Western Container Sales Announces Rental Fleet Acquisitions in Texas, Discount Program With PODS

Western Container Sales, Railbox Consulting’s portable storage container rental and sales company, has announced its acquisition of container rental fleets in Dallas and Houston. At the time of the acquisition the fleet was 100% utilized and represented roughly 10% of the units on rent for Western, however that number has since been diluted by growth.

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Western Container Sales has added 20' and 40' steel shipping containers to their portable storage rental fleet in Dallas and Houston. (Photo: Business Wire)

The company only acquired containers in the transaction and did not take on any other assets or employees, nor did they request or require a non-compete from the selling party (who is still fully operational). Seller details were not disclosed, and Western seemed more focused on adding to its units on rent than in eliminating competition.

Company president Mike Norton, formerly of portable storage industry giant Mobile Mini (now WillScot Mobile Mini Holdings Corp, Nasdaq: WSC), said the company was looking to make similar investments in the future. “While we don’t want to change our model to be completely asset-based, a fractional blend of some company owned containers in our rental fleet makes sense as we continue to grow.” Mr. Norton added that the company has no desire to operate their own delivery fleet and will continue to outsource last-mile deliveries.

Additionally, the company has announced a special partner discount with PODS for moving and storage. Because Western offers neither moving nor off-site storage services, they’ve partnered with PODS to offer a discount referral program. Customers can only access the PODS discount through a page on WesternContainerSales.com.

The company also rolled out another update on the digital side: an improved eCommerce user experience. Already a digital leader in the portable storage container industry, Western’s new buying experience walks customers through the shipping container purchase process and provides delivery pricing using a dynamic rate hauling calculator powered by AWS (Nasdaq: AMZN).

Railbox Consulting CIO Derek Murashige, who had been GoDaddy’s (NYSE: GDDY) Director of Customer Systems Excellence prior to joining Railbox, said the new experience would focus on providing the customer as much information as possible. “Our approach has always been to make the buying experience simple and allow the customer to choose their channel-of-choice to do business with us. To add unnecessary complexity and interrupt that self-service process is to ignore Occam’s Razor.” Mr. Murashige added, “The new buying experience provides complete transparency for pricing and our delivery process, counter to the opaqueness of quote request forms and hard-sale tactics employed by others.”

The investment in technology at Western comes in the middle of a record revenue year for the company, which was already named as one of Minnesota’s 50 Fastest Growing Private Companies by the MSP Business Journal last year. The tech improvements have allowed the company to experience double-digit growth in 2020, without adding any additional headcount.

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