True Stories

This is a rather sad story for those of us in the storage industry about how we lost a potential customer. I received a call from a parent telling me how her daughter was in the process of going back home for the summer from college and had wanted to store her stuff for the summer in a storage unit. The college student was a freshman attending college in another state was not familiar with the area but did go through the yellow pages and called a storage facility. It was sad that while she had tried to contact the storage facility several times, she was never able to get a hold of anybody there. Thus, her parents ended up driving over two hours to her new apartment when school resumed. As I was speaking to this college student’s mother, she was telling me she as the mother, was willing to pay upfront for six months worth of storage no matter what the cost if it has saved her having to drive up because her daughter is always acquiring things and never has enough room.

The mother emphasized how dearly she loved her daughter but how the drive alone, picking up he daughter’s stuff and eventually taking it back to the new apartment her daughter was going to move into the following semester was a headache, since her daughter was going to fly back home from the summer anyhow.

Unfortunately, the storage facility that the daughter had called to inquire about is not one of our clients, well at least not yet. The mother was calling me from her home state where she had looked up a facility in her area that is a client of ours and was curious if that company had a facility in her daughter’s college town area. While the facility that her daughter had called, advertised flyers on her college campus, she could never get a person to speak with. That facility must have been inundated with calls and they surely missed an abundant amount of calls from many other students needing to store their belongings.

So what did I learn from this…several things. Advertising. You must market/advertise your facility anywhere and everywhere. Especially in college towns, whether it is college boards or mailings to dorms and apartment complexes. Make flyers and have someone post them on college campuses advertising a college special offered to them so long as they store for two months, which most college students need to do so anyway. The average college student will have moved an average of at least four times while in college, most of the time having to store their belongings.

Once you have placed your advertisements, the calls from students needing that unit will start to pour in. You better make sure you have enough people to answer your calls and assist them, because if a student cannot get a live person ready and able to assist them to acquire storage, not only are we failing our college kids, for they have enough to worry about, but that new potential storage business is being lost.

PhoneSmart will go far and beyond to assist you as a client to aid those college students get a storage unit so that their parents won’t have to worry about having to drive hours to pick up their stuff, and at the same time your company is making money. It’s a win-win situation!