MASTER MOVERS: Two Demon Deacon graduates are scaling their campus storage business to help students decamp with ease.

• Author: Gentry, Connie

Working at a frozen yogurt shop in middle school taught Sam Chason that a minimum wage was not enough of a reward for the hard work involved. So at 14, he began hustling--mowing lawns, selling everything from T-shirts to a BMW online.

He earned $30 an hour, plus tips, serving gourmet hors d'oeuvres to executives at a catering company. He made enough to save $50,000, which he put in his parents' safe, before entering Wake Forest University. His entrepreneurial itch would kick into overdrive during his freshman year.

A new cohort of college students finish final exams each May, but face a problem, especially those who live hundreds or even thousands of miles away. They have to depart rooms full of furniture, TVs, refrigerators and personal items, much of which will be needed when classes resume in the fall.

Chason saw the business opportunity while a freshman at Wake Forest, where 80% of the 4,000 students residing on-campus come from outside the state. In 2017, he started Storage Scholars as a solution for classmates to store their belongings over the summer months.

The company served 64 Wake Forest students in the first year. Seven years later, its customer base topped 8,600 students at 73 campuses nationally. They typically pay about $550 for the cost of moving and storage.

Storage Scholars expects revenue to top $5 million this year, versus about $2 million in 2022. On a single day in mid-May, the company handled about 3,000 moves.

Finding motivated staffers, then paying them well, has been critical to the company's growth, Chason says. It has 13 full-time staffers, up from four a year earlier, and about 1,000 seasonal workers, typically students at the client universities.

Each worker is paid at least $ 15 per hour, plus tips. For experienced staffers, pay can reach $25 to $27 an hour. Student wages are expected to total $1.75 million this year, up from $1 million in 2022.

Chason credits much of this success to an epiphany moment while working at a frozen yogurt shop near his home in Westchester County, New York. "There are clearly better ways to make money and spend your time," he says. "Storage Scholars was a natural culmination of doing dirty, sweaty work like lawn mowing, being a handyman, shoveling [snow], and working for a catering company."

He made even more money as a teenager by "selling things on Craigslist, Facebook marketplace, and garage sales with thousands of items, anything from a T-shirt for 25 cents to a $20,000 BMW M3...