What's the first step to turning around the trajectory of a facility?
Full points if your answer was, "it depends." Every facility is different, and every facility—whether you've acquired an existing facility or are taking a good look at your own—will have different needs.
When you're looking to revitalize your self storage business, one of the most critical things to do is to take a step back and evaluate what actually needs attention and how to prioritize your business's needs.
Listen to this Gabfocus Spotlight, where we hear from Adam Steckler of StorageMart. He dives into how to evaluate your storage business's needs.
Question: "How do you evaluate your storage business needs?"
Check out the video clip below to hear their answers:
In this Gabfocus Session: Revitalizing Your Storage Business, Adam Steckler of StorageMart and Drew Pearson of Pearson Partners joined Tommy and Melissa to talk about how to breathe new life into a self storage business.
Check out the full Session to dive deeper!
Don't want to watch the clip? Here's what Adam had to say:
So John Dario was my old boss at Edison Properties. He's still the CEO there.
And he wrote a book called the Retail Management Formula.
And I know, like, you hear that name and you just start falling asleep. You're like, oh, my God, this must be terrible. But I would read it. It's a series of books. They're not that long. There's, like four I think there's four books in the series, and it teaches you how to look at a facility.
So we use what's basically called like a pyramid structure.
So you start with, right—you walk up to—and this can be different for every organization. This doesn't have to be the same structure. You can just pick what works for your organization, or your pyramid could be a lot smaller, or it could have many more layers.
But it starts with the basics. When you walk up, is it clean? How does it look? Has it been swept? Is there garbage laying around? Right?
A lot of times those are the basics. Sometimes people will walk into the bathrooms. What do the bathrooms look like? Sometimes that's an indication of what you're going to find in the rest of the facility, and then you work your way up that pyramid.
The next level, we like to say, is operational controls. If you find that, if you have cash that's unsecured, a lockbox that isn't locked, is the safe open?
And it's crazy. We find those things from time to time, and we stop right there, right? You stop at that level of the pyramid. You say, okay, I'm not going any further because we have to work on these basic levels. And then you work your way up the pyramid more towards building and developing your team.
And then maybe at the very top of the pyramid, you get to what we call business development, where you're actually canvassing the neighborhood, right? If your facility is running so well that you have time to go out in the neighborhood and see what else is going on, maybe that's the pinnacle, the top.
So we try and think of it as layers, and you build up from the basic to the more complex, and that's how we approach it."
—Adam Steckler
