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We've all been there. You just cleaned out the attic or the basement or whatever and now you've got all this stuff you want to store elsewhere--Grandma's pink-fringed couch, Uncle Don's old kitchen table, Aunt Dottie's antique armoire.
So you rent the cumbersome, impossible-to-drive truck, con some hapless friends into helping you load the junk and then cart it off to some warehouse in the boonies, where you get to perform the unload-load procedure all over again.
All in all, it sounds like a relaxing way to spend a Saturday afternoon. Uh, maybe not. Two Chantilly businessmen, John Cercone and Tom Johnston, think they have a solution to this kind of storage dilemma, a plan that virtually takes the "self" out of "self-storage", at least as far as the customer is concerned. Their new company, Store to Door, offers something called "mobile self-storage," which is basically just what it sounds.
For $69 a month, Store to Door delivers a 280-cubic-foot storage vault--that's about 5 feet wide by 8 feet deep by 7.5 feet tall--to a customer's home or business. The customer fills up the container, which is covered with a special tarp to protect against bad weather, and then a few days later the company picks it up and takes it to its climate-controlled storage facility in Chantilly.
When items are needed from storage, the customer can either come out to Chantilly or the vault can be redelivered for free. The vaults have bar codes so they can be easily located in the 18,000-square-foot warehouse.
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"in these days of high-tech, sexy companies, we're low-tech, no sex...it's simple, it's stupid," said Cercone, 36.
What sets Store to Door apart from its rivals, Johnston said, is the service-oriented backgrounds of its owners. He and Cercone previously ran the local office of Safesite Records Management Corp., a Boston company that provided retrieval and storage of records for businesses and government agencies. In February, the closely held Safesite was sold to a competitor for $62 million, leaving the men searching for their next opportunity.
Together with James B. Wayman, the former chief executive of Safesite who now runs the Store to Door location in the Boston area, Cercone and Johnston hit on the idea of selling portable self-storage. The partners were drawn to the business's potentially recurring revenue stream and predictable expenses. They estimate in a year sales will reach $1 million, with profitability coming in 1999.
The trio invested about $2 million of their own money to launch Store to Door. The high start-up costs including renting warehouse space and buying storage units and trucks, are likely to deter prospective entrepreneurs from entering the local market.
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