Finding a New Self Storage Site: A Guide for Business Owners | Self Storage Explained

Randomly pick a town in the UK, over 20,000.

So I'm looking for a warehouse or I'm looking for some commercial land.

I'm looking now at Bury St Edmunds.

What about a name for the business?

Yeah, a name for the business.

Whereas if the maximum revenue is 150, a member of staff is never going to pay off. Some people do sell packaging and boxing and boxes and padlocks and things. The percentage is typically so small, like one and a half percent. I generally wouldn't be wanting to come into somewhere and just kind of undercut because that can be erased to the bottom. Hello and thank you for joining myself and my colleague Steve in Highlands. We are going to record something that we haven't done before with basically we're going to pretend we're looking to open up a new self storage site and we're going to start with nothing and we're going to go through all the different steps that we would use to basically find a site, how we think about it and all the different steps about like looking for a good location. So we'll see how it goes. Should be a bit of fun. Stephen is actually having a beer and he's forced me to have one as well. So we're hoping to make this kind of just pretty relaxed and just a bit of fun going through how we would look for new sites. So we're actually going to start by just assuming there's. It could be anywhere. So we're going to ask, I think chatgpt to pick a town or a city in the uk. Is that right, Stephen?

That's correct.

And then we're going to focus on that. We're just going to say that that's where we're going and that's it. So we're going to.

Yeah, so we're just going to ask it for a site in the UK maybe or, sorry, a town in the uk maybe over a certain population. Do you have a population maybe you would like to?

Probably over maybe 20,000.

Okay, so we'll develop some criteria here. So we're going to say on ChatGPT, randomly pick a town in the UK, over 20,000. Any other criteria? Gum?

No, I think that's. No, go for it. I think that's good.

Let's see what it comes back with, where we're looking.

Where are we looking?

So we're looking in Bury St Edmunds, in Suffolk.

Bury St Edmunds. Okay. I hope we don't have any customers in Bury Stevens, because they might be, they might love this. But anyway, we're going to just go.

Fictional business, not a real one.

So it has a population of 35,000 people. Yeah, and it is, let me have a look, see where it is. So it is outside Cambridge. Okay. Okay, so let's assume we're, we're in Barry St. Edmunds. We want to find somewhere that's relatively close. So we're going to look for, look for some sites. But before we do that, we're going to look for, we want to kind of see where what self storage businesses already exist there. Yeah. So step one, before we do that, let's remind ourselves in the UK, there's about 0.8 square feet of self storage supply per capita. So with Burritz and Edmonds, with a population of 35,000 people, let's just think about roughly how much self storage do we think will be possible to supply? So 28,000 square feet of self storage space for the population of Bury St Edmunds should be pretty easy to fill. Okay, so 20,000 square feet. So now we've got to go and find out what is already in Bury's Endeavons. Are there any sites? Now we're going to use a tool, a special tool. Stephen, do you want to introduce that?

Yes. So we're using a tool called StoreTrack. So this is I suppose like a massive data application built for self storage. So it gives you all sorts of insights around things like finding sites, but even beyond that about, you know, competitors, pricing and things like that. So it's originated in the us but actually recently they've launched in the uk. So we're just going to try it out and see what happens. So, yeah, I'm going to pull it up here and I'll just search for Bury St Edmunds.

So we're saying that StoreTrack is a US company. Actually it's run. The CEO's a guy from Northern Ireland.

That's right, yeah.

Just up the road from here. So they've also sent us a. If you go to storetrack.co.uk, they've sent us a link for anyone who wants to try it out. It's a 50% off single market reports. So if you want to use this promo code, if you want to check out storetrack, storetrack.co.uk and use the code storeafriends to get 50% off. Now we're not making any money on that, so that's just for anyone to use. So store of friends, all in capitals. You type that in. If you want to sign up For a single market report, you'll get 50% off.

So I'm looking now at Bury St. Edmunds there are a few facilities I can see already. There appears to be a couple of container yards. There's four container yards and two standard self storage. I'm assuming they're indoor facilities. Now I can click into any of these. If I say if we go to this one here. Home Store self Storage bury in this tool, I can see the profile for that business.

