Thomas Clark on Trade Show Peaks and Mobile Storage in Las Vegas

In this episode, host Mark Mann sits down with Thomas Clark, Las Vegas General Manager of Advantage Trailer Rentals, a Warehouse on Wheels brand, to talk about trade show peaks in the Las Vegas trailer market, companies relocating from Southern California, and keeping costs flexible with storage trailers. Thomas describes a high-end textile customer that went from five units to 80 in 3 months, puts roughly 500 square feet of trailer floor space at $150 to $200 a month on a storage model, and explains why the age of a storage trailer says nothing about its quality.

Key Takeaways

1. Trade show peaks are planned with partners months ahead. Thomas says 40 to 50% of the warehouses he comes across in Las Vegas belong to trade show businesses building booths, backdrops and displays, and the city has long had an infrastructure of cartage trailers. Ahead of events like CES or SEMA, where Mark puts the spike in demand at 300% in a single week, Thomas sits down with those partners to learn what their year looks like, then plans his fleet against their demand. Year-round, half of his fleet is on rent to trade show partners. His rule is “plan, don’t react.”
2. Container detention fees are where trailers save customers money. Freight from the Port of Long Beach arrives in containers that are “basically a rental car” and have to go back, and Thomas finds they cost $300 a day once they go over that period. He says that for customers without the labor force to process everything quickly, WOW trailers can save “thousands, tens of thousands of dollars on a monthly basis.” When a customer has no room on its own lot, he arranges off-yard storage with transportation vendors and local landlords, and bundles the rental, storage and transportation into one price.
3. A textile customer went from five trailers to 80 in 3 months. It took Thomas seven or eight months to get a meeting with the Los Angeles textile manufacturer, whose main distribution is in Las Vegas. It started with five or six trailers, and once it saw clear floors and aisles that were no longer clogged every day, it grew to 80 units. The rental was supposed to be short term, but the customer told him, “We’ve gotten so used to this process. We’re keeping everything.”
4. On a storage model, a trailer is a low, temporary monthly cost. Thomas puts the floor space of a 53-foot trailer at roughly 500 square feet and, by his figures, the storage model at $150 to $200 a month, depending on the quality of the unit. A business that outgrows its warehouse for half the year would otherwise shop for a new multimillion-dollar facility, with the power, security and insurance that come with it. Thomas calls it a temporary rental and says “you can basically end it at any time.” In slow months he’ll often agree a reduced on-site rate so the customer keeps the unit and avoids spending another $500 moving equipment around town.
5. Kitty litter that jammed a 3PL’s floor now cycles through 48-foot trailers. A 3PL storing for a very inexpensive big box store had kitty litter one pallet high across its floor, to the point where it couldn’t bring any more inventory in. By Thomas’s numbers, WOW’s trailers support roughly 40,000 pounds, or about 20 pallets each, and he used his surplus of 48-foot units because the shorter trailer handles more weight. The newest stock goes into a trailer parked on WOW’s secured lot while the oldest comes back for distribution, and the customer decided it didn’t need to buy another warehouse.

Episode Chapters

Click any timestamp to jump to that section on YouTube.

• 00:00 — Meet Thomas Clark
• 02:27 — Trade Shows and 300% Spikes
• 05:29 — Out of Space After the Move
• 08:08 — I-15, Demurrage and Partners
• 10:35 — Desert Heat and Long-Term Planning
• 15:03 — Trade Show Storage and Slow Seasons
• 19:10 — The Trailer Versus Lease Math
• 23:59 — Gateway of the West
• 27:38 — California and an 80-Trailer Rescue
• 30:56 — Running Out of Room and a Playbook
• 34:57 — Kitty Litter and Heat-Proof Roofs
• 39:25 — Signature Round
• 43:43 — Retiring the Trailer Age Myth

Transcript

[00:00] Meet Thomas Clark

Mark Mann: Welcome back to The Wow Factor. I’m your host, Dr. Mark Mann. On this episode of The Factor, we turn our focus to the neon capital of the world, Las Vegas, Nevada. Las Vegas’s primary value proposition is its status as a regional distribution hub. It offers one-day truck access to over 60 million consumers in the western US, including major markets like Los Angeles, Phoenix, Salt Lake City. Right. With major tenants moving into the area representing several billion dollars of investment that underscores the shift toward local manufacturing, Las Vegas is shifting toward a more balanced market where a high volume of new supply is being met by resilient, albeit more selective, tenant demand. In 2026, marketwide vacancy stands at approximately 12.9 to 13.3%. This is a significant increase from the sub-3% levels that we saw during the pandemic, but it represents a stabilization as developers pull back on speculative products— sorry, projects.

Today’s guest leads Warehouse on Wheels operations in Las Vegas and is a seasoned leader in the Southwest logistics space, known for managing high-velocity fleet operations in one of the most volatile hospitality and trade show markets in the world. He oversees a critical node in the Western Triangle, which includes Vegas, Phoenix, and Southern California. Thomas Clark, General Manager for Advantage Trailer Rentals in Las Vegas, welcome to the Factor.

