Storage Mart

edgeable, and forward-thinking, Burnam’s passion for the family biz knows no bounds – a successful foray into the U.K. realm of self-storage is proof positive of that. StorageMart is headquartered in Columbia, Missouri, two hours from Kansas City and St. Louis in “the heart of fly-over country.”Accord- ing to Burnam, the company began with a rainy holiday in Texas. “Back in the early ‘70s, my fa- ther was a home builder in the mid-west.When I was 10, we went on a holiday to Brownsville, Texas and it rained the entire time.What do you do with a bunch of kids when you’re on vacation and it’s raining? Well, in my family, you went out and looked at real estate. Dad kept going to this self-storage complex (the first he’d ever seen) and visiting with the owner. Finally, the man said, ‘Look I can tell you’re thinking about getting into the business. So, give me ten bucks and I’ll tell you how I did it.’ Dad agreed, came back to Mis- souri, and in 1973 built one of the first self-stor- age complexes in the mid-west.” STORAGEMART That company was sold in the mid-1980s, and Burnam and his brothers joined their father in a new venture. In 1994, they created a Real Es- tate Investment Trust (REIT), did an IPO on the New York Stock Exchange, and took the family business public. It grew rapidly, from about 60 locations to 250 in five years. Burnam recalls, “It attracted the attention of our biggest competitor, Public Storage, and they launched a hostile take- over of our company. It ultimately became friend- ly but, end result, we had 500 employees on a Friday and only 10 on Monday. And I was related to three of them.”What to do next? Armed with a bit of money and a lot of con- tacts in the storage business, Burnam and his brothers went to Wall Street, eventually forming a partnership with Warburg Pincus. Thanks to an influx of investment dollars, they rolled out a line of self-storage facilities that were bigger, better, easier to use, nicer locations – a whole new generation of product in major American cities, including New York, Chicago, and Miami. The business continued to grow and do well, but