Creating a Safe Room with Samuel Fish

This is The Secure Family Podcast. Welcome friend, I'm Andy Murphy, the host, and I'm also the founder of The Secure Dad. This show is all about empowering parents to protect themselves and their family. I believe that security is the foundation of happiness, and I want your family to be safe and happy. The information that I share on this podcast is for general information purposes only.

First Andy, thank you for having me on. My name's Samuel Fish. Uh, I'm the founder of Shield Security Doors, and we manufacture custom high security doors, mainly for residential. Also some commercial, but anywhere that there is demand for both aesthetics. security. That's really our niche.

That's cool and it's good that you mentioned like aesthetics and security, because I think some people when they think security door, they think of like a vault from a movie or something like that. But it, this is, you're talking about like a door that you could put on the front of your home, right?

Bingo. The first thing that comes to mind for the majority of us when, when we talk about security doors is a big ugly steel door.

Mm-hmm.

That's what it conjures up. Um, our doors are designed to look like virtually anything. Uh, one of the best secrets good security. I. keeping it a secret. if your security door doesn't look like a security door, if it looks like a nice custom residential door or a four panel door, a six panel door, uh, perhaps whatever was on your home before or that matches the other interior doors in your home doesn't attract any attention to it.

And that's great. And that's a very good point. So, uh, what got you started in the security industry?

My grandfather was a locksmith. Uh, my great uncle was a lock distributor. My father grew up in, in my grandfather's lock shop, and he went on to, uh, start what one of the largest, uh, lock and key companies in the world called Ilco Unican. So, uh, if you are or any of your viewers have any keys in your pocket, I guarantee you some of them came out of, uh. Came out of his factories.

Wow. That's cool.

the environment that I grew up in. When I had a day off school, was in the factory and I thought that's what all school kids did when they had a day off. You go to the factory and work. Uh, so that's, for me, that's, uh, where it started. It, it's one of those things that's always been in my DNA, uh, one of my brothers works in the industry as well, and for myself. doors was the direction that I went in, uh, personally.

Right. Mm-hmm.

product. Um, and so that's how I got started in this business, uh, very much, uh, in my DNA.

Yeah, I would say so. So you're like third generation and, and, and dealing with this. I think that's great.

The biggest misconception that, uh, that I come across, and this is really a cultural issue for us, uh. love it. And you've talked about this before. You've talked about a, a culture of locking your doors when the reality is we have a culture of not locking our doors.

Right.

all have friends who say, oh, I live in such a safe neighborhood, or, oh, I live in a gated community. I don't lock my doors at night. it's one of the biggest mistakes we could possibly. Make. So from, uh, in terms of what's the biggest misconception or mistake, it's just not utilizing the tools that we already have available. Not locking your doors,

I, I, I agree. And like I used to get made fun of because, uh, I would lock my car in front of my apartment when I was in college and people are like, you lock your door. And I'm like. Yeah, like why don't you, this is just weird 'cause I grew up, I imagine like you in, in your household, the door was always locked when you weren't using it. That was just normal for me.

and, and it. For, for, for Americans. That's, uh, it's something that we clinging to for our own peace of mind and safety, telling people, oh, I live in such a safe neighborhood

Mm-hmm.

really important to us. And as a result, we have not developed a culture of security doors as exists in Europe. That market, that industry never developed. We don't have a culture of security doors. We ha we do have a gun culture. Which they do not have overseas, but we don't have that culture of security doors, which is the type of product that we make and are selling, but it's a very underdeveloped market here in the US compared to overseas.

All right, so let me ask you, you talk about, you know, the culture that we have here in the US of not wanting to lock our doors of living in safe neighborhoods. What are things like in Europe, because you're kind of referencing that. I wanna know what's. What's the, what's the other part of the globe doing? What's their culture?

So if you go to any middle class apartment in Europe,ill find a steel door with a multi-point lock on it. And usually a decorative wood skin to make it look pretty

Mm-hmm.

you walk up to the door, none the wiser. This is. You will find it almost everywhere in Europe, Western Europe, Eastern Europe. This is a normal product. A new apartment building gets built. Those are the type of doors that go in, even on older buildings. I mean, I, I remember, uh, my, my grandmother, my great-grandmother, uh, they were Italian. I remember on the doors in their apartments. were 20 locks on them going up in every which direction.