Thomas Clark: Hey, thanks, Mark. That’s an awesome introduction, sir. I have to be clear: we changed the date on this a few times, and today happens to be April 1st, so I was half assuming this was a joke when I signed on today. But looking forward to it, brother. I think you introduced me well. I grew up in Las Vegas. I’m a Nevada guy all day long. I’ve done logistics at the airport, with trucks, with trailers, with cars. You name it, I’ve moved it. I’ve packed it. I’ve loaded it. Now with Warehouse on Wheels, it’s more of the supply side and what I call a support side of the business, where I get to go into locations and find out, “Hey, what are you doing? How can I help?” So it’s been very exciting.

[02:27] Trade Shows and 300% Spikes

Mark Mann: Absolutely. So let’s stick with that, actually, Thomas, because Las Vegas is no longer just a tourism town. It’s become a critical kind of relief valve for Southern California’s ports, right? You guys host over 6.6 million trade show attendees every single year. So how does that 24/7 nature of Las Vegas change the service expectations for mobile storage compared to the standard 9-to-5 market?

Thomas Clark: Yeah, no kidding. So trade show has been the backbone of this city, legitimately, for a very long time. Yes, travel, tourism is a big deal, but those big trade shows that come in bring in lots of dollars. That being said, if you go around the city much like I do, you’ll find that 40 to 50% of the warehouses you come across are trade show. They have warehouses all over town creating booths, creating backdrops, displays, you name it. And they have to move things back and forth. So that being said, there’s been an infrastructure of, we call it, cartage trailers in this city for a very long time, and a very inexpensive business as well.

That being said, with the manufacturing coming into town, with the 3PLs coming into town, we’ve got warehouses coming up all over the city where we used to have vacant lots. Now we have tilt-up warehouses coming up weekly. I want to say we’re somewhere in the neighborhood of 30% empty occupancy, and they keep building because it keeps coming. Every month we’re getting new and new manufacturing, new and new large-scale operations, large distribution centers where they would have been, like you said, at the ports. They’re moving to Las Vegas. It’s a 4-hour drive from the port. You can come out here, get cheaper real estate, cheaper taxes, cheaper everything, with an awesome labor pool as well. So the city is built for it. It’s ready for it. And it’s just really exciting that post-COVID the transition has been unbelievable. Just like you said, the uptick from where we used to be, mainly tourism and trade show, now we’re literally a genuine manufacturer and distribution port. It’s actually been a very fun few years.

Mark Mann: Yeah, I mean, I’m seeing that all over the news post-pandemic, and there is still a big focus on the trade shows. How do you prepare your fleet for an event like CES or SEMA, where demand can spike like 300% in a single week?

Thomas Clark: Yeah, it’s exciting. So the idea is you make your partnerships, right? You don’t just simply do business with people, you partner. So we sit down with these guys and we have meetings, and we say, “Okay, what does your year look like?” They generally know. And then we could build a plan. My fleet represents X, their demand represents Y. We come up with an equation that says, “Okay, you need X amount of units on this day for this many months.” These guys do share a lot, which is nice. They all work against and with each other. So a lot of these trailers will go on rent to one group and kind of get shared around. It’s pretty fun as long as you stay ahead of things. You know, plan, don’t react.

[05:29] Out of Space After the Move

Mark Mann: Yeah, absolutely. And as you mentioned, we are seeing a lot of companies move from Southern California into Nevada. And it really does— like I said, there are billions of dollars tied up in that move. So what’s the first thing that these refugee companies ask you when they realize how tight the Vegas warehouse market actually is?

Thomas Clark: Well, first it’s, do they have space? Right. So they move it. They move from one location to another location. They purchase a 500,000-square-foot facility. Huge, beautiful, shining, glistening floors, shining, everything works appropriately. Then they fill it up, and then what do they do? Then they turn to the outside. Where in the past these companies like Prologis would build space for trailers for additional storage outside, out here it’s not happening at all. It’s all prime real estate. So every vacant lot you see, a tilt-up warehouse is going on. So it is a factor of: do you have enough dock doors, and do you have enough space?

Which is where another side of our business comes in, which is off-yard storage. I’ve got multiple customers that need extended, extended, extended space. You know, we’re talking thousands of extra square feet, but nowhere to park it. So I also factor in there, I say, “Okay, I can partner with my transportation vendors, I can partner with my local landlord, and create space for them to run their business.” I like to say, if your warehouse takes 5,000 square feet of inventory and you have the opportunity to get 10,000 square feet of inventory at an excellent price, do you pass up on the opportunity, or do you call Thomas, have him send some drivers over with some trailers? We figure out a very amicable pricing point on the rental of the unit plus the storage of the unit plus the transportation of the unit. We bundle the whole thing together, baby, and we make a nice partnership.

Mark Mann: Absolutely. So you do allow people to park on your lot. I mean, you lease your lot for parking there, too.

Thomas Clark: I do.

Mark Mann: Awesome.

Thomas Clark: Well, I do, and I partner with, you know, like I said, I have different partners that I use. You know, it’s not exactly direct with me. But I always say, to grow a business, sometimes you’re making money and sometimes you’re shaking hands. And a lot of times I’m doing a lot of handshakes to create that goodwill, so down the road things are looking better.

[08:08] I-15, Demurrage and Partners

Mark Mann: That’s exactly right. Way to do it. Let’s kind of switch our gears over to I-15. Now, I-15 is the lifeblood of the Southwest between LA and Vegas. How do you at Advantage act as that staging ground for freight moving from the Port of Long Beach into the interior of the US?

Thomas Clark: I’ll use, specifically, when you talk about shipping containers, they have— oh God, what’s the word? There’s a specific term.

