If you're interested in upping your storage business's game by utilizing technology, you should make sure you're utilizing it properly—and in the places where it will help.
There are many aspects of the industry that tech can help improve, but operators are often slow to adopt some of the technology that is out there.
Chuck Gordon of Storable and Raheem Amer of Mini Mall Storage took some time to talk to us about how they believe operators are underutilizing technology in today's storage industry.
Question: "How are operators underutilizing storage tech?"
Check out the video clip below to hear their answers:
In this Gabfocus Session: Storage Tech Summit, Tommy and Melissa are joined by Raheem Amer of Mini Mall Storage and Storable's Chuck Gordon. They get into the weeds about all things tech, including where the industry is with tech, how to best utilize it, and how to fix some common problems.
Check out the full Session to dive deeper!
Don't want to watch the clip? Here's what Chuck and Raheem had to say:
You know, definitely the most underutilized functionality of our software platforms in general is revenue optimization and revenue management.
The vast majority of storage operators still do not manage their prices or increase their prices on existing tenants specifically. And so now it's just leaving money on the table.
I guess the way I like to frame it is there's a lot of companies out there looking to buy storage facilities and the best kind of facility that they can buy is someone who hasn't changed their rates in 20 years, doesn't sell insurance, doesn't do anything on the internet. They want to buy that because it means you've massively under-optimized your business and they can buy it and start making a lot more money than you were.
So to me that's what you should be doing. Start with rate management and then of course, do the other things I just mentioned too.
But again, there's a million different things. There's two-way texting, there's efficiencies you can have in your lean process, there's the quality of the communications that you send out and making them look good, there's all kinds of good stuff.
And we have at Storable vast kind of information on our site about the different features and functionalities of our software that you can read about, watch videos on to better understand and take advantage of.
So invest the time in doing that and you can really learn how to best use the software."
—Chuck Gordon
"I think that's a great point.
Revenue management is a science and an art, and there's folks out there that are still stuck in legacy thinking and are still trying to manage to occupancy. You can't take occupancy to the bank, you take revenue to the bank, and you have to drive revenue correctly.
Oh well, I can't do rate increases because my asking price is lower than the customer is paying. Wait, hold on, there's a huge problem here. Why is your asking price lower than what the current customer is paying?
There's already a red flag for me before we go into anything else.
So it's just those kind of things that I think a lot of owner-operators leave on the table. They just don't know how to manage both at the same time, and it's sort of like do I chew or do I walk? Which one do I do?
In the self storage industry, you need to be able to do both.
That's one of the reasons why this industry is doing so well. And I think all the consolidation, all of the different things that are happening, are happening because of that, is there are people that are able to do that at an extremely high level.
And another thing I love about our industry is we share this knowledge, we share it freely. I've gone to webinars, I've gone to different conferences, and we share all of this wealth of information and people sit there, listen, and then they go away and do the same exact thing and they never change.
And I think that needs to be one of the big things that we need to do is we take notes, we learn, but we don't go back and execute it back on our properties. And I think that's something we need to start getting better at."
—Raheem Amer