Which one's that, Stephen?

That is Home Store Self Storage Burry.

Yes. I'm on the website at the moment actually I just googled this as well. So they're an indoor site.

So it says they've got a total square footage of 45,000. Total rentable of 34,000.

It says this in store track.

That's what store track data has given us. Yeah.

Okay, so the rentable space of 34,000, that is a lot for a population of 35,000 where we thought 28,000 was the max.

Yeah. So I can start drill down into the data and see about, you know, you can see all sorts of information like the website which I can pull up here, Y giving some people some free advertising here I think if we're going through this Gavin. But yeah, no, it's great to see. Looks like a nice indoor store.

Yeah, home store. Okay, so then we also. Then what, what else can you see there?

So we can see more information about the town of Bury St. Edmunds. So the market summary gives us like a. We can choose the radius around it that we want to search. So we can see within, you know, different facility, what facilities are in a different radius. You can see the total net rentable square foot in the area of the radius I've got selected, which is three miles at the moment. You can see the square foot per capita which is 3.7 is the current.

Supply in the area.

Current supply, is that what that means? The square foot per capita? I'm not sure if it's current supply. It says square foot per household is 7.35.

Okay. Okay.

It says there's a total stores of six. Mid sized two and small four. And there are two new developments actually as well. So you get information on what's being developed. So we can actually click in here as well. I can see the known developments and the amount of square foot that that's been developed.

Okay. So it looks like maybe just not spend a whole lot of time on this particular stages because we're going to just assume we're going to we're going to look for a site in Barry St Edmunds. I'm also on Bluebear Self Storage who we know there's also Barry St Edmunds self storage.uk container sites. Ruffamestate.com also has container storage there as well. So there's definitely a good bit of supply. Absolutely. In this area and it may be that that 0.8 number is kind of a UK wide number but if you go into London it's a lot higher than 0.8. It may be that these are areas which are probably more affluent areas that might, might have significantly higher self storage. So this would, we're sort of breaking the rule I think a little bit which is like try and find a place where there's obviously lacking in a lack of supply.

And how would you, how would you ask, like suggest to somebody to compete if they wanted to open an area like this? Like what would you tell them not to? Just don't try or what would you normally do?

It would depend where else I would. If this was me and we were actually doing this real life, I'd be looking like you might as well make life as easy as possible.

Yeah.

So I'd be looking at other towns around like there's Newmarket, there's Mildenhall, is it Thetford, Cilverstone. Different towns around the area that look like they may have decent populations as well. Yeah. And check those out and just trying.

To see if you zoom out in store track we can see then the facilities there. So it's a good way to kind of gauge I think quickly like what sort of suppliers are in the nearby areas as well. And like New Market there has two. I'm not sure what the population is although I suppose I can by just clicking and checking. So if I use New Market as the town center now, it's going to give me number of people who live there.

You'd need to go and do some more on the ground research I would say like go and visit these sites, find out more about the size. Like that home store. If it's 34,000 rental space, is that number accurate? Is it fu. Like is that place full turning away customers? That's information I want to know first as well and stuff we probably just don't have time to do right now. But so I'd call around. Let's assume you call around and you conclude we're going to go for. Go for it and open up something. The next step is some desktop research to sort of see like what's available. So I'm going to go to, I'm just going to Google here. I don't know where you would search for commercial property but I'm going to just.

And are you looking to buy or to rent?

Well, let's just assume either. I think if all being equal you'd rather buy if you've got the cash.

But so would you be looking for land to build or industrial, like kind of warehousing? What's your preference? What are you going to start with?

Well I would look at what's available like home store that have a really nice looking indoor site. So is that enough for the area? I'd be open to either. I used to sort of think that container sites, it was better to go indoor because it's more easily defensible because you have to spend more on an indoor site. Whereas a container site kind of, anybody can do it if you've got like 50 grand or whatever to open up some containers. But containers, there's plenty of demand for them and from a pure return on investment it can be a great investment too. So I'd look at either. So I'm on rightmove at the moment.

