From IT Tech to Business Owner: Building SA Lockout Pro

I've spent eight years fixing other people's infrastructure — federal systems at CBP, enterprise migrations at USAA, and more recently, phone repair and field IT work. At some point you start asking the obvious question: why am I only building things for other companies?

SA Lockout Pro started as the answer to that question. It's a mobile locksmith service for San Antonio, operating as a DBA under my LLC, and it went from an idea to a live website with automated lead intake in a matter of weeks.

Getting the Legal Structure Right

The business runs as a "doing business as" name under my legal entity, GetGreenTech LLC, which I formed through Northwest Registered Agent. That distinction matters more than people think — the LLC is the legal structure that owns everything, and SA Lockout Pro is the public-facing brand name it operates under for this specific service.

Filing the DBA turned into its own small lesson in due diligence. Northwest Registered Agent quoted me $150 to file the DBA paperwork on my behalf. Since GetGreenTech is an LLC, the correct filing actually goes through the Texas Secretary of State, not the county clerk — and once I confirmed that, I filed it myself directly through SOSDirect instead of paying a 10x markup for something I could do on my own.

EIN and a dedicated business bank account were already in place under GetGreenTech, which kept the business finances cleanly separated from day one — something I'd recommend to anyone starting a side business, even a small one.

Building the Infrastructure Before the First Customer

Because I already run a homelab with Proxmox, Docker, and a small fleet of Raspberry Pis, I had the pieces in place to stand up real infrastructure instead of just throwing together a basic site.

The domain, salockoutpro.com, runs on Cloudflare Registrar — cheap, reliable, and it let me skip paying for Google Workspace by using Cloudflare's free email routing instead. The website itself is a small Node.js/Express app, with an automated deploy pipeline that picks up changes shortly after I push to the repo. No manual deploys, no SSH-ing in every time I tweak a sentence on the page.

Lead intake is automated through n8n, routing new inquiries straight into a dedicated Telegram bot so I see them the moment they come in, whether I'm at a job site or asleep. That's the same automation backbone I use for monitoring Atlas, just pointed at a different problem.

What's Next

The site is live, the DBA is filed, and the lead pipeline works end to end. The next milestones are getting the Google Business Profile fully verified and continuing to refine the site for local search visibility, since most lockout calls happen in the moment someone's locked out of their car — they're searching on their phone, and showing up in that search matters more than almost anything else.

Building SA Lockout Pro reinforced something I already half-knew from the homelab side: the technical setup is rarely the hard part. Knowing which parts of the legal and business process to do yourself, and which advice to ignore (looking at you, $150 DBA filing), saves more time and money than any infrastructure decision ever will.