Mark Mann: Demurrage.

Thomas Clark: Yeah, it’s like the detention fees for sitting for a long period of time.

Mark Mann: It’s retention fees, or— demurrage is what I’ve heard it called. Yeah. When they hold the—

Thomas Clark: When they hold it at the port. Yeah. So they’ll get the containers. They’ll bring the containers here, but the containers have to go back. The containers are basically a rental car, right? And the longer they sit, we’re finding $300 a day when it goes over that period. That’s when I can come in and save the day. My units, you know, we can get you very effective pricing and save you literally thousands, tens of thousands of dollars on a monthly basis by partnering with the right groups that say, “Okay, we want to move the stuff in quickly and we got to move the stuff out quickly, but we don’t have the labor force to process everything quickly.” So we do a lot of cross-stocking. We provide a lot of that kind of storage just to keep things moving.

Mark Mann: Yeah. Now, you guys are located northwest of the city, and we’re seeing massive industrial parks popping up near the Speedway, which is even further northeast. How are you positioning Advantage Trailer Rentals to support the big box retailers who are setting up shop out there?

Thomas Clark: Yeah. Like I said earlier, I like to partner, not have customers. So I have partners, not customers. One of my biggest customers has a southern lot that they let me use for free. They get, you know, some sort of preferential pricing, preferential, you know, first dibs kind of a thing. But with handshake deals and good partnerships, I’ve been able to expand my footprint all over the valley to help support the locations south side, north side, east side, just by making good partnerships and good deals with existing customers.

Mark Mann: I love the idea of “I don’t have customers, I have partners.”

Thomas Clark: Yeah. I mean, more companies really need to think in those terms.

[10:35] Desert Heat and Long-Term Planning

Mark Mann: Now, unlike our managers that we’ve spoken to in Indy and Memphis or Detroit, you guys are dealing with 110-degree summers out there. How does that extreme environment affect how you maintain your trailers and protect the high-value goods? I’m assuming you have vendors, right?

Thomas Clark: Well, one of the beauties of Las Vegas is it never rains, so leakage is something we only find out about maybe once a year. But through partnering, we have vendors that do small tasks. So we’ve hired handymen to come on, and we’ve literally used our in-house company training material to teach them our way to do patches, to do roof repairs, to do the simple things, right, where a normal mechanic would cost us 100, 120 an hour. We can have a handyman come out, 50 an hour, and do simple repairs for us, which has really been a beneficial thing. We could pass those savings down to our customers as well, or our partners, if you will.

But by making a big network of people that say, “Okay, here’s the job. Here’s what we pay. Let’s do this thing together. Let’s all make some money.” So as long as we’re all making money, we’re all shaking hands. We’re all smiling. It’s a beautiful thing. But our network is big. We have different people for different things. And it’s good to pass those savings along, because technically I only rent trailers. Everything else is just a bonus. Mark, every little thing that I’m doing beyond renting trailers is just one more beneficial thing of doing business with Advantage Trailer out here in Las Vegas.

Mark Mann: I love your outlook. It’s exciting.

Thomas Clark: Yeah.

Mark Mann: So a lot of Las Vegas-based leaders still see storage trailers as a temporary band-aid for those hair-on-fire moments, right? How do you coach an operations manager in North Las Vegas or Sunrise Manor, even down in Winchester, to see mobile storage as a strategic part of their long-term facility plan?

Thomas Clark: Well, we talk about it in terms of: yes, it is short-term, and it is flexible. You know, there’s peak seasons and whatnot that normal businesses have to go through out here. Peak seasons, it can be Q2, Q3; Q4 is generally peak seasons out here. Knowing your customer, knowing when the fluxes are coming, is how best to prepare. So you coach up your people and say, “Okay, find out when their peak seasons are, find out when it ends, right? Find out how their operations work.”

Generally speaking, I have one customer we’ll use, for instance. I won’t use their name, but they’re a huge, huge textile manufacturer out of Los Angeles. Their main distribution is here in Las Vegas. It took me seven, eight months to get a meeting with them, because it’s high-end retail. So they’re very, very walled up, literally security everywhere. But once we got in, they found the value of, “Okay, well, we’ll take five or six trailers.” Cool. Once they saw the beauty of, okay, you don’t have to have clogged-up aisles every single day, you don’t have to have clogged-up everything. Well, that went from five units to 20 units to 80 units in a matter of 3 months. Just seeing the value of, oh, at a low cost, we can have clear floors, safe working environments, and a much more presentable environment.

If you go into a warehouse and you see stacks and stacks and stacks of pallets going to the ceiling, you think two things. One, these guys don’t know what they’re doing. And two, this is very unsafe. We can come in here, give them the opportunity of clearing that floor out, and once they see the value, once they see it, and they understand the process and the simplicity of reaching out to us and, you know, getting repairs and getting things moved and swapped out for them, they see the value pretty quickly. And like that customer, they went from five to 80 quickly, and that was supposed to be short term. We sat down with them when we were assuming they were going to come back, and they’re like, “You know, we’ve gotten so used to this process. We’re keeping everything.” So, you know, go in, don’t sell, provide a service, right? Provide a service to somebody. Say, “This is the service. This is what it can do. This is how it can help.” Once they see it in motion, it’s really hard to go back.

Mark Mann: Yeah. You provide the solution, and it changes their mindset.

