Small Business Insights with Laura Fisher
Small Business Insights with Laura Fisher
Kefi Spaces - David Fisher
Meet David Fisher, a skillful entrepreneur with a clear vision of the future of real estate. Fisher has successfully founded, established, and operated more than seven companies that are currently in the industry of Space as a Service. The new era of co-warehouse is here, and David Fisher has come to disrupt the market with the concept of Kefi Spaces, starting his headquarters in space city of Houston. Listen to the full podcast episode and follow Kefi Spaces online and on social media with its latest development and soon-to-come opening date.
If you liked today's show - please let Laura know by either contacting her at laura@fisherpodcast.com or give her a great review. Also, if you know of someone who would be an inspiring guests, let her know… even if it's you. Until then… "You better be Up to something!"
SPONSORED BY: Kefi Spaces, Houston, TX. https://kefispaces.com/ Co-Warehousing, Fulfillment, office space and more. Call today 713-661-2701.
If you liked today's show - please let Laura know by either contacting her at laura@fisherpodcast.com or give her a great review. Also, if you know of someone who would be an inspiring guests, let her know… even if it's you. Until then… "You better be Up to something!"
Welcome to small business insights where back office conversations give us insight to what's really going on. Is it grit, or luck? That gives a small business owner an advantage? Let's find out. I'm your host, Laura Fisher. All right, we have David Fisher in the studio. I know him personally. He's been my husband for 24 years coming in October. But let me give you a quick introduction about the business man, David Fisher. Some people refer to him as a serial entrepreneur. He started when he was young. The first test the first business you open was was it aircraft marketplace in western aviation? Is that right Dave?
David Fisher:First Western aviation which was called Fisher global aviation, back in 2000. And then, and then aircraft marketplace came about 2001.
Laura Fisher:But before that, you were in telecom and sales you've you've had quite the career so you decided to come off and do some some things on your own. But since then, you've gotten into this what you call the space business, you got into Imperial Storage Solutions, doing the mini storage, co working and you open Business E Suites, you also open cold storage, which has cold and refrigerated freezer storage and a park you have the other all under the big thing called the Imperial Business Park. And you also happen to be one of you uHaul number one dealers in Texas. That about cover it.
David Fisher:Yep, that's covers it so far, so far.
Laura Fisher:So now you are on to something new, but it is still in the space business. So tell us what that is. The company's name is Kefi spaces,
David Fisher:Kefi Spaces, and kefi spaces is all about everything that we've grown here at Imperial business park has been a solution to customers needs. For example, we started with storage, Mini Storage. And then in the back, we had some acreage and they wanted some warehousing space. And so we added warehousing, small warehouses, and then in then they wanted like an office attach their warehouse. And so at the front of our property, we built office warehouses. And then we noticed that people would move out of the office warehouses, and we wanted to know, kind of where they were going. We already knew who they were. They were mostly ecommerce entrepreneurs. And they had grown to the point where they really needed more space. And they needed a loading dock. And mini storages traditionally don't have loading docks. And so I was wanting to follow their growth, and provide that solution. Again, we're in the business of providing space, office space, parking space, mini warehouse space, office warehouse, it doesn't make a difference, it is space. And so I wanted to follow that journey with them and provide that solution for them. And so I decided I was going to invent a new industry. And it was going to be pretty much shared warehouse space. So now they had a loading dock, but they had their own private Mini Storage, if you will, within the warehouse, and they had loading dock truck docks. They had everything that you'd want, but they would not have to lease the warehouse itself, we would provide that space. And so I invented the industry. And as I researched it, I found out that it already existed. It already existed. And so then I moved into the Hey, why don't I see who's doing it? Who's doing well? What's their occupancy? And I found out who's kind of the class A have it and who's the Class B and who's the class C and I really got my arms around it went and visited several and spoke to several and have decided to create our own brand. And that brand is keffi spaces.
Laura Fisher:Alright, so I also know that the probably, one of the reasons why you're growing is because you seem to have a heart towards small business and the entrepreneur because we I know we've owned this mini storage, but that's not normal, that mini storage is care about helping the tenants grow their business. So what is it about you that makes you have a heart towards the entrepreneur?
