A Rock River Door technician running low on fuel will call the customer from the road. He says he has to stop at the gas station, then asks whether he can grab them a cup of coffee or a Gatorade on the way. “It’s the little stuff,” Al Stephens says.
Stephens owns the company, which works out of Rockton, Illinois, and serves homes and businesses on both sides of the Wisconsin line. He thinks about his crew’s arrival the way he thinks about hiring help for his own house. “I don’t do plumbing. I think I can, but I’m going to hire a professional in case I can’t,” he says. Then he watches who turns up. “You see the guy that shows up, how he’s dressed and what he’s saying, how he’s talking. If he comes up in a rusty old Ford Ranger with no lettering, there’s red flags that you look out for.”
He decided no one working for him would ever be the man in that truck. It registers with customers. One homeowner who had an opener replaced wrote that the technician phoned ahead, arrived on time, and that his work truck and appearance confirmed the choice.
Stephens started the company in 2008 after working for another door company that, he says, was not paying enough attention to what customers needed. “I just thought I could do it better, and turns out I was right,” he says. At first it was Stephens and one other man in a truck. He says the company now has seven service techs and installers.
Garage doors, overhead doors and access systems remain, in his words, “kind of our bread and butter,” for homes and businesses alike. When he bought Rockford Door Company, it brought a division doing storefront repairs, entry doors, hollow metal doors and door closers.
Much of the structure behind the crew’s habits, Stephens says, came from a mentor he has worked with for about four years, a man he describes as the owner of the biggest door company in the country. Stephens has gone to seminars and events with him and sends his technicians to his shop in Arizona for special training every few years. He says the technicians are trained through the IDA and hold certifications.
The company always treated people right, Stephens says, but the mentor brought more operating procedures. “It’s all about procedure,” he says. The procedures themselves are basic, simple stuff, in his telling. The payoff is consistency. “If you follow the procedures, everything rolls a lot smoother.”
The team meets weekly. When someone is not following the procedures, there is a one-on-one. “We don’t lose employees because they’re treated right. They can be honest,” he says.
New hires start in a truck, riding along with people who have been with the company for years and watching how a call is run. Whether a recruit already has training in fixing garage doors, Stephens says, “is irrelevant.”
“We want them to learn how we do things different, what sets us apart,” he says, “and they learn that from the guys that have been around for a long time.”