Thomas Clark: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, absolutely.

Mark Mann: And like you said, it’s like, “We’re so used to this now. We’re just going to keep on doing it.”

Thomas Clark: Yeah. That’s it. Yeah.

Mark Mann: Fantastic.

Thomas Clark: Yeah.

[15:03] Trade Show Storage and Slow Seasons

Mark Mann: Last time I was in Vegas, just out on the Strip, I just noticed how packed everything is, so close together. And a lot of those resorts have, you know, zero back-of-the-house storage. Do you guys act as like a hidden basement for some of those large hotels out there?

Thomas Clark: For the hotels, not so much. But the trade show— so every hotel has convention space. It’s something that you know and you see when you’re walking around looking for the bathroom in the Bellagio. You’ll see “convention center” written on the board as well. You don’t go back there, because you’re looking for the bathroom, you’re looking for the bar, you’re looking for the restaurant, right? You’re not looking for that. But with my partners in the trade show, yeah, I’ve got— year-round, half of my fleet is on rent to these guys, storing equipment, storing furniture, all those kinds of things.

And like you said, they don’t know it’s an option until they know it’s an option. And once they find out about it, it’s very economical, very useful. And the term “temporary,” it’s a safe thing. You’re not signing a five-year lease, you’re signing a temporary rental, and so it’s very safe, because you can basically end it at any time. So it’s just a very comfortable thing.

Mark Mann: Yeah. Earlier you talked about peaks and knowing when the peak is and when it begins and when it ends. How do you help a Vegas business use mobile storage to save money during those peak seasons when their inventory levels drop?

Thomas Clark: Yeah. Well, it goes back to being a partner. If you’re on good communication, if you feel like you can make a phone call and say, “Hey, Tom, what’s going on? Hey, I need this. I don’t need this. I want to move it in and out.” So it’s just being present. It’s being a professional partner. It’s being somebody that they can easily get a hold of and easily talk to about their problems that they— or not problems, or I guess you can say problems. Is that safe? Problems—

Mark Mann: Opportunities.

Thomas Clark: Yeah, I guess so. Yeah. But being a good partner means being present and being available. That means if they’re having an influx or a decrease, they can comfortably reach out to me and talk to me and say, “Hey, this is going on.” And it’s a heads-up, not a “Hey, we’re returning 30” with a blanket email, right? They’re going to call. We’re going to talk, because we have a good relationship already. The last thing you want is somebody just returning things to you for no reasons, no heads-up. So you have to build those relationships from the beginning.

If you have a good connection and a good relationship, they’ll call you, you can talk it out with them. And often enough, you can just sit the units with them for a couple of months and maybe reduce the cost. Maybe, because transportation is expensive. Gasoline is through the roof. It’s over five bucks a gallon out here. For diesel, it’s about 6.50 a gallon out here right now, which is, yeah, it’s insane. So oftentimes the most economic and smartest thing to do is just to keep the unit for a few months, as opposed to spending another $500 moving equipment around town. That’s just a money suck.

So the benefit of having the unit on site and having the good relationship and saying, “Hey, okay, you’re slowing down right now, you’re going to ramp up in two or three months. Why don’t you just hold on to the equipment? We’ll come up with a nice, you know, reduced storage, on-site rate or whatnot for your slower periods. Keep the unit, hold on to it.” And because we don’t know— like you said, things can peak out here 300%. I can go from being 100% utilized out here to 70% utilized in two months. And that can happen. Which means at one moment I might have plenty of inventory, and at one moment I might have any inventory. So you use those kind of talking points with your partner, so you have a good relationship. You know, you’re not messing with them. You’re not trying to sell them on something. You’re trying to help them. So being a helpful partner is the most important thing in that kind of basis.

[19:10] The Trailer Versus Lease Math

Mark Mann: Yeah, totally agree with you. Now, you had mentioned five-year leases, and, you know, we’re coming out of it, but we’re still seeing this uncertain 2026 economy. So you got a lot of warehouses out there requiring 10-year leases. And so let’s talk a little bit about the cost savings. So in Vegas, you know, we mentioned industrial rents have seen double-digit growth recently. Can you walk us through the math of a 53-foot trailer versus a 5-year lease in a North Vegas flex space, let’s say?

Thomas Clark: Yeah, for sure. So a trailer runs you— it’s about 500 square feet for a trailer, floor space. On a 53-foot trailer, it’s roughly 500 square feet. On just a storage model, that could run you anywhere from $150 to $200 a month, depending on the quality of the unit. That being said, if you needed— so we’ll say for peak season again, right? So, you know, your warehouse isn’t big enough to do operations. You know, for half the year, you aren’t big enough to do your operations, which means, okay, now we have to shop for a new multimillion-dollar facility. With that comes power, with that comes additional security, with that comes additional insurance, with that comes, like you said, the unpredictability of our current markets, tariff wars, whatnot. These things pop up out of our control.

Being available to them at a low cost— and like you said, if you don’t know it’s a business, then you don’t even know it’s an option. So my job is to get out there ahead of these guys and say, “Hey, hold on to my info. Maybe today you don’t need me, but maybe in a year, maybe in six months, this might become a very viable opportunity.” We could sit down and talk about, look, for 200 bucks, I can park you 500 extra square feet. If you don’t have room on your lot, I can park it for you on my lot for long-term options. We have a lot of distribution, so, you know, as long as we’re not doing apples, it’s usually pretty safe in a trailer.

