Chris Walls With Go Mini’s

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Lee Kantor: [00:00:32] Lee Kantor here, another episode of Franchise Marketing Radio, and this is going to be a fun one today on the show, we have Chris Walls with Go Mini’s. Welcome, Chris.

Chris Walls: [00:00:42] Welcome, Lee. Glad to be here!

Lee Kantor: [00:00:43] Well, I’m excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us a little bit about Go Minis. How are you serving, folks?

Chris Walls: [00:00:50] I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you there for a second.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:53] Tell us a little bit about Go Minis.

Chris Walls: [00:00:56] Well, we are a portable storage company. We help people move and store their goods and it’s probably one of the most convenient solutions out there. So if you’re you need something, if you’re going to move, for example, we rent by the month. We can deliver the container to you, say, you know, the first of the month and you’re going to move on the 15th. You have two weeks to load it up. You give us a call. We can pick it up and move it across town for you to your new place. Drop it off in the driveway there and you could unload it and take two weeks to do that since we rent by the month. So it’s one of the most convenient and non stressful ways to move. And we also use it for storage. So if you have, you know, maybe you have pool furniture or you just have too much stuff around the house, you give us a call, we drop it off for you. You load it up, we can store it at your property, or we can take it and store it on our premises for you. When you need it, you just give us a call. We bring it back. So it’s a pretty convenient, a simple option for storage and a lot better than traditional self storage, where you have to rent a truck and load it up and then unload it and that sort of thing. So it really saves you a lot of time and a lot of frustration, frankly.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:58] Now what was the genesis of the idea? How did this come about?

Chris Walls: [00:02:03] Well, we were formed in 2002, and I think that the founder was a man by the name of Bill Norris, who’s still involved with the company and a shareholder. He has moved away from the day to day, obviously, but he saw what Pod’s was doing and thought he had a better idea. A more convenient idea is one of our major competitors, and our delivery system is much different than theirs. We have larger containers and but the idea itself was just a great idea, and he wanted to expand and make it what he thought was a little better. And I would agree that our system is a little better than all the competitors out there.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:40] So now is it that the container that I’m going to get, I can use it as my personal storage unit down the road, or I can just use it to transfer belongings from one place to another

Chris Walls: [00:02:52] So you can keep it for a long as long as you like. In fact, we have a number of people who do that years and years, which always surprises me. But yeah, you could. You could keep it for a few days if that’s all you needed it. We rent to rent by the month. You keep it for the month. You can keep it for two months, three months, several months.

Lee Kantor: [00:03:08] It doesn’t matter now if I’m going to have that on my property. Is that something that I have to worry about permitting or getting permission? Or is that something that it’s just like kind of a shed and they don’t care?

Chris Walls: [00:03:21] Generally, no. There are a few towns, primarily in California that have come up with some ordinances for how long they could be there. Or you may need a permit, but the vast majority ninety nine point five percent it’s a temporary structure. You don’t need any type of permitting or anything along those lines,

Lee Kantor: [00:03:39] Even though the temporary might be a year or two like

Chris Walls: [00:03:43] That. That’s correct. And I think that’s what’s happened right is that some people have kind of put it out there, Hey, that’s been there. You know, the code guy may go by. That’s been there for two years. We should probably look into that, that sort of thing or some neighbor may complain or something along those lines, but it could be for quite some time. But given that it’s not affixed to the ground, it’s our containers are actually on wheels. It’s pretty temporary.

Lee Kantor: [00:04:04] Now what does it look like from the franchisee standpoint? What kind of kind of background or a skills or, you know, career path had they been on prior to getting involved with you?

