Rodriguez finds her ideal job at Morningstar Storage

By St. Clair Murraine

Outlook staff writer

Just six years ago Tallahassee was such an unknown to Felicia Rodriguez that when a job transfer to the capital city came up she asked the question most people do when they hear about moving to Florida.

“Palm trees and beaches?” was the first thing she wanted to know about when the offer came up for her to leave Virginia Beach, Va. She had an offer to run a Morningstar Storage 96,000-square feet location off of West Tennessee Street.

The move to Tallahassee represented the second major career decision she had to make. Rodriguez has been with the Virginia location for only three years, after spending 18 years as a manager at Nine West.

 Tallahassee seemed so far and didn’t meet her expectations of palm trees and beaches, but her gut told her it would be a solid career move.

“I had 100 percent peace even though I was taking a pay cut,” she said, “which I’m way beyond now because Morningstar takes care of their employees.”

Rodriguez exemplifies the Morningstar concept. She essentially has free reign over the operation without eyes in the skies looking over her every move. 

Rodriquez has become so good at the job of managing the storage company that even in the pandemic, she is keeping it afloat. Her list of repeat customers continues to grow and many of them she knows on first-name basis. That includes a customer who lives in Hawaii and has had a unit for 22 years.

Rodriguez has seen a myriad of customers, ranging from those who are downsizing or even building a house and want to store items. Sometime storage is short term like this past Christmas when a family who bought ATVs for their children and had them stored.

The most common clients are college students from nearby FSU and TCC. Move-in is highest between March and July, sometimes as many as 600, Rodriguez said. 

Rodriguez is big on community engagement and has become as a popular member of the Greater Tallahassee Chamber of Commerce. In addition, she has membership in the Kiwanis Club.

It’s the kind of engagement that Morningstar encourages, as part of its give-back approach to growing in the 12 states where they have 73 locations in the Southeast.

“We believe the core to our business is the community and being involved in the community,” Bill Stephens, the company’s vice president of marketing said during a Zoom interview from his office in Charlotte, N.C. “The core driver of our business is really about the relationships that we can establish.”

That goes for every location, including the second one in Tallahassee at 5600 Roanoke Trail. The property that Rodriguez manages is located at 5086 Capital Blvd. at West Tennessee Street, tucked behind of a Circle K store.

When Rodriguez joined Morningstar Storage in 2011, she found herself doing a job far different from the one she had at Nine West for 18 years. She left that job at the urging of a friend and found the responsibilities at Morningstar to be somewhat similar to the merchandising position she’d left.

She had a little more leeway, though.

“They give us pretty much everything and say ‘do it. Here are the guidelines,’ ” she said.

In the process, she learned a lot more than just the administrative side of running the business. She wouldn’t hesitate to tell a maintenance person that their price is too high and go out and tackle the project herself.

For instance she uses a shop vac to clean ducts instead of paying the cost of hiring to get it done.

Renting a unit could cost as little as $59 for a 5-foot square space to as much at $699 for a 20 feet by 60 feet unit.

And, as if she needed a sales pitch with all of the amenities that that Morningstar Storage offers, she might add: “We make it as easy as pie for you to store here.”