Mark Mann: Yeah. So you mentioned the wasting money on those other things like power and overtime and insurance and all of that. In a lot of jurisdictions, mobile trailers are taxed differently, too, from permanent structures. Is that a hidden savings that you’re— if you put your Vegas CFO hat on, is that something that your clients are focused on?

Thomas Clark: Oh, absolutely. Insurance is a big piece. Currently we’re in negotiations with a large contract, and the holdup is insurance. This is a new concept to them. They’ve never been introduced to the idea of the mobile storage. So now I get to partner with my experts and call them in the compliance department here with ATRG Warehouse on Wheels. And we used to read this book called The Challenger Method, and The Challenger Method was something along the lines of: challenge these guys and let them know, hey, maybe what you’re thinking may not be the best strategy. So we’ve got to get ahead of them, explain to them the benefits.

Which is where the beauty of having a larger network— right? I’m not just a simple two-man team. We have a nationwide network. We have experts. We have people that spend their whole day digging through insurance contracts, digging through the red tape and understanding the minutiae between renting a warehouse and renting a Warehouse on Wheels. There is a big difference, right? Sure, a building probably won’t get stolen. You can’t steal a building. Can you steal a trailer? Possible. Sure. Anything’s possible. But you weigh the pros and the cons, and you realize, okay, this temporary solution: very effective, very useful, very flexible. You take those into account and say, okay, we can do this, right, or we can’t do this. Some operations, the products, you can’t do it, right? And that comes with sitting down, talking to people, being available, being able to have a conversation, being able to educate, being able to say, “Okay, maybe I’m not the right solution for you, or maybe I am the solution for you.”

But it all comes from building a partnership, building trust. And once you can build those things, people will listen, and you can grow people’s understanding. Oftentimes, like you said, if you don’t know it’s a business, you don’t know it’s a business. And so it’s my job to get out there, educate people, let them know, hey, there’s another option out there. You don’t have to go the traditional route. We can go a little untraditional, which is where I pride myself as being very untraditional, and go out there, show them the options and give them the opportunities.

Mark Mann: Absolutely. You know, having that 500-square-foot box, like you said, at the dock, it definitely reduces, you know, the number of warehouse workers they need and all the other things that go into it.

[23:59] Gateway of the West

Mark Mann: Let’s talk about some regional comparisons. Now, we’ve talked to GMs in the Midwest about, you know, the crossroads of the country and all of that. Would you call Las Vegas the gateway of the West? And how does that shift the types of commodities you see in your trailers?

Thomas Clark: Yeah, very much so. I mean, Vegas has grown over the years for various reasons. The Hoover Dam was a big one, right? When they built the Hoover Dam, that built a whole city called Boulder, right? It used to be called Hooverville, I think, but now it’s Boulder City, right? That whole city was built just because of the dam being built. And now Vegas, just like you said, being situated right on the I-15, we are the halfway point between here and Salt Lake City, right? St. George is in southern Utah between here and Salt Lake. St. George has also blown up over the past 10, 20 years for the exact same thing you’re talking about. Everything’s moving through here. Everything’s moving through here.

And so you need new mechanics, you need new tire vendors, you need painters, you need electricians. So just the fact that we are on this highway, or this gateway, right? Just by being where we are located, it’s grown the city, because you have to support all these other things, which is kind of where we come in as well. Delivery trailers, over-the-road trailers, storage trailers, it all grows from being in the right place at the right time, Mark. And it feels like Vegas is the right place at the right time right now, because nobody wants to pay extra taxes on anything, and Vegas has like no taxes. So come on over.

Mark Mann: Absolutely, man. Blow that place up.

Thomas Clark: It’s awesome, man.

Mark Mann: All right. So in terms of WOW’s footprint, you’re the westernmost of all the Advantage locations. Unlike some of the Advantage locations in Texas or Alabama, which are heavily focused on manufacturing and even automotive, you guys are heavily focused on experienced logistics. How does storing furniture and fixtures and that kind of equipment for a hotel remodel, for example, differ from storing auto parts?

Thomas Clark: Well, like you said, depending on what you put in there and depending on the weather, things can get really shady really fast. So, you know, plastics: not a good idea to store over the summer out here. But Las Vegas, we say the weather— you know, if you’re in Detroit, it’s hard to do business in the winter. In Las Vegas, it’s hard to do business in the summer. So it’s a very similar transition of how’s the weather going to treat these products. So like I said, it’s all about knowing who you’re talking to, what’s going in the unit, what’s smart to put in the unit.

I have a car manual— well, it’s a website that supplies car parts, we’ll call it. They rent lots of units from me, but they can’t put everything in there. You can’t put a fender in there. You can’t put a bumper in there. But you can put brake drums, you can put brake pads. Any kind of non-melting materials will go in there, and they use it as such. That way their warehouse gets freed up with pallets, gets freed up with dangerous freight. You can’t stack brake drums on the eighth level of a rack. You know, it’s just not safe. So you bring the trailers in. It’s a safer, more economical version of racking, I’d say. You know, you can only go as high as the ceiling permits, but these trailers— well, yeah, sure, we’re 13 feet high, but I can bring you another one, and it’s nice and safe. So safety aspect comes in big time.

[27:38] California and an 80-Trailer Rescue

Mark Mann: Absolutely. So let me ask about your territory real quick. Do you have trailers in California right now?