So what are you looking for in a site when you're looking at this list?

I am looking for either. First of all I'd look for warehouses. So let me see, there are only 11 results here. So this is for sale. So I'm looking for a warehouse or I'm looking for some commercial land. Those are the two things I would look for here. There is a 4,000 square foot warehouse for sale for 1.45 million which is, you know, a lot based on the prices I'd be looking at here in Northern Ireland. But there's a warehouse, maybe a bit of land. I'm not seeing much in the area. This is always the problem with self storage is the biggest challenge finding sites. It's always, always, always a problem. Now here is a warehouse here which.

Is.

7339 square feet in the Rougham industrial estate which is presumably next or in the same place as the other. The container site we're looking at we saw as a competitor but it's on at £4,025 per month. So that works out at, let's just call it £50,000 a year. 7,000 square feet you're actually talking about what, £7 a square foot roughly there for that place a year which isn't potentially isn't terrible, it's actually potentially really good in that area. So I'm just going to click on that. To have a quick look at it. It may be that it's not really usable space. That looks like a pretty, pretty solid enough building to me. So that's. Yeah, that looks pretty good. Is it high enough for a mezzanine? It does. You could even put a mezzanine floor in there potentially and double it up. Looks like decent access. Now it looks like this site is actually at the place where the guys have their container business. So just because I see containers there. So it may be that maybe as a standalone you wouldn't do this because you'd be competing with people there. But that looks like an interesting option. I'm going to go back, maybe come back to that in a second. Here's a warehouse. In a modern warehouse. Very high eaves, 13.4 meters. This is a good one. So here, what size is it? 22 and a half thousand square feet of warehouse storage with massive eaves. It's fitted out as an office at the moment, so. Oh, no, sorry. There's also a huge warehouse. So this is going to be really good for. For distribution warehousing. But if this was. If you, if you were going to build a self storage business, you'd be taking this and putting in two or three floors of mezzanine. I mean, you'd be talking about a huge site there. So potentially that's too big for this particular location. I don't know. Then there's. There are others. There's another one. Here's one which looks interesting as well. £6 25 a square foot. Yeah, that's interesting too. And that isn't, as far as I can tell, in the same area as a competitor. So should we maybe just go with this one? Let's go with this.

Yeah, let's try it.

The alternative, of course, is finding some land and putting containers on. So maybe we do that a different time. Let's just go with this.

Great.

Okay, so now we're thinking, okay, we're going to go for this warehouse. I haven't got it long, but let's just assume we'll go for this. So let's. I would not know if we're doing this in real life. I'd go and spend some time at this point, before I got too far, I'd go and spend a bit of time in Barry St. Edmunds. Yeah, it's one of the things I'd like, go and kind of get a feel for the place. But you could also go and get a financial model built. So. Like a really early financial model.

Yeah, but we could first of all we could look it up on Street View and see, see what it looks like. Oh yeah, if you send me the address I will.

Okay, yeah, good idea. Can pull it up so it, the, it's IP33.3TX is the postcode.

Okay, pulling that up now.

I'm going to bring up the financial model then.

Looks like quite a built up area from satellite view here. Yeah, it's actually so it seems to be in a bit of an industrial area with some home furniture shops, car dealerships. So you'd imagine there's quite a lot of through traffic coming through which obviously ideally you're looking to be as visible as possible to the public when you open a facility because still a lot of business comes from just people passing by and becoming aware of you through the signage. So potentially good signage opportunities.

Okay, so we're going to go for it.

Let's do it.

