Look Out for Luck - It Can Change Your Life

Bob Smith has been working in construction since he was a teenager and exclusively in commercial door, frame, and hardware installations since his mid 30s. As he got older, he realized his body would not be able to endure the demands of physical labor for much longer. Four years ago, he was presented with a fortuitous opportunity to try his hand at repairing damaged doors, something he had never done before. Smith took a chance and accepted the job, and he has pursued that path ever since.

With the tools and supplies in these carts, Smith can repair damage to virtually any door.

That day four years ago, Smith received a phone call from a salesman at one of the companies he worked for. The salesman had a door repair job, and the regular subcontractor he usually called was too busy to do the job. The salesman knew Smith had built, repaired, and finished period furniture and thought he would be able to perform the repair.

Smith was able to do the repair in approximately twice the amount of time it should have taken him, but he charged the company for less than half the hours he put into the job. “I thought it would be worthwhile for my future to do a good job,” Smith said.

He made mistakes, and had to re-do his work, but he completed it by teaching himself on the job, using skills he had learned building and repairing furniture. Smith realized this kind of repair work was something he liked doing, and over the next year, he was offered a few more door repairs. “I was slowly learning; I was learning from my mistakes,” he said.

As Smith hones his techniques and continues to learn, he also refines his tools and the way he stores them. The drawers in these carts allow him to organize his tools and supplies in a way that makes them easy to find when he needs them.

At the end of the following year, that same salesman called him again to look at another repair job in a $50 million mansion in the District of Columbia with sixty-two custom-made doors and frames that had been damaged when they were installed. But this time Smith declined the job, suggesting the salesman needed the skills of the subcontractor, “the master,” as Smith phrased it, who had been too busy to do the first job Smith did.

Then luck swooped in.

The day “the master” and his team started the repairs, Smith was working in the same building. He asked if he could watch as they did the repairs because he was trying to learn as much as he could.

“These two wonderful fellows worked with me for the rest of the day, sharing every secret, every trick, every shortcut, every step that they used to make repairs that you couldn’t see from a foot away when you looked at them,” he said. “They took my skill level from at that point about a three, to I’d say a nine.”

This picture is the "before" view of one of two hotel doors Smith worked on. The doors came with cut-out areas for locks to be installed. Except, the hotel had not asked for the doors to have locks.

This picture shows the "after" view of the two fully repaired hotel doors.

In one afternoon, Smith participated in what turned out to be an intensive crash course in how to skillfully repair doors. None of what he learned was what he had anticipated. “Everything was so simple and so logical,” he said. “All you needed to do was know the proper steps and the correct materials to use to effect the [door] finish. None of it was what I thought it was.

Since that afternoon, the percentage of repair jobs Smith is doing has gradually increased to approximately forty percent of the work he is doing. “My goal is to get to one hundred percent [repair work] within two years,” Smith said.

Lately, Smith has been thinking a lot about luck. His father was a big believer in luck. Smith believes, as his father did, that people do not often think about luck “and how much luck plays a part in your life,” he said. “It’s luck that I was sent out to that job, it’s luck that I made that discovery, and it’s luck that I got two really wonderful guys to just, honest to God, share secrets that I, right now, guard with my life.”

Smith loves doing door repairs. “It’s something I enjoy. It’s pleasurable,” he said. “I make my customers very happy. I make myself very happy at the end of the day.”