Chris Walls: [00:04:17] You know, that’s really good question. And they’re from all over. Initially, we had a lot of people who were in the in the moving business, so this wasn’t necessarily their primary business, and that’s changed a little bit. And we have them from from all different types. We have ex corporate folks. We have, you know, obviously the people that are moving, people that are just looking for their next endeavors and they look at the numbers and say, Hey, this really works, and it’s a relatively simple business to operate. So if I’m looking for someone you know the key franchisee, you need someone. I think that is just motivated to go out and market and become a member of their community. I mean, the folks, one of the things that we believe sets us apart is that we are local. We have the support of a franchisor who’s a national organization, but each one of our franchisees gets involved in the local community, donating containers when they can for food drives or for certain charity events. You know, a lot of our guys donate to local sports teams so they can use them to store their things and that sort of stuff, and that’s just being part of the community. And and we look for folks that are willing to do those types of thing. And, you know, the more knowledge they have about marketing, the better off they’re going to be. But we can certainly train them and teach them all the different techniques we have on the digital marketing side and that sort of stuff. But I’m a true believer in that. While you have to do the digital marketing day in and day out, there still is no substitute for actually meeting people, shaking hands and obviously in a COVID safe manner these days. But getting out in the community and getting people to know that you’re the local. They can supply these types of things, it really makes a big difference.

Lee Kantor: [00:05:53] Now is a consumer typically kind of that residential consumer or is it a B2B play as well where business people are using it, as well as kind of people that are just moving or just have a lot of stuff?

Chris Walls: [00:06:07] It’s both. We have about once you get established with a franchise, probably 25 to 30 percent of your business is going to be commercial and that could be a local builder. That could be a restoration company, that sort of thing. And then you do the residential side, which is moving and storage also restoration projects. Hey, I’m redoing my kitchen and I really don’t have a place to put a store everything. While you know, the new stuff came in early, I got to put that somewhere and I have to take delivery of it, or I have a place to put some of the old stuff. Or, you know, I don’t want everything to get dirty and that’s in the home and it’s going to be a mess. Let me throw all my furniture that I’m going to keep in there and that sort of thing, you know, redoing my floors and getting new carpets, that sort of stuff.

Lee Kantor: [00:06:49] So the franchisee, I would imagine, wants to become best friends with the real estate agent, the mortgage person like that whole kind of, you know, real estate mafia group of people that are kind of serving the community.

Chris Walls: [00:07:04] Absolutely. And we’ve had some really creative things done in that way where our franchisees have created a partnership with a local realtor, successful realtor and the realtor would actually offer a go mini as part of the listing. You know, some people use know they’re going to use them for staging, Hey, let’s get rid of the clutter. Where are we going to put it? You can put it in a go mini and we’ll we’ll work a deal with the realtor. They’ll deliver that and everybody’s happy along those lines. We’ve also had some guys who went out and actually had magnets made for some of the more successful realtors in their market. And when they put the Go Mini in the driveway, there’s a big almost billboard of that realtor provided by Joe Smith Realty, that sort of thing. So that’s worked out well. So yes, that’s actually one key area to to that. We encourage our franchisees to go out and try to explore and go to those realtor meetings and get to know the realtors who are doing well in the area.

Lee Kantor: [00:07:59] Now, in order to be the franchisee, is it something that I have to actually take possession of all of these storage units like do I have to have kind of a big space where I can hold dozens and dozens of storage units?

Chris Walls: [00:08:13] Yes, you do. And we recommend about an acre of land. You don’t need a building. Our containers are built so that they can withstand the weather, their air, their water tight, and they’re made of steel galvanized steel in most places, and they last quite a long time. Our containers lasts about 20 years to 25 years. They’re quite durable. But you would need, as we say, we recommend about an acre of land that’s fenced and has some security. The good thing is, most of our folks that rent our containers generally don’t come back to them. We bring them to them. So it’s not like you’re going to have a lot of trouble coming in and out like you would at a self-storage unit. It’s a little different model, but you do need you do need that land. And you know, and some of the more dense areas, you can put that outside of the community that you’re serving, so you can find land a little bit cheaper. That makes the economics of the franchise a little better as well.

Lee Kantor: [00:09:06] Now, when you’re buying the franchise, it’s something that, oh, I buy 50 or I buy 100. Is that how you sell this or is that how it sold? Or is it just like when you get a franchise that includes X number of units?

