Jefferson Shreve never thought he would get into the self-storage business, not even after he did.
The owner and president of Storage Express has facilities in 107 locations across five states. The company mainly operates in rural Midwestern areas, such as Martinsville, Indiana, where Shreve, 50, opened his first facility during the spring semester of his senior year at Indiana University.
It was a significant departure from his plans when he moved away from Indianapolis for college. He thought he would study political science, then go to law school, but an internship with a real estate lobbyist in Washington during his junior year changed the course of his life. Until then, he’d never thought of real estate as a career, but rubbing elbows with developers piqued his curiosity. He knew when he got back to Indiana, he wanted to get a summer job with one, and that is where it started.
He got hired by a company that built strip centers next to malls. At the time, it was trying to figure out if it could do anything with the excess land behind its structures.
“The idea of doing self-storage was something the guy I worked for wanted me to vet while working there as a summer job,” Shreve, a Perry Township resident, said. “They ended up not running with it.”
But Shreve thought he had some good ideas. Inspired, the undergrad gathered enough money to buy one acre of land by State Road 37, then got a construction loan to get started.
“By the skin of my teeth, I got it opened up and people started renting,” Shreve said.
He made enough money to make his first payment on the property, and that gave him the confidence to turn down a full-time job offer from the strip mall developers.
The Martinsville facility is still there 29 years later, though it has grown from one metal building with 50 units into a 14-building compound.
Not long after it got going, Shreve built another one in Salem, Indiana, then another in Linton, Indiana, and another in Avon, Indiana. They were all about the same size – one building with 50 units – with around six months, maybe a little longer, in between each open, Shreve said.
“I thought I’d develop a few storage facilities, then graduate onto something sexier like apartments or shopping centers,” he said.
Now, Storage Express is the largest self-storage company headquartered in Indiana.
“No one thinks about a storage unit until they need it,” Shreve said. “They just don’t.”
When a person experiences a move, a divorce or another life upheaval is when Storage Express can make its case. The company puts a lot of marketing dollars into search engine optimization, so when a person looks up storage units or self-storage on their phone, Storage Express comes up first.
Despite only thinking of them when they need them, Storage Express customers stick around for 14 months on average.
“A lot of my customers think they’re going to need it for maybe three months or so, but most of them end up keeping it for longer than they think they’re going to need and that’s a beautiful thing,” Shreve said.
Still, running a self-storage business has its challenges. Some customers do not pay their rent and there is a multi-step process that has to be followed to put a lien on and auction the contents of a storage unit. With 107 locations, Shreve said, his company has to have good systems in place to make sure those things are carried out the right way. It is better to stay ahead of it and make sure people pay their rent in the first place.
“It’s not like their homes,” he said. “It’s not on the top of their mind, so there’s that aspect, too.”
Another thing about businesses with a lot of moving parts is something is always happening. The company finished renovating a facility on South Madison Avenue in Indianapolis in March and there are two new locations on the horizon. The first is a 100,000-square-foot building at Mann Road and Interstate 465 in Indianapolis that will be finished in about six weeks. The other, on a nine-acre site at the northeast corner of Thompson Road and U.S. 31, will serve as the regional office for Indianapolis in addition to being a self-storage facility.
Getting to Know Jefferson Shreve
- We live in the same house on the Southside that my grandparents bought in 1961.
- I love to read newspapers. I was a paperboy when I was 12 years old and they stack up, but in my free time, I like to catch up on them.
Best Advice:
Don’t run out of cash. A lot of businesses with great ideas fail because they run out of cash.
Keep in Mind:
A one-person business makes a living, an organization makes money.
Why Do You Own Your Own Business?
I love the sovereignty that comes along with it. People go into business because they want to make money, but, after a certain point, the driver for a lot of people is just the sovereignty that comes with having your own business. I love that.
Something Unique About Your Business:
We operate differently. We don’t have managers at any of our locations. We’ve centralized the whole front end of it.
Words to Live By:
Don’t give up.
Originally published in Southside Business Leader, 2018. Republished here for archival and portfolio purposes.