Contest Winner

PhoneSmart, the leader in self storage call center and lead/reservations operations, held a contest for people to guess when they estimated PhoneSmart would write its 300,000th lead/reservation for one of its 500 self storage facility clients. Contestants knew that PhoneSmart wrote lead/reservation 250,000 on January 24th of 2006, but nothing more.

At 10:05 AM central time on August 28th, 2006, Lucia Darnell, one of PhoneSmart’s many dedicated and experienced self storage sales representatives sent the milestone lead/reservation to a client’s store in New York State. The winner with the exact date was self storage veteran Mr. Jim Chiswell of Virginia. The second place guess was from Ms. Cathy Brown of the Bogart, Georgia StorageMart who guessed August 17th.

Tron Jordheim, the PhoneSmart director, notified Chiswell via email that he was the winner of the grand prize. The top prize is a two night expense paid trip to Kansas City Missouri in mid December to view the Holiday lights and enjoy the Holiday atmosphere of the Kansas City’s Country Club Plaza for himself and his wife. In response to Jordheim’s email Chiswell wrote, “First let me thank you and tell you how overwhelmed I am by the prize. My wife Jackie is already researching KC in December! It will be great fun.”

In reflecting on the 300,000th lead/reservation milestone Tron said, “We are so proud of the many talented people who have helped PhoneSmart become a sales power house for its self storage industry clients. We want to thank all of our wonderful clients for the support and encouragement they give us. It is only fitting that Jim Chiswell is the winner of the prize. Jim has been a cheerleader for our efforts since the company first started and has offered much encouragement through the last several years. It is also fitting that a person who knows self storage so well could take a look at PhoneSmart’s past performance and filter that through his experience and guess the exact day. That is a real tribute to his forecasting abilities.”

The second place winner, Cathy Brown, will be receiving an assortment of Columbia, Missouri’s premier hot sauce from CJ’s Restaurant so she can sample a bit of Missouri from her home town.

Although PhoneSmart has been in operation since December of 2000, its founders have been in the property management and self-storage business since 1974. PhoneSmart is a subsidiary of TKG-StorageMart Partners, a $600 million dollar company with over 50 self storage facilities in 13 states. StorageMart is operated by the Burnam family. Many people have met Mike and Cris Burnam over the years at self storage conventions and expos. Prior to StorageMart in 1999, the Burnams had built their Storage Trust business into a 250 facility Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) what was acquired by another storage company.

After realizing what the potential impact could be from gaining one or two additional rentals per month at 250 properties, the Burnham’s decided to capture its missed calls. Storage Trust developed call center technologies and systems for an outside call center provider that took calls for all of its stores. Storage Trust spent about $500,000 in development and service fees over a one year period in which more than 60,000 calls went into the call center.

Management was shocked to see that the average self storage business was missing about 20 rental inquiries per month. The end results of this new undertaking produced additional rentals and an increase in the bottom line profits that were very impressive. Although it became apparent quite quickly that the typical call center model was not what was required.

So plans were drawn up to bring the technology and experience in-house and establish a Storage Trust call center. By handling the call center internally, Storage Trust felt it could control costs, significantly increase the number of net rentals and be able to direct the technology and development.

Before the in-house call center could become a reality, the purchase of Storage Trust was completed. However, there were about 15 facilities in the package that did not fit into the takeover plan, so the Burnams bought them back and started all over again as StorageMart. One of the first things that StorageMart did was to hire the former IT chief from Storage Trust, Monte Ellis. He took their plan for a call center and developed it into PhoneSmart.

In December of 2000, Tron Jordheim was brought on board to run the growing subsidiary. Tron came from a sales and customer service background in the bottled water and pet care industries. He had been the GM for one of the top Culligan bottled water franchises in the nation.

StorageMart has invested well over $1,000,000 to recreate and improve upon the call center systems that Storage Trust had developed a few years earlier. In December of 2000, PhoneSmart began taking calls for 15 StorageMart stores. By December of 2002, PhoneSmart was answering phones for over 40 client companies and 300 stores. In December of 2002, PhoneSmart undertook two projects to assure great performance and service over the long term.

PhoneSmart totally rebuilt its call center, tripling the number of sales rep stations. It added sound proof walls and ceilings to give a great sound to every phone call. It re-wired the entire portion of the building to protect the phone center’s power supply and to allow for back-up power in case of catastrophe.

PhoneSmart also established an off-site back-up phone center, so that it can continue seamless operations in the event of telephone line interruptions at the local Switching stations or T-1 lines and in case disaster ever struck the main phone center. PhoneSmart has since added a complete suite of sales support services including secret shopping, sales training, sales role-playing, lead generation and ad tracking. PhoneSmart currently services over 500 self storage properties in 43 states and 4 Canadian provinces. For complete information on PhoneSmart, simply visit their website www.phone-smart.info.