Boy were we wrong!

We haven’t botched a demand forecast for quite some time. Our experience in the self storage industry and our extensive histories of past demand usually put us in a good position for correctly staffing our call center and for being able to alert clients on trends.

We were flat out wrong about the end of December and the beginning of January. December 30 and 31 proved to be about 20% busier than we anticipated. New Year’s Eve in particular was a surprise. Coming on a Sunday, we thought it would not be busy. Wrong! We had one of the few lousy answer percentage days of the last several years. This is good news. It means that people still want to rent storage units.

January 2nd was expected to be a pretty good day, with many people having off from work and hopefully looking for storage. But several client stores chose to remain closed on the 2nd without notifying us and so we ended up with a lot more calls than we anticipated. We are still maintaining a respectable answer rate for today, but we will be tired by the time we close tonight.

This all means a few things.
1. Demand is stronger than we anticipated. This hopefully indicates that January will be a good month for all of you.
2. If you closed your stores on New Year’s Eve or on January 2nd, you should reexamine your holidays for next year.
3. We will be much more careful about staffing around New Year’s 2007.

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Disclamer: This entry is intended to promote our partner StorageMart and some or all participants received compensation.

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