» Self Storage Facilities

There have been concerns for some time that the military was going to build self storage facilities on its bases to compete with the storage facilities off base. Many of us thought that as soon as the storage association members would raise their concern with military representatives that a reasonable understanding would develop. Most of us have felt that the trend in recent years was for the government to NOT compete with private enterprise.

But now we have seen that a meeting between Self Storage Association representatives and members of the military did not go well. The military wants to compete in self storage. They apparently see a great opportunity to get a cherry deal from operators who are willing to lease a facility on base. There will of course be people who will sign the lease and run the units.

What will this do to the businesses around the bases? It will make it tough to compete. Will this give other government entities the idea to get into the storage business? You bet! I can see airport authorities creating self storage space on the airport properties, advertising enhanced security from the TSA personnel who work in the airport.

Wait a minute. Don’t we have a big enough challenge on our hands competing with each other and competing against non-consumption? I imagine everyone in our business will try to rally their local law makers into a coalition to stop the government agencies and the military from hurting private enterprises in this way. But will it succeed?

Just in case it is not successful, we better think about how to compete. If you will need to draw customers off base to store their goods, you will need something on site to attract them like a barber shop, a pool hall, a taco stand or a beer hall. You’ll have to offer something to make it unattractive to rent the cheaper unit on base. Maybe for a small additional fee, you do the laundry of you customers every week. Perhaps you give a free airline ticket to everyone who signs a year lease on a 10×10 or bigger. Maybe you give a pair of Kevlar gloves with each new rental.

You could probably defend yourself against the Airport Storage venture by selling a more convenient location. Most people will not want to drive around to the back of the airport and fight airport traffic, when they can just turn into your place as they drive by on their way to work or shopping.

The people who will be running these facilities will likely be leasing the property from the military or the airport and will not have an ownership stake. This will make it hard for them to raise enough capital or raise enough courage to compete against you if you do NOT compete on price. Staying out of a price competition can be difficult. Your occupancy may suffer a hit after “The Storage place on base” opens up. You may have a hard time keeping up your monthly new rental goals. But price matching is not always the way to go. If you can rent a lot more units by cutting price, you can make up for the shortfall. But if all you do is destroy the market in your area and make the standard rates 30% lower than what they used to be without dramatic long term increase in occupancy, you have shot yourself in the foot. Ouch! Usually out-marketing your opponent is more effective.

How many cheap colas are there? Sam’s cola is cheap and easy to get. And Sam’s sells a lot of it. But Coca Cola’s numbers keep rising. They market the heck out of their drinks, some of which are just water, and they are making money.

When you out-market your competition and out-do them in customer service and sales performance, you can lose some occupancy without long term suffering. You will regain ground after word of mouth has let people know that your place is a good value and a great place to store. A good value that is a great experience always beats the cheapest offering for probably 75% of the consumers in that market place. You can let your competitor have the people who will only take the cheapest deal. They are hard to make happy and not great referrals sources anyway. The people who will spend an extra few dollars to get a good experience are the people you want anyway.

I’m not saying that the military is doing you a favor by setting themselves up in the storage business. But I am saying that they will not be as tough a competitor as you might think. Time will tell. Hopefully the military will find that too many congressmen and women are getting harassed by their constituents for this grand storage plan to every take shape.

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elf Storage facility.

I drove through a city I hadn’t visited in a while last month. I like to see what storage places look like in different localities. It was after dinner and dark. I got into my rental car and started heading back to my hotel. On my way I passed a neon sign on a big building that said “elf Storage”. I was fascinated. I parked across the street and watched for a while. I could see the first row of drive-up units clearly.

My first thought was of Anne Ballard, the storage pro who likes to talk about making sure your lighted signs have good bulbs in them. I thought this might be a storage place run by someone who never saw Anne give a presentation and let the “S” burn out. Maybe my eyes were deceiving me, but I could not see an “S” on the sign.

I waited for a little while longer and I noticed a truck pull up. A couple of short guys jumped out with these huge sacks and dragged them across the driveway and opened a roll up door. It looked like the unit was stuffed with sacks.

I knew what I was looking at, but I would not let myself believe it. I stopped believing in Santa Clause when I was a little kid and recognized our neighbor behind the phony white beard. Now may sense of reality was starting to spin.

Just then, a tap on my car window startled me. There was this big stocky guy with a long white beard. Sweat broke out from my forehead. He said in a soft deep voice, “Can I help you, son?” I didn’t know what to say.

I rolled down the window and started to stammer. I couldn’t form a single intelligible word. He said, “Well I guess you can’t fool all the people all the time.” Then he chuckled a jolly chuckle. He continued, “We thought we could hide in plain view and get away with it until Christmas. Don’t you dare breathe a word of this or you will have coal in your stocking for ever!”

I said, “Yes sir” like a shy second grader and started my car and began to pull away from the curb, when one of the short guys took off his hat to reveal his pointy ears. He laughed and waved at me.

I had to pull over a few blocks later and sit and wait until I stopped shaking and could catch my breath.

I know I was not supposed to reveal this. But I couldn’t hold it inside any longer. I did not say which city I saw this in, so I may not get in trouble. But if you know your markets, you know where the 5th Street elf Storage facility is. It is not what you think it is. Or maybe you know already. Just don’t tell them you found out from me.

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Competing for consumers.

