How the Fastest-Growing Self Storage Operators Are Scaling 5x Faster | Stora Summit @ FEDESSA 2025

Morning, folks. I gave everyone a second there now just to get their head around life. Welcome to Dublin, gang. So my name is Rob. I'm going to be introing you today. Just kind of we look after things. So today, the store summit, it's pretty exciting for us here at Store. Okay, so we've got a good bit going on and it's nice to see what the store journey's done over the.

Last number of years.

I remember sitting on Gav's couch in about 2017, he was telling me about a Container box in Banbridge. I was like, what are you talking about, Gav? And then he went and he set up store stuff and then we set up store. So it's going to be nice to see what we have here today, kind of where we're going with it and what the plan is. Okay, so UK's biggest self storage influencer, Gavin Shales.

I did not know Rob was going to say that. Any idea why the feedback. Let me take this off. Yeah. Thanks for embarrassing me. Okay, cool. Yeah, thanks everybody. Thanks for coming along. Great to have you all here in Dublin. We have more people than we thought would turn up, so the store team have been banished to the door, which is a good problem. But apologies. So, yeah, this is our first ever Store Summit. Today I want to show you how the fastest growing self storage operators are scaling five times faster than the industry average with Stora and also how our evolving platform will help you operators keep that momentum and push further into the future. The first generation of software products in self storage were designed and built to help you manage your business. So raising invoices, processing payments, tracking your unit availability, things like that. We firmly believe that there's a second wave now of self storage software platforms that we're leading where we have to do a lot more than just those basics. We're really, really focused on helping you to not just run your business, but help you to grow your business too. And we're going to dig into kind of what we mean by that today. And as we think of it, your self storage software is your growth engine for your business. We want to be a core partner with you in helping to grow your business. So what does that mean practically? So for Store, what have we been doing for the past bunch of years? Okay, yes, 70% of bookings through STORA come through the website. That's across about 100,000 bookings this year, all online. Stora is also a software product that grows revenue. So one of our features last year was dynamic pricing and that is on average, growing revenue by 4% for customers. We also earlier this year released a price increase tool in March. Between March and April, our customers who turned that on on average saw 9.96% revenue increase from one month to the next. We also have AI based payment tools, a lot of that coming from Stripe, who are with us here today, and card updaters, things that are designed to stop payments from failing. And these things really help with bad debts. And once people have onboarded or cutlery on board and get using Stora, we'll often hear that the bad debts have been reduced by up to 50%. So these are the sort of things that we're really focused on as a business and overall are helping our customers to grow. And last year in 2024, the average customer using Stora saw 32% growth on their revenue, which is 5 times industry average. And this is something we really are very proud of. Now it's not just down to us. People are opening up new sites, expanding the facilities, but these tools that we're building are having a direct impact on people's top line. It's this growth that's led us in just over four years, which is amazing, to now par almost 25% of the sites in the UK and Ireland. We're also expanding now rapidly across Europe. We'll take, as I said, about 100,000 bookings through the platform this year, probably around a quarter of a million next year. We're on track to process well over £100 million of payments for the system in the next 12 months. And what we want to talk about today is how we're going to move that forward and help this industry as a whole move forward. So one of the key parts of what we're doing is the poor evicted storage team are standing at the door, but we are making a massive investment in our product. The investment we're making is the largest in any self storage platform across Europe. We've got the largest product team. We're investing millions of euros a year in the features and tools that are designed to help you to grow. But we think we can go a lot further. So we firmly believe that Stora can be your growth engine, should be your growth engine, and our customers who are using it should be at a huge advantage over anybody else in the market. That's why today, as well as talking about these tools, and we want to have a chat with everybody at the end about how we can help you in your business, we're also announcing two new major features in Stora. So we've shown with this 32% growth that the winners of today in this industry are the ones who are embracing an online first sales mentality. So this is a mentality focused on an online presence built to convert prospects into paying customers, while also making sure you don't leave any revenue on the table. This shift in the industry to online first has made the checkout this online checkout is now the most important sales tool in self storage, we believe. And while storage checkout is already from the data we see the best converting in the industry, we know this can go a lot further. There's so much more for us to do. So today we're introducing the next generation of self storage checkout, designed to capture more sales, grow your basket size and also unlock new revenue streams with new products and services. And while this checkout will work brilliantly for most operators, we also know that some of you have more bespoke needs as well. So maybe you've built your own tailored flows, your own websites, and you want to connect your self storage software more deeply into the way you already work. I'm looking at some customers now. I know, I know that this is the way you want to work. So that's where our new public API comes in. So earlier this year we announced we'd started to work on it and today we're launching it. We're really, really proud of this. It's been a big, big project for the past four, five, six months and we're announcing that today. The API, what it does is it gives you, the operators, the freedom to extend and customize your self storage software however you need. So plugging in accounting tools, CRM tools like HubSpot, marketplaces, access control, even your own apps, you might want to build as well. It gives you full flexibility to build whatever it is you want in order to grow your business. And this ties back to where the industry is going. So sales, what we've seen really in the past few years is sales moving beyond kind of, you know, the old kind of come down to the site, have a coffee, get a little tour, see your unit, pick your unit. We've seen it move a good bit past that. We've started to see it move past telephone sales. Eventually we will see it move past online sales as well. Sales are moving beyond websites and human LED processes. They're flowing across ecosystems, marketplaces, partner tools. Even AI agents could be driving a sale for you really soon. People actually buying their self storage in a completely new way that we can't even fathom today. So this API is built with that in mind. Our vision I'm going to hand over to Dave in a second. No pressure, but our vision is to be the platform that this industry builds on. So we want Stora to be an open, extendable and customizable platform. A foundation that operators can use to build, scale and grow whatever way works best for them. Okay, So I hope I've touched there very briefly on some of the things that have helped to drive the growth that we've seen in the industry. Those four things, our focus is on partnering with operators and helping to drive your growth. These two new products that we're releasing now, David's going to get into a bit more detail. He's going to talk about them both. I'll hand over to David, our head of product. Thank you very much.

Gavin, did you know there was a clicker here the whole time? You didn't use it and it works. And there's me with a different haircut. Hello everyone. Thanks for coming. Good turnout. Sorry, store team banished. I hope you can hear and see because I'm very excited to show you all what we've been up to lately because it's all their hard work. So Gavin said this shift to online first, it's not happening. It's happened. It's here. It's already well underway. A lot of you know this and your website is arguably your most important sales tool and the checkout is a huge part of that. It's already where 70% of bookings happen on the store platform. But actually to go a little bit deeper, 2/3 of them happen on mobile and that makes the checkout, especially the mobile checkout, even more critical. So that