You can’t have failed to notice the boom in storage business over the last ten years. They’re springing up on the outskirts of many towns in the UK and the London storage market is growing day on day. They’re an asset for houseowners who are moving or downsizing, but they alone can’t account for the demand.

Many small business owners are finding that storage units are a boon to their business, helping them solve many of the problems that running a company brings with it, without an undue commitment of time and resources.

Today we’re looking at the businesses that make use of storage units to inspire you if you’re trying to solve some of these same problems.

Seasonal Work

One of the major users of storage units are businesses which are largely seasonal – whether they’re selling ice cream in the summer, or presents at Christmas.

This means they have dramatically fluctuating storage needs, and self-storage facilities offer the flexibility that serves this. With a storage firm, you can keep a small unit in your off season, and then, at short notice and without penalties, move up to a larger one as you begin to acquire the stock you need for your busy season.

For businesses that close down altogether outside of their high season, storage facilities offer a secure place to keep their important assets until the following years, from stalls and tables to equipment like tills and refrigerators.

Online Retail

For many people, the first foray into the world of entrepreneurship is selling online. It’s a matter of commitment and success that determines who will move on to full career of working for themselves on businesses they own, but most start by selling some old DVDs or ill-fitting clothes on eBay or the Amazon marketplace.

If you graduate to running your own online storefront (which increasingly easy to set up, whether you’re buying and selling existing goods or making your own products to sell), you may want to find a secure option for your inventory, so you aren’t keeping thousands of pounds worth of business stock in your own home. Your insurer may thank you!

For those working at a small scale, self-storage is the perfect solution. As above, it’s relatively easy to increase or decrease the capacity of the storage you’re buying depending on your needs, so you won’t find yourself paying more when you don’t need to.