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Office Space
Store first – then
rent office space
Walk into any High Street café and the
chances are that a high proportion of
the clientele will be business people
and freelancers catching up on email
between meetings.
When mobile working took off in
the last decade, Starbucks, Costa and
other outlets with freeWi-Fi and copious
coffee became first port of call for people
looking for somewhere to hold off-
site meetings or kill time productively
between appointments.
As the number of mobile workers
increased, so, too, did the variety of
‘third places’ for work outside the home
or office. These range from established
business centres and informal, club-like
co-working hubs to more surprising
locations – like self storage depots.
One such is Store First. It has 14
purpose-built self storage facilities across
the UK and enjoyed its best ever year in
2015, doubling overall occupancy levels
and recording growth of 97.8%.
Much of this growth has come from
providing office space, meeting rooms
and freeWiFi to business customers, from
start-ups and small businesses to itinerant
workers who use Store First centres as an
affordable base for their operations.
Business Info
spoke to Oliver Kitson,
Operations Director for Store First, about
this surprising aspect of the business.
Business Info (BI)
: Is office and
workspace a growing part of the
business?
Kitson (K):
It’s something that we’ve
had from the word go. Right from
when our first site was built in 2012 we
decided that we wanted to do things
a bit differently to the other storage
companies. A lot of people were using
storage facilities not just for things like
moving house but for storing paperwork
or stock, so we decided to gear our
centres more towards businesses.
Having things like boardrooms, meeting
rooms and hot pod desks (individual
workstations) has really helped.
From day one, we’ve had customers
using these spaces for training staff, for
disciplinary proceedings that they want
to hold off-site, or for interviews and
reviews.We’ve also got things like free
printing, so if they need to print invoices
or credit notes they can. It’s something
we’ve got in all of our sites, and it has
massive appeal for people.
BI:
What spaces are provided?
K:
We’ve got meeting rooms,
boardrooms and most of our sites have
got on-site gyms as well. They’re all free
to use by customers. During busier times
customers might need to phone up on
the Monday to book a meeting room
for two hours on the Thursday, but it’s
pretty much first come, first served –
people just come and use them as and
when they need to.
BI:
Are all the offices shared or are
there individual cellular offices that
people can rent?
K:
We have individual offices at four of
our storage centres, and they are almost
like a separate arm.
A lot of the office customers we
have are also storage customers, but
Need more office space or a base for mobile workers? It
might be worth giving Store First a call – and not for the
obvious reasons
the offices they have are their offices
to use and fit out as they like. They also
get access to other facilities, such as the
gyms and boardrooms. The common
areas are shared, but their offices are
theirs and theirs alone.
All of our centres have ‘hot pods’,
individual partitioned desks a bit like
those you’d have in an open plan office,
where people can go and set up their
laptop.We’ve got freeWifi at all of the
centres, so they can just log in and do
whatever they need to do. They can print
things out as and when they need and
that’s free of charge as well.
BI:
How does it compare price-wise to
other office space?
K:
It depends where we are in the
country, as rates do vary. But we always
shop around to see what the local
marketplace is offering.With the office
spaces we look to be 10-20% cheaper
than other serviced offices. On the
storage side of things, we tend to go in
at around 30% under.
BI:
What kind of organisations use the
facilities?
K:
A real mix.We cater for everyone from
people who run Ebay shops to plumbers,
plasterers and tradesmen in general. Then
we’ve got businesses like accountants
and solicitors who will use the storage
areas for paperwork and make use of
the general facilities for things like
interviews. Really a whole plethora – we
have shop fitters who keep their kit there,
companies that fit solar panels. Anything
and everything, there’s a whole range.
Oliver Kitson,
Operations
Director,
Store First