Thomas Clark: I do. Yeah. Okay, oddly enough, California has a severe lack of this industry. They don’t have a lot of storage options. So, believe it or not, I do a lot of business in California, and they pay these exorbitant transportation fees to get the trailers, because they don’t have access to them in their area. And like we said, once they get used to it, it’s really hard to go back.

Mark Mann: So it sounds like coming soon: Advantage Trailer Rental LA.

Thomas Clark: Yeah, actually, I mean, keep it under your hat or whatever, Mark, but there has been some talks. I do a lot of business in Southern California with purchasing units, so my network has actually grown quite successfully in Southern California with connections. And there are talks in— yeah, an LA location is in the works. Yeah.

Mark Mann: Can you share a time when a Vegas customer was facing a massive storage bottleneck, maybe during a major convention or something, and Warehouse on Wheels came to the rescue and was really the only solution they had?

Thomas Clark: Yeah. Oh, great. Yeah. One of my early customers— it was actually my, I want to say, my first year. So super exciting. We got a phone call that says, “We need help. We don’t know what to do.” They built a new distribution center, and they were having the worst time with staffing. They could not staff the building properly. It was a 24-hour operation, a large-scale operation. You’re trying to hire two, three, 400 employees in a short period of time. And as you know, in that first 90 days, people come and they go. They don’t make it. They don’t meet standards. This and that happens. They don’t make it past their 90 days. So these guys were having a real tough time staffing, and that was causing problems with detention fees with these trailers they were getting from Southern California.

So they’re bringing them up. They’re racking up these huge detention fees with sitting sea containers. I noticed this place driving by one day: sea containers as far as the eye can see. I went in there. “Okay, let’s go. What can we do? Well, let’s cross-stock all these. You don’t have the staffing. Well, can you staff it to cross-dock it?” ‘Cause their outbound— they had to send outbound. That was the priority. They had to get outbound. So they shift all their focus on the outbound, and the inbound they had to reduce dramatically. But that being said, they were able to cross-stock. We got them 80 trailers pretty quickly, and they used them for a long period of time until they got their staffing up.

Disappointment for me when the trailers finally came back. But we were able to come in and help. And really, that’s what we are. We’re a support business. We’re here to support. And we were able to get them from just absolute chaos to under control to staffed up to running properly. I mean, unfortunately for me, they reduced it down to about 10 trailers now that they still use regularly. But we were able to come in and say, “Hey, let us help,” and we were able to help. We gave them a good price. Everybody was happy. They were able to get their staffing figured out, and now their business runs pretty smoothly. So we were there at the beginning when they were having all kinds of problems. We came in and saved the day. And one of these days, Mark, down the road, we’re going to come in and save the day again. I’m sure of it.

[30:56] Running Out of Room and a Playbook

Mark Mann: You know, at the end of last year, I was reading an article about the fact that they removed a hotel on the Strip to bring in the Oakland A’s to Las Vegas. And in that article, it talked about green building initiatives. They want to make sure they’re following green guidelines for building initiatives. How does the reuse of trailers for storage fit into the sustainability goals of your corporate partners?

Thomas Clark: Ah, yeah. So like I said, the limited amount of space in the city is unbelievable. If you came out here 20 years ago, it was a very different city. 10 years ago, very different city. 5 years ago, very different city. Post-COVID Las Vegas is a very different landscape, very different footprint than it used to be, where we used to have, say, space. There’s no space anymore. The city— if you’ve been here on vacation, there’s mountains that ring the whole valley, and at this point there are houses to every single mountain, and now they’re growing up on the hillside, right? So the city isn’t stopping growing. They’re running out of room. They’re running out of opportunities. They’re running out of things that they’ve used in the past, right?

So “the past, we always did business this way” is no longer a Vegas motto. We can’t do it. So it’s transitionary, right? Now it’s, who can do what to help us, right? So it’s being upfront, saying, “Hey, we can do this. We can provide this for you. Hey, I can also provide this. Hey, we can also do this.” And it’s an education process. You know, the way we used to do it doesn’t work at all anymore out here. So now this is a new concept. We bring it to them. It’s been very productive. I’ve partnered with multiple renovation companies, multiple moving companies, and they’ll take units and they’ll sit on them for months, years, waiting for that time. Now, the hotels don’t have these opportunities. They don’t have the room anymore. So that’s where a third party like us comes in and says, “Hey, we can help you in this way,” and they say thank you every single time. Thank you.

Mark Mann: Every time.

Thomas Clark: Yep.

Mark Mann: That’s great. So let’s give our Vegas listeners a playbook. I’m sure we’ve got a lot of folks out there listening in your area. If you’re an operations manager and you are out of space and out of budget today, what’s the first step you would tell them to take before they even call you over at Advantage?

Thomas Clark: The first step that I would have them do before they call me: understand their volume and understand their flow. Most logistics companies that are worth their salt know what’s coming. They should know three months, a year in advance. So as long as they know their numbers, as long as they know what this volume looks like before they call me and they say, “Hey, I’ve got 10,000 square feet. I’ve got to figure out— can you help me?” So that’s what they got to figure out. It’s like, how much do you need? How much freight can we park? How much freight is going to expire? How much of your freight can you sit in a unit for a year and never touch it, right?

