Deep Dive: Revenue Optimisation & Dynamic Pricing | Stora Summit 2026

So I'm going to talk for a little bit about one of my favorite topics, which Ollie has already kind of set up very nicely, which is revenue optimization. And we're going to talk about that chart that we went through there with showing occupancy levels kind of flattish, but rate per square foot going up over time. That's what I really get pretty excited about, because I think for all operators, that is just such a really, really great way to grow your business. Once you've hit kind of high levels of occupancy. So, have I to use a clicker, have I, for this? Okay, oh, okay, here we go, okay. So, right, so I'm not gonna kick this off. I'm gonna start off actually with Adrian Lee from Big Yellow. So Adrian Lee was the CEO of Big Yellow for, I think from founding in 1999 up until 2 years ago. And he ran that business and did a lot of this kind of revenue optimization. And I got to know Adrian, met him for the first time properly about a year ago, got to know each other. And Adrian has recently joined to advise us at Stora. So he's kind of working with us to help us figure out a lot of this stuff and bring some of the tools and processes that a large operator like Big Yellow brought to the business and bring them into Stora and make them available to our to our user base. So I'm going to— Adrian couldn't make it today, sadly, but he has got a video. So I'm going to run the video here and we'll start with that.

Hi everyone, Adrian Lee here. I'm sending you my apologies that I won't be with you at the Stora Summit in person. And I hope that this first conference is both challenging and enjoyable day for you all. I've started working with Gavin Shields and the Stora team to continue with their award-winning software products, and I want to assist them to design into it some of the features that a larger operator would want to see for their customer service, their customer attraction, and their revenue management. And today I want to share with you in a few minutes how the larger operators think about revenue optimization. Revenue optimization is the single biggest lever that you have to use once your site is occupied or hopefully mature. But there are three interconnecting parts of that that you need to think about, and they are it works best when managed together. The first of those is the base room pricing that you give to each room. You then have your dynamic pricing, which you adjust based on availability for the new customers that move in, and then for existing customers, the price increase process that you use. Your base room pricing is set with reference to your competition and also to your product quality. Don't race to the bottom. If you have the best product in town, price for it. And your discounting strategy, your 50% off for 8 weeks or your first month for a pound, is part of that base pricing and is not separate from it and needs to be considered together. But don't forget to adjust your base pricing on an annual basis to give yourself an inflation increase. Your dynamic pricing is layered on top of your base price, and this will be adjust— this will adjust your base price depending on each unit size and the availability of that unit size. The point is to sell your rooms at the best possible price that you have plenty of. But a word of warning on the American model of adjusting your pricing daily based on what your competitors are doing. That's just a race to the bottom and benefits no operator. Set your model, let it run, and review the outcomes. Your existing customer rent increases, the part that many operators try and avoid. And the key principle here is that your existing customers need to pay for the discounts that you're giving to your new customers. You should set up a matrix of price increases based on how far above or below price— the base price— each customer is. For customers that are close to or above the base price, smaller increases are given. For customers that are further away from the base price, larger increases need to be given. Don't just leave your customer moving rate at the same price that would— and where they started. And don't be afraid to let your customers pay more than your base price. Think about your phone bill, your broadband bill, your Sky subscription. The new offer is always cheaper than what loyal customers are paying. That's just how pricing works in mature business, and self-storage is no different. Sit down with your team every 6 months for a business review. Look at your base prices, look at your discounting in your offers. How is your dynamic pricing set up? And what's your customer price increase process? Treat it all as a system. Set it up, let it run, and review it on a regular basis. This is exactly the kind of thinking that the Stora team is building into its product, and which is why I'm working with them. We want every business owner to benefit from the revenue optimization plans that large operators have routinely put in place. I hope you enjoy the rest of today.

