When John Yoakum went out on his own in garage doors, he made himself a deal about time and money. More than two decades later, he still keeps it.
He did not set out to be in the trade at all. Yoakum planned to join the military. While he waited, he signed on with a temp agency, and the work it found him was in garage doors. The enlistment never happened, and the trade stuck. Eventually he decided he would rather answer to himself. Bulldog Garage Doors & Operators has been installing and repairing doors and openers in Lincoln since 2004.
The work covers homes and commercial buildings. On the commercial side that means rolling steel and sectional steel doors, the heavy kind that close up warehouses and shops. It is also the one thing the boss and his crew don’t see the same way.
“I prefer to do commercial all day long, but my guys would definitely prefer to do residential all day long,” Yoakum says. “We’re happy to do both.”
Two of the people around him are family. His son works for him, and his daughter handles what Yoakum calls “all the paperwork stuff,” the side of a trade business that never shows up in a driveway but decides whether the trucks roll on time. Bulldog presents itself as a family-owned company, and with his children in it, that is a plain description.
The schedule bends toward the customer with a broken door. Service calls get squeezed in as fast as possible, Yoakum says, and most residential service calls are handled the same day.
He thinks about the work in terms of value that runs in both directions. A job has to be worth doing for the people doing it, and the customer should come away feeling the money was well spent. One customer, in a review the company posts on its site, described buying new doors from Bulldog and then having the crew install openers he had bought somewhere else without any hassle. The company also helped him sort out warranty work on a bad circuit board in one of the openers he had bought himself.
Lincoln residents have noticed. The company holds a 2026 Lincoln’s Choice award, voted by the community, for garage door installation and service in the city.
The posted hours run 8 to 5, Monday through Saturday. Yoakum’s own day tends to run longer, and he traces that back to the deal he made when the business was new.
“When I started, I told myself if I had too much money, I didn’t need to go work an extra hour,” he says. “And I’ve never had too much money, so I always work an extra hour.”