via business.financialpost.com – Excerpt: Satchu then described how such an opportunity came to him. When he took some personal stuff to a self-store centre, he was shocked to discover they had no more room. “I thought: why should a storage centre ever be full? If it’s full, why wouldn’t you raise your prices? You should never be 100% full.” That epiphany led him to co-found Storage Now, an 11-property self-storage company that was bought out four years later by InStorage REIT for $110-million.
Back to juice. Satchu tried to get his students to analyze Nantucket the way he had dissected the storage industry. One student said he didn’t like the industry: “If you don’t control the distribution, you give up a lot of margin.” But Satchu pointed out the new-age category was growing 30% a year: “That’s pretty darn good,” he said. “Plus, the biggest players aren’t in it yet.”
But that’s the problem, a student said; one day Coke and Pepsi will come in and crush everyone. Not so fast, said Satchu: Starbucks scooped out the coffee category; Dell showed the PC industry a new way to sell; Amazon took online books away from Barnes & Noble. “Much larger, well-capitalized competitors miss things all the time,” Satchu said. Vision and speed can beat incumbency.
via There’s no penalty for boldness, so keep asking and you might get a ‘yes’ | Financial Post.
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