How I built my portable self storage business

all right what's up you guys so i wanted to take a second and tell you guys about the story about how i got my portable self storage business started um i actually fell in love with the idea of self storage back when i was in her early high school i was on a trip to florida with my dad because my sister went to college down there and he had a friend down there from high school that we'd routinely go down there and visit so my dad and i would a couple times a year take a long drive down florida to visit my sister and also see his friend and on those trips when we'd visit his friend um i was always so excited to visit him because he was a real successful guy um he used to own his own accounting practice in orlando that he sold for billions of dollars when he retired in his early to mid 50s and ever since then he's been doing nothing but commercial real estate in orlando florida and as you can imagine was doing extremely well but one of the properties that he owned was a large boat and rv storage facility i mean i'm talking when you walked in there was just nothing but beautiful rvs and boats for as far as you can see probably a couple hundred thousand square foot in total boat and rv storage uh and i just remember touring that facility when i was probably in eighth or ninth grade just going wow you know thinking how amazing it was and he only had one person managing the whole property and you know at that age i knew that i wanted to be an entrepreneur and a business owner one day and it just really got me doing a lot of thinking it's like wow what a great business you know just storing people's stuff and you know it really didn't require a lot of employees or anything like that so i was thinking man this is a business i got to learn more about so you know in early high school i started researching storage and you know i was reading a lot of finance books i was reading about warren buffett i was reading rich dad poor dad and you know all these financial books learning how i can get into entrepreneurship how i can start my own business and again still early high school and i actually was in business classes in high school too and was participating in a in a business plan competition so i thought wow that's neat i'll i'll actually double up on this and do something for my business plan that i might actually do someday so i created this business plan um with a friend of mine for business class where we would actually take it and compete at a business competition and i ended up getting second place for my business plan where i developed um a plan to build a self-storage facility and rent it out and like i said i ended up getting second place which really took me off because i lost to a juice stand um but i did get second place had a chance to advance the states but anyhow that's just a small part of the story so in early high school i had no way of really implementing that plan i mean there was no way i was gonna go buy or build a facility i mean these things cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy or build on the low end and you know i just didn't have the resources to get that done so and later in high school i started to research how can i get started in this business on a small scale and when i was researching that that's when i stumbled across portable self storage you know i thought wow what a cool idea i could get started with one or two units instead of 100 or 200 units i could just get one two three or four units in a truck and a trailer although this is not my first truck and trailer uh but anyhow i thought wow you know what an awesome idea i could get started with a couple units all while still going to school still working um in the future so i could slowly grow this business over time so that's exactly what i did um you know i kept on this plan i started saving money and it was finally my sophomore year of college at west virginia university that i saved enough money to buy my first truck and my first four portable self storage units i bought them from troche out in wisconsin which is a big self storage manufacturer and they actually ship these portable storage containers basically as raw materials so you had to build the rest of them so i can remember coming home every single weekend for months on end and i'm not a super handy person but coming home for months on end um every single weekend from west virginia which was about a three hour drive one way to work on building these storage units and my brother was a huge help with that you know he pretty much pretty much helped me slash do all the work in building the storage unit so uh but long story short um after a lot of hard work i was able to get those first four units built and they immediately run it out i you know so they rented out so fast that i didn't even have a chance to get decals on some of them so in some of those units 10 years later today have been rented out the whole time to the point that i still don't even have decals on them and i just that's a funny little story but uh yeah so anyhow uh that's sophomore year college at west virginia um i got those built got them rented out and i continued to work at college continued the full-time schedule at west virginia where i majored in finance um and over the next couple years i just kept saving the money kept reinvesting the profits i was making from running those portable storage units and then i bought some more and then i buy some more then i graduated college and with my background in finance i went to live in philadelphia for a couple years working as a financial analyst at vanguard was there for about two years all while continuing to run this business on the side i would actually take all the customer calls still but schedule for my brother to do all the deliveries uh for me when i was at home and a lot of times i would still drive home on the weekends to make deliveries when he couldn't do it so a lot of work but anyhow i was able to make it work for two years and then uh you know it's about time to move home philadelphia is about five and a half hours from where i live in western new york and my longtime girlfriend i knew that we were going to be getting engaged all my family was back here so i knew it was time to make a change so uh even though i loved vanguard and what i was doing there i