Entrepreneur Shirley Liu

The Hays business that just got bigger and bigger

by MARY RIDGWAY photography by KELSEY STREMEL

Only 0.3 percent of the Kansas population starts a new business. Applying the national average, only 25 percent of those will be women, and startups led by Asians is 11 percent.

Of all new businesses nationally, only 80 percent survive to the second year and only 56 percent last five years. Shirley Liu ’05, ’07 has kicked all the odds to the curb by creating a new business called CloudStorage LLC. Liu, president and owner, is a young Chinese woman whose humble presence disguises her tenacity, dedication, rigor and resilience. She is an innovator who started with an idea that now provides for her family and other people in Hays and abroad.

Her journey to Hays started in China at SIAS University, where she earned a dual-degree in business administration from both SIAS and Fort Hays State University. The two universities have partnered to provide American education in China for almost 20 years.

Liu worked very hard on her dual degrees and graduated at the top of her class. For her achievement, she was awarded full tuition at Fort Hays State University to earn her graduate degree. She completed her master’s degree in communication studies in 2007. After graduating, she and her husband returned to Zhengzhou (pronounced Jung Jo), in the Hunan Province, where she taught marketing, international trade, and business management for four years at SIAS. But, after a while, Liu became restless. She was growing tired of teaching the same thing year after year and needed a new challenge.

She and her husband decided they wanted to move back to Hays.

On arriving, she was a little nervous because she didn’t have a job and was finding it difficult to enter the local workforce. Ultimately, she had to make some choices to put food on the table. Liu was always interested in starting a small business and decided to start selling on eBay out of her home. With one shelf of products and a small business loan, CloudStorage was born, and the entrepreneurial venture began to grow – very quickly.

She began by partnering with a friend from China in 2012. The partners created two companies one located in Shanghai and the other in Liu’s home in Hays. The Shanghai partner served as a purchasing agent to provide Liu a way to bid on parcels of used server components.

“I started at my home. Then I rented an office. And then I buy and sell, buy and sell, and it just got bigger and bigger,” she said.

The business quickly outgrew her home, and she relocated to a small office in the Hadley Center. One office grew to five. Then the people from Hadley said CloudStorage was not going to fit in the smaller offices and offered to move the business to the basement that had available space. It was the 6,000-square-foot former laundry area of the old hospital and the business operated there for almost three years.

“I would tell them, ‘I need more space. Sorry, I’m getting bigger,’ ” Liu said. “Every time that I got bigger they would clear another area for me. They were always accommodating to our changing needs.”

The business continued to get bigger. In 2017 she bought the former American Legion building on Canterbury Road and remodeled it.

CloudStorage, now 7 years old, specializes in selling refurbished servers and components – memory cards, hard drives, and CPUs. Its customers are usually data centers or IT departments in companies, schools or banks.

Buying new components is very costly, so buying quality products in refurbished condition, including a warranty, is a good option. Most of the refurbished products are from wellknown American brands.

Liu is very conscientious about not compromising data and providing a quality product. Her team wipes and tests the components using U.S. Department of Defense standard best practices.

“We don’t want to leak our vendor’s data, nor introduce bugs into our customer’s systems,” said Liu.

And she stands behind her product. CloudStorage offers a superior level of support to her customers.

“Right now, our warranty is talked about. It’s really good. Our memory cards come with an automatic one-year warranty. For the networking cards and modules, we provide a three-year warranty. My competitors only provide 90 days or expect customers to pay extra money to extend a warranty,” Liu said.

“We put a lot of effort into building relationships with our customers. We are not only winning the competition by lowering our prices, but also we provide warranties; we provide services; we revisit our customers and follow-up with them; we always pay attention to them. That helps us maintain our great customer base. Customers will think about us if we think about them.”

Liu and CloudStorage are now in a position to give back to the community. The FHSU Entrepreneur Club has toured the facility and she enjoyed sharing her experience with students. CloudStorage also sponsors an FHSU scholarship. In three years, the business will donate $10,000 to name the endowed Business and IT scholarship from CloudStorage. At the end of summer, CloudStorage came in third in the 2019 Duck Derby cardboard boat competition to raise money for Big Brothers Big Sisters.

“Starting a business just made sense. I came back to Hays with only an intent to feed myself and have some income, but it turned out to be a really good business,” said Liu.

“I’m very happy I can help other people too. I have a good team and provide local employment. I’m also very proud that I’m able to help some international students after they graduate,” she said.

Today, CloudStorage is a thriving business that employs 14 people in online sales, accounting, preparing server components, shipping and receiving, data processing and an IT department. Many of her employees are Fort Hays State students or graduates.

From a little home start-up to a remarkable and solid business, Liu has impacted Hays, the United States, and the world. Through persistence and innovation, and determination, she has succeeded against the odds.