New businesses open in the Greater Toronto Area constantly. According to Narcity, over 50 new restaurants alone opened in Toronto between January and September 2016. An additional nine restaurants opened during the final quarter of the year. If you have recently opened a business in any part of the GTA, self-storage solutions must be part of your overall planning.
Running a successful restaurant, retail store, or other small businesses means accumulating a lot of furnishings, equipment, and general inventory. It’s not always practical to keep everything at your primary business site. Here are some examples of why leasing a self-storage unit will make your operation stronger and more functional.
Ideal for Storing Seasonal Equipment and Supplies
Where do you plan on keeping your Boxing Day decorations? Where will the special china that you haul out for private Christmas dinners be kept? What about the holiday displays that you place in your show windows when Canada Day is just a few weeks away?
Leasing a storage unit to house all of your seasonal decorations and equipment means it’s in a climate controlled environment. It’s also secure and easy to keep organized. With those items you only use for a short time properly stored away from your place of business, there will be more room to keep the things you do use regularly near at hand.
Renovation Time: Keeping the Disruption to Workflow to a Minimum
Your company is growing. That means the business site must be renovated in order to create more workspace or enlarge the retail space for display purposes. While the renovation is underway, non-essential furniture, inventory, and clerical supplies need to be kept away from the site.
With storage units in Toronto of all sizes available, it’s possible to ensure anything that you can do without during the renovation is secure. Consider a mobile storage unit that can be placed on the premises if you really want to keep the stored items close by. Otherwise, a permanent facility in a convenient part of town will suffice.
Keep Your Seasonal Stock in a Safe Place
Retailers have to think about more than where to tuck away seasonal decorations. There’s also the matter of non-perishable inventory that relates to specific seasons. The odds of selling a patio set when winters in the area average a low of -1°C and a high of 1°C during December are not all that great. Why keep those sets on the display floor when you can use the space for the stock that your customers are looking to buy during the winter season?
A local storage facility will offer units that are more cost-effective than returning seasonal goods to some distribution center in another part of the country. Best of all, you do have them handy if a customer should inquire about a patio set while the weather is still cold. That will endear you to those customers, especially if they’ve checked with your competition and found them with nothing to offer.
Storing Goods for Online Sales
Perhaps your local shop is not the only way you reach out to customers. Even locally owned retailers often have a presence on the Internet today. That means having inventory on hand you can use to fill those online orders without delays.
Organize your inventory by using a storage facility to house the goods you offer in the online store. Keeping that inventory separate from what you sell in the store makes it easier to track how quickly certain items are being sold. Remember that you can always transfer the online inventory to the store if you need more units to fill a local order immediately.
Lower Cost Per Square Foot
At first, you may think it’s odd to lease storage space across town instead of leasing the office suite or storefront next door. The fact is that storage facilities charge monthly rates that are lower per square foot than what you would pay for those other types of spaces. Since your staff will not be working daily in the storage area, why pay the extra money for lights, utilities, and other amenities? Your business expenses will be lower and you still have ready access to whatever is in the storage unit.
Security at the Storage Facility is Better Than You Realize
You may be surprised at how the security measures at the storage facility compare to those in your place of business. They could be superior. For example, what’s the setup for security cameras at your business site? The right storage facility will have them in numerous places. They are also more likely to have a guard on duty around the clock.
What it boils down to is your storage unit is likely safer and more secure than your place of business. If the inventory or supplies you want to store happen to be worth quite a lot, the facility is the only practical place to keep them.
Take a fresh look at how your operation is structured. Think of what the right storage unit would do to enhance the business. Call today and arrange to check out a few available units. It won’t take long to see why savvy business owners are making good use of these facilities in the GTA.