So they need to understand those things, and they’ll come to me and they’ll say, “Hey, I’ve got this problem.” They’ll give me a little bit of the information. We’ll go over some of the things I just talked with you. Okay, how many pallets are we talking? How long-term are we talking? Is this seasonal? Is this expected? Is this normal growth? Is this unpredicted? The tariffs gave us an opportunity to put a lot of units on rent for long-term storage. Some of these companies, you know, they’re bringing in things from China on a regular basis. Well, if you can get ahead of it, and if you do your metrics just right, you can have a pretty good idea of what’s coming, right? Come to me, let me know your pretty good idea. We’ll sit down, we’ll talk, and we’ll come up with a solution together.

Mark Mann: Perfect.

[34:57] Kitty Litter and Heat-Proof Roofs

Mark Mann: As you know, those 450-square-foot boxes can be used for almost anything. I’ve talked to your colleagues, and they’re storing Christmas trees in North Carolina and bourbon in Atlanta and condoms down in Montgomery, Alabama. What is the most unusual use case for our trailers in your market?

Thomas Clark: I got a good one for you: kitty litter. Kitty litter. So one of my biggest customers, they do third party for a very large distribution group. If I said the name, you would know exactly who they are very quickly. Very, very inexpensive big box store. If you could do the math in your head right here. And they do a lot of storage for them, a lot of 3PL storage. They found— well, one, kitty litter is extremely heavy. Extremely heavy. These pallets are 2,200 lb apiece. So this isn’t even something they can put in racking.

They were a customer of mine. I went into the warehouse just to do a checkup, just say, “Hey, how are you doing? How are things? Show me around.” We walked around. There’s kitty litter everywhere. One pallet high. One pallet high. Kitty litter as far as the eye can see. And it jammed them up to the point where they couldn’t bring any more inventory in. They couldn’t bring anything. And they were jammed up with this kitty litter. So I said, “Well, how much does it weigh?” They told me how much a pallet weighs. Okay. We did some math. Our trailers can support roughly 40,000 pounds worth of material. And I said, “Okay, based on these numbers, we can put about 20 pallets per trailer.” Okay, sounds good.

And then on my end, I say, “Okay, which units most effectively can carry the load?” Believe it or not, the shorter unit handles the weight more than a longer unit. It’s physics, right? The shorter unit can handle more weight. I had a surplus of 48-foot units. They can handle the large loads. They fit 20 pallets. We figured out a way to space them properly, but now we’ve got a 40,000-lb trailer full of kitty litter that sits for months and months and months. And now it’s a normal process where we know how many pallets, we know what the pallets are, we have the dates on the pallets or the dates on the trailers with my transportation partners. We cycle the trailers through with them. That way they’re able to put the newest stuff in a trailer, come park it with us, take the oldest stuff, bring it back to them for distribution. It’s worked out really, really well, both fiscally, and it’s being a good partner.

It’s just been a very good deal. And as you know, kitty litter is as dry as it comes, and so is Las Vegas. So hey, load that trailer up with the kitty litter. We’ll store it for you. We’ll keep an eye on it for you in a nice secured lot, and then provide adequate and professional service when it comes to delivering the units back to them. So I would say that that was the biggest surprise: one, how heavy kitty litter is. I never realized how heavy— it’s like paper. You don’t think that paper’s heavy until you pick up a box of it, and then, oh, holy cow, it’s really heavy. So it was just very interesting. Right place at the right time. They didn’t know what to do, and I walked in. I said, “Well, you know, this is my business, right? I store stuff like this. I’m in storage. Let me help you.” And she says, “It didn’t even cross my mind. Thank you for coming in here and broadening my horizons and realizing what we can do.” We shared with them the math on it: okay, here’s how much it’s going to cost to rent, to store, and to move. They crunched their numbers. They determined, “We don’t need to buy another warehouse. We need Thomas.” And I said, “I’m happy to be here.”

Mark Mann: Yes. And it has to stay dry, which is where that high-quality roof repair comes in really handy, right?

Thomas Clark: You got it. Yeah. Well, we actually have used various products over the years for that as well. Found a really good one that is heat-treated and also a flexible sealant. So when you’re putting the sealant on the roof, the flexibility of the sealant is something that is very important. These trailers rattle, they move, wind, it shakes. If you don’t have the right kind of sealant, one, the heat will get to it and dry it out and it’ll crack. If you don’t put the right sealant on there, the vibration of the trailer will crack the sealant. So we actually found a really good product that works really, really well in these high temperatures, that we’re able to coat the roofs of our units, and we don’t have those problems. So it’s actually pretty ingenious on my behalf, I’d say.

[39:25] Signature Round

Mark Mann: Fantastic. All right, it’s time for the signature round. Get a little personal here. What was the specific moment in your career when you thought, “Yeah, this is my world”? Warehouses, trailers, the Vegas hustle, all of it.

Thomas Clark: So I’ve had a lot of jobs, Mark. Plenty of jobs over the years. Plenty of different locations, plenty of different things, doing this and doing that. And I really— I mean, I was in hospital administrations at one time, and I’m just not that personality. I’m a much more blue-collar guy. Yeah, I went to college. Yeah, I’ve had very professional jobs. Yes, I’ve wore a suit and tie for a living. But I really found my niche in the blue-collar world. The people in this environment: easy to deal with. They understand problems. They’re problem solvers, not problem creators. So I’ve just really always found myself, hey, this is an industry and a field that I can be a part of that makes sense to me. Math is easy. Logistics is easy to me. And these are fun people.