Do any of you remember when you could actually build a storage facility and just wait for it to fill up?

You still may be able to find the perfect location and build a property under budget. But can you win the consumers in the market? Marketing has become much more intense than it ever was. The competition to get a dollar of spending money from a consumer is fierce. You are competing against lots of other businesses that are not even remotely storage related for the attention and the business of consumers. You are also competing against lots of other storage and organizing options. If you are not spending a significant portion of your day concentrating on marketing and sales your competitors will leave you in the dust.

Look at your market and see how people are trying to get noticed and trying to get leads.

What are you doing?

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Welcome to the self storage blog, our diary of the self storage business.

Today I was taking a drive around Toronto visiting storage facilities and I saw perfect illustrations fo the old and the new theories of successful storage business. One store I looked at was the back end of a building that had retail store in the front. You had to drive all around the back end through a parking lot that looked like you weren’t suppossed to be there. The office was uninviting and hadn’t been updated since it was built in the early 80s.

The other store I visited was just completed and was a mutli story climate controlled retail big box across from a shopping mall. If you store your stuff there, your stuff would live better than you.

Here are the two ends of the spectrum. How are these two styles of storage going to effect each other and change the industry?

bye for now,

Tron

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Welcome to the self storage blog. We give you a window into the self storage business based on the large peer group we service.

I often tell people that there seems to be two types of people who own storage facilities. One group is just pulling cash out of the property and really doesn’t want to put any time, effort or money into running a better, more profitable property. They seem satisfied making a profit based on little effort and minimal investment. Now you can’t really fault people with an attitude like this, because they are making money, their properties are meeting their expectations and they are happy. This sounds like an ideal situation.

Then there are people who are trying to run a business. They try to create efficiencies, try to maximize financial performance, seek to develop their personnel and try to make the best of what they have.

I think PhoneSmart’s call center service has something to offer both groups. In almost every case we can create enough rentals to pay for ourselves several times over from phone calls the store would not have been able ot handle without us. For the person who is trying to run a business, this sounds like the ideal service provider situation. You would think that if you told business people that you can find money that they left on the table at a minimal cost, they would line up to sign on the dotted line.

Sometimes business people are so busy trying to keep their program moving forward or so busy putting out fires, that they lose sight of the “maximize financial performance” goal.

For the people who are milking a cash cow this should also be attractive. We require no new money. We pay for ourselves from “Found money”. Yes it will take a little effort ot get us integrated into normal operating proceeures. But once the store staff is used to working with us, we become standard operating proceedure and require no extra effort. At this point the owner can go back to the “no hassle-no worries” style of management…but be at a higher level of financial performance and a higher level of profit.

In the mean time, we keep turning missed calls into rentals for our many clients. Bye for now, Tron

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I stopped at my favorite natural foods restaurant, The Main Squeeze, to get a cup of soup for lunch the other day. The place was packed. People were lined up at the counter to order food. People were waiting off to the side to get their to-go orders. I wiggled into the only stool available at the counter and watched the process for a while. The staff people behind the counter were juggling tasks and moving orders towards the kitchen like they were tossing bowling pins. They were making juice and smoothies while cutting produce and cleaning their work space. They’d drop what they were doing for a minute to deliver some food to a table, and then it was back to tossing bowling oins. It actually looked smooth.

I could see into the kitchen through the pass-thorugh. The kitchen staff was moving from task to task in a “zone”. They reminded me of basketball players. Odd, since the college finals are going on today. They were working the plates and the pots and the pans, moving the meals towards the pick-up window. An then they’d yell “order up!”, and I knew they made a goal. I like to eat at the Main Squeeze, because the food is delicious and healthy. The chefs there get some great flavors going, and everything on the menu is whole grain or fresh produce. Much of it is organically produced. The only problem is that this kind of good food doesn’t happen fast. If you like to run up to the counter, order and leave in five minutes, forget it, it ain’t happening. If you get there before the lunch rush, the place is half empty and the mood is mellow. But the lunch rush is bumpin’. And the staff keeps up. And the customers patiently wait for their yummy goodies or they visit with people they know or they make a new friend with the person on line with them. This is the customers ways of saying to the staff, “It’s okay, I can wait a few minutes. No problem.” I enjoy watching the staff juggle. It almost looks like they know what they are doing. But I know they don’t. They may have some idea as to how many meals and drinks they might need to make, but every day is different. They also look calm and cool, even though I know they are hustling. So it becomes a matter of team work. can the team handle the chaos while making it look efficient?

This is what we do in the call center. This is what you do at the self storage facility. During the quiet times, it is easy to make it look easy. We take the calls, help the people make a reservation and wait for the next call. You take the people on a tour, help them sign the lease and move on to that next customer with a question with ease. But what happends when the lunch rush comes? or the after work rush? or the last Monday of the month rush? Can you handle the chaos while making it look efficient. Most days, we can do it. Callers would never know that the phones are ringing off the hook and we are juggling calls like butcher knives. I bet you can do it most days, too. When customers are lined up four deep, can they notice that it is busy and going crazy, or do they just go with the flow, because you are remaining calm and cool and you are making it look easy? If you aren’t sure of how well your choas efficiency works, you don’t have much time to get ready. Even yesterday, which should have been a ho-hum Sunday had a few big spikes in call volume.
bye for now, Tron.

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