Catherine,

Hindsight is always a wonderful thing but anyone planning to enter a NEW
contract with a commercial storage company should always look carefully at
the costs involved in closing the account. The default contracts/terms and
conditions will most likely have very steep penalties for closing the
account and removing your boxes. My experience is, as Robin suggests, that
by negotiating with them and going to tender you'll be able to remove any
penalties and bring the costs down to an acceptable level. If you enter into
a five-year storage contract, for example, the cost of removal at the end of
five years should never be any higher than the standard cost for retrieving
those boxes while the contract is active.

I am often amazed at the contracts/terms and conditions that are proposed by
many of the major storage companies. I helped a client recently to negotiate
a new storage contract. In the original proposed contract there was
virtually nothing relating to the responsibilities of the storage company.
It was almost "we will store your boxes". The majority of the contracts was
conditions imposed on the customer. The final contract we developed which
was approved by both parties had over an additional page of responsibilities
for the storage company, including for example, what standards they would
work to, measures taken to protect assets from damage, permitting regular
inspection of facilities etc. The clear message is, decide what you want
from your future provider and work with them PRE-CONTRACT to ensure the
terms and conditions and costs meet with YOUR requirements.

Hope this helps.

Regards,
Eldin.


Eldin Rammell,
Director RAMMELL Consulting Ltd
http://www.rammell.com
 

-----Original Message-----
From: The UK Records Management mailing list
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Robin Scally
Sent: 16 November 2007 16:40
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Moving from one commercial storage company to another...

Catherine,

Its a very competitive market and you need to remember you hold all the
cards I.e. The assets. Nearly all storage companies will offer "discounts"
to get your business from the incumbent. You can negotiate to off-set the
cost your incumbent storage company will rip you off, I mean charge you, to
remove YOUR assets from their warehouse. I recently did this by way of free
storage on all boxes moved to the new company until the exit cost was
covered, in this case 7 months. By tendering you should be able to reduce
you overall storage cost, as each try to undercut the other. We reduced our
storage cost by as much as 30% and increased our service levels to boot. 

Robin
Freashfields Bruckhaus Deringer

----- Original Message -----
From: The UK Records Management mailing list
<[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
<[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Fri Nov 16 16:09:37 2007
Subject: Moving from one commercial storage company to another...

Recently I've been coming across a general viewpoint that when you have
a lot of boxes stored with a particular storage company you are "stuck
with them" and can't ever move to another because the costs of removing
the boxes are so prohibitive, so it is assumed that the cost of staying
will always be cheaper than the cost of moving.

Does anyone have any comments on this? I'm particularly interested to
hear from anyone who has moved from one to another and found that it
worked out cheaper overall.

Thanks as ever, this list is so useful and helpful.

Catherine