Okay, so I've, I'm on, I've been on the store website and I am going to download the free financial model. So let me see what's, what's the size here? So 9,399 square feet. So I'm going to plug those numbers into our calculator here. So size of 9399, was it 9399 or 9003? Yep, 9399. Let's assume we're going to make. I'm going to put in £30 a square foot here. Sure, it's a pretty affluent area. Let's assume we get 25% of the corridors fitted up. 25% of the space is used for corridors. Let's say we're going to hit 80% occupancy, additional space rent per month. Okay so that's a calculator. Just that's what we're going to hit every month. Let's say it takes us three years to fill. So 36 months and we're going to say 10% of our income will come through insurance. Now the rent, the asking rent here is 625. So let's just plug in the asking. That is a. Okay, that's calculated. So let's say business rates, I don't know, let's just say they're £2 a square foot instead of one. Let's say you've negotiated a six month rent free period. We'll fuel our monthly costs. Let's say you're paying a bit for payment processing. Let's say you're. So this is assuming, this is assuming we're going to go with a, a smart entry system. So with a smaller site like this, I would be going with a smaller, with a smart entry system because you don't. What is this 9,399 square feet? You don't really. You're not going to put a, put member staff into a site that size. I don't think.

What do you think the max sort of size would be before you would consider a staff member?

It really comes down to the revenue as opposed to the size ultimately. Like what's the. Is, is the maximum revenue £150,000 or is the maximum revenue 1.5 million? Yeah, because then if it's 1.5 million, then you know, if you spend 40 or 50,000 pounds staffing the place, are you going to take the one and a half up to 1.7 and get a good return? Whereas if the maximum revenue is 150, a member of staff is never going to pay off because they're never going to return more than their cost. It's going to be a cost, not a boost. So just at 9,399 with £30 a square foot, I mean the, the most this business will turn over is probably about 170, 180,000 pounds if those numbers are right.

Yeah.

So and that's at 100 occupancy probably or something like that. So yeah, I would be thinking more staff, staffless for this one. So let's assume it's £18 to fill it out, including a smart entry system. So initially we're recommending you did 130,000 pounds. You would in total need 260,000 pounds. By year four, we're projecting you'd be making a 28.8% return on your investment. Cool. I'm actually thinking about moving over to some various nemons now, opening this.

You don't need to move with a smart entry system.

That's true. I just mean go over for a week and get it opened.

But even if you did go over and open this, you would still need a, would imagine, you know, somebody in the area to be working in some capacity to, to, you know, look after in some way or at least clean the facility.

Exactly. That's one thing I have learned with my own sites here is you do need to have. You need to have somebody who can go there. Something can go wrong, things can go wrong. You need to have somebody nearby.

Yeah.

Okay. So the model looks pretty good. We're assuming we'll fit out a third of the business at the start. A third after one year and the final third after year two. So yeah, I think that's looking pretty good to me. 28.8% return by year four is not bad. Okay, so we've got our location, we've found a site. The financial model looks good. You'd go and spend a bit of time there. What next or what else? What have we forgotten so far? What about a name for the business?

Yeah, a name for the business. I don't know if you want to get into marketing yet and that that side of things, but I suppose we could.

Well yeah, why don't you. Let's go to Chat GPT see if ask it for a name.

Well yeah, we could do that. I mean are we planning on starting a chain? Like, like do we want a few businesses? Do we want one business? What's our approach here? What are we looking for?

The reason you're asking that is because. Would you call it after the name of the town?

Yeah.

So where you might be limited if you want to grow new sites.

So we see lots of people naming their business after their town. So in this case would be Bur St. Edmond Storage. And then two, three years later realize this is going really well. I want to open another site but now I don't, you know, what do I call it? I don't want to call it Bury St. Edmunds too. So what we find several of our customers have grown over over the last few years. They would end up rebranding. So sometimes you know there is definitely benefits to having the name of your town and Self Storage as the brand name from SEO perspective more than anything but probably long term it's better to have a brand that can expand so something more not generic. Ideally you know you can tailor it to the, to the audience you'll be serving but something that's more flexible anyway.

Yeah so so we could let's go.

To chatgpt and ask for a name but we actually at store we already have a brand marketplace and just going to pull it up here on my screen just because we already have thought about this. We spent a lot of time in the last few years thinking about Self storage brand names and we've had endless sessions of coming up with different names. So we, we have quite a few already. Quite a few we sold but maybe we'll just pick from all the ones that isn't sold.

Yeah, let's do that. Yeah yeah.

So we have Ace Space is one store Garden we have Spacebud Stellar Storage Cell Stow would be the main ones.

