I didn’t pick the name Garage Doors Plus because it sounded good on a truck.

I picked it because I knew exactly what kind of company I wasn’t going to run. I’d spent six years in the industry before starting GDP, working for a national company, doing commercial doors, docks, residential installs. And I kept running into the same wall. The moment a job had anything beyond the track and the opener, anything structural, the answer was always the same: “That’s not our department.”

So the client would have to call a contractor. The contractor would show up two or three weeks later, maybe. The door install would get pushed. And that homeowner would end up managing two or three different companies just to get their garage functional again. You know, that’s a frustrating situation to watch, especially when you know the problem is solvable and you’re just not allowed to solve it.

That’s where the Plus came from. Not a branding exercise. Just a decision about what we were going to be.

What We Actually Do When We Show Up

When someone calls us, they’re calling because their garage door is broken. But the door is rarely the only problem. You start to see that pretty quickly once you’re actually out there doing the work.

Maybe the header is rotted out. Maybe the framing is out of square. Maybe the siding around the opening needs to be replaced because a previous installer cut corners years ago. Maybe the opening itself is too narrow and the homeowner’s truck doesn’t fit. There are a lot of ways a garage door situation is more than just the door.

Most garage door companies will tell you to call someone else when they run into that stuff. We handle it. Either directly, or through subcontractors we’ve worked with long enough to trust. We widen openings. We replace headers. We reframe walls. We refinish siding. We install service doors. Whatever it takes to make the opening work the way it’s supposed to.

The Problem Behind the Problem

Here’s what I’ve learned after 13 years: the client doesn’t really care about the door. What they care about is the problem the door represents. They can’t park their car. They can’t get into their house. They’re worried about security, or they’re embarrassed because the door looks terrible and they’re trying to sell the place. The door is just where it shows up.

So if I show up, replace the door, and leave them with a framing issue they now have to manage on their own, I didn’t really solve their problem. I sold them a door.

I had a client a few years back who called because they wanted a new garage door. Pretty standard request. I went out to measure and noticed the opening was too narrow for their truck. They’d been angling it in for months, scraping the mirrors every single time. You could see the marks on the frame.

I could have sold them the door they asked for. That would have been easy. But it wouldn’t have fixed what was actually wrong.

So I laid out their options. Replace the door as-is, or widen the opening by 18 inches, reframe it, match the siding, and give them a door that actually worked for how they live. I told them what I would do if it were my parents’ house.

They went with the wider opening.

That’s what the Plus means in practice. It’s not about selling more. It’s about solving the real problem. The one they called about, and sometimes the one they didn’t even know to ask about.

What That Approach Has Built Over Time

After 13 years, roughly 75% of our business comes from word of mouth. That number still gets me a little when I say it out loud.

That didn’t happen because of marketing. It happened because when we show up, we actually handle the whole problem. And we’re honest about what that looks like. If we think there’s a potential issue we can’t confirm until we’re into the job, we say so upfront. And if it doesn’t end up being an issue, it comes off the bill. No surprises, no padding the estimate to protect yourself.

That’s not typical in this industry. Most garage door companies are fighting for every lead, buying ads, running promotions. We do some of that too. But the majority of our calls come from people referred by someone we worked with before. Someone who trusted us enough to put their own name behind us.

That’s worth more than any ad campaign we could run. And it’s a lot harder to fake.

Why the Name Still Means Something

People ask me sometimes how I came up with the name. I always kind of laugh, because it wasn’t anything complicated. It was just: we’re going to be the garage door company that does more. That was the whole thought.

But the more we’ve grown, the more I realize the name functions as a daily standard. For me, for my team, for the way we answer the phone and the way we close out a job.

Not every job goes perfectly. We have callbacks. We have jobs that don’t go the way we planned. But how you handle those is part of it too. You go back, you make it right, no argument. That’s what “Our Word is Our Bond” means in practice. It’s not just a tagline.

Did we actually do the Plus today? Did we solve the real problem, or just the easy one? Did we leave that client in a better spot than we found them?

Those aren’t complicated questions. But they’re the right ones to be asking.

Every day, the name is on the side of the van, on the invoice, on the sticker we put on the door when the job is done. And it either means something or it doesn’t. For us, it has to mean something.

That’s why it’s the most important word in our name.