Boxing King

Like most good business ideas, the genesis for Hire A Box was a problem without an immediately obvious solution.

Managing director Barry Harris ran a removalist company for 35 years before retiring, but his friends were still asking him where they could find boxes for the move.

“I told one of them to go down to the supermarket and he said that you’re not allowed to do that any more,” Harris recalled.

“In my business I had already set up a small hire business of boxes for my own customers, which worked quite well. So then I started to think that maybe everyone could hire boxes, not just personal customers. I thought it was a good idea and I knew it hadn’t been done in Australia. Then I thought someone might have done it overseas because there is someone doing everything over there. There was no one in England or Europe – I couldn’t find anyone in the world doing it so my next thought was ‘what the hell is wrong with it?’”

To test the business, Harris ran a pilot operation in Sydney for six years, driving around for every delivery and pick up of boxes and taking note of what customers wanted.

“What I wanted to find out was if it worked, could it be profitable and if people would actually like the service itself. I also needed to find out how long people actually needed the boxes for before I could pick them up,” he said.

“Over a six year period I did every delivery and every pick up myself. I spent those six years on the road pretending I was a franchisee and my wife was the franchisor.”

When he realised the idea would be successful, the next step for Harris was to embark on an education.

“I knew it could be franchised, but not knowing anything about franchising I went out and bought a book called Franchising for Dummies,” he continued.

“I had friends who said they knew about franchising but I told them to go away so that I could learn about it myself. I have now developed things in the franchise industry that have never been done before, like sharing the work and breaking up smaller areas than there will be franchisees. There is also a guaranteed income which has never been done before.”

Harris said the more he worked on the business, the more he started to understand how quickly it would grow.

“I realised I had something which had not been done anywhere in the world and which is very powerful,” he explained.

“Everyone that moves needs boxes. You can get boxes delivered to your door for half the cost of buying them and you can keep them for up to three months and then when you are finished we pick them up and they can be delivered to someone else. For the customers the boxes are half the cost and have a lot of service along with it.”

The company has grown extremely quickly, moving from one franchise just under two years ago to 24 across Australia.

And now the next target is the United States.

“We are launching at the LA Expo at the start of October and if the expo in Melbourne is any indication - where I got three franchisees - then the equivalent should be 20 to 30 franchises because the show is 10 times bigger,” Harris forecast.

“I’ve given a prediction that with the speed which we covered Australia and the team that we have in America behind us, we should have America covered in three years with about 300 to 350 franchisees. That is about 100 franchisees a year which is quite easy with the team we have over there.

“The growth so far has been pretty phenomenal. It is a story which I haven’t bothered to try and get out there because I wanted to get out there quietly. Because no one else is doing it I wanted to keep it as quiet as I could for as long as I could, but now that we are doing it I am ready to tell the world about it.”

Harris said there were two main challenges to setting up the business – the first was managing the speed of growth and the second was educating customers.

“We were signing up one franchisee every two weeks and I was doing that myself because we didn’t have any sales staff,” he added.

“The challenge was keeping up with the growth and how fast it was. Last December I had one employee taking phone calls and now we have eight.”

Harris is also ploughing revenue into advertising the service on radio and television and he said the effort was slowly being rewarded.

“We have now shown that there are more people going into Google and typing ‘hire a box’ instead of ‘moving boxes’ or ‘packing boxes’,” he said.

“Before, no one knew you could hire boxes.”

And all this at an age when most would start thinking of cutting back.

“It doesn’t matter how old you are. At 65 most people are thinking of retiring but I am ready to take on the world,” Harris laughed.

“It is going to be an exciting journey and I am looking forward to it very much.”