Well let's let's pick a space. Mlb.

Yeah, that's one of my favorites.

Okay, so we've got a space. So that's. We've got a brand. Much out of interest. If we were buying that off our marketplace, how much would that be?

It's £1,995, which gets you the brand domain name and also you get 20 credit off your store account as well.

For how long?

For a year, I think for agenos.

What were we thinking?

Yeah.

Okay. So you'd get that if you bought that brand. So if you bought the brand, you get all that stuff just like ready to go. You could of course go and design your own. And most people come up with their own names.

Yeah. And we appreciate most people will just do that and most of our customers do that as well. So, you know, a brand is quite personal a lot of the time to somebody. So it's worth thinking about. And we obviously have these options. You can, if you're stuck for ideas, they're there if you need them. We want to help people get started ultimately. But definitely think about it. The one thing I would say when it comes to branding is do put effort into it. Don't skimp on. Is becoming easier and easier to skimp on it, I suppose, because you can get AI tools to develop, generate logos for you. But it is nice to put some thought into it and think about not just the look, the positioning, what are your brand values and all these things. But for now, I think we're a space.

Okay, We're a space. So if anyone's listening and they've got a name, we have some of the people who did the work for us on the branding, we could put them in touch with people. So if you do want, if you've got a name you'd like some help with just turning it into like logos and something that looks good, you can get in touch and we can put you in touch with somebody who can help you out with that. So ES space. Okay, so we've got the brand, got the name, got the website.

We don't have the website yet, but we could have it very quickly.

There's a domain with that. Yeah. What's the domain? Aespace start.

So it's aespacestorage.com.

Okay, so we've got aspasestorage.com. yep. Let's assume for the purposes of this call we're going to use Stora.

Okay.

So you're going to have a website very shortly with everything up and running. So we can start to Promote it and take bookings and everything else.

Yeah, stick your website up as soon as possible. We would always recommend even before you open because your domain will get indexed by Google which means people will actually potentially find you make sure there's a way for them to pre register their interest. So it's just a way of kind of you can get ahead of yourself. That's why it's good to decide on the brand early. You don't want to, you know, day one you open the facility and it's the first time anybody's hearing about you, you want to, you know, it's self storage. So it may not seem all the time like the most exciting thing in the world but people can be interested in what's opening in their area. So you want to be doing things like even leafleting some SEO work potentially also some Google Ads just to kind of drum up some initial awareness of the business.

So that's a pre opening mode in Stora. So with Stora you can get everything set up, put it in pre opening mode and that gets you the website up. And if, let's say if we could fast forward now three months, we've agreed terms with the site. We've taken out like a 20 year, 40 year lease on the site. We know that it's going to get fitted out in the next six months sometimes.

Yep.

There's no good reason not to get, not to just launch a pre opening website. Just get on with it. You might as well.

As long as, you know, obviously it's one thing we find, you know, in self storage is that people, you know, they, they have an idea when they're going to open but usually it takes a lot longer. It's things, it's just in UK in particular things seem to take longer than they should a lot of the time and usually it's not your fault, usually it's a supplier in some ways holding you back but. Yeah, but still all I would say is don't put necessarily the opening date unless you're sure that it's going to open on there.

Yeah, but you can start to write blog articles. We'd be, we'd probably release an article couple a week. Barry to Dev and self storage. That's what we would do in this case over the next three to six months, wouldn't it?

Yeah and I'd be focusing on getting the, I'd be on Instagram, I'd be on Facebook pumping out social content. Just you're trying to build an audience really just to kind of have some Awareness before you, before you open.

And I think the expectation of building an audience for a self storage site should be low. It's not that exciting a product, sure. But a lot of the content is, it's to build audience, but also just to be found online. So Google finds you and starts to rank you. Right. You could do a lot of that work before by the time you open. If we were doing this, by the time we opened, we'd want to be probably in the top 1, 2 or 3 in SEO results, wouldn't we? Like we'd expect to try and expect to achieve that.

Yeah, it might be difficult in a competitive area, but you should at least be, you know, doing everything you can to appear as high up as possible as early as possible.