David Fisher:You know, I don't know. It's just kind of developed over time. The A small businesses have a need for knowledge they have a need for, you know, they have something they're passionate about, they don't have a lot of resources. You can't really tie him down to a lease, it's useless to be honest with you. Because, you know, even if you sign them to a 235 10, year lease, whatever, you know, if they're, if they need to grow, you can't really hold them back. And if they, if they don't succeed, then you know, I mean, what's the point? So we just put everything on a month to month basis, we'll sign a one or two year lease for some clients who qualify, but realistically, we want to help the small to mid sized business grow and prosper. And in doing so, it will help us as well because as Zig Ziglar says, in order to get what you want, you have to help other people get what they want. And so that's exactly what we do.
Laura Fisher:All right. So tell us what is CO warehousing. Now, you talked about different kinds class A, Class B, class C, what does that mean?
David Fisher:Okay, so co warehousing, it's a basic element is shared warehousing, where you have these small businesses, ecommerce, or other businesses that all work within a warehouse. But of course, they their products, and everything are their products. And so they want it to be separated into walled off partitioned units, where they can lock the door when they leave. And so that is just think of it as a mini storage inside of a warehouse. Okay. Now, when I talk about the different classes, there are companies out there such as ready spaces and cube works, who are phenomenal companies. Okay. And but they're more of a Class C, in my opinion. And the reason is, is they're there in warehouses, no air conditioning, some of them don't even have, you know, fans, and they provide basically bare bones concrete.
Laura Fisher:Okay, what are they storing? And when you have something like that, is that just pallets of just dry goods? Or
David Fisher:yeah, dry goods, engine parts, things that really don't need to be climate controlled.
Laura Fisher:People aren't working in the Units?
David Fisher:Yeah, they are ironic. And, you know, I mean, maybe that works in some places in the country, but I've actually seen people in these 120 degree warehouses, you know, working, and it's just seems difficult.
Laura Fisher:Well, we live in Texas, so we definitely know what that feels like.
David Fisher:Right? But but I've seen it and the occupancy in these ready spaces and cube works are like 100%.
Laura Fisher:So there's a need?
David Fisher:Right, there's a need, but they're cheaper, because they don't have you know, any any real amenities. And then you go to the Class B, which is a company really out of Raleigh, called the loading dock and their chain link fence off, okay, so, and you can go to the loading dock dock comments and see what they do. And they are a class B there in an rollies kind of a nicer climate, and they've got about five locations. And And let me tell you why these companies, we all know that, these warehouses are, you know, they have a community section, kind of where, you know, people collaborate, which is, you know, many warehouses have the office component, and then the warehouse component, and so they lease out both, just like, you know, ready spaces and cube works, but then they also have everything chainlink fenced, okay, so, that's a great concept. Because if you're in a, say, a 200 square foot space, you need to go to a 500 square foot space, you simply just move the fence, are you more or tear apart the fence, which is a great, you know, modular thing. And so that is, I would say a Class B, okay. Okay. And then our conditioning, are you not sure? No, they're not air conditioned. They're not air conditioned, but their climate houses are not I would say 95% of all warehouses are not air conditioned. Okay. And then you flip over to a company that I admire greatly by the name of Salt Box, okay. And Salt Box is a company based in Atlanta, and they've grown nationwide. And they primarily are in I've not been to every one of their locations, but I know they they tend towards air conditioned spaces. They have a high end modular wall panel, made by Allied modular, it's more of a fiber board. And it is I would say they are a the class A of the the industry. And so you're setting setting a new standard Well, right. And, and, and there's a few other, like low loft, and some others that have come up and but but they're kind of new. And I haven't really seen what they're doing yet. But all in all, those are the main players right now. And so the audience that they're catering to, is primarily the E commerce entrepreneur. that Amazon is the largest e commerce company in the world. But when you look at what Amazon does, if you send your product to Amazon, number one, it's expensive. Number two, you got to follow their rules, you can't put your own, you can't put your own flyers and pamphlets and things like that in it. Number two, they have to see kind of purchase orders where it came from. And if you get they want,
Laura Fisher:Amazon wants to know where I got my product?
