Infocare keeps secrets safe
Business grows after slow start
by Marina Parr

Howard Furst knew he had a solid idea for creating a document-storage business.
The computer age -- which was supposed to bring about a paperless revolution -- had instead left office workers awash in even more cover sheets and case files than before.
Still, Furst, 51, spent his time doing his homework before launching his Bellingham business 10 years ago.
He toured labyrinthine storage centers in California, where companies routinely stowed away everything from medical records to boardroom minutes to legal files.
Next, he hired a consultant who specialized in document storage.
That consultant told him to take out a map and draw a circle around his proposed business, with a radius that worked out to 45 minutes in drive time.
Furst remembers the consultant’s words, or rather, his silence to this day.
“He asked how big is your market?” Furst said. “I told him. Then there was a dead silence on the other end of the phone. He said it would be tough to make a go of it. It was a bit ominous.”

Going his own way
Furst, who went on to start Infocare, Inc., anyway, would have been wise to heed the consultant’s advice.
Problem was, he had already quit his day job as a software engineer for Wall Data.
Indeed, Furst had used stock money he made when Wall went public to pay his business startup costs.
“The first two years were brutal,” said Furst.
Furst found it took longer than he expected to grow his client base.
“The sales cycle is tremendously long,” Furst said. “It might take six years to get a customer. They have to accumulate enough paper to get to a point where they need you.”
These hard-won lessons should serve as warning signs to others anxious to open their own businesses.
It’s critical to do your homework. Furst is glad, for example, that he took the time to fly to Los Angeles to see how other document centers operated.
But so is listening to the advice you get. In other words, don’t get so excited about what you’re selling that you don’t take a long, hard look at who is in the market to buy it.
It turned out Bellingham wasn’t quite ready for a document-storage facility in 1995.
But Furst had already made the investment and plunged ahead.
He found himself back at work as a software engineer. He held down that job full-time to earn a paycheck and hired other people to run the storage business.
“I would take my paycheck and pay them,” he said. “But it grew consistently.”

Business makes money – finally
After five years of hard work, the business was profitable – an admittedly long time for those without deep pockets or other ways to earn a living in the interim.
These days, though, Furst is flush with success.
In 2004, Infocare opened a brand new, 10,000-square-foot facility. Furst doesn’t advertise where it’s located because of security concerns.
Inside, shelves that climb as high as 30 feet in the air, are linked to a series of stairways and cat walks. State-of-the-art fire systems are embedded in the racking and a special security system helps ensure that files stored at Infocare are kept confidential.
Furst built the new facility because he was running out of room. Previously, he rented three warehouses and was close to renting out a fourth, when he decided to build his own.
The new storage facility can hold 90,000 boxes, Furst said, and includes room to grow beyond that.
For some business owners, renting a crowded off-site storage unit or squeezing past mounds of files in a cramped office spurs a call to Furst’s company.

Companies crave organization
But it’s not always space that Furst’s customers crave when they turn to Infocare.
Many are even more pleased with his ability to set up organized systems that allow them to easily maintain and access their paperwork.
Organization, it turns out, is an even hotter commodity than extra elbow room.
“What I’ve learned is that storage is a minor portion of what we offer,” Furst said. “We call it a service business … It’s knowing where a file is when you need it. That’s what it always boils down to.”
At Infocare, detailed reports account for each and every document. That’s handy for employees who used to have to rummage through a backroom or a mini-storage looking for an inactive file.
Indeed, Furst’s employees can deliver a file directly to clients who now never have to leave their desks.

Paperwork keeps growing
Paperwork is a big part of many businesses these days. Where do you put your old tax returns from five years ago? Or monthly receipts, daily sales tax worksheets and customer accounts?
Law firms spit out reams of reports and notes. Health clinics have to keep track of medical records, some stretching back decades.
For Marissa McCauley, an office administrator with Bellingham law firm Adelstein, Sharpe and Serka, Infocare has been a godsend.
“For us, obviously, the biggest issue is confidentiality,” McCauley said.
All of the documents stored at Infocare are labeled with bar codes that give no clue to a snooping thief as to their contents.
Indeed, only a handful of Infocare employees have access to the files and great care is taken to keep contact brief and efficient.
It’s these employees -- Furst counts two full-time and three part-time -- who hunt down documents, pull them from the files and shuttle them where they are needed.
That’s a big relief for people such as McCauley whose law firm is one of Furst’s original customers.
“The physical part was becoming quite burdensome,” said McCauley, who used to have to wade through storage units, hunting down old files that were suddenly called back into circulation as reference materials or to bolster ongoing court cases.
McCauley routinely found herself hauling heavy boxes off of top shelves and then “huffing them back up to the top,” after she found what she was looking for.
“When Howard came along, it was a treat,” she said.

Technology trumped so far
Storage at Furst’s facility costs only pennies per day per box. It’s a bargain-basement price that has yet to be beat by advances in scanning technology.
The former software engineer still sounds a bit disappointed that scanning documents doesn’t yet make financial sense for companies. Furst puts it this way: It would cost the same amount of money to scan a box of documents as it would to store them for 40 years.
Also, right now, courts tend to rely on original documents when settling disputes. Scanned documents have yet to carry the same kind of legal weight, largely because of fears such documents could be altered after-the-fact.
Another worry is that rapid changes in technology will make scanned documents easily out of date.
“That’s not a trivial issue,” said Furst, who laments, “Even CDs are becoming obsolete.”
So Furst is relying on an old-fashioned but effective way to grow his business: square footage.
“It’s ‘yesterday’s business,’” Furst points out, talking about the mounds of out-of-date documents taking up space in his modern warehouse.
Those piles, it seems, and Furst’s profits are destined to only get bigger.