Yeah. So you want to be found. All right, so what else? Any other considerations then before you open? Signage. That's always a. Like if you have got a good road frontage, get great signage.

It's important to. Having a logo unlocks a lot of, a lot of things that need to happen. So yeah, good road front signage is important. It's clear that you just need to stand out. You need, you need to be seen. So obviously people go for bright colors and self storage a lot of the time. For that reason. Probably best to write on your business side front that you are self storage in case it's not in the name can be easily forgotten about. You want to put your contact details on there, depending obviously on your preferred booking approach. So you probably should be thinking about this too. How do you want to run the business? Because we've already kind of determined that we are going to have an unmanned automated facility. It probably lends itself well to online booking flow. But also you don't have to do that. You could be still based somewhere else, working remotely, taking inquiries on the phone. But in this scenario, imagine we put our website domain on there. We would have a phone number because it's always good to capture customer needs from a phone call.

We have a customer, we have a customer, a Sora customer who has a really big site and he gets his pricing, so has the pricing behind a contact form. And he has a team of people already working for him in India who are doing a lot of the sales and they're seeing huge conversion rates of people making inquiries online. So with store there's a few different choices. It's just show your prices, let people book. There's hide it behind a get your pricing. So get a contact before you show pricing. They let people book. Then if they want but you can always contact them and follow up. And then the third option is to not show the prices at all and just collect. Basically have your customers request a quote. So we'd be making a decision with that. What you're saying is given this is a smaller site, we're going to sort of run it without staff. We'd probably want to just let people book online. Yeah would be the expectation here and then in terms of then so you'd be having to think about Smart Entry. So how do people get in and out of the site as well? So let's think, let's have a chat about that. Like with my two sites I have the Noki system from Janus but there are other competitors now so that we have ones from Opentech, we have ones from pti, there's others, I'm sure I'm just not the top, not off the tip of my tongue. But there's lots of different options now for Smart Entry.

So thinking about things like Sensorberg, Bearbox, you know there's. In the UK there's lots of options but also you know, Fairbair Fatal, there's the same options plus more unique ones to your area and obviously one of the considerations, this is why it's important to decide on your approach so much of this, you know, really think about it all together because say you decide on Noki, you, your software is going to have to integrate with Nokia so you need to be thinking about your software at that point in time too. And obviously for the purpose of this we've said Stora but any supplier you talk to, you just have to be thinking about like do they support my chosen tools? And a lot of the time we would find while we, we integrate with pretty much all the big ones now in the UK and Europe but people will try to, you know, find like a cheaper niche solution which is more local to them and a lot of the times there isn't like it's just not technically even possible to you know, link that into the website and automate the move in flow. So you just have to think about like what do you invest in and because you're just. Your technology decisions are very important up front because it dictates the experience of the business.

Yeah, you got to really. We have a self storage ecosystem map, don't we on our website?

Yeah.

So I think if you're, if you can find, check that out. Normally if you're picking, if you're picking new software, picking Smart Entry, picking any service, go to a list like that and make sure. That they kind of play with the other actors in the industry. Because one of the things I think does happen is you start off by getting your git automated and you get a local installer comes along and he has a solution that he uses for every business in the town or the area where he works, but it's not for self storage. And so you'll never get an integration with that service.

And if you decide to just. A lot of people would decide to just automate the main gate because it's usually a lot cheaper. And then you have to think about them. Well, how do people get into the units? So you need a system for, you know, either you could look into a padlock management system, which is another digital way to manage padlocks, but more often than not, what you see is people just leave padlocks on the units or in the unit or even on like a lockbox at the front. But again, all that feels very manual and very much like human interference is needed to actually set that up. So while it's more expensive to fully automate the entire journey, if you are not going to be there and you're not going to have somebody there all the time, it could well be worth the investment. It just depends on your desired approach for business.

