Owning a business is a huge undertaking, and we do everything we can to be financially prepared. No matter your budget, though, there are always going to be expenses you couldn't prepare for. Maybe you didn't expect them at all, or maybe they fluctuate from month to month and year to year.
In this Gabfocus Spotlight, Alex Erbs of Erbs Management Group explains some of the expenses that self storage operators don't think about or that can become unpredictable.
Question: "What are surprise expenses at a storage facility?"
Check out the video clip below to hear their answers:
In this Gabfocus Session: Managing Your Finances, we invited Magen Smith (Atomic Storage Group) and Alex Erbs (Erbs Management Group) to talk with us about managing the finances for a self storage business. Our guests discussed a variety of important financial topics, such as unpredictable expenses and measuring the success of your business.
Check out the full Session to dive deeper!
Don't want to watch the clip? Here's what Alex had to say:
Vendors.
Vendor costs on everything.
I mean, just even getting new installs of gates and camera systems and everything like that, everybody's prices are going up.
Just like we're raising rates. They're raising their rates too.
So when you're going to these facilities and putting in new gates, new cameras and stuff, I mean, it's not that it was ever cheap, but it's not getting cheaper to say the least.
We do a lot of work in northern Wisconsin. Can anybody tell me what the weather is going to be like in regards to plowing bills? And now that's not specific because of the last 18 months here, but there's been a lot of extra weather in those regards. And being able to plow.
You can't estimate those expenses.
Are we going to have a crazy snow season? Are we not going to?
And then the other thing I would put into is payroll. I mean, it's tough to hire right now. It's not easy. Where we could get a certain kind of mid-range pay there. You gotta pay a lot higher now and making sure that you're keeping up with the rest of the market there. So I think the payroll has gone up significantly for a lot of facilities there."
—Alex Erbs