Okay, so you, you talked about a safe room just a second ago. Um, now I remember the, I think it was a movie with Jody Foster that had a safe room in it, and that was like. My, I think it was actually called Safe Room, but like that was my first introduction to the concept. 'cause you know, growing up I didn't have a safe room in my house. It just wasn't like something that I would've, would've done. But like, what does that mean to you? Tell me what a safe room is.

A safe room. Safe rooms come in many different shapes and sizes. primary purpose of a safe room is to buy you

Hmm.

in an a safe room is not where you are going to seek refuge in a zombie apocalypse. That's not what it's there for. safe room is there that if something, God forbid, happens. where you're going with your family. Locking the door. And calling the cops or calling for help or retrieving a weapon. Whatever you are gonna do in an emergency, you're going into your safe room to buy yourself time. That's the purpose of a safe room.

Mm

level is a five minute door.

Got it.

it means in a five minute test is that door is subjected to 30 man minutes of attack time. The 15 minute test, that's four and a half man hours of attack time. So everything is always a matter of time because if you have enough time, right tools and the right skills. You will get in anywhere. It's

Right.

of time. I will get into Fort Knox if I have enough time. So that's the underlying concept here for people to understand. rooms, security doors are all about buying you time to call the cops, to retrieve a weapon, to assess what's going on.

Right, and you make such a great point about it being, you know, measuring this in time, not in weight, not in inches thick or things like that. I make the joke, uh, to my friends that I can break into any house in America with two things, and number one is a chainsaw, and number two is time. So like. You can get in anywhere.

Yes, and they should. That doesn't mean the safe room has to have. A highly armored specialized door. It can be a hollow metal door that you're adding a few deadbolts to if you want to DIY something, do it. Uh, of course this really comes down to people's budgets,

Mm-hmm.

your budget is a hundred bucks, a hundred thousand or or 10 million, you can do something to create that safe room for you and your family. With a reinforced door, and it doesn't matter who you are, it doesn't matter if you're a celebrity. It doesn't matter if you're a politician, a wealthy business owner, unfortunately, you may need that room one day an emergency to buy you time crime can be, uh, very random and very opportunistic, and

Yeah.

We don't really know that we are a target or at risk until something happens.

Yeah, and that's, that's a lot of people's wake up call is they, they think, oh, I live in that nice neighborhood like we were talking about earlier. And oh, nothing would ever happen here until all of a sudden it's happening. And I usually caution people that when those things happen, I. You would have the thought, I would pay any amount of money for this problem to go away right now. And that's the preparedness aspect of this, which I think is really important.

Ideally, you want it to be a room that only has one access point,

Mm-hmm.

door into it. if it's on a second floor and there's a window, okay, that's not the end of the world because most likely. Whoever is trying to get into your home isn't gonna be scaling a ladder to get into the window. It's possible it happens, but for the vast majority of us, you want to have one access point. So it may even be something like a mechanical room in your home where you already have a fire rated hollow metal door. That's a great starting point, especially if it's an outswing door.

Mm-hmm.

yes, walls are very often a vulnerability. However, if you are the type of person that has a legitimate fear. Of someone coming through your walls, then you're in a different class of threat and risk. You're not just a, a normal person who wants to make sure that, oh, if someone ever broke into my home in the middle of the night to steal my tv, how am I gonna react? Because people breaking in to steal a TV or to steal jewelry, they're not coming to go through walls.

Right.

are opportunistic criminals who are looking for an easy target. They're looking for an easy I. Break in, and if your house is not that easy place, they're going onto your neighbors. They're not coming after you of who you are. They're coming after you. Maybe you live in a nice neighborhood, maybe you live in a nice home and they're just looking for an easy target because the lights are off you fit the bill.

Exactly. Or you've got a nice car parked outside and they wanna come inside and get the keys. That's, man, that's a growing one right now that you know you're advertising, oh, you've got a BMW outside. Well, the keys are inside, let's go get 'em. That seems to be the, the mindset of a lot of people. So when we're talking about. Picking a room in our home to be our designated safe room.

