Cathleen Allison/Nevada Appeal
Inside a nondescript warehouse in Carson City, thousands of boxes fill much of the 30,000 square feet of space.
Many will be stored there for years, others will be sent to the Bay Area to be destroyed. Either way, they represent a growing business for Gerd Poppinga and Brian Olson, co-
owners of Offsite Data Depot, which stores, scans and destroys sensitive documents for companies and state and local governments.
The company moved to its Carson City location in January after spending more than three years in Mound House. Poppinga said the company is growing thanks to new laws and a growing awareness of identity theft.
"It's picked up just because of governance, regulation has really pushed it," Poppinga said. "Identity theft is probably the key component."
Poppinga said there are 20,000 boxes, each filled with thousands of pages of documents, inside the warehouse today. Plans are to eventually store up to 200,000 boxes in the climate-controlled warehouse (the temperature never goes below 50 or above 85 degrees). The warehouse also provides security for documents and allows no flammable liquids inside. Even the forklifts are electric.
Poppinga joined forces with Olson in 2006 after running his own data storage business. Olson spent more than a decade as the chief technologist for a financial services company.
Offsite Data Depot recently earned a contract to store documents from the Atlantis Casino. Other customers include the Carson City Sheriff's Office and state government agencies. Most of their business, about 70 percent, is for document storage, followed by online backups, e-mail filtering and document imaging.
Poppinga said being based in the state capital should give the business a leg up.
"This can be a high-growth business once you get your name out there and you've been branded a little bit," he said. "You can grow typically 20 percent to 30 percent a year easily. Sometimes 75 percent. It can be very explosive depending on your region. Granted, we're in the capital so that's helpful for us. Gaming is big, too."