Our Story — Safe Sheds Sales, Inc.

We built the storm shelter we couldn’t buy.

Above-ground storm shelters, built to FEMA standards in southern Illinois, since 2002.

Four people in a factory or industrial setting, wearing safety helmets and jackets. Two men are wearing yellow helmets, and one woman is wearing a white helmet. They are smiling and standing close together.

Safe Sheds founders Betty and Don Guymon, with News Channel 5 weatherman Scott Connell and current Safe Sheds COO Michelle Barbee, when the St. Louis, Missouri, NBC news station featured the company in the fall of 2015.

The storm that started it.

In 2002, a severe windstorm tore through a town near ours. Don and Betty Guymon went looking for a tornado shelter that could protect a family in a house like the ones they had just watched come apart in local news reports.

What they found didn’t fit. The shelters on the market were too expensive for the families living in the most vulnerable homes, too complicated to install, or buried underground where the people who needed them most couldn’t reach them.

So Don, as Don has always done, did some research. He pulled out the FEMA standards, sat down with them, and started designing a shelter that didn’t exist yet. Safe Sheds was incorporated later that year.

Worker welding metal parts in an industrial workshop with several machinery and workers in the background.

Bill Marke has been welding for Safe Sheds since 2007.

The four rules we set then are the same we build to today.

The homes most vulnerable to severe weather, like tornadoes and hurricanes, are rarely the most expensive ones. A shelter that only protects people who can afford a customer safe room isn’t solving the problem.
Our shelters leave our shop finished and arrive on our own trucks, set in place by our own delivery installers. No subcontractors. No excavation. No second tradesmen to schedule. And it’s ready to protect the same day it arrives on site.
Underground shelters ask you to open a hatch and take stairs in the dark, in the rain, with a storm coming. That doesn’t work for people who need shelter most - anyone using a walker or wheelchair, anyone carrying a child, anyone with bad knees, anyone wrestling with the family pets. Above ground, you open the door, the lights come on, and you simply walk in. And, on the other 364 days of the year, the shelter earns its keep as emergency storage.
Each shelter we build meets, or exceeds, the FEMA standards for storm shelters that provide “near absolute protection” in the face of Mother Nature’s worst storms.

A small, beige concrete shed labeled 'SAFE SHED' with a black handle on the door, located outdoors near parked cars.

A person working on the underside of a concrete shelter in a rural outdoor setting, with a tractor wheel visible nearby, and a caption reading #ThrowbackThursday The first Safe Shed - 2002.

White semi-truck with a flatbed trailer parked on a grassy field. In the background, there is a row of tall trees with some sparse branches and a shelter with a gray roof. The sky appears overcast.

What changed, and what didn’t.

In 2009 we outgrew the original shop in Alma, Illinois, and moved to a larger facility in nearby Salem. The extra room let us improve the production process and build better (and more) shelters than we could in Alma.

Today we deliver to 22 states, from Texas to North Dakota and from Colorado to the Carolinas, on our own equipment, with our own delivery installers.

The four rules didn’t change. Neither did we.

Who you’re buying from today.

Don and Betty are retired. The company they started is run, day to day, by Don’s daughter, Michelle Barbee, Chief Operating Officer, who joined in 2014. Cheryl Shetley handles sales. Jacob Hockett is Plant Manager.

Cheryl has been here since 2007. So has Bill Marke, the welder who builds your shelter door. One of the installers, Lee Tolbert, who sets it on your property came on in 2008. Jacob joined in 2011. Among the five of them, that’s more than seventy-five years at one small company in Salem, Illinois.

That continuity is the point. The person who answers your call, the hands that build your shelter, and the drivers who set it in your yard are the same people who were here last year and intend to be here next year. When a family calls us fifteen years after their shelter was installed, someone here still knows how it was built and delivered.

A man with a gray beard wearing a yellow hard hat and black Columbia jacket, smiling, holding a framed certificate that reads 'Precast University' awarded to Jacob Hockett, in front of a blue backdrop with logos of NPCA.

Jacob Hockett completed his National Precast Concrete Association Master Precaster certification in 2025.

Our commitment to our customers:

An excellent product and service that doesn’t stop at the sale. You should be able to reach a person, get a straight answer, and have the shelter you paid for protect your family exactly as we said it would.

Our commitment to our employees:

Work that is valued, well paid, and worth staying for. That’s not a slogan on a wall. It’s why the same hands have been building these shelters for two decades. It’s the reason the shelter we deliver this month is exactly like the shelter we delivered to the McDaniel family in Vilonia, Arkansas, in 2014. And every other Safe Shed customer through the years.

Group of five people standing together during an award ceremony or event indoors, with one person holding a clear award trophy.

Michelle Barbee (escorted by her father, Don) was honored with the National Storm Shelter Association’s Kiesling Award in 2024. Shown are previous honorees Corey Schultz, Mike Vaughn, and Marc Levitan.