A storage business owner toured seven Las Vegas facilities and realized their 25,000-square-foot operation was overstaffed with three employees, while massive 100,000-150,000-square-foot sites ran with just one office worker. They cut ancillary services like office space and deliveries, then automated operations to focus on core storage.
Chapters
I think the, the other one, the, the fundamental change that we've had in recent years was we did a trip to the, uh, self-storage conference in Vegas, and we went there thinking, right, what— we know what we do, what can we do better? How are these guys using tech? What is it they're doing that we can bring to our business and improve it? And actually, when we got there, we, we visited I think it was 7 sites in Vegas, um, in the sort of 3, 4 days we were there. And what we found is they were running 100,000, 150,000 square foot sites with one person in an office. And I'm back here with 3 people in a 25,000 square foot site, and it's like, what the hell are we doing? So it was very much— I know I came back from that trip and said to Mark, right, we need to start automating and centralizing here. And I think the big thing it made us realize is we're overcomplicating it. People generally want self-storage. If you're offering office space, receipt and dispatch, you know, deliveries, you're offering all these different things, the reality is in some of your smaller stores, it, it means you need 3 staff and you're not making enough extra on the additional 2 staff. for what you're offering. So I think for us that was a big game changer, and it's really led our, our recent journey in which Mark's been one of the drivers for us.
