyone whose name is on the unit rather than on a contract, is building something that runs without you selling your hours. The tenant and the landlord also arrive at different pages and need different things when they get there, which is a design question first and is taken seriously at understanding what people need before designing anything.
The £2,208 rests on four years, and four years is the only number in it that nobody at Redgate has measured. It is an average across the landlords still on the books, which is to say an average of the ones who did not leave. What that figure actually is decides what the firm can afford to spend to win the next one, and whether it has been shrinking since the agency that referred half of them changed hands in 2025.