The investment being locks in every door. Yeah, yeah. So I was chatting to a customer earlier today who has a system at the gates and then he has. Leaves all the units open. So 300 indoor units leaves the unused ones open and they have a padlock vending machine on the way in that they sell for €10 and €16, depending which one you want. And that. That's a pretty efficient way of doing it. The limitation there is overlocking. If we were. If we wanted to kind of not have to go down to this site, if we want to go here once a month or once every six months.

Yeah.

Or have. Or a half staff or that time it's better to have a smart entry system because you can overlock them immediately, remotely.

Yeah. But you can overlock the main gate as well. But the problem with that is somebody else can open the gate and then they can get to the unit.

That's true. Yeah.

Yeah.

So you can be overlocked through the main gate. That's a good point. Yeah. So the padlock solution isn't a bad solution. It's much lower cost upfront, but not quite as handy going forward.

And if you're planning. But if, you know, if you're working on the budgets and you just want to get into Self storage. As you were saying earlier about buy versus rent, maybe that's a good solution just to kind of get in and.

Start a couple other things that sometimes, well, really important thing to consider is planning. So making sure, you know, if you're going to lease a warehouse or buy a warehouse, you got to make sure that you, it either has the planning you need or you're very confident you'll get the planning you need. So that's planning in Northern Ireland at least, it's storage and distribution. It's probably, I'm sure it's the same most places. So you want to make sure you've got, either got the planning or you can get it easily. I spent about a year, maybe a year and a half trying to get the planning for my second site in Dungannon. And until you've got the planning, Even if you're 99% sure you'll get it, you don't want to go and spend quarter million pounds getting stuff out. You want to wait. Another thing, sometimes people would, on the site of this size where the revenue maybe wouldn't be huge, sometimes people would ask, will I register for VAT from the start or not? Because you know, I could wait for, you know, wait until it sort of passes the VAT threshold. You could argue that it's worth waiting for a couple of years to, you know, until you sort of hit the threshold there. The downside of that is you won't be able to claim your VAT on your fit out costs today. And that, that is a big downside I think if you're getting started because you, you know, if you spend quarter of a million pounds on a fit out plus your VAT is £300,000, you're gonna, if you're VAT registered today, you can reclaim back that 50 grand. If you're not, you're gonna wait. It's gonna, isn't until you register in the future that you can then claim that back. So you're, you're gonna have a more of a cash flow issue. The other thing is if you were to, to VAT register in two years time, you suddenly have to deal with, I don't know, 50 customers. How do you deal with those 50 customers? Because you have to change their invoices, you have to add vat. You either, you either take a hit on their price or you call them up and tell them, look, your rent's gone from 100 pounds a month to 120 because we're adding VAT. That's going to be a Tough thing to go through on time. So if it was me for my first site, I just registered for VAT from the first, from day one, because I thought it's going to be easier, I'll get more cash in and I don't have to worry about changing the future. But that's something to consider. If your container site can only ever turn over 80 grand a year, it may be better not to bother registering for vat. Is there anything else that we'd think about?

What about additional services beyond storage, like with this site? Would you consider, I suppose, selling anything else or even upselling? What would you be thinking for this?

I probably wouldn't. The percentage. Some people do sell packaging and boxes and padlocks and things. The percentage is typically so small, like one and a half percent of. I think it was locked in stores. Annual revenue is boxes and packaging and they have reception. So I wouldn't personally bother with that. I know most of our customers don't do it because they're trying to run kind of a quite a lean business. You might do it if it's unmanned. I definitely, which this is. I definitely wouldn't be selling those things. I would definitely be selling insurance. So I would get in touch with the insurance providers.

And how long before opening would you be thinking about that?

I'd probably do it about six weeks, eight weeks before. Because you also. Actually I'd probably be thinking about it before that because once you lease it, you have to also consider insurance for the building as well. So you might have to take out insurance for damage or anything else. So I'd be talking to Basil Fry, the ones that most of our customers use, but there are others as well be insured for that. But then contents insurance wise. So you want to be able to sell. It's not called content contents insurance now it's called tenant protection. But you want to sell that to customers. So four to six weeks before I open, I'd be talking to them maybe, maybe longer and getting that in place. But no, apart from that, I don't think I'd be thinking about any other sales. Just to keep things simple.

