Category: The BSS Journey

Part 3: Removing Walls and Rewiring Merit House may look tired, but structurally it’s solid — reinforced concrete columns and floors, built in an era when overengineering was still fashionable. The first real physical step was simple in theory:remove the internal partition walls and strip the building back to an empty shell. When choosing contractors,…

Part 2: The Planning Permission Merit House was built in the 1960s as a beer factory. Over time it became a sign-making workshop — Merit Badges — and eventually picked up the name Merit House.(Yes, I could have renamed it Allcam House or BSS House. No, I didn’t bother.) From the start, the building carried…

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…