DEPOTIUM in the media
Self-made storage man
Turan Kalfa arrived in Canada in 1984 with a mere $150 to his name. Since then, he has built a company with annual revenues of $4.5 million
STEPHANIE WHITTAKER, The Gazette
Published: Monday, March 20, 2006
If Turan Kalfa ever finds the time to write the novel he has always yearned to pen, he might want to examine his own life for inspiration.
Kalfa's life story has all the ingredients of a page-turner. A childhood in Turkey where he was raised by his widowed mother who dreamed he'd attend university and become a professional. Several years at sea, working in shipping, becoming a captain by age 19. A stint, mercifully short, in the French Foreign Legion. Arrival in Canada with a mere $150. A few years of running his own moving company in Montreal while attending university. A career shift in which he creates a self-storage company called Depotium. Building that company within a decade into one that enjoys annual revenues of $4.5 million.
You get the impression from Kalfa, 44, that that's just the beginning of the story. In fact, when he shows you architectural drawings of self-storage buildings slated for construction in such places as Valleyfield, Dorion, Sherbrooke and Joliette, you know this yarn is far from its conclusion.
"Self-storage is a relatively new industry in Quebec. We're about 20 years behind the U.S.," Kalfa said. "I go to the U.S. every six months or so to see what's going on in this industry there."
For the record, self-storage is different from the moving and storage business. Anyone who wants to store stuff can rent a space in one of Depotium's giant warehouses, as little as nine square feet or as much as 500. What defines "self-storage" is the fact that clients move their belongings into the warehouse themselves or hire someone to do it.
"About 50 per cent of my clients are women who live in condominiums and who need space to store off-season things like bicycles and skis and winter coats," he said. "I also have commercial clients, people who run retail outlets, who need warehousing for merchandise."
Other clients include import-export companies that need storage for the goods they distribute and pharmaceutical sales representatives who work from home and need to park their samples.
"Then there are the people who get divorced," Kalfa said. "They have pictures of their ex-spouses that they can't take into their new marriages but which they'd like to keep for their children. They rent little lockers for them."
Kalfa, who dreamed of being a writer but whose mother wanted him to become an engineer, didn't foresee his current gig when he was a youth in Turkey.
"My mother sent me to university and told me to register, but when I arrived and walked around the campus, I decided not to stay. The army had taken over in Turkey and many of my friends had been jailed without trial. I knew that if I became a student, I'd become an activist on the front lines."
So he took off for Istanbul, found a job on a small ship cleaning oil tanks and spent five years at sea.
"During that time, I came to Canada to study navigation in Toronto for three months."
Back at sea, Kalfa, by then first officer, was promoted to captain after the captain was removed from the vessel because of a family illness. He was 19.
During the recession of the early 1980s, he was laid off and headed to Paris to look for work. After losing a bag containing his passport, money and captain's papers, Kalfa was penniless. Unable to get any help from the Turkish embassy, he took the advice of someone and joined the French Foreign Legion.
"By this time, I had visited 40 or 50 countries and the one I loved best was Canada. When I came to do navigation courses in Toronto, people would ask me where I was from and when I said 'Turkey,' there were no judgments or prejudice. In Europe, Turks always get a negative reception. Canada was the kind of society I wanted to live in."
So in 1984, Kalfa left the Legion and immigrated here with $150 in his pocket. He found work in a Toronto bagel factory before moving to Montreal and finding a job in a West Island company that made bomb components for the U.S. military.
"I registered at Concordia University to study to be a programmer analyst and worked in the evenings," he said.
In 1986, Kalfa bought a van with the help of friends and advertised his services as a student mover. He hoped to work as a programmer analyst for the company where he was employed.
"But they never gave me the job I wanted, so I quit and took moving more seriously."
At about that time, the transportation industry was de-regulated in Canada and Kalfa learned he would be able to offer interprovincial moving services with a $250 licence.
"I started moving between Montreal and Toronto," he said. "By 1988, I had five trucks. At that time, a lot of young Turkish graduates were leaving Europe to find work in Canada and I hired them. If other companies charged $100 an hour, I charged $60. We got so busy so fast, we couldn't keep up. By 1994, we had 95 agents across Canada."
But by then, Kalfa was weary of the long hours he was clocking.
"I never saw my kids," he said.
It was then that he discovered the concept of self-warehousing.
"I had a warehouse because every mover needs storage space," he said.
In 1996, a real-estate agent found Kalfa storage space under the railway bridges at Place Bonaventure.
"With six partners, I leased the 74,000 square feet," he said.
He also sold his moving company.
"At that time, I was living on the 12th floor of a building on Alexis Nihon Blvd. and I could see the abandoned spaghetti factory from my balcony," he said.
It took three years and several offers to the owners, but Kalfa bought the space and renovated the building as a self-storage unit. In the past decade, Kalfa has opened 14 Depotium warehouses, most of them in the Greater Montreal area and is targeting another 30 sites that he plans to open in the next five years.
The former spaghetti factory, which measures 300,000 square feet, boasts 7,400 lockers and 1,900 clients.
Kalfa says his biggest challenge now is to persuade municipalities to create a uniform zoning for self-storage in Quebec.
"This is a new industry," he said. "In St. Laurent, I'm zoned industrial. In Lachine, it's commercial and in St. Hubert, I'm in the same category as heavy industrial refineries."
Moreover, there was no French name for the industry. So Kalfa borrowed a term from France and Belgium.
"Self-stockage," he said. "The Office de la langue francaise says I can use it, but I get visited by them when people complain about the name. The Office is slowly coming to accept it."
Kalfa wants self-storage to become a known industry in Quebec.
"I want to define the industry here," he said.
Once he's achieved that goal, he may well write that book that he knows he has in him.
© The Gazette (Montreal) 2006
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