Nick Rutledge installs garage doors with tools that, as far as he knows, no other company has. He designed them for himself, and he won’t part with them.
“I’m not aware of any other company that has those, because these are tools that I’ve specifically designed for myself,” he says. “I don’t sell them to anybody else.”
The point of the tools is repetition. Rutledge says they let him put a door in the same way every time, to the manufacturer’s specifications. He started Guaranteed Overhead Door in Midwest City in 2014, he is its only owner, and he has no interest in growing it past the point where his own standard reaches every job.
Garage doors were the family trade. His family owned a door business, and he grew up around it. They sold it while he was in high school and moved to Texas. He stayed behind to finish school and took a job with another door company in Oklahoma. Later he joined his family at their new company in Texas, came back to Oklahoma, did other work for a while, and then opened his own shop.
The company handles both residential and commercial doors, and Rutledge likes having both. A commercial call breaks up a run of homeowners’ garages. “You don’t get burned out as fast as what you would just doing the same thing over and over,” he says.
He keeps returning to the idea that a garage door is more machine than people assume. “Most people just think you push a button and your door goes up and down,” he says, “but there’s a lot of moving parts to a door.” So he explains. If the rollers are worn, he wants the customer to know why that matters. If someone asks why springs are dangerous, he walks through how the whole system works.
That starts on the phone. A caller who asks only for a spring hears that not all springs are the same and not all doors are the same. He remembers one customer thanking him for answering every question. The company’s spring-repair page describes the same habit in the shop’s own words: technicians weigh and measure each door on site and work from charts and torque calculations instead of installing whatever spring happens to be on the truck.
Rutledge treats the trade as something he is still learning. “You can never know everything there is to know about anything,” he says. He tracks changing products and which manufacturers have improved, and he says he wants to give customers what he would want for himself.
The trucks carry enough parts that many repairs can be finished on the first visit, the company says, and its listed service area runs from Midwest City and Oklahoma City to Edmond, Yukon, Shawnee and Lake Texoma. When someone is on the way to a job, Rutledge says, the customer gets a heads-up so nobody waits around all day.
He does not run a staff of employees. The people who work with him are contractors, often men who own their own businesses or moonlight, and the number varies, with five or six on average. He says they are all people he has come to trust over the years, and a couple of them are people he learned from.
He has no wish for a bigger payroll. “I don’t want to be this big company that has 20, 30, 40 employees that I gotta deal with,” he says. He wants the work to stay personal, and he thinks size would end that. “At that point everybody just becomes another call,” he says, “and you can’t maintain that family-owned personal business when you do that.”
One of those contractors has been around longer than the company. He is the man Rutledge went to work for after his parents sold the family business. “I’ve known him since I was 17,” Rutledge says.
The two still trade work. “If I need help on jobs, he helps, or he’ll run calls for me,” Rutledge says. “I run calls for him.”