So we have worked out how we want to run the business. We have our website set up hopefully on the first page of Google. We're a couple of weeks away from opening. Like what's next?

Okay, so we're sort of fast forwarding like we're. We're opening soon.

Well, we can go back if you want, but I'm jumping to the end maybe.

No, I think that's. I Think that's right. I don't think there's anything, I don't think we've missed anything major. Right. So we're about to open like promotion. Promotion. Trying to get some local press. I mean sometimes you do see sites, self source sites to get up a local press. That can't hurt. Getting the word out, making sure people know that your business is there. Yeah. I would probably do some flower drops. We did flyer drops in Dungannon. We happened to run a, with a concert that put it down when it opened.

Yeah.

And so like everyone in the town knew that this new business had landed and I think that's word of mouth. Spreading the word is just really, really important because self storage is such a needs based product. You know you're not going to, people aren't going to be oh, it's finally open. I'm going to store things. But it just when it's there you'll, you will find, you know, people are, people are moving house and you want them, you want them to know that you're there and you want you to be top of mind. So I'd probably do flower drops. I'd probably, I would probably spend quite a bit on signage. Yeah. Depending on the location. If you said it was opposite an Aldi.

Yeah.

So you know you've got a great, great passing traffic. You want people to see it's there. I might think about some sort of a discount. I'd be checking out the competition around the area to see what they're doing around maybe you know, half price for the first month. I wouldn't want to escalate that. So if they aren't doing it I probably wouldn't. But if others are doing it, I might want to match.

So how would you be pricing a facility like this compared to your competitors?

I would probably. Well, depends. So look, if we went down the route of kind of a really high quality indoor site and it looks like there is competition that has that already, I'd probably be trying to find out what their pricing was and be around the same. I generally wouldn't be wanting to come in to somewhere and just kind of undercut because that can be a race to the bottom. So I'd come in and price it. Maybe if there wasn't other high quality indoor sites in the town I'd probably be sort of quite aggressive on the price and just see what happened. One of the mistakes I made with my, with Port it down was I went in really, really cheap early and it was fine. I got filled up. But we were able to bring people's prices in line over time, but I just wasn't confident enough to know like, you know, you can actually maintain a relatively good price here on this. So yeah, it would start with checking out competitors and saying, and I wouldn't generally try and undercut people because you want to avoid a price. Sorry, a price war. Yeah, I think other than that, I think we're ready to open.

Great.

Okay. Well, yeah, so if you've got as far as this, some resources that we think are useful here. So storetrack for checking out the area, trying to find sites. So we've got the discount there. If you want to check it out. It's Store of friends. If you want to go to storetrack.co.uk, you can sign up for a, for a trial there or an account there with that discount code. We use the financial model. Yeah, we've used a bit of, we didn't really use ChatGPT, we just used that to send us down the various indebted path. We've got our storage marketplace for finding a brand so you can go and check that out, even just for inspiration, the self storage ecosystem which is on our website. We have some other blog posts about getting started and finding new sites. There might be some stuff there on our website too. So check out Store Co. Any other resources we went through.

Well, if you're completely new to the industry, it might be worthwhile checking out our UK Industry Insights report. It'll give you some guidance, I suppose, on what other self storage businesses are pricing and things like that. In the UK it's always worthwhile attending some local events, trade shows as well if you're new to the industry. Just to get an idea, just to.

Bring up the model there. So we're talking about making here a £258,000 investment and we're going to make 75 grand a year. So I'm pretty happy with that. This is definitely a goer.

Yeah.

So, okay, thanks very much, Stephen. All right, that was fun, that was good and yeah, thanks very much for watching and we'll hopefully do one of these, maybe we'll do another one of these for containers sometime soon. At Stora, our mission is to help our customers build the best self storage businesses. Self Storage Explained is here to bring you the best from inside and outside the industry to help you learn how to grow and scale your business. For more resources go to Stora Co Academy, including our financial model and lots of in depth, step by step guides on how to grow your business. To find out more about using Stora, go to Stora Co and sign up for a demo. Thank you very much.