That is right. The vast majority of doors that we're gonna find in homes zero security. Very often when we are replacing some interior doors, I will ask a client, alright, send me a picture of what your existing door looks like. 'cause what I want to do is match the design. I don't want your safe room door to stand out in any way. I've long believed that the, the, the, the most important door in any home is the master bedroom door,

Hmm.

because in an emergency, that's typically where we're gonna seek refuge. That's where we're gonna run to. And maybe it's also a matter of, okay, grabbing your kids running into one of their bedrooms. Depending on the layout of some homes, it

Right.

be a hallway door. That leads to your bedrooms. Part of the trick to though to this though, is also being in the habit of locking that door at night. Maybe it's a question of locking your bedroom door at night, locking your master bedroom door. For people with young kids, that's not always possible, although there's upside to locking your master bedroom door at night, uh, when you have young kids coming to wake you up 'cause they, uh, can't sleep.

Right.

benefit as well.

Yep.

but that situation, if you are in the habit of locking a master bedroom door at night, we've all had our home alarm system go off in the middle of the night, wakes you up usually from the best part of your sleep, and it's a very disorienting, it takes time to figure out what's going on. Oh, did the neighbor's cat trip? The alarm? Did a gust of wind? Uh, blow open a door that wasn't properly secured. Is someone trying to break into the house? What's going on?

Mm-hmm.

had his bedroom door been the secure door, and he was in the habit of locking that at night. He would've been perfectly fine. There would've been an intruder in the house, but he would've called the cops and they would've arrived long before would've gotten into the bedroom.

Right. And that's, that's a great point that there was a lot of things that failed. I'm of course a big proponent of a layered home security strategy, and that's the core layer right there. That's if everything else breaks down, if you've got a strong door that is locked, that's that's gonna be there and that's gonna work for you no matter what, whatever else happens. So when you're looking at a safe room, what are some things that we should have in that room to help us in a crisis?

If you have a weapon, a great place to keep it because it's also a secure space for a gun safe, a door that you can lock that adds an extra layer of control and security around that and around people you don't want getting their hands on it, able to reach it. So weapon, ensuring that if it is, uh, a, making sure it's a room where you have cell signal.

Mm.

it's great if you are putting this in a mechanical room in your home with concrete walls and a and a preexisting steel door, outswing door. But if you don't have any cell signal in there, it's gonna be a lot harder to call for help. as I was saying earlier, a safe room is not really where you're gonna ride out a zombie apocalypse for that. You need a bunker.

Right, right.

It, it's a place, it's a, it's a space that's going to keep you safe and calm for 5, 10, 30 minutes until help can arrive. So, yeah, you might wanna have some water in there as well. You might want to have a toilet also, you people react very differently in these circumstances and some people need the bathroom.

Sure. No, that, no, that's, that's a great point. Um, I actually advocate that people still have a landline, uh, at their home. Even if it's 10 bucks a month, I say pay it. Uh, we have one and it's really just for calling out. Like, it rang yesterday and I'm like, I don't give this number to anybody. I don't know who this person is. I'm not answering it. So it's really just for me to be able to call, you know, for, for help in an emergency, you know, that sort of thing. Um, but yeah, we need to.

is always, uh, the best fail safe there, uh, because you can also have cell signal jammers.

Mm-hmm.

that if here we're talking about a, a more determined, more planned

Correct. Right.

or, or, uh, home invasion than the opportunistic, that is what 99% of us are worried about. Someone isn't coming after us because of who we are, our hope high profile or things like that. It's, you live in a nice home, in a nice area, and it looks like a, an interesting target. Uh, but all that to say yes, uh, a landline those who still have one, uh, a great place to put that phone is in your safe road.

Right. And, uh, like a lot of homes today are not, they're not including, you know, telephone wire in any of their stuff anymore. So that's, you know, if you have a, you know, a, a house that's been around for a little while, that's gonna be there. And in most states, you, even if you plug an old landline phone in, you don't have service. You can still call 9 1 1 from it. That'll be the only thing that you can reach. You can, uh, I don't know how much longer that's gonna be around.

There are, uh, few, every few months you'll typically hear, uh, a call. Um, an emergency call. Often it's, uh, celebrities in Los Angeles. Uh, this one came out publicly and she's not a client of ours, so I, I feel comfortable talking about it. Uh, Sandra Bullock had a situation

Hmm.

home invader, it was probably a couple years ago now, and she's talking to the police dispatch, and telling them I'm in. I closed my safe door. Uh, but she had a stalker. She had a home invasion. And, uh, that safe room kept her safe until the cops arrived and apprehended the suspect. Um, so that's a very real world example of something happening. Now, far more often we hear the stories of where a safe room would have made a difference, where it would've

Yeah.

where it would've prevented a tragedy. Those are the stories that we hear about most often that keep me up at night and that I carry a sense of guilt with because I look at these situations and say, we could have prevented a tragedy here. Uh, one story that, that I talk about often, uh, is that of a, a young girl in, uh, rural Wisconsin. Her name is Jamie Kloss, and she was followed home one day. Uh, from school.