David Fisher:Yeah, they want that. And they it's kind of confidential, well, it's Amazon, and you either play by their rules, or you don't play at all. And the other thing is, if you're shipping to somebody like walmart.com, you know, through walmart.com, you know, other e commerce stores, you can't do it through Amazon, it has to be Amazon. And so these, the other thing that I've found out about Amazon is Amazon really knows where you're getting the product from, if they see a lot of volume from, you know, for example, you know, socks, and and they see, you know, that that socks are really coming from, you know, China to to, you know, through these ecommerce entrepreneurs that are warehousing within the Amazon facilities and their shipping, yeah, they will actually bypass you. And so and they will, and the greater you grow the the more expensive the space becomes, and they'll kind of squeeze you out. And before you know it, they are selling socks directly, and you've lost your way of distributing your product. Well, you're done. Okay. And so a lot of the E commerce entrepreneurs are saying, hey, I want to be able to do it myself, I want to sell through Amazon I want to sell through, which will fulfill it ourselves, I want to sell through Walmart and Sam's Club and, and macys.com. And you know, all of these other Exactly. And so the way that they can accomplish this have their own storefronts is to be in their own warehouse, okay. And so they do a several things a, they start off small. And maybe they start off in their garage, then they go to a storage facility like ours, then they go to a small warehouse like ours, and then they're into their own shared warehouse, or maybe they go to an order fulfillment company, which is a separate private three PL company. And so we decided to create a co warehouse, which would be their next step from, you know, the small warehouse without the loading dock at a storage facility, which is us and then move into a warehouse, which it allows for shipping and big rigs to show up where they're able to show up at a loading dock. And then some of these entrepreneurs, they're not really into hiring people, so they do it themselves. But if the volume gets too great, you don't want to sometimes have people on the payroll. And so we're also going to offer three PL services where we can be that labor for them. And we'll be the labor as much as they want, including unloading their trucks picking packing shipping. And so we've created a sophisticated software to handle that and communicate with the entrepreneur as far as what's arrived, what's being
Laura Fisher:that sounds like are more than just co warehousing you're offering a lot more services?
David Fisher:Well, we're starting them small, okay, and we're growing them to the point that we will provide every service they need so that they can manage their business and you know, whatever they want, if they want to hire employees and stick them in the warehouse, fantastic. If they want to not have employees, fantastic if they need us to provide seasonal employees, we can do that all the way to handing off the three pl 100%. To us. So that is what we're doing in our in our warehousing for them. And, and we'll do it again on a month to month basis without contracts without commitments, because we know that these small businesses do not know where they're going to be in six months. Let alone six years. So why? Why hold their feet to the fire?
Laura Fisher:All right, I get that. When we come back. I'm gonna have Dave, let us know a little bit more about who this is for the CO warehousing with all the other servers. I don't like that.
David Fisher:Let me say it. All right. When we come back, we're going to talk about what's in store for Kefi, how they plan to grow, where they plan to grow? And what type of offerings they're going to provide for the small to midsize customer. That's different than the competition. All right.
Laura Fisher:Do you hear that?
David Fisher:And you better be up to something
Laura Fisher:you've been waiting to say that?
David Fisher:Would you keep that in there?
Unknown:Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. Thank you for listening to small business insights. Today's show is sponsored by GAVI spaces, new location in Houston, air conditioned warehouse units with loading docks, carrier services, fulfillment, break room, free Wi Fi, the perfect place to grow your E commerce business keffi spaces located in the design district of Houston. And now back to small business insights.
Laura Fisher:All right, we're back. So Dave, let's hear you answer your own question.
