When was the last time your doors got cleaned?
When was your HVAC system serviced last? How about your landscaping drains? Your driveway?
Self storage facilities need a lot of maintenance - but you’ve also got to run a business! While you’re busy following up with leads, pursuing liens, and paying the bills, your facility is getting further and further away from new.
Maintenance is a very popular topic among storage operators! Staying ahead on maintenance gives you a better facility, which helps you get more renters, which helps you build a better facility.
Jackie Belau of Everbrite Coatings joined us on two separate Gabfocus episodes to help us break down the importance of maintaining your facility (we had to cover the topic twice because the audience had so many questions!).
One of the biggest things our audience of operators wanted to know is “how often should I be doing X?”
How often should the cameras be checked, how often should the hallways be swept, and how often should the weeds be pulled? The answers to these questions will vary depending on the facility and your management style, but one thing doesn’t vary; you need a way to keep track!
That’s why we asked Jackie for her facility maintenance checklist.
Jackie’s list is simple, easy to print, and customizable - so you can use it however you need! If you want a daily checklist of tasks to print out and carry with you, this is a great piece to start with.
Customize this with the daily tasks you want done, then print out enough for the week and have your manager fill one out each day. This doesn’t take long, and it ensures none of these important steps get missed.
If you’re instead looking for a way to track those tasks that don’t get done every day, but shouldn’t be neglected either, those are on here too!
Are you wondering, like our Gabfocus audience did, how often certain tasks should be completed? This gives you a good starting point that you can adjust as needed.
Checklists are a great way to ensure everything gets done - but it’s also a way to prove that you’ve been keeping up with your facility.
If something does go wrong, a catalog of filled-out checklists can give evidence that certain tasks were indeed performed.
For example, imagine there’s a break-in at your facility; someone has cut the lock and stolen everything out of a unit. Maybe your cameras caught it, or maybe they didn’t have a great view of that particular unit.
With regular maintenance checklists, you can know for sure that the lock was cut between the last time someone went around and the time it was found. You’ve got documentation that can nearly prove as much!
You’ve also got evidence that you’re doing your due diligence for keeping the facility safe. Whether or not that’s important may depend on your state and your situation.
This is just one of the many useful forms you’ll find in our Self Storage Operator’s Toolkit! We’ve collected a wide range of useful documents from our friends in the industry.
Even if your needs don’t match the form exactly, it’s much easier to edit and customize an existing form than it is to turn a blank document into something useful!
For more great resources and information, check out the links below!
At StoragePug, we build self storage websites that make it easy for new customers to find you and easy for them to rent from you.
With Insights, our self storage marketing platform, operators get the data and digital tools they need to make the get out of their website and their self storage investment.
