My Experience working for Storage Squad

Throughout my time here at the University of Illinois, I have been lucky enough to work for a company that I really like. The company is called Storage Squad LLC.. The company picks up people's things at the end of the school year, stores them for the summer and then delivers it back to them when they get back on campus. The way this "organization" is set up is very unique, and it avoids unnecessary transaction costs.

What is so unique about storage squad is that it is all decentralized. The CEO lives on the east coast and he works exclusively remotely. He hires a "regional operations manager" on each campus that the business exists, and they are in charge of running the entire operation. This person sets up office in the warehouse itself and is responsible for planning routes, communicating the schedule and  communicating with the customer. Everyone else under them is a regular employee.

The way I see it, Storage Squad is a three tier organization with the CEO at the top, managers below him and regular employees below the managers. The system works very well as long as the managers are stern and demand respect from their employees. I think the reason that it works so well is because the pay is competitive at $15 an hour. In addition to that, many of the employees are friends outside of work, including the manager. This makes it so that everyone holds each other accountable and no one is disrespectful or secretive.

This organization is unique and unlike any other business I have been a part of. It is impressive to me how the organization runs successfully with little communication with the remote CEO.

Comments

  1. Professor ArvanSeptember 16, 2019 at 5:51 AM

    This post is rather skimpy - under 300 words. The requirement is a minimum of 600 words. In future posts try to deliver on that.

    Let's assume I don't understand the market here for the services that Storage Squad provides. Might you have written a paragraph or so to explain which students puts their things in storage during the summer? Are these students continuing in the fall? If so, I thought most apartments are 12 month leases. Why not just leave stuff in the apartment during the summer? And if the students are graduating and moving to someplace else out of town, do they really want to keep their college stuff? In any event, for me there is some need for you to first explain the demand side of this business.

    You repeatedly said the business is unique, but there have to be other companies that offer storage space. Do you know if the others are also a chain or only a local business?

    You talked about the work of the regional manager, some of which I understood. I didn't know what planning routes means. Is it that this business combines U-Haul with storage so picks up the stuff that the customer's location and then puts it into storage? This then would be like a moving company, but instead of moving the stuff to a new location it is moved to storage (and then back again at some later time). Is that the type of work that you did?

    The other thing you might comment on is the hours worked. Is that on a predetermined schedule or on an as needed basis? If the former, $15/hour sounds like pretty good pay to me. If the latter, maybe less so. In either case you might talk about whether you were on a clock to do a job or if you could take your sweet time doing it.

    I imagine there is a lot of seasonality in this work. During peak demand I'm sure they are quite busy. What about at other times?

    Answering questions of this sort is what you should be doing yourself in composing the piece. The managing time part might be where you can identify transaction costs. Also, since there can be damage to contents, how that is managed might be another place to identify transaction costs.

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