Two Wake Forest University alumni will get their chance to swim with the sharks this week.
Storage Scholars — the Winston-Salem pickup and delivery storage service for college students — will appear on "Shark Tank" on Oct. 14. The episode premiers at 8 p.m. EST on ABC.
Founded in 2017 when CEO Sam Chason and COO Matt Gronberg were freshmen at Wake Forest, now might be the perfect time for Storage Scholars to make its "Shark Tank" debut, as the company continues its national expansion, with plans to double its customer base by next summer.
Company profile
Business: Storage Scholars
What it does: Pickup and delivery storage service for college students
Founded: 2017
Top exec(s): Sam Chason, co-founder and CEO; Matt Gronberg, co-founder and COO
Employees: Seven full-time, several part-time and over 400 seasonal
Website: https://www.storagescholars.com/
Twitter: @ScholarsStorage
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/storage-scholars/
Instagram: @storagescholars
Storage Scholars on track to more than double campuses served, become a national company
This past academic year, Storage Scholars served 23 campuses — right on target for what Chason predicted in summer 2021 when he spoke to the Triad Business Journal for an awards profile.
Now, by summer 2023, Chason expects to service 50 schools, more than doubling its customer base.
His goal is for Storage Scholars to become more national in its coverage area, as the company is grounded in the East Coast, down into the South through Texas. Chason hopes to break into more cities as well — Boston, New York, Nashville, Tennessee, and Los Angeles, to name a few.
Chason told the Triad Business Journal he also wants to continue expanding across different types of schools so that Storage Scholars can service students at large state universities and small liberal arts colleges — and everywhere in between.
Storage Scholars has brought in $2 million in sales so far this year, Chason said. He added that Storage Scholars served over 3,500 customers this past year and had an average feedback rating of 4.8 out of 5 stars.
Chason attributes the ability to have an ambitious growth goal to having hired more full-time employees and being “ahead of the curve” from where the company was a year prior.
In the past year, Storage Scholars has gone from two to seven full-time employees. The company also employs several part-time employees and over 400 part-time college students.
He also noted the importance of deep relationships on university campuses, starting with the administration down to the students Storage Scholars employs.
Chason said he has a meeting with each "Campus Co-Founder" — essentially the student point of contact at each university — weekly. He knows that the experience working for Storage Scholars can help make a difference for a college student in a number of ways — including the fact that the company has paid over $804,000 to the students it employs.
“It’s not like here’s my spiel, a couple of T-shirts and we’ll see how it goes. They’re a significant part of our company,” Chason said. “If people want to be a part of this, they can make good money and they can learn marketing, operations, sales, logistics, supply chain — actually get a taste in all these different facets of business and do that while still being a student.”
Chason said that Storage Scholars has two additional partnerships in its pipeline, declining to disclose more information before the deals close.
As of now, Chason is solely focusing on Storage Scholars and its growth, having dissolved Moving Scholars, a residential moving business he launched in April 2021.
"Shark Tank" to provide Storage Scholars legitimacy, eyeballs
Chason said that preparing for "Shark Tank" was like preparing for a championship game: he and Gronberg watched game film (previous episodes of the show); practiced their routes and plays (the numbers and stories for their pitches); and worked out every day (cut out distractions, slept well, ate healthy). They wanted to show up and leave it all on the field.
While Chason can’t reveal whether any of the sharks invested in Storage Scholars, he said that this will be an opportunity to get more eyeballs on the company and provide it with more legitimacy.
Many entrepreneurs who go on "Shark Tank" — whether or not they receive an investment — see an uptick in website traffic, sales and interest in their startups after the episode airs. Chason hopes that this will be the case for Storage Scholars, especially with student applicants who want to run branches of the company on their campuses.
He likened a startup being on "Shark Tank" to a business executive having an MBA from Harvard, noting that the process to get on the show is in-depth.
“It’s a lifelong childhood dream (of mine),” Chason said. “It’s an opportunity to get some eyeballs, but more so legitimacy from a hiring and sales perspective.”
