Every business involves profits and losses. Loss can be so high as it can take your everything with it. If you talk about the self storage business, then you can be assured of not risking everything for nothing. The stores can be opened up with low investment. The only requirement which the profession demands is that you ought to own an asset which should be essentially an accommodation.

The self-storage may appear to be the latest inventions, but in practice they have their existence from several decades. The first self storage company was established in the mid 1970s when they leased the facility to the needy for increasing the storage space. Initially such spaces were used just for storing inventory temporarily, but later on it was discovered that the space can also be used to run the discount stores.

The tenant has no right on the space rented to him, but the landlord allows the facility of locking to the tenants in order to secure their belongings. On the other hand, the landlord has no right on the belonging of their tenant except for the cases when tenants fail to pay back the rents. The owner has no possession or control on the belongings of their tenants during normal circumstances.  Read more...

Self-service storage is a popular way of offering individuals a space to rent or lease for storage purposes. The customer can choose from a variety of rooms, spaces and units, from small to large and lease that space for storage depending on the things that he will put on the unit. The customer then can put whatever he wanted to store on that space. The customer will take charge of that space and is responsible for everything inside it.

Inside the self-storage units, everything is closed; you can see no window but just pure walls with corrugated metal. The customer who leases the place will be given a key and he held responsible to whatever operation that will occur inside the unit for he is the only person holding that key. Each storage unit is usually accessed by opening a roll up metal door that is about the same size as a one can garage door.

In order to ensure safety, built in surveillance cameras are mostly present in storage units. Some will hire security guards to their units and some will install alarms in case of illegal entry of some persons. There are many safety practices that can be used and it’s up to the customer’s choice which of those practices he will apply to his unit.  Read more...

The next topic that I’d like to cover with all of the owner operators out there is budgeting. With the economy being as tight as it has been the last couple years, many people have become a lot more aware of their expenses. Trucking is one business where you can analyze and evaluate all day, and it might not do you a bit of good. At the end of the day, you need to make sure you are planning to be ready for the worst case scenario, not expecting and wishing for the best case scenario. Some things, like the rates you are paid and the miles you run are somewhat predictable. But the one variable that isnearly impossible to predict is the amount of money it is going to require to maintain your truck.

Even if you have a brand new truck or have a used truck with a million miles on it, the chance always is that you will not know when your truck might need maintenance. Some trucks may break early on, some may break later, but it eventually will break somehow. When it does break, the visit to the shop to get your truck back in business is rarely less than $1,000. Keeping this in mind, your budget needs to prepare you for these types of occurrences. Once you have this factored in, these repairs just cause a minor setback versus completely stopping your business.  Read more...

We’ve known it for a long time but it didn’t quite add up. With increasing frequency, we experienced bizarre weather conditions which had not been felt earlier in the past century. These phenomena are due to the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Greenhouse gases create a blanket that traps the release of heat back into space consequently making the earth a warmer place to live. Carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide, the so-called greenhouse gases are discharged into the atmosphere when fossil fuels are burned such as gasoline and coal.

From a study, GreenHouse Gas Online revealed that 30 percent of carbon dioxide emissions come from vehicles and other modes of transportation. Buses, delivery trucks and semi-trailer trucks using diesel engines are responsible for one third of these carbon dioxide emissions.

In 1936, when the trucking industry begun its operations shipping agricultural products from farms to cities, diesel fuel emitted fumes of carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide, visible as the obnoxious dirty soot. Greenhouse Gas Online says that for the past 100 years there had been a rapid accumulation of man-made greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. This started the cycle of global warming. Clearly, transportation takes most of the blame.  Read more...