Flexible Mini Warehousing

Traditional warehousing comes with inherent risk. It can be costly, with long terms and finicky contracts, resulting in a financial commitment that can be a major hurdle for many businesses who need larger sized storage space to survive and hopefully thrive.

Fortunately, there are other warehouse storage solutions to help your business grow. Self storage is more flexible than traditional warehousing in several important ways – cost, contracts, and the ease of scalability.

Warehouses & Flexibility

Imagine you’re a small clothing retailer, ordering a container from overseas. It arrives on a Monday, and you’ll need a 200 square foot warehouse storage space near you for about 2 weeks while the clothes are picked and packed. With traditional warehousing, you’d have to keep the space much longer than the 14 days you actually need it for – maybe months or years. But with self storage, you can process the stock and distribute it in a  couple of weeks, and then close down the space. No unused warehouse storage space. No continuous overhead. End the use of the warehouse unit and wait until the next shipment arrives to open one up again.

The same works if you want to get a bigger storage space. You also can always upsize or get a temporary additional room, at any time.

Traditional warehousing may seem cheaper than self storage initially, when you compare cost per square footage, but after adding business rates, security and utilities, warehouses will often actually work out as more expensive.

And with self storage you won’t be locked into a typical 3–5 year leasing agreement. In fact, at Big Yellow, you only have to give 14 days’ notice on any space below 1,000 square feet, and we always refund back to the day any unused storage space.

It's not uncommon for a small business to come to us and start with a 50 square foot storage space, with no long term commitment, and gradually take additional and or larger and larger spaces until they may be operating in several thousand square foot of storage space. And even when they get to a point where they decide to move on to their own warehouse, there’s still only a 14 or 28 days’ notice period to close down a storage room.

We also provide office space for as little as 28 days. Again, this means less commitment, initial outlay and overheads. If your situation changes rapidly, which it often does with a new business, you have built-in flexibility, lowering your risk.

Self Storage Warehousing made Easy

We want to make sure our customers’ lives are as easy as possible when they store with us. When it comes to business warehouse storage, this means:

• No business rates.
• We can provide contents protection.
• Ability to take on extra storage space or downsize unwanted space easily.
• Large car parks
• National Customer Service for multi-site storage

Additional Warehousing Services

As well as the storage space itself, we offer a range of helpful services for our warehouse customers, which are chargeable depending on usage:
 

Extended hours access to your secure warehouse space.

• For certain customers we offer extended hours access beyond our standard store opening hours
• Warehouse units accessed by individual access codes.
• Individually alarmed rooms for peace of mind.
• Secure outside gates on most sites.
• 24 hr CCTV externally monitored.

Collection & Delivery

• Allows you to manage your day better.
• No waiting round for couriers at home.
• Goods can be taken to a secure location for collection by yourself later.
• For certain customers, we can place deliveries directly into the storage space, making your life easier.

Forklifting

• Forklift on site.
• Greater flexibility for deliveries.
• All staff trained on forklift use.
• Free use of pallet trucks and trolleys

Power/lighting

• As you move up storage room sizes, we often have lighting in units which helps with activities such as picking and packing.
• We also have storage units with – or we can install – power sockets. This is useful if you wish to run a laptop and printer.
• Activities in storage rooms can be signed off by our facilities department so we can offer a wide range of storage room usages.

A Team to Support your Business

Another big benefit when using warehousing with us, is the staff at Big Yellow.

Within most stores, you’ll find members of staff who have been with the company a long time, with a wealth of experience to share after helping many small and medium sized businesses with their warehousing.