Of all the U.S. states, Nevada has been hit hardest by the downturn in the residential housing market, and the economic indicators point to more difficult times ahead for Las Vegas in particular, arguably the state’s largest tourism draw. Consumer spending is down, construction has all but stopped and large casino projects are in search of financing, according to published reports. The city’s gaming industry also is suffering as a result of the recession.
AT A GLANCE: Puliz Records Management |
Principals: President Tim Puliz, who is pictured standing at right, and General Manager Ryan Puliz. Location: Headquartered in Reno, Nev., with a second location in Las Vegas Employees: 30 Equipment: Seven wire-guided order pickers, six scissor lifts, 10 delivery vehicles, two plant-based shredders and one baler Services Provided: Hard copy records storage, data protection services, imaging provided through a third party and NAID-certified plant-based document destruction |
Despite these factors, Puliz Records Management plans to grow its document destruction services in Las Vegas. "It has always been a basic tenet of our business philosophy to be reasonably diversified," Tim says.
"As the industry changes and we see an opportunity, that is where we go," says Ryan Puliz, general manager of Puliz Records Management and Tim’s son. And the company has identified mobile destruction as a probable growth area.
Tim adds, "If a client is asking for something, we check to see if we can provide a product or service that can meet that need at a profit. If we feel we can, then we go for it."
GOING FOR IT
Albert Puliz and his sons, Allen and Tim, founded Puliz Moving & Storage in 1978 as a small moving and storage business in the Reno area. Albert worked previously as a mover, and Tim spent his summers working in the industry beginning at the age of 13. The company was an agent for United Van Lines and Mayflower Transit Co. before expanding into trade show service contracting and records management. The company sold the trade show division in 1998 and currently owns nine office and warehouse facilities in Nevada and Salt Lake City, Utah, totaling 340,000 square feet. Puliz Records Management occupies 150,000 square feet of this space in Reno and Vegas, while the moving and storage division occupies 105,000 square feet. The company leases the remaining 85,000 square feet to tenants.
Puliz Records Management serves more than 600 clients, managing more than 1 million cubic feet of boxes. It offers twice-daily pickup and delivery service, secure vault storage for tape backup rotation and high-value items and plant-based destruction services that are certified by the National Association for Information Destruction (NAID), Phoenix. The company’s Reno facility handles most of the secure destruction services, shredding 45,000 pounds of paper per week on average, Tim says, largely for the company’s storage clients.
"We chose to offer these services because they are compatible with our other warehouse and trucking services," Tim says. "We were able to gain some important economies of scale associated with our administrative costs, warehouse utilization and truck utilization."
Puliz Records Management’s Reno branch serves clients in the medical, corporate, legal and financial sectors, while the Las Vegas branch’s largest and fastest growing client segment is the hotel-casino industry, Tim says.
TAILORED SERVICE
The company’s acquisition of Business Analysis Co. of Las Vegas has helped Puliz Records Management to capture business from the city’s casinos. "Through our acquisition of Business Analysis Co. of Las Vegas a few years back, we gained a unique expertise in the management of casino records in relationship with all of the state gaming audits these casinos are subject to," Tim says. "With a clear understanding of what these auditors require for specific audits, we have created a document identification and ‘bundling’ system for casino records that makes it simple for our staff to provide the auditors with the exact documents they request—nothing more and nothing less."
As a result of the recession, Puliz Moving & Storage has seen revenue from its moving and storage division decline by 40 percent since 2007, Tim says, and growth in the records management division, which accounts for 35 percent of the company’s $14 million in revenue, has contracted. But that doesn’t mean Tim and Ryan see a lack of opportunities to further expand and diversify its business.
The company is currently looking at another possible acquisition. "It’s all about dollars and cents," Tim says, noting that complimentary corporate cultures also are important to a successful acquisition. "You don’t want to lose any key employees and accounts. You have to be very careful in your due diligence." He adds, "We are driven by our culture and our core values. We really don’t want to put a lot of effort in areas where we can’t generate the kinds of returns we’d like."
This philosophy applies not only to acquisitions but to the company’s organic growth as well.
FUNDAMENTAL VALUES
Among Puliz Records Management’s core values are providing the best working environment for employees and the best service to its clients and growing through training and innovation, all while remaining profitable, Tim says.
The ways in which Puliz Records Management has innovated throughout the years include providing clients access to the company’s database, long before most software providers developed Web interfaces for records center clients. "We hired a small vendor to create a system to allow our clients to log in to our system via modem," Tim says. "When we felt there was a need to switch to a net-based program, we wrote our own."
Tim attributes Puliz Records Management’s early growth to its innovation in this area.
Client referrals have helped the company grow, and it achieves those referrals by providing IT applications that are just as good as those offered by larger companies, Tim says, but with a personal touch.
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Ryan adds that the company’s adaptability and personal service are advantages that have boosted it profile, particularly in Reno.
GROWTH OPPORTUNITY
Despite the weak economy, Ryan says the company still sees growth in its off-site destruction services and is preparing to add on-site services before the end of the year. "When we see our competitors doing something, we need to ask ourselves if we should get in that area," he says.
Tim adds, "Destruction is our largest client growth area. We’ve been putting our effort into growing this service in the last year or so."
The company has hired Vickie Riley to lead its document destruction services sales effort in Las Vegas, and Ryan says she will play a critical role in the company’s growth in the near term.
"We should be up and going in our Las Vegas branch first, with the Reno branch following suit soon after," Tim says of the company’s expansion into mobile shredding. "We will have to NAID certify our mobile shredding operations as soon as we get the truck on the road."
Tim continues, "Looking back, I would have started our shredding services about 10 years earlier. We could have had a very large market share in our two cities by now."
Ryan and Tim also say the Las Vegas market presents more opportunities for growth than Reno does, though the competition is more intense in Las Vegas. "We have three to five times more competitors in Las Vegas," Tim adds.
Puliz Records Management also is investing in its Internet marketing in an effort to reach more prospects. Tim says, "Recognizing that Internet marketing is playing an ever-increasing role in a successful marketing campaign, we recently contacted Tom Adams with Flourish Press (San Diego) to manage our Web sites (www.puliz.com, www.puliz
records.com and www.pulizmoving.com) to maximize our exposure to Internet search engines to provide our potential customers with information about our companies and all of the services we offer."
Ryan says with many companies relying on Web searches to find potential vendors, this is an important initiative for the firm. "We would like to migrate our budget away from the yellow pages to the Internet. We hope to be able to approach it in a truly professional way with Tom."
By embracing marketing and technological innovations in the records storage business and expanding its services at a time when other companies may just be looking to maintain their market share, Puliz Records Management hopes to continue to be a prominent name in Nevada’s records management industry. The author is editor of SDB and can be contacted at dtoto@gie.net.
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