Purr-Fect Lock

Larry Stadler had a solid career as a train conductor for CP Rail when a friend asked him for help with his locksmith business. “I said, 'I have a union job and it doesn’t really fit',” recalls Larry. But he went anyway, just to try it out. “I started learning some things from him and over the following year I found I was good at it.” A year later, Larry applied to the province for his own business license and started Purr-fect Lock Inc.

The business name might seem a bit different from the usual names associated with locks and security, but it makes sense once you know how much Larry loves cats and the many he has adopted over the years. At the time he started Purr-fect Lock Inc., Larry's wife had a pet-sitting company by the same name so he thought it would work for him too. “The other locksmiths ribbed me about it for sure," he laughs. "It wasn’t a very macho name, but I went after a different market. I would predominantly get a lot of females phoning me because they needed someone they could trust. It seemed to work. Over the first few years it was 70 per cent women that would call.”