“I treat everybody like they’re my grandma,” Tyler Crosek says, “and I would recommend whatever my grandma needed to them.”
That is the quoting policy at Two Brothers Garage Door Services in Round Rock, and it holds because the company is so small. Crosek is the one who looks at the door, decides what it needs and writes the quote. He says he tries not to “take advantage of customers” or sell them things they don’t need. “And it’s just me, so it’s really easy,” he says.
The work is mostly residential repair, including springs, rollers, cables, panels and openers, along with new doors, in Round Rock, Austin and the towns around them. Commercial jobs make up a small share.
Springs are where the habit shows. The company’s site explains that a builder-grade torsion spring is rated for roughly 10,000 cycles, which at four openings a day comes out to seven to nine years. On a door with two springs, the second has done the same amount of work as the first and is likely close behind. So the company prices a job both ways, one spring or two, and tells the customer what shape the other spring is in.
A homeowner with an 11-year-old door that was getting harder to open described one such visit. Crosek needed about 30 seconds to see that the door was rubbing against the house, and he recommended an adjustment. The customer still wanted the single spring converted to two, and Crosek agreed, then suggested nylon rollers to replace the plastic ones. The whole job took about half an hour, and the customer came away saying there had been no hard sell.
The team is Crosek and one other man. He has one person he can count on to follow up on installs, and his public replies to customers name that person as Ethan. “I do everything, so it’s easier that way,” Crosek says. He expects to hire eventually and hopes new people “can look up to me as far as hustling and doing the right thing.”
How big to get is an open question for him. “It’s always been to hand it down to my kids,” he says. He would also consider selling: “If I could sell it for a good price, heck yeah, I would do it.” But he keeps coming back to scale. “I don’t want to be that big,” he says. “I think being small is where I want to be, family owned for sure.”
He came to the trade in Dallas, where a friend’s father knew someone at a garage door company that paid trainees for two weeks of instruction. Crosek signed up, worked for several companies after that and has been in garage doors since 2014. Owning his own shop was the plan from the start. “My dad raised me to never work for anybody,” he says. For now, he says, “I just want my kids not to have to work for nobody.”
Speed is the other thing he holds himself to. He tries to reach a customer the same day, and the next day when he can’t. “It’s always an emergency for the garage door,” he says, “so people don’t want to wait.”
He calls the pace a hustle and ties it to his family. “I don’t have time to sit around and say, ‘Oh yeah, well, how about tomorrow,’” he says.