Category: The BSS Journey

Part 1: The Architectural Plan How do you convert an old building into a self storage warehouse?The first sensible step is to ask people who already do it for a living. I sent the existing layout drawings of Merit House to three specialist self storage builders. Two responded fairly quickly. Within three weeks, I had…

Tuya isn’t a new name to me. I’ve seen it pop up in all sorts of products over the years, and in my mind it always meant one thing: You can control devices using your phone instead of a remote control. In fact, my office furniture company (Allcam) even sells a TV lift that features…

You’ve probably seen it before. A child shouts “Alexa, switch on the living room!” and the lights come on instantly. Nobody touches a switch. Nobody even stands up. It feels like magic, and you think: If a ten-year-old can do this, surely automating a self storage building should be easy. That technology is IoT. The…

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…