Chris Walls: [00:09:19] We sell the franchise based on the population in the franchise territory that you get your protected territory. So depending on the size of the territory and generally we like to start generally like to start about 400000 as their smallest that will sell. Now you’re going to need containers. If you add a 400000 person territory in your first year, you’re going to buy sixty eight containers and then as your territory, it gets bigger. Obviously, you buy more containers and then you have an obligation to buy containers every year until you reach a certain saturation point.

Lee Kantor: [00:09:51] So it’s something that it kind of you don’t have to go of buy it all on day one. You can grow into it as you as a as kind of your brand matures in that market.

Chris Walls: [00:10:02] That is exactly correct and it works out very well. We like to have people fully stocked when they start out so they can get out there and start putting them in the community. And maybe they have some extras and sometimes, like I say, they donate or they put them in a good spot so people can see them. Because one of our best ways of marketing is is

Lee Kantor: [00:10:17] The container, right?

Chris Walls: [00:10:19] It contains a big billboard in your neighbor and say, Hey, what’s that? It’s like, Oh, we’re redoing our floors and we put all our furniture. Hey, we’re doing that next month, too. That’s a great idea. Next thing you know, we have three containers in that neighborhood that was one of four that

Lee Kantor: [00:10:32] Were you kind of affected by that container shortage that you hear so much about with the supply chain disruption?

Chris Walls: [00:10:39] Very much so. I’m 2021 was a great year for us from a growth standpoint and our containers. We had a record number of containers ordered and we. A record number of containers get caught up in that shipping crisis. So it was it was very painful, quite frankly, as we’re having such a great year to have containers that used to take 10 weeks to get here. Now, taking months and months and months, we had some frustrated franchisees. I was very frustrated. But we work through it. And you know, one of the things that I’ve discovered through the crisis is there’s a difference between having vendors and partners and and our container providers, which we call Minis are many providers were our partners. You know, they informed us what was going on. They stepped up and they helped out. We went back to our franchisees and formed then what was going on. They stepped up and they helped out, and the franchisor were from the corporate office was able to help out because the cost went through the roof. We were seeing shipping that I was paying 5X the time, you know, 5x what I paid last year. It’s just crazy. And you know, we made a decision as a company, as a board that this is temporary and we can’t let this stop our growth. So that’s why we went out and we try to put everybody together and say it’s going to cost us more, but we’re going to split that cost up a little bit for this one year to try and get everybody the containers that they need as quickly as possible, and we were able to do that. We finally got them all delivered this year and we saw just phenomenal growth. The best it’s the best year we ever had. Twenty twenty one, we’re going to have close to 30 percent network growth this year. So I think we made the right decisions, even though it was a little costly for us.

Lee Kantor: [00:12:21] Now has that crisis abated or are you still kind of working your way through it?

Chris Walls: [00:12:27] We’re still working our way through it. It has abated somewhat. We saw some pricing come down here late in twenty twenty one and but nowhere near what it used to be. And the time frames have shortened as well, which is almost as important for us. And we expect that to come down as we move through 2022 and talking with I’m not a shipping expert, but I’ve become more and more than I would like to be honest with you, when in 2023, they do expect it to abate as new ships come online that had been building for the last two years or so and help relieve things. So it’s definitely getting better, but it’s still not good.

Lee Kantor: [00:13:05] And so what do you need more of like? Are you looking? Are you actively looking for franchisees in certain regions or like, how is your growth? But is it from kind of the west to the east? Or are you just taking them where they come?

Chris Walls: [00:13:18] We take them, where they come. We do have certain areas that we target that are available. We’re in 40 states right now. We’re going to we’re going to crest one hundred franchisees this year. We had we added 14 new franchisees last year, which is a record year for us. Wow. And and yeah, it was phenomenal. And what I love to see, very honestly, is a lot of the growth came from internal from folks that are already in the system.

Lee Kantor: [00:13:42] So they were just buying more territories.

