» Conferences

The Self Storage association’s September convention will be a great one. There will be the first group of people inaugurated into the Self Storage Hall of Fame. It will give us a chance to recognize some of the pioneers of our industry.

There will de discussions of self storage on military bases. This is a sore issue for those of us who have locations near military outposts.

You will get a chance to see the on-line demand estimator that can give you some idea of how demographics of a particular area will translate into demand. This should be interesting.

And of course you will have a chance to see the PhoneSmart crew in our booth.

I have a special offer that should make it interesting for you. PhoneSmart is offering one paid full registration and a night out to dinner for one lucky winner. We will select a winner at random from anyone who can name three different people who have posted submissions to the self storage blog over the last several months.

Just look through the archives and pick out the names of three people who have submitted items and email the names to me at Tron@phone-smart.net. The deadline for entries is August 17th. If you are selected the winner and you have not registered yet for the conference, we will buy your registration. If you win and have already registered, we will reimburse you for it. And we will treat you to dinner. There will be two dinner times available for you to choose: Wednesdays or Thursday at 8:00 pm in one of the restaurants in Caesar’s. You can transfer your prize to someone else if you won’t be able to use it.

So don’t delay. Look through the archives and submit the three names to me soon.

bye for now,
Tron

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Welcome to the self storage blog, where we open a window for you into the world of self storage.

Today I attended a meeting of the self storage association of New Jersey. The association is managed by Chris McGrath and his staff of professional association managers. I noticed several things about the group in attendance. Many I have know for several years. There were larger operators and smaller operators. But they are all successful and they are all doing well in their businesses. Is this a chicken and egg sort of thing, you ask yourself? Are they successful because they are active in supporting the association and active in benefiting from the association’s work? Or do successful people support trade associations and unsuccessful people don’t. I think they are successful because they have a good association. In the brief meeting today, there was an excellent module on protecting information we receive from credit reports and other sensitive customer data. There was a review and update on the service members relief act, which could impact many of you. There was a good review of marketing strategies. Several vendors had a chance to talk about their busineses. I found a few of them to be very educational. Nick Malagisi, the self storage broker, talked about some criteria for rating a facility as “Institutional grade”. He raised some good points for stepping back and taking a look at your facility or others. John Gilliland from Real Estate Investment Management talked about how owners can make sure their facilities are being managed correclty by hiring a professional management firm. Why should an owner worry about his investment? Tom Garden from Syrasoft raised some great ideas talking about a new module his staff created to manage automobile and titled vehicle storage.

If you are not active with your local state group, you need to be.

bye for now,
Tron

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Welcome to the self storage blog, where we look at the world of self storage.

Yesterday’s meeting of the CA self storage association was all about financing. It was interesting to see a comparison between loan activity in 04 and 05. Lenders are getting much more creative with how they make a loan happen. More storage owners are taking a closer look at their options before choosing a loan. And based on the number of 10 year loans about to mature, there appears to be a big re-fi boom in the wings. You are also seeing more interest-only loans and more loans with stair-stepping prepayment penalties. Both are indicators that owners plan to sell or re-finance again soon.

It will be interesting to see what happens when interest rates begin to rise again, as they surely will at some point. Will that put some owners in a negative cash-flow position? When you are talking about the kind of money it takes to make a storage project work, an increase of a point or two in interest changes the game.In the mean time, we will keep trying to help owners gain occcupancy and revenue, so their long term options become attractive.

bye for now,
Tron

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Welcome to the self storage blog, where we keep a diary on our experience with self storage.

I didn’t get a chance to put in an entry yesterday, as I was travelling. I am in Orange County California for a meeting of the California Self Storage Association. PhoneSmart is a co-sponsor and we hope to talk to lots of clients and maybe gain a few new clients in the process. Our sponsorship involves a few fun things. There will be a very special, very California prize that will be raffled off at today’s meeting. I can’t tell you what it is yet. I was sworn to secrecy, so as to not devulge the nature of a new campaign the California association is starting to gain more awareness from non-members and more participation from members. The state associations play a very important role in helping our businesses and they need support and participation. So go help your local state association.

The other prize at today’s meeting will be a PhoneSmart night at Dodger stadium for the first game after the All-Star break. It will be Dodgers vs. Giants for a fun north-south rivalry game. So I have been thinking baseball lately.

Yesterday our calls at PhoneSmart were in the strike zone and there were a lot of pitches being thrown. We actually saw more calls than we had forecasted, as this week of July is generally a little bit slow as people are gearing up for end of the month moving a nd cleaning projects. So this was a good sign. When the calls are busy, we are making money for our clients and for ourselves. And we are helping people who need storage find a great place to store with as little stress as possible. We are in the perfect win-win-win situation.

I’ll let you know how California is doing in my next entry.

bye for now,
Tron

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Lunch in Newport Beach

If you are responsible for keeping your properties rented up, you’ll want to come and have lunch with me in Orange County California on July 12th. I will be hosting a lunch at 11:30 AM at the Balboa Bay Club. Seating is very limited. So RSVP ASAP.

I will be sharing some success stories from our clients. The internal upside in your property is in your phone calls. You can rent to more of the people that are already calling you.

Thanks,
Tron

Thanks for reading the self storage blog.

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Welcome to the Self Storage Blog.