Is this working okay? Yeah. So Adrian gave a lot of info there, and I'm sure for lots of the operators, there may be nothing new there, but there's hopefully some stuff in there that might make you think or something that might be new. Whenever Adrian was over in the office with us a couple of weeks ago with the product team, We talked through this stuff, some of it we hadn't even thought of actually, and it was really, really interesting to hear from him. So the 3 things that he talked about are number 1, the base price, and as part of that, it's your discount strategy as well, the rack rate really. The 2nd part is your dynamic pricing, which is altering the price live for customers as they're coming in based on demand or occupancy. And then there's the part then that Ollie touched on quite a bit, which is your existing customer rent increases, which is really important as well. So we're going to talk about each one a little bit more, and I think one of the— we're going to touch also on just existing customer rent increases. One of the things that I hear a lot from customers is just a bit of hesitancy around doing it, and I think Adrian touched on it there. It's, you know, customers are used to getting an increase on the Sky bill and your phone bill and So it's kind of part of a mature industry, which I think is reassuring to hear as well. Okay, so why does this matter? And I think this is— I actually pulled the— I stole all these slides, or one of the slides. The 3 charts on here is what really, really interests me about this topic. Because once you're kind of at 80% full, and Adrian also used the term with me, They used to talk in summers, so used to think like, how long is it going to take for us to fill up? 2 summers, 3 summers, 4 summers. Once you get to that kind of 80% occupancy rate level, what are you going to do from then on? And these charts really show for me where a big area of focus should be for your self-storage business once you hit that stage. Okay, so let's look at some actual numbers and what this means. So if you can raise your rents through existing customer rent increases and dynamic pricing by 20%, which is less than was in those two charts, if you can do it by more than 20, by 20% over a 2-year period, then for, on this example, you've got 250 units, you're 80% full, it's £200 a unit. Let's just say you maintain your occupancy at 80%, you would grow your revenue by £480 £480,000 a year to £576,000 a year. And that's a £96,000 a year increase, 20% increase to your revenue by driving up that price over time. That's a significant amount of money, obviously, and it's— because there's no additional cost to providing this, it goes straight to the bottom line. There's almost £100,000 of additional profit. That's, you know, it's very attractive to get that. But what I think is the real kicker, when you really sort of think about what's the impact of this? It's the valuation of the business. You know, if you ever do want to sell or go to sell or raising debt or whatever, there's going to be a valuation on your, your site and your business, and that is where this really kicks in. So at a 10 to 20x multiple of EBITDA, you're talking about just from turning this on an additional £1 to £2 million additional valuation on this site alone, which I just think is just such a fascinating compelling number when we think about how we're running our business going forward. So that's why this, for me, it really does matter that, you know, we talk about this and we have it as a tool that we can use in our businesses as well. Okay, I wanted to go— sorry, I'm just going to go back one. I wanted to go now, and I have picked a victim. Will Strivens is here somewhere. Will? Oh, Is that right? The back will tear me out here. So I'm just going to ask Will a few questions. He's been doing this at his site as well. So we're going to ask a couple of questions about his experience. Well, before we ask a couple of questions, can you just give us a 1 sec or 5, 30 seconds on your site and your self-storage business?

Yeah, so we are basically a farming family and I've sort of started working in the business for probably the last 4 or 5 years. Prior to that, I was a tree surgeon, so that's sort of where my knowledge base comes from. So nothing really to do with self-storage. Mostly what we do is caravan motorhome storage. We've also got some shipping containers, and we've just opened a new indoor facility as well for indoor self-storage.

Okay, thank you. So, Will, so I wanted to come down here and ask a couple of questions just to bring some of this to life. As somebody who's been doing this for a while. So what have you been doing in terms of revenue optimization so far?

Well, I'm quite pleased actually, because pretty much everything that's been said up there. So what we did was I've sort of inherited a mature overoccupied store, like demand was super high. So what we did basically was just kept pushing the rack rate up to sort of see where the ceiling would be and where bookings would maybe slow down a bit. Then we use that to kind of test the market, basically. And then we've just been doing big increases for the existing customers. There's lots of old customers on legacy pricing which have been hit the hardest. Some of them are having like 25% increases. There's— well, we've got about 700 customers, so some of them have been hit real hard. And there's like 2 people maybe that left, and one of them came back on the higher rack rate afterwards anyway when they left. So yeah, now we've actually built some occupancy, we've got some spare occupancy to play with, means we can start using the dynamic pricing because we didn't— we, we couldn't really use dynamic pricing because our occupancy was full all the time anyway.