Right.

Uh, the story of Jamie Kloss and her parents, Jim and Denise, that's something that we can all understand. Rural Wisconsin, middle class family, uh, both her parents worked at the local, uh, meat, meat packing plant, I believe it was. These are ordinary people and if they had, had a room, doesn't have to have a, a specialized drawer on it. Just a, a slightly safer place that they could have gone, the door and called the cops, it would've bought them a few minutes.

Um, think about the average front door that's on the home of a, you know, a middle class suburban house. Um, what makes, tell me the difference between an the average door and a security door. What's different? What are the upgrades? Um, kind of walk me through that process.

So the difference is I would say, one, having multiple locking points. A one inch deadbolt is great, multiple deadbolts is much better. So. Multi-point locking systems, or even if you're just adding additional deadbolts into your existing door, that you're doing is gonna be an improvement. So we don't have to strive for perfection, we're just trying to make things stronger. Improving the resistance. So one locking points, two steel framing or reinforced jam kits at very least.

Right.

what good is it? It's not gonna stop any bullets when it's open. Forced entry resistance for the vast majority of us is the most important security criteria in our doors. How difficult is it to break in? How difficult is it to break through? And that's the State Department forced entry testing that we do. Some of our clients also do need bullet resistance, but we always offer that as an option.

I like that. Yeah. And, and lots of great points in there. You brought up the, uh, the glass in the door. I remember watching a new story from, gosh, maybe eight or nine years ago, somebody had kicked in this poor lady's back door out in California, so she had a locksmith come and put a second deadbolt on the door. So great, wonderful. But the whole top half of the door was glass.

use the tools that we already have. Let's start with using what we already have, and that'll make a big difference.

So Samuel, you know, home security is not just one particular thing. There's a holistic approach to it. What are your thoughts on like a multi-point home security system?

Security doors and windows are one part of the equation and they're an important part, and I'll come to it afterwards, but lighting, alarms, those are all very important parts of a comprehensive security system. On their own, they are tools. For example, cameras, unless they're being monitored 24 7 are really an investigative tool to try and catch the bad guys afterwards. a camera probably isn't gonna stop. A determined intruder from getting in lighting will good.

And that's a very good point. Um, Samuel, I've had a really good time talking to you. Uh, today. Uh, this kind of takes me back to my roots in starting The Secure Dad with talking about home security so much. And it's nice to sit here and talk with somebody who's an expert, who, who has, uh, who understands things li like I do. We share a lot of the same opinions. So this was really cool. So if, uh, if.

is mine and, and thank you for the opportunity to, to be on.

Yeah, man. Um, so if people wanna know more about you and your business, where can they find you online?

So first at our website, shield security doors.com, uh, on Twitter at uh, shield Sec Doors, I believe it is. Um, we try to blog, uh, at least once a month. Uh, but for your audience, what is so valuable us is hearing. Real world, day-to-day examples and stories of their experiences with home security and what happens in the course of, uh, unfortunately a home invasion. How they reacted, what they did, what they didn't do, which instincts kicked in, what was helpful to them and what wasn't.

Mm.

so we, we developed a, a lockout system whereby he can lock the door from the inside, turn an additional thumb turn. That mechanically disengages the lock. So even if someone came with the key, you can also apply this to a husband and wife situation, uh, with a marital dispute that goes horribly wrong, uh, where one is trying to kill the other. Uh, it allows us to have to provide someone inside with the peace of mind to know no one's getting in, even if they have the key.

That is awesome. So Samuel, thank you so much for your time today. I appreciate what you're doing and, and being able to create a product that's gonna help so many people. Man, God bless you. I appreciate you.

Thank you, Andy, and have a good rest of the day.

That's all we have for The Secure Family Podcast for today. Thank you friend for listening. Thanks again to Samuel for being on the show. For more on him, visit ShieldSecurityDoors.com. Take back your privacy and personal data with help from DeleteMe. Get 20% off our privacy plan when using the code Dad at checkout, DeleteMe is the official data removal service of The Secure Dad. If you are a DIY person and you wanna secure your home, then I have the ultimate checklist for you.