If you will be in Southern California in mid July, you should have lunch with me… Here’s the info…

Have Lunch and Boost your Profits.

Rent more space without increasing your expenses

Find the internal upside in your property…it’s in your phone calls!

Join PhoneSmart director Tron Jordheim for lunch at
The Balboa Bay Club’s First Cabin Restaurant
In Newport Beach, CA. Tuesday July 12 at 11:30 am.

There is no cost to you. All you will spend is your time.

Seating is very limited. RSVP by July 1, 2005.

Current and future clients are all welcome.

For more information on the Balboa Bay Club www.balboabayclub.com

For more information on PhoneSmart www.phone-smart.info

PhoneSmart
Your Profit Partner
Call center
Secret Shopping
Sales Training

bye for now, Tron

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I attended an academic conference over the last couple of days that dealt with the increase in Spanish speaking immigrants to Missouri, our home state. You can look at the conference at www.cambiodecolores.org . Many people in Missouri have decided the best way to deal with the increasing population of immigrants in general and Spanish speaking immigrants in specific is to be proactive and make the best of it. I took home many interesting impressions. One thing I thought was very interesting is the approach health and social service providers take in getting their services out to those who might need them. I don’t want to debate issues of government or non-profit organizations and their structure and spending. What I’d like you to focus on is how these agencies determine who their “population” is and how they go out and deliver their services. The self storage association and self storage insiders have been studying the self storage business and know a lot about who uses storage, when they use it and how they use it. Or do they? We do not take the same approach as some of the social service agencies, do we? One session dealt with migrant farm workers. This is a difficult population to study and deliver services to, becasue they fly below the radar and stay as far out of the public eye as possible. Do you know how sociologists are able to identify who is a migrant farm family? From school enrollment. Migrant farm families move from place to place following the harvest schedule or going after the next job. Their kids get moved from school to school. School enrollments can be tracked. So the health workers and legal rights advocates, the English-as-a-second-language teachers and the school aid workers target the kids who change schools and determine if they come from a migrant farm family. Then they contact the parents through the kids and go out to deliver their services. This is good sales technique. Yes, many of us sell boxes and rent trucks, so we can be there for people as they are moving and orgainizing. But do we track home sales, paint purchases, subscriptions to remodeling and decorating magazines, trips to the lawn and garden store or college enrollment? I wonder how clever marketers might adopt some of the best practices of social service agencies and start to take our services to the populations that should need them.

bye for now, Tron

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I had a great week last week at the self storage association meeting. We got to see a lot of current clients and made some great contacts for future clients.

I hope you will enjoy looking at my self-storage blog in the weeks to come. It will give me a chance to share with you impressions and reactions as they happen. I am fortunate to have a lot of friends, acquaintances and clients who are storage insiders. Between their feedback and what we see every day from the phone calls we answer, we have developed an interesting window on the business.

The host hotel was well set up for an association meeting last week. Almost everyone stayed at the host hotel and when I walked slowly enough through the halls, I bumped into all kinds of people I wanted to see. I read in the SSA Monday News that there were 1400 in attendance. I think I talked to almost all of them.

We had a good turn out at my Selling Self-Storage Seminar on Wednesday. It was the first one of these I have done in conjucntion with a national event where all attendees were PhoneSmart customers. That allowed us to talk about many ways that PhoneSmart call center reps and store staff can work together to rent to more people.
We had some very good sales people at the seminar, so we could talk about more advanced sales techniques. We did our seminar in a Hotel that was created in Philadelphia’s first skyscraper, the PFSF building, which went up in 1932.

The trade show was great, too. DJ Johnson, one of our great call center reps, helped work the booth. We talked to a lot of current clients. It is very rewarding to hear the success stories people share about the call center and our secret shoppng service. We created quite a few promising prospects for new business, too. It will be fun to watch them go throuigh the process of implementing our solutions and reporting back to us with their success stories at a future trade show. We are lucky to be in a service business that is so helpful and so profitable to our clients.

I found the conference sessions interesting. The SSA is trying to become a leader and authority in self storage marketing, operations and advocacy in a more sophisticated way than in the past. I find it to be encouraging, although some people will be uncomfortable until they see how things develop. The studies in consumer habits and operational and financial characteristics seemed well crafted and of great value. The more our clients and prospects learn about their business, the more they can see the value we create for them.

I had a fun breakfast while in Philly. My childhood friend from grade school lives in Philadelphia. I hadn’t seen him since graduating high school. It turned out he works in a building about three blocks form the host hotel. It was fun to get caught up with him.

It was great to get home from my trip, too. It takes your family a little while to adjust after you get home from being gone for a week. I am glad I am not on the road every week.

I was also very pleased that it took me just a couple of hours to get caught up after getting in the office this morning. The people who help me run PhoneSmart do a great job taking care of business, so I can go out and see clients and create new clients.

The call volume is looking good today as we expected it might. We have had several good spurts so far.

Here is a reminder for you for next year. We had forgotten how many people tune in to the March Madness Basketball games. We were looking at call volume for Saturday the 19th and were at first puzzled at how slow it was in comparison to trends. But it was a big basketball day and many people were watching their favorite teams play hoops. Wait until next Monday. You will like how busy it will get.

Tune in next time for more words from the world of storage blogs. Bye for now, Tron.

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Currently there is an association meeting in progress. We will keep you up to date.

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