Woman Risked $7,000 to Break Into Male-Dominated Locksmith Industry, Now She's Booked Around the Clock

'I'd never held a screwdriver in my life,' Sahar Yona says of the day she fell into locksmithing. She was unemployed and interviewing to answer phones at a locksmith's office when the person across the desk suggested she try the trade instead.

Five years and about $7,000 (£5,250) in tools later, the 27-year-old runs her own around-the-clock locksmith business in New York City and says she now fields as many as 60 jobs a week. She founded Locksmith Girl of NYC, a residential and commercial operation she launched under its current name in July 2025, and orders her days around being reachable. To catch overnight calls, Yona keeps two phones and a laptop turned up loud beside her bed because every job counts.

The $7,000 Bet Behind Locksmith Girl of NYC

She came to the work with no background in it. After the 2021 interview, Yona spent roughly two years training, applying for a licence, and buying equipment before the job paid her anything, putting about $7,000 (£5,250) into her first set of tools. Only then did she begin taking work as a subcontractor for larger locksmith firms.

She had reckoned the odds could work in her favour. Being a woman in a trade run by men, she reasoned, might give her an edge, and she describes herself as a 'go-getter'. Yona became her own boss in November 2024, she said, after repeated misogyny from customers, peers, and bosses. She would not share figures, saying rates vary with the difficulty of each job, but said she earns more running Locksmith Girl than she did as a subcontractor. For context, the jobs site Indeed puts the average locksmith salary in New York at $76,745 (£57,600) a year.

The field she entered is overwhelmingly male. Women make up fewer than one in 100 of the more than 5M installation, maintenance, and repair workers in the US, according to US Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

What a Viral TikTok Did for Her Locksmith Business

The jobs did not arrive through paid advertising. Business was quiet in January when Yona filmed a TikTok pitched at women who did not want a male stranger in their home late at night to deal with a lock, urging them to call her instead. The clip ran past 600,000 views.

Work followed, from men and women alike, up to 60 jobs a week. Yona had noticed over her years on the job that many women felt uneasy letting a male technician in during a vulnerable moment, and built the company around that. Its website casts Locksmith Girl as a woman-owned Manhattan business, though she has since stressed that she serves everyone. The work spans apartment lockouts, lock changes, rekeying, smart-lock installations, and tenant turnovers, along with commercial door jobs.

The days can run long. On her busiest, Yona said, she worked from 4 a.m. until 1 a.m. the following morning. A call over dinner can mean a friend climbing into the car to ride along, though she says those moments are getting rarer. She admits to thinking about work almost constantly, and to a measure of paranoia about the next job.

More women have signed up for the classes taught by Jennifer Richards, a fourth-generation locksmith and member of the ALOA Security Professionals Association, over the past three years, she said.

For now, Yona is putting the momentum back into the business, scouting a physical storefront for Locksmith Girl of NYC, a step up in overheads for an operation she has largely run from her phone and her car. Between calls she practises picking locks, drawn to 'the defiance' of legally getting into places built to keep people out.