Something to Believe In

Something to Believe In

Companies by Mark Gordon | Managing Editor

An entrepreneur who disdains risk has still managed to grow his business - in revenues, employees and product lines. It starts with faith-based principles.

The story of how novice entrepreneur Steve Wilson grew a one-shop self-storage business into a five county conglomerate stretching from Tampa to Naples, plus two additional business lines, isn't exactly a Rockefeller-esque read out of Business Growth 101.

"I'm not a businessman at heart," Wilson candidly admits 30-plus years into running Hide-Away Storage Services, recalling that he even suffered a full-blown panic attack the initial time bulldozers dug up land on the first piece of property he ever owned. "I'm not a risk-taker."

Wilson's story is still inspirational, though, as well as educational. For one, Wilson learned all aspects of the business on his own, save for some challenging real-estate appraisal classes he took in the mid '70s. Over the years, his self-made schooling has included everything from writing a business plan that can project five-year trends to learning the nuances of commercial real estate development to the specifics of branching out into new storage connected business lines and products.

And what's more, Wilson has successfully incorporated his Christian beliefs into nearly every aspect of the business, from signs in front of stores to the company mission statement. While he's far from alone in mixing religion with business, his successful experience can be useful for other business-owners and entrepreneurs seeking to utilize a similar philosophy. (See related story on page 7.)

Wilson, 64, is president of Sarasota-based Hide-Away. It's grown about 10% a year the last five years, to about $12 million in 2006 revenues. The firm has 73 employees.

That growth, Wilson says, is despite a slowdown in one of the company's newer product lines, what he now considers the industry's linchpin: Mobile storage units, such as the ones made popular in the late '90s by Clearwater-based PODS Inc. and other companies; sales in Hide-Away's mobile storage division hovered around $1.5 million last year, off 15% from 2005.

Career change

The chain of events that took Wilson from business rookie to president of a $12 million company began in 1977, after his mother died. Wilson, then 35, was all set to put the $20,000 inheritance he received into a savings account or a CD.

But he had a newspaper reporter's curiosity about the self-storage business. Indeed, Wilson's first career was as a reporter, initially as a foreign correspondent for the AP News Service in New York and Tokyo, and later, as a county government reporter for the Bradenton Herald.

Wilson was thinking of changing careers around the time his mother died. He and his wife Maureen - high school sweethearts who met while growing up in Indianapolis - chose the Gulf Coast as the place to raise their family, and he was looking for a job with better financial prospects.

And Wilson's curiosity was especially ignited after an aunt in Naples held a desk for his daughter in a self-storage garage there. The industry was in its early stages then, and Wilson figured he could put his inheritance into it, find an "old guy in a rocking chair" to manage it and watch it grow. He miscalculated.

"Little by little," Wilson says, "we just got sucked into the self-storage business."

The first facility Wilson put together was on Cortez Road in Bradenton, the site of his panic attack that nearly derailed the business before it got going. Through 1990, Wilson continued to add self-storage facilities in multiple Gulf Coast locations, adding new features as the industry matured, such as much-needed climate control. Hide-Away facilities are now in Tampa, St. Petersburg, Bradenton, Sarasota, Fort Myers and Naples.

Wilson realized it was going to take a full-time effort to grow Hide-Away, so soon after opening the first facility, he gave up the idea of ever returning to write for newspapers or work as a real estate appraiser.

What's more, as the business was growing, Wilson, who considered himself an "aggressive atheist" as a teenager and through his college years, grew into Christianity. There was no epiphany, no darkness to light moment, he says, but looking back, it was something he wanted to do for a several years but didn't completely understand.

The transformation was important past the purely religious aspect, too. It enabled Wilson to focus his religion on Hide-Away, giving him a greater purpose to build the business upon some Christian principles, none of which the company shies away from in its promotional and marketing materials. For example, a company card of core values includes a commitment to display God's love and that people are more important than things.

Says Wilson: "I think most people are glad to do business with someone they know believes in something."

'Chasing finances'

In both the religious and business growth, Wilson has learned that he always seems to have more to learn.

The business side has presented several challenges, starting with the real estate phase: Finding the land, buying it and then getting the permitting and permission to build on it.

The difficulty, Wilson and other Hide-Away executives say, is the self-storage business moves at a turtle-like pace, meaning it could take up to five years into a project to realize the location is bad, the market is shrinking or there's another fundamental problem. It could take almost four years for a facility to become fully rented, Wilson says.

Another constant challenge and learning lesson for Wilson is figuring out how to motivate staff to regularly look for improvements and innovations in an industry that essentially has little sense of urgency; the customer normally rents the storage space for long-term purposes, not to flip it like a condo. As such, there are very few instant decisions that need to be made.

"We need to make sure our customer service and quality improves," says Wilson, "even when there's no immediate demand to improve it at one time or another."

One way Wilson attempts to accomplish that is by an incentive pay system that rewards performance.

Finding financing has also been a long-term challenge for Hide-Away. The task is complicated, Wilson says, because the company has multiple facilities in multiple counties that are in different stages of maturation, and success. Plus, some banks have balked at long-term loans, given the time it takes for self-storage facilities to become hits.

Over the past year, though, as Wilson has added several executives to his senior management team, he also began to look into long-term financing that would cover the whole company, not just some facilities in piecemeal. He found it with John Hancock Life Insurance, where he recently signed a 25-year, $49 million agreement. "This is first time in a decade we don't have to go chasing finances," Wilson says.

Three-legged stool

A line of credit is a big help to Wilson as he looks to continue leading Hide-Away's growth in areas outside of self-storage. He's looking at new business lines, and has been for the past five years, simply because supply in self-storage on the Gulf Coast has caught up with demand, he says.

The future in the industry, Hide-Away executives predict, is both in providing mobile storage and moving services. Both of those lines come with pitfalls, though.

In mobile storage, there is competition, mostly in the form of PODS Inc., which pioneered a self-contained storage bin concept in the late '90s and has since taken it national. Also, the slump in the housing market has meant less people are moving, which in turn means there's less mobile storage needs.

And on the moving side, the challenges include having the right number of people to do the moving, as well as liability and insurance concerns. Hide-Away has been providing moving services in some form for about five years, and last year it became the Sarasota-area agent for Stevens Worldwide Van Lines.

Wilson is not fazed by the challenges to growth, despite his initial resistance 30 years ago to even owning his own business. He says the three business lines put together are like a three-legged milking stool: One leg is a place for storing stuff, a second leg is for the labor of storing and moving the stuff and the third leg is the transporting the stuff. "We are trying," Wilson says, "to become everything you need."

Review summary

Company: Hide-Away Storage Services, Sarasota

Business: Self-storage, mobile self-storage and moving services.

Key: Seeking revenues in new lines of business to continue growing company; Maintaining Christian principles in daily approach to the business.

Christian principles and business 101

Michael Pink and David Johnson, two Gulf Coast-based proponents of mixing business and sales techniques with Christian principles, have another core belief, beyond the Bible. Essentially, it's not about religion.

And that's not just a defense mechanism from years of having to account for and explain their philosophy to some unbelievers, Pink and Johnson say.

Instead, it's based on the simple idea these principles make sense in all aspects of life, not just inside a church, says Pink, who has written several books on the subject, including "Selling Among Wolves," in addition to consulting with dozens of big and small businesses, such as Lucent and Cisco.

"I don't see any disconnect from the scriptures to the bible to business," says Pink. Neither does Johnson, who runs Sarasota-based Epiphany Consulting.

"This applies to people who say 'I'm trying to accomplish something,'" Johnson says. "Being in business just to make a buck isn't cutting it anymore."

Through Selling Among Wolves, Pink says the Ten Commandments can serve as motivation for successful sales efforts to grow a business. Here are three examples:

• Honor Thy Mother and Father: In religious terms, this commandment recognizes the need to feel secure and have boundaries. But in sales terms, showing potential customers the boundaries and the risks of going past those boundaries is essential in developing a rapport with the customer, Pink says.

• You shall not commit adultery: Pink says past the obvious rule, this commandment is about making it clear the spouse is preferred over all others. In business, that works by showing customers, in actions and policies, that they are preferred over others.

• You shall not covet: Contentment, says Pink, is being satisfied with what you do have, while covetousness is thinking you'll be satisfied with what you don't have. Therefore, any good sales technique includes helping your customers become content through the product or service.

More information is available at www.sellingamongwolves.com and www.epiphanyconsulting.net.