left that job moved back home and took a job as a commercial insurance agent in quarry pennsylvania bought my first house hack or first duplex so lived in one side running out the other to eliminate my housing expenses and then continue to work that job for two years but now i was at least close to home so i could do all my deliveries and nights and weekends keep the business growing so over those two years i continue to reinvest the profits continue to buy more and more units and then um fast forward two years i really wasn't liking the commercial insurance job anymore so i decided to leave insurance and just focus on my self storage business full time and at this point i had built my business up to 84 units and i'm really proud of that because i was able to do it all on the side of everything else i was doing a full-time career school but i was also to able to build the business to 84 units in a really rural market i mean i'm from climber new york and it's it's a farm town you know i graduated with 30 kids so i'm delivering these things kind of all over the county um to customers so i have a wide enough customer base so i'm pretty proud that i've been able to get to 84 units at that point um all on the side and in a small rural market so fast forward um six months uh my wife and i had just bought our first house together and i was still just doing self storage full time but that is when the city manager of the city of quarry contacted me who i developed a relationship for um with from when i was in insurance and he offered me a job as a business manager with my finance background and it's more of a finance and accounting position which is something i enjoyed more which was more up my alley and it was good pay a good opportunity to help out my local municipality in my career so i decided to take that job so that's what i'm doing today a couple of years later i am working as the business manager in an accounting in a finance position all while still um running my portable sales storage business only today i now have 96 units and my brother and i are in the process of closing on a bowling alley in warren pennsylvania that we're going to be converting to indoor climate controlled self storage where we'll actually be able to get about 118 additional storage units in that facility and then the outside of the building is all paved concrete kind of like what you see in here where i'm going to be able to park a bunch of my portable self storage units for advertising and also for outdoor storage and get my business into another new and bigger market so business is continuing to do well continuing to grow and i'm super happy about it it's an awesome business it's really similar to real estate you know i rent these portable storage units out month to month and i also develop revenue by charging delivery fees and moving fees when i move these containers around for my customers so it's really a great um residual income business um these units you see here in the back are actually some some of my oldest units that have actually rusted up a little bit so i'm working on those but all my newer units are you know beautiful galvanized steel don't rust out at all this is my new delivery system i upgraded to not long ago it's a this single axle truck this trailer and this machine so with this i'm able to take a portable storage unit just like that one back there using this machine i put these tires on one end of the storage unit down here and then this machine i drive into the other end of the storage unit and that allows me to drive the storage units around wherever my customers need them whether it's in their yard their driveway out back so i can leave this whole rig parked out on the road instead of trying to back it into someone's driveway or in their yard and then just use this machine to move the units wherever my customers need them and people have really responded well to that they love that um you know every time i make a delivery my customers are amazed and super happy that i am able to get the storage unit right where they need it and that's something my competitors haven't been able to do so it's an awesome business it continues to grow i really love it and if you're interested please check it out at www.box it also i would love it if you hit the subscribe button and the like button to help with youtube algorithm i'm really trying to give this youtube thing a chance um and and grow my channel my channel is going to be all about building this business um personal finance entrepreneurship and business you know i always thought uh how cool it would have been as a kid growing up if i could have gone back and watched videos of how my dad built his business you know i've been lucky to witness my dad build a pretty successful business for himself a trucking company we haul milk and juice for customers in this area uh but anyhow i always thought it would be so cool if i could go back and you know see how he built the business the challenges he faced and the successes he had so that's one of my goals for this channel too is to document the processes i go through this business now i've come pretty far in 10 years with this business but it's still a really small local business and i really want to take it to the next level so i'm excited that i'm now getting into this youtube thing now um because i don't have any kids yet um but i suspect that's probably coming soon and when that does i'm gonna be able to whether anyone ever watches my channel or not i'm gonna be able to send them back to all these videos and show them all the things that i was working on to grow the business in the early days before they were even alive and you know i just think that's really cool um it'd be cool for myself to come back and look at these type of videos in 10 20 30 years and i just hope my kids will one day enjoy that as well so yeah check us out www.boxinglocket.com hit the subscribe button and stick around to see some of the work that i got done uh today and see my whole system in [Music] action [Music] do [Music] mmm [Music] you

Channel: nick heil

Views: 1,732

Rating: 4.7808218 out of 5

Keywords: self storage, real estate, investing, business, entrepreneuriship, passive income, cash flow, money, small business

Id: YIaZPLi9k5I

Length: 15min 0sec (900 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 30 2020