So, and how's it gone so far? What are the results of this so far? Like, what are you seeing in terms of revenue, profit?

So just with the shipping containers, there's— we've got 60 shipping containers and it works out about £950 a month increase just from them. So with the vehicle storage, it's a little bit muddier because the billing periods are different and things like that. But across the whole site, it's like £30 grand a year better off just from targeting the existing customer increases. And setting the price where you want it to be, not worrying too much if they're going to leave, because what we found is that people don't really leave. Also, I think if you're going to do an increase for an existing customer, set it where you want. Then if they come back to you, you, you can maybe kind of ease off a little bit, um, but you've still increased your price, so you're still winning basically.

That's what I was going to just finish off by asking. Have you had One of the big concerns, even myself with my own sites, you know, a while back, you're just worried, you don't kind of want a customer getting too annoyed or kind of getting annoyed, it was, I don't know, just coming in and causing a problem. Have you had any pushback from customers? How have you found the customer reaction? You've obviously mentioned a few move-outs, but any— how do you deal with it? Have you had it happen much?

Yeah, so there's been a couple, None of them have been horrendous situations to deal with. I reckon if you get your messaging right to the customers when you send out the increases, then that's kind of half the battle as well. We've obviously used Stora for all of this, the whole process, and we can tweak and set those how we want. And yeah, one person was a little bit difficult, but they're an old customer on a legacy price, so they're the one you kind of want to lose anyway because they get replaced with someone on the new rack rate.

Okay, thanks, Will. Final thing, if anybody who is looking at this and thinking, yeah, kind of hesitating, any bit of advice for anyone?

I would say just, you've just got to do it, and you'll be surprised how many people don't even notice or get back to you. I think if you can like quietly justify it as well, so you have something in your head The other good thing I like about using Storea as well, if we do get any kickback, I just sort of blame it on the system. I'm like, oh yeah, sorry, it's automated. Then I become the hero. I'm like, I'll sort you out a deal, and I'll do them a deal, and then it's kind of an all-round win really. So yeah, definitely do it.