Chris Walls: [00:13:44] Yeah, which to me is just OK. I really think this business is doing well for us going places. And we added a lot of things this year. What I’ve talked to the corporate staff about is how does the franchise or add value to the franchisee, how do we grow their business? So when we looked at different things this year, we did our first national television commercials. We did a couple and we went and had a studio do it and really came out spectacularly. We ran them for a couple of weeks in October. It really is a test run just to see which channels perform the best. And then we’re going to do in earnest in spring, which is our seasonality. When we start to get busy again or busier and run, you know, we’ll have a couple of months of running that commercial. So we’re doing things like that. We just did an animation, which I think if you if you watch any television and see advertisements, you’re seeing a lot more of the animation. We did that so and we had a broken down so our franchisees could use it on their local markets or if they wanted to do social media, we had it.

Chris Walls: [00:14:47] You know, it’s a it’s a one minute animation. It’s cut down to 30, cut down to 15, cut down to 10 and cut down to six so they can use it a lot of their social media part and some marketing folks to help them with their social media campaigns and and make sure everybody is up to snuff on that. We’ve come up. We revamped what we call our quote, end quote engine on the line, which is a the primary way that our franchisees get their business. And we’re actually in the middle of new operating system that we created internally. And it’s really from cradle to grave that it takes leads that come in from the quote engine, internalizes them, puts them right into the operating system, automatically gives our franchisees the ability to communicate with the customer, the potential customer via text via email if they’d like does the contract automatically with the signatures process with the credit cards does helps with the delivery. Text the client when we’re on our way, I mean, the system from soup to nuts is just phenomenal, and that’s only available to so many franchisees and no one else.

Lee Kantor: [00:15:47] Now I would imagine if some. He’s buying additional franchisees, buying additional territories. There is a lot of economies of scale in terms of if I got an A. I can just pop and get another half acre or another acre adjacent and then keep all the storage units together.

Chris Walls: [00:16:04] Absolutely. You can do that right there. You can stack the containers if you have a forklift for storage. And you know, the other side of the coin is if you have an acre on the west side of town and you want to expand the east side of town, you can get a smaller it’s got a half acre lot and get the economies there. And the beautiful thing about this franchise is it does not take a lot of employees to run and it scales so nicely as you grow. When you look at, you know, when you start out, you can do it with one person. One person could be driving the truck and and with our new system and could be entering potential clients and that sort of thing. Usually it’s two, but that grows when you start out at one hundred containers. Two people can handle that. Two hundred containers, that’s still two people. When you get over two hundred, maybe you’re going to add another truck. So now and that’ll take you maybe to four hundred containers. So you can you can really grow and you don’t have to add a lot of employees, which is we all know in today’s market. Yeah, that’s very difficult to find. So that’s it’s a big, big selling point for us and our largest franchisee only uses six employees.

Lee Kantor: [00:17:05] Now are you seeing this as kind of some folks doing it with like a parent and a child, like a recent graduate, this guy kind of gives them a family business that they can run together.

Chris Walls: [00:17:16] We’re seeing that. We’re seeing, you know, corporate refugees. We’re seeing people that have other businesses, and they started looking at this and say, Hey, this might not be a bad adjunct. For example, some of our best franchisees are actually self-storage owners and they’re maxed out. And for them to expand, sometimes it’s impossible. So when they look at this and said, Geez, I’m getting a lot of people here who need storage, maybe I can offer them a mobile storage, right?

Lee Kantor: [00:17:39] It’s just more options on their menu, right?

Chris Walls: [00:17:42] And they can go find a lot that’s going to be in another town that maybe is cheaper and they can do that. And the economies that they’re going to get from the mobile storage is going to be better than their self stores, which is a very good business in and of itself.

Lee Kantor: [00:17:53] Well, congratulations on all the success. If somebody wants to learn more about the opportunity, what’s the website

Chris Walls: [00:18:00] Website is w WW Go MINUSCA

Lee Kantor: [00:18:03] And that’s they can find out if they need storage and they can find out about the opportunity there.

Chris Walls: [00:18:07] Yep, we have a franchising website right off of that as well. You can click right through it.

Lee Kantor: [00:18:11] Well, thank you so much for sharing your story today, Chris. It was great chatting with you.

Chris Walls: [00:18:16] Same here, Lee. Nice meeting you.

Lee Kantor: [00:18:18] All right, this is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you next time on Franchise Marketing Radio.