How Sam Kennard built a $2.6b empire

Then, a few years in, he got an email from one of his key employees. She also sent her angry email to the entire company.

“We had a people explosion, in the sense, in 1998,” Kennard tells How I Made It.

“One of my key employees blasted an email through the whole company, just sort of laying out her view. She loved the business so much that she thought she’d fall on her sword and die and say, this is what was going wrong in the business.

“I was in denial. I was refusing to accept that this great business had people problems. That was just a blast in the face for me. I did not expect that she would do that. I was very hurt by the fact that she would do something so damaging.”

From that day, everything changed.

He shares what he learnt on the podcast, including overhauling his management style.

“I changed from an authoritarian style or a command and control style to a much more constructive, a collaborative style of leadership, which is much more my nature,” Kennard says.

The employee who sent the email kept her job. But a broom went through management as he cleaned up the culture, which included doing an organisational cultural inventory with Human Synergistics – something the business has done every year since, bar one or two years. Its managers are also given a book: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

Today, the business employs more than 300 people and is sitting on assets worth more than $2.2 billion. According to its latest accounts the Kennard brothers enjoyed a $15.5 million dividend in 2023, down slightly on $16 million paid out in 2022.

The success allows Sam Kennard to help causes close to his heart, such as homelessness through support of The Salvation Army and Stepping Stone House. He also helps the education of kids in Kenya through So They Can.

The influential business figure is also a key backer of conservative lobby group Advance Australia, with his private company contributing $20,000 in 2021-22 according to filings with the Australian Electoral Commission. He also contributed $40,000 to the Liberal Democratic Party (he unsuccessfully ran with the party to try to win outgoing Joe Hockey’s lower house seat in 2015).

Among Advance Australia’s views is that “mainstream Australia is under siege by stupid laws and woke ideologies like ‘net zero’ or a ‘retirement tax’, cooked up by elites that have no idea what it’s like to work for a living”.

North Sydney-based Kennard isn’t shy about working. Growing the Kennard’s Self-Storage business has “been a very, very slow grind”.

“We’ve been growing through development. It’s hard work, it’s got a lot of risk. You buy land that doesn’t earn any money, you start to build it, it still doesn’t any money, takes years to rent up, and then you get to break even, and then you start to make some money some years later.”

Buying the competitor

Then in 2004, the business would nearly double overnight. Competitor Millers Self Storage hit the market. Alongside Valad Property Group, Kennards bought it for $220 million.

“It was like doing a mini MBA, I think,” Kennard recalls of the acquisition.

“It’s intense. And it’s stressful. And I did that and decided I didn’t really want to ever do that again.”

The business is celebrating its 50th year. It was 1973 when Neville Kennard took a punt, opening a storage unit at the back of one of the family company’s hire sites in Moorebank, Sydney.

“He opened the first storage unit in Australia,” Kennard says.

“And that was a product of going to the US to a hire convention and one of his rental industry buddies showed him self storage in Los Angeles. He came back, and the penny dropped, he just loved the idea.

“I imagine, knowing him, he probably sketched the whole design of the property on the flight back, and you know, started working on it when he got back and fairly quickly built 100 or 150 storage units at the back of a property in Moorebank.

“If he had asked people or did market research into whether people needed storage units, then probably the answer would have been negative. But he just thought it was a good idea and just sort of better to take the plunge and do it and then try it and see what happens.”

It wasn’t the only idea that Neville had. In the early days, alongside the hire business and his storage start-up there was a portable toilet rental business, a construction building rental business and a generator rental business (they were sold off to provide capital to grow the storage business).

Trading marbles

Storage for many years was on the fringe, until Sam took the bull by the horns. His decision to join triggered plans between his uncle and his dad to split the company as their respective families grew.

“[It was] to better enable future generations to own more discreetly without blending cousins, and cousins who get married, and cousins’ cousins.

“It was a very mature, amicable, friendly negotiation. They used to describe it as trading marbles, you have that business, and I’ll have those two properties.”

Kennards Hire, owned by his uncle Andrew Kennard, was founded by Sam Kennard’s grandfather Walter Kennard in 1948 after a customer of his rural supply and machinery business wanted to borrow a concrete mixer and so instead he hired it out.