Why SpareFoot is hiring 100 new employees this year

by Garrett Reim
February 26, 2015

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When Chuck Gordon, co-founder and CEO of SpareFoot, was an undergraduate student at UCLA, he took a trip to Singapore to study abroad. The move wasn’t permanent so he had to find a place to store belongings that he wasn’t bringing. However, as a cash-strapped college student he wasn’t interested in paying for a storage unit, so naturally he left some of his stuff with friends. An idea dawned on him: if he could use friends’ extra footage to store belongings, couldn’t you do the same with strangers’ extra space? SpareFoot was born.
 
At first SpareFoot listed available storage space in homes, much like Gordon had intended. But then something unexpected happened. The professionals — the self-storage businesses SpareFoot was supposed to be competing against — started contacting the company wanting to listings too. 
 
The idea was counter-intuitive. Gordon had started SpareFoot as a sharing economy competitor to self-storage units, much like Airbnb competes against hotel rooms. When self-storage businesses started calling it appeared SpareFoot had stumbled upon something beyond itself, an unfulfilled demand: the need for better self-storage listing and marketing.
 
“Most people don't know how fragmented and how big the self-storage industry is in the U.S.,” said Gordon. “There are roughly 52,000 self-storage facilities in the U.S. and 90 percent or so of the facilities are owned by independent operators, and many of those operators own just one or two facilities. Self-storage is a very entrepreneurial business.”
 
After realizing what they had found, SpareFoot pivoted and changed itself into a marketplace for self-storage units. Independent self-storage businesses needed to find ways to get the word out. SpareFoot could provide a much better search engine ranking, much more efficient marketing, and as the listings grew, an attractive one-stop shop for self-storage customers.
 
“Power that they wouldn't have if they were relying on their own resources,” said Gordon.
 
Because self-storage isn’t a service that tends to be top-of-mind for most customers, SpareFoot also was offering a simpler way for new customers to discover local self-storage options.
 
“By far the highest percentage of self-storage tenants are dealing with what we call ‘life events,’” said Gordon. “The biggest ‘life event" that drives self-storage rentals is a move from one place to another, whether it's across town or across the country.”
 
Death, divorce and household downsizing also drive usage. According to Gordon about 10 percent of U.S. households currently rent self-storage space. That makes for a big industry.
 
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The SpareFoot team
 
“Annual revenue for the industry is over $25 billion in the U.S.,” Gordon said. “By comparison, global revenue for the mobile-video-game business was around $25 billion in 2014.”
 
Today over 9,400 facilities list on SpareFoot, and to get a larger chunk of the $25 billion self-storage market the company is charging hard. Just this week SpareFoot announced plans to hire 100 more employees, most within the first half of 2015. 
 
“A lot of those new hires will be app and web developers,” said Gordon. “Our development team is constantly working on new products to benefit our facility clients as well as self-storage consumers.”
 
Should SpareFoot follow through with its hiring plans it will have over 280 employees by the end of the year, and not much spare footage.
 
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