Storage Wars
EZ Storage (now Public Storage) was our first “official” location near the University of Maryland, in Beltsville, MD.
What do you do when your small business can’t afford a full-sized commercial space? You get creative and adapt!
Navid and I founded College Scooters in the summer of 2010. What started as a small part-time hobby at our house while working at Verizon stores in the Ocean City area was starting to feel like it could be a real business by the end of the summer. In the early spring of 2011, we became “official” on paper with the state of Maryland, and proceeded to look for locations.
College Scooters’ earliest days are humble! Our first official location during the summer of 2011 in Ocean City was a 200 square foot commercial storage unit on 1st street, next to the recently opened Lazy Lizard (unfortunately more than half of these units have not been torn down for a brand new hotel development, so I think there’s only three left now out of the original twenty). Lazy Lizard was storing all of their backstock of liquor in unit one, and we were in unit three, slinging scooters to the beach town. Ocean City planning zoning granted us a business license and we got our sales tax certificate from Maryland. We were off to the races of entrepreneurship, one scooter at a time.
With me going to school at Salisbury University and Navid at University of Maryland, we figured it made sense to try stores in both markets. It was easy to find a spot in Salisbury, which is a rural city on Maryland’s eastern shore. Prices there were still pretty depressed (at this point we’re only 24 months past the financial housing crisis and the DOW Jones hitting its lowest point since the 90’s). We signed our first Salisbury store lease in August of 2011, for only 300 bucks a month! It was a tiny office space at the end of an industrial cul-de-sac, but it was only one mile from the university and would work just fine. College Park (where UMD is located) on the other hand, was not cheap, because it is only six miles from one of the most expensive real estate markets in the country - Washington, DC.
After searching and searching up and down the I-95 corridor trying to be as close to UMD as possible, we were starting to feel pretty defeated, thinking there’s no way we can ever afford a proper store in that market. We started to consider we actually need to get started, not what we want. Our list of needs was pretty simple: we needed a garage-style space, a safe area to work both inside and outside, the ability to take deliveries from large trucks, and to be “close enough” to UMD. We turned to our roots of starting small in a storage unit in Ocean City and figured why not try that in College Park?
After a few google searches, we found a storage facility in Beltsville, MD that actually had garage spaces. If you’ve ever seen a storage complex in a dense urban area, then you know the garage-style spots are actually super rare. Most facilities only offer small indoor storage spaces down a skinny hallway, usually on a second floor or higher… aka not conducive to a scooter shop.
We learned there was one garage unit available out of the four. Without hesitation we booked it online.
How we pulled this off, I still really don’t know. We literally operated a scooter “dealership” right out of a public storage building… but it worked. Customers came in droves to purchase our quality scooters for their campus commute and city travels.
All joking aside, I think our success at the storage unit came from a few avenues. The first being our website. At the time of our storage unit operation (2011) it was still common for small businesses to not have a developed website. By developed, I mean having all of their products listed, a thorough About Us page, contact forms, and lots of photo/video. I built our first website using webs.com (which was bought by Vistaprint and is now defunct), and we had it loaded with every type of scooter, YouTube video links with walkaround tours, multiple contact forms, and most importantly, BRANDING. We had brand colors and a custom logo, giving customers the impression we were a legitimate operation, despite operating out of a storage unit LOL.
Another avenue that allowed us success out of the storage facility was our professionalism and product knowledge. Navid and I wore professional polos, we answered our phones with the polish you’d expect from a big dealership, and we knew our product forward and backward. By the time our customers showed up at the storage facility, they were pretty much sold.
One of the funniest things about the storage unit operation was the reaction when people first showed up at our “location”. After arriving, they would usually call us and say something like, “Uh yeah hi, I think I’m lost. I followed the directions to your location in Google Maps, but I’m outside of a EZ-Storage facility.” We would them promptly tell them “No worries, you’re in the right spot, we’ll have ‘our’ security guard let you in the gate.” I still laugh about this often.
Regardless of the challenges presented by operating out of the storage unit, it allowed us to start a business in a costly market we otherwise couldn’t have afforded at the time. It allowed us to build our cash-on-hand to the point that after a year, we felt comfortable we could take the leap on a real commercial space that just became available closer to campus. If it wasn’t for the storage unit days, I’m not sure we would have ever built College Scooters to the level we did. It was a small step in the right direction for two busy full-time college scooters who were trying to capture the transportation business of a growing metro.