Gadi is in his late twenties and has been doing this for about fifteen years, which does not add up until you hear how it started. His older brother was running locksmith work down in Palo Alto, and Gadi was a kid handing him tools and watching. By the time most people are choosing a career he already had one. It came from the house rather than from a course.
He grew up in the Bay Area and moved into San Francisco on his own later. He lives in the Mission now, which is why the business is on Mission Street and why he is usually a few minutes away rather than an hour. The van is parked on these blocks because this is where he is anyway.
What he is like to deal with
Calm, which matters more than people expect. Most of our calls catch somebody on a bad evening. Locked out, late, cold, annoyed at themselves. The useful thing in that moment is not urgency, it is somebody showing up unbothered who has done this a thousand times and is not going to make you feel stupid about a door that closed behind you.
Direct about money, too. He will tell you when a rekey does the job instead of new hardware, even though the new hardware pays better. People notice that, and it is most of why the reviews read the way they do.
Spanish
Fluent, not conversational. In the Mission that is not a selling point, it is the basic requirement, and it is the difference between understanding a job and guessing at it.
What he actually does
All of it. Residential, commercial, automotive, which is the real base of this trade whatever anybody tells you. He is strongest on car keys, which is the part he enjoys, and the van is kitted out for it with two cutting machines and the programming gear. Access control and low voltage work goes to a specialist we have worked with for years, because that is its own trade and pretending otherwise gets doors broken.
The company
Quick Locksmith Inc, licensed by the California Bureau of Security and Investigative Services under LCO 7840. Registered at 2431 Mission Street, San Francisco, CA 94110. 4.9 stars across 130 reviews on Google.
The thing we would point at is not any of that. It is how many times somebody in this city has needed a locksmith in the middle of a bad evening and Gadi was the one who turned up.
