JT Bailey got into garage doors in December 2004, working on Cape Cod and the islands off it. Much of the work was on Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard. “A lot of high end work,” he says.
Springfield, Oregon, is a long way from there, and Bailey allows that it is “a little bit different.” The habits came west anyway. On the islands, he says, crews were trained to work in fine detail and to very high standards, and the “big dollar jobs” they did all the time required it. When he started All County Garage Door, he brought that training with him.
The training shows up in the schedule. Bailey is the sole owner of a small company, and he says its size lets him keep quality control tighter than a bigger outfit could. He also says he does not overwork his technicians. The company does plenty of service work, but a new installation gets room in the day. “I want to make sure that they have the time to do that job correctly, perfectly,” he says.
He does not want to hear anything negative from a customer once the job is done.
Bailey spent his first seven years in the trade working for a franchise. All County is not one. He says it has no contract with any supplier or manufacturer that obliges it to carry a product, and nobody tells the company what to push. It sells Amarr doors and LiftMaster openers, among other brands, because over the years he has seen good results from them.
Some in the business will say franchisors don’t steer what their dealers sell. Bailey doesn’t buy it. “I worked for a franchise for seven years when I started this trade,” he says. “It happens.”
Most of the work is residential. Bailey says he prefers working with homeowners and home builders, and the company takes some commercial jobs without chasing them. All County is licensed in Oregon, sends its own technicians rather than subcontractors, and covers Eugene and Springfield out to Creswell, Pleasant Hill, Junction City, Cottage Grove and Veneta.
He has one rule for when something goes wrong on a job. “If there’s any issues, like particularly quality issues or damage or something to the door, we’re not going to try to cover it up,” he says. “We’re going to point it out to the customer.”
A homeowner who replaced a decades-old wooden door saw that follow-through. Of the several companies he contacted, he wrote, Bailey was the only one who came out to bid in person, and he talked through the unusual construction of the garage. When a minor problem turned up after the install, Bailey worked out a fix and swapped the part under warranty once it arrived.
The standard Bailey sets for a finished installation runs long. “We don’t want to have to go back for many years after we do that installation,” he says.