So blame the system then, is that what you're saying? Blame Storea. Okay, thanks very much, Will. Okay, so thank you, Will. That was, it was really interesting to hear an operator who's actually doing it. Are these on as well? Okay, cool, okay. So I just wanna touch briefly then on just these three things, just like how do you do it? We've pulled in a couple of Stora screenshots here, but not everyone's using Stora. Whatever you're using, this is pretty straightforward. Set your rack rates, look at your competitors and your product quality. I think that was a really interesting point from Adrian on his video there. Just think about— what I like about what he was saying is just don't overfocus on your competitors. Think about your product, where you want to be, your business, where you want your price to be. Don't get obsessed with beating competitors' pricing. I think that's a really healthy way to think about building your business. Don't race to the bottom, treat discounts as part of that base price. And, you know, it's interesting to hear what discounts are being used at the moment. The other thing, the thing that, I mean, I have one site left now back in Northern Ireland that is very, it's a bit ignored unfortunately, but he mentioned nudging up your base price every year for inflation. I just thought, why had I not even thought of that? I hadn't thought of that myself. So I went and did a I catch up, we put it up by about 10 or 15% because I hadn't done it for 5 years. But yeah, like, just, it's such an obvious thing really, but you sometimes need to be— you need somebody to tell you to do it. So yeah, as a quick thing to go back to, maybe if you want to look at this when you go back, look at where your current customers are, look at your current street price. If there's a gap, do a bit of work and, you know, think about trying to close that gap and drive a bit of revenue there on the business. The second part then is dynamic pricing. Interestingly, I think what Adrian had used in the past was just occupancy-based pricing. So taking kind of, you know, once you're over 70%, do that, over 80%, do that. It wasn't really taking into account necessarily demand. So, you know, I think this is another nice little way of optimising your price. So if you want to think about what you could do, If you don't have this turned on, if you are a store customer, go and recommend turning it on. If you're not, think about how you can turn this on at your business. It's a great way to also just build your business up over time. And then the final one we've talked about is the existing customer rent increases. Really, really important. And that is the part, the main part there, I think, that's driving that chart that Ollie shared and how you grow 20% on your rate per square foot. So I really think Look at that, look where you are. If you're afraid of doing it, try a few, see how you get on. But I think we hear from the bigger operators that it's a core part of running a modern, mature business in a modern, mature industry. Okay, so before I finish up here, I just wanted to, I suppose, say the way we see our role in all of this, why are we talking about this? Our role we see is always to try and help our customers succeed. So, you know, at the moment we have some of these tools built in, but, you know, I think really looking forward, we aren't trying to build these tools just so you can do it. We want to get to the point where the systems can do it for you. I think that's the key thing you should be looking for in a product, in a piece of technology as we move forward, tools and systems that can just run on your behalf and help your business improve. That's the way we think, that's the way we're bringing our business, that's the way the business is going. We want to bring, as Adrian said, the things that these big operators have had for years and get them into the hands of every independent operator and all operators, give everyone a chance to grow and optimise their business over time. So that's where we're going. We've already started with a little bit of this, so we've just launched this report in Stora today, which is basically Ollie's chart. But it shows you your occupancy level and will show you kind of how you can, as you make changes to these along these tools, like how you can adjust that rent per square foot over time. So this is already live in Stora, or it's live later today. And so that's what we're thinking now. There's lots more to come. And, you know, as I said, we see it as our job to get these kind of tools into people's hands so they can build the best possible self-storage business. Okay, so I've got through that. I'm probably speaking far too fast, so apologies if I'm talking too fast, but I've got through that a little bit quicker than planned. I'm sure if there's any questions, I'm happy to take something, but other than that, we're going to— I think Aled's up next. Yeah, yeah. Okay, does anyone have any questions?

Dynamic pricing, does it always only ever go up, or is there a risk it goes below base?

Well, I think that's up to what you set. So I can answer that for Stora. You can have it so, you know, if you're below a certain percentage, it will go— you can have it go down as well. So yeah, it depends how you want to run it. I don't know what the best practice is really. I'm not sure what would have happened in some of these other businesses, to be honest, but I imagine it happens just to drive, to drive, um, drive those bookings.

Hi Gavin, um, something you and I have spoke about a couple of times, and I was speaking to a couple of colleagues today about it. You know, I've got a note in my system today where we can put some rate increases in, uh, people have been with us over 6 months, bring us up £150, £200, but we can lose that with a discount with a new customer who maybe isn't going to ask for it or doesn't really require it. And I've asked about the opportunity to put in something. If they say, for example, they're only staying for 6 weeks, they don't get the 50% or they don't get the 2 months. And I think that would be a great help for everybody because I think the discount system from— I've seen, I'm only in the industry 2 years, as you know, is really driven by the industry, and I don't believe it's driven by the customers. We're all scared to not do it because the guy down the road's doing it.

So are you wondering if, like, is there— should you potentially only make the discount available if they stay a certain amount of time? Yeah, yeah. So I think, yeah, in the store system. Well, I'll add it to the list of things to get done, but it's not there at the moment. But yeah, you could certainly put in the contract. And, you know, then handle it kind of on a case-by-case basis. I, I think I noticed somebody at one of my sites a few weeks ago canceling and moving in straight into the same unit again for a discount. And I've only ever seen it happen once, and I thought, once in 7 years, I'm not going to worry about it too much. But, um, I think, yeah, it'd be interesting actually to almost give, you know, the third month is half price, or the third month is free. Yeah, okay, great. I'll hand over to Aled.

Very much, Gavin Shields.