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After digging into the numbers in Chapter 11, one thing became painfully clear: if you want to survive in self storage, you need to automate as much as you reasonably can. Costs rise faster than revenue, and the only “flexible” cost you can truly control is staff time. So the question wasn’t whether I needed…

“Humanless” self storage doesn’t literally mean a warehouse with no staff at all. Some parts of the operation will always require human involvement — especially anything related to safety and responsibility. For example, every new customer still needs a proper induction: These are things no app, chatbot, or fancy lock can replace. But “humanless” does…

My instinct told me that self storage should be a good business.But instinct alone doesn’t pay the bills — or offset £2,000 per month in business rates and utilities on an empty building. So I decided to dig into the facts.Not glossy marketing brochures or industry hype — but the actual financial accounts of some of the…

Unlike residential estate agents — where quality varies wildly from region to region — the commercial property world is far more consolidated. Most major players operate nationwide, with only a handful of smaller firms specialising in particular regions. For most of my career, I actually had decent experiences with commercial estate agents. In the early…

Over the past two decades, the UK — like the rest of the world — has seen an explosive rise in e-commerce. New warehouses popped up everywhere, and old buildings were converted into logistics hubs at a dizzying pace. According to the ONS report “The Rise of the UK Warehouse,” the number of UK premises…

People often imagine that small business owners have it easy — that we sit behind desks giving orders, delegate the hard work, keep all the profits, and enjoy flexible hours with plenty of freedom. Reality couldn’t be further from the truth. In a small business, when someone calls in sick, quits suddenly, or simply doesn’t…

The racking columns arrived in packs — each roughly five tons in weight and eight metres long. My forklift looked tiny beside them, more like a toy than a machine. I stood there, hands on hips, thinking, How on earth am I going to unload these monsters? You might ask, “Didn’t you expect them to…

I hadn’t even begun negotiating when it happened. Both factories, eager to break into the UK market, saw my project as their golden ticket — their first UK demo site. And before I could even open my mouth, they were already competing with each other. Emails flew back and forth like a ping-pong match.Prices dropped…

I’ve visited many factories over the years — some impressively large, filled with the rhythmic clanging of metal and the hum of production.Our monitor arm supplier, for example, has about eight workshops, each roughly 40 by 100 metres. At the time, I thought that was big. Then I visited the automated warehouse racking factories. To…