Generally speaking, my customers, my partners, they’re easy to deal with. They’re fun people to get along with. They’re people— what do they say? You vote for the guy you want to have a beer with. And I like to partner with people I like to have a beer with. You know, these are good people. Easy to deal with, and just fun to be partners with.

Mark Mann: So when you leave the yard in the evening and head home, what pulls you away from freight and space and all of that, so you can show up 100% for your team the next week? What are your hobbies?

Thomas Clark: Oh man, that’s a long list, Mark, as you know. I golf a lot, and the beauty of Las Vegas is you can golf on Christmas Day and you can golf on Fourth of July. So I golf. Yoga. I’m very adamant on weightlifting. I bowl; I’m in a bowling league. You know, I’m an avid outdoorsman. You don’t camp too much in Nevada, but southern Utah, northern Arizona: beautiful camping. I love getting out. I love getting out of the city. Sometimes you can feel trapped in your little town, right? You see the walls, you see the roads every day. It’s good to get out and get a new perspective. So, you know, camping always does that. It’s a good reset for me.

Mark Mann: Yes. So think about the best boss or mentor you ever had. What is the one thing they said to you that you now find yourself repeating to your team or your customers?

Thomas Clark: Oh man, that is a hard question. I would say I had a boss a long time ago. He was the COO of a very large— my boss was the COO of a very large hospital group. He was polished, he was educated, he was smart, he was capable. We saw eye to eye on very few things. But because of that, I took the opportunity to learn. You can learn a lot from someone not like you. Someone who’s a lot like you, you don’t learn a lot from them. You just learn, oh, we’re very similar. So I took the opportunity to learn from somebody who I did not see eye to eye with on a lot of things. I have a big personality. I don’t know if you can tell.

And I remember him sitting me down one day, and these words have haunted me until today, and I say them to every employee I’ve ever had, especially in management. He said to me one day, he says, “Thomas, do you want to be seen as funny or professional?” And I said to him, “Well, both. Why can’t I be both?” And he goes, “No, no, no, no. How do you want to be seen, professional or funny?” And if you really boil it down, you want to be seen as professional. You want to be seen as personable. You want to be seen as approachable. You want to be seen as someone you can be talked to, but you have to come across as professional.

And it’s something that’s haunted me. And every employee I’ve ever had, especially in management, I’ve had that exact conversation with: “Look, I know you want to joke. I know you want to mess around. I know you want to be fun and silly and all these things, because I get it. If anybody gets it, I get it. But at the end of the day, you’re running a business, and nobody wants to do business with a clown. Everybody wants to do business with a pro. So go in there, be a pro, be a professional, be yourself.” But really, his message really rings true to me for many, many years: do you want to be a professional, or do you want to be funny? Yeah, pro comes first, and then the personality can come later. But they have to see you as a pro first.

[43:43] Retiring the Trailer Age Myth

Mark Mann: I totally agree, Thomas. It’s been a pleasure, and I know we’ve covered a lot of topics here, but what is one myth about the storage trailer business that you hope we can retire after this episode today?

Thomas Clark: The age of the trailer has something to do with the quality of the trailer, Mark. I say people will say, “Well, what year is the trailer?” Well, it happens to be a 1998 storage trailer, but it’s in really good shape. There’s nothing wrong with it. And they’ll say, “Well, it sounds old.” And I say— this is something I’ve said many times— “I’ve seen a ’69 Mustang, looks like crap, and I’ve seen a ’69 Mustang that’s gorgeous. I see a ’69 Mustang that’s not worth a dollar, and I see a ’69 Mustang that’s worth $50,000.” Just because of the age of the trailer doesn’t really mean that much when it comes to the storage side of the game. As long as the trailer is in good shape, as long as it’s been maintained, as long as there’s somebody paying attention to it, it can go on for years and years and years. So that’s probably the big one: the age of the unit has nothing to do with the quality of the unit, especially when it comes to a storage trailer.

Mark Mann: And if I know one thing, I know you guys put a lot of work into maintaining those units as well. So that’s a good one.

Thomas Clark: Yes, sir.

Mark Mann: For anyone listening who is feeling the squeeze in the Las Vegas market right now, what’s the one thing they should do this week?

Thomas Clark: Go online, look up Advantage Trailer, or actually, go to Warehouse on Wheels, and reach out to me. Say, “Hey, this is something I got cooking. This is an issue I’ve had in the past.” Reach out to me. Let’s have a conversation. I go into places all the time and drop off my card, drop off material, and I always say, “Look, I’m not trying to make a sale today. I’m trying to be a partner with you down the road. Hold on to my stuff. You may need me.” So get in, get in with me, have a conversation, find out what can be done, and hold on to my info, so when the time comes, you can get a hold of me.

Mark Mann: Guys, if you’re listening to this podcast in the I-15 corridor, from Southern California all the way up there to Vegas and all the way up to Salt Lake City, www.warehouseonwheels.com is where you can find Thomas Clark, General Manager at Advantage Trailer Rentals. Thank you, sir, for showing us the WOW factor in the Western Triangle.

Thomas Clark: Ah, it was a privilege, Mark. Thank you so much for having me on here. Talk soon, buddy.

Mark Mann: All right, I’m Dr. Mark Mann, and we will see you on the next episode of The Wow Factor.