David Fisher:Okay, so one of the things I want to do that's different than than everybody else, is, I want to create a brother sister location. So if I'm in a city, I want to create a Class A and Class B, or C version of it, because we do find that some companies do not require that air conditioned space, we find that some of the clients do not need certain aspects, and they don't want to pay for it. And so if you can just imagine if I had a 200,000 square foot warehouse, and I put a wall right down the middle, and I had air conditioning on one side that people really worked in, and the other half of it was a non air conditioned space that had a I'm going to be courteous and put those, you know, big ass fans in there. But other than that, it's just, you know, hey, we're storing stuff that doesn't need to be air conditioned. And we don't want to pay that premium. So I would like to create kind of a brother, sister, and maybe maybe the warehouse is down the street, maybe it's next door. Maybe it's, you know, a few miles away,
Laura Fisher:You don't want to lose business. Well, exactly. Because where else I know you.
David Fisher:Exactly. And so I want to be able to respond to those customers who say, I really don't need this thing in a warehouse. And I'd say, Oh, you just need our sister location, why don't you give them a call. And so we'll be able to accommodate both. And so that is what's in the future. And I would like to create that in several parts of the city, starting in Houston, because Houston is phenomenally large. And so you've got the north, south, east west side of town. And so from there, we want to grow into other large, what I call NFL cities, so that we can expand our footprint and our brand. The other thing that I'd like to do down the road is possibly even franchise it so we can help other entrepreneurs grow their own Kaffee spaces. And so that is something that I'm thinking about, but I'm not I'm just in the thought process stage, but and that's what is in future for kefi spaces.
Laura Fisher:What does Kefi mean? How did you come up with that name?
David Fisher:Well, first of all, I didn't come up with it. I wanted it to be like warehouse.com, but it was taken. I wanted to be like, you know, just different names and and our marketing company came up with it. And in Greek, it means prosperity and growth and and things that apply to an entrepreneur. And so you know, kefi Spaces applies to the entrepreneur, because the Greek meaning for it is growth and success and passion. And I think every entrepreneur that's going to be successful, if they don't have growth and passion for their business, then realistically, they're just not going to succeed. That's kefi spaces.
Laura Fisher:All right. Now one other feature that you haven't mentioned, is it also going to include office space meeting room space fulfillment. So tell us a little bit more about that. And why is that a good partnership with warehouse space?
David Fisher:Well, people that you know are in the business. They are a lot of times needing conference printing, high secure internet. They require you know, office space and mail, a photo room to photograph their products that they're putting up on eBay or Etsy or whatever. And so we're providing all of those rooms available to them. The office space, you know, they can rent a A month to month, the conference rooms, they can book using our app. The photo room is just like a conference room, a meeting room, they can book it, and we'll provide meal services for them. But it will also provide meal services for the general area where people need a business address will provide co working virtual offices. Everything that a co working facility should offer will provide that to the community at very reasonable prices. Because we know that it's not just the warehouse component they need. They also need the the business office structure.
Laura Fisher:Yeah. All right. And lastly, what is your three PL? What is three? PL? What is three? Pl mean? What's the definition? And what are you going to be doing? What does that mean?
David Fisher:Well 3 PL in its basic is, is order fulfillment. And so we'll be providing the order fulfillment of any criteria that they require meaning you know everything from unloading it off the truck to putting it in our warehouse racks and barcoding it, putting it inside of their specific units. Or if they if they're just renting Rackspace from us, it'll go on our racks, all the way to fulfilling it and boxing it up and, and putting all the packaging materials in it and shipping it off. But what makes us a little different is we'll actually put in their individual business flyers, brochures, things to help with with that, whereby as we know, you can't do that, like at an Amazon warehouse or other warehouses, they just can't keep up with that, let me tell you one other thing that we'll do as well is we will modify our software to their unique requirements, whereby if you get a large three PL company, they a digest, don't have that capability of doing it, you have to fit into their mold, whereby we'll modify as much as possible our software to fit into your mold, because you may be doing business on a government contract that requires some type of Oracle interface. And our programmers can do that we, you may be looking at a contract, we have one company that's doing business with AT&T, you know, AT&T is not going to modify the way they do business. Right, they do business, you have to modify the way you do business. And so our software technicians are creating a software to interface with their requirements. And then we'll create a bot to make it seamless. And so that is the flexibility we offer that I can tell you is absolutely unique.
Laura Fisher:That sounds awesome. All right. So Dave, I heard that you plan on looking for more locations. So what is the future for Caffee? And if someone's interested in reaching you or investing what what would you tell them?
David Fisher:So we are looking for investment, we do have a a umbrella fund called kefi spaces, LLC, and people can invest in that. And then their investment would be put into whatever project we're working on as they want it to be meaning each project will be a series one, series two, series three, and they can say hey, I want you know, this much of my investment to go into that series and this much to go in the other series, or I don't want to go into any series yet. They can do that. And so that will be some that's something that we're doing right now. And the reason we're doing that is we want to acquire certain warehouse properties that fit our unique criteria. And as a result of that we want to grow into the cities, you know, if you think about where we want to grow into, I mentioned NFL cities, which is great, but a lot of these NFL cities have different parts of town. They have the north, south, east and west, for example. And as a result of that, we may want to be in multiple locations within that city. But you know, if you take a non NFL city say You know, I don't know Nebraska. Okay. And does anybody do e commerce in Nebraska? Of course they do. Wyoming? Of course they do. And so we're not limiting ourselves to specific locations. And one of the reasons I thought about franchising this is we have the ability to to train, we have the ability to set this up, and there are people that may want to take the brand and and it will expand our brand, it will create a great business opportunity for them. And they will do it our way. And they will be able to be in cities that we may not, you know, have a relationship with we may not know the city, and, and it's on their radar, it's not on our radar. And as a partnership, we can create that opportunity for them. And we're all about helping small to midsize businesses grow and prosper. And if if an entrepreneur wants to franchise and create somewhere in, you know, somewhere like, wherever, you know, cut and shoot Texas, I mean, realistically, they can do that we will help them, we will assist them, we will, you know, help them create that we will sell them a franchise. And as a result of that we will train them. And we will keep our brand and expand our brand. It helps us brand wise, and it helps them because they will have the format, the infrastructure and everything else that they need. And I think it's a win win, as long as they have the attitude of helping small businesses grow and prosper as well, where a small business,
Laura Fisher:There's something about the you know, just to make a point on that you just can't say that. It's a service industry we're in, we're servicing them. And you can't just say yeah, that's, that's who I am. But I know, you, you really take an interest in every customer you meet, because you really do want to see them grow and prosper.
David Fisher:Oh I do. And you know, it frustrates me when I see an entrepreneur. And they come and ask me for advice. And I give them advice. And they completely don't do it. Okay. And which doesn't mean I'm you know, my word is gospel and whatever. But you know, and then you see them crash and burn because they didn't do you know, what they what we discussed, and I've seen that happen time and time again. And you're like, Well, you know, what happened? Well, you know, I didn't do that. So, I don't know, in my opinion, I like to help people that want to help themselves. I do not like to help people that want everybody else to do it for them. I believe that if you're going to be a successful entrepreneur, you have to get off your butt and make it happen for yourself. And you have to also be green, I have a saying that if you're green, you grow and if you read you're rot. And that's true in nature. And it's true in business. I mean, if you're green, you you really want to learn from somebody, anybody, it could be anybody. And then if you're red, meaning you're just closed off to learning, then you know, you rot. Yesterday, I was in meeting with a competitor, ironically, sort of a competitor. And when I was listening to him, my jaw was on the table, he was speaking to me about things that he does to run his business. That is amazing. And I was in a pure learning mode. And here I've been in business for I don't even know how many years 40 years, and I'm learning. So that's where I'm at?
Laura Fisher:Well, I am gonna let you say the closing tagline. But I want to let people know why I made that tagline is because I'm around so many entrepreneurs that they're always up to something. So Dave, can you close this out and say,
David Fisher:Well, you better be up to something.
Laura Fisher:Y'all have a good day. Bye bye. Thanks for joining us this week on Small Business Insights, make sure you visit our website at Fisher podcast.com where you can follow the podcast on iTunes or your favorite podcast platform so you'll never miss a show. If you enjoyed and found value in today's episode, we'd appreciate a rating and review on iTunes or simply share it with a friend that would help us out to make sure you tune in next week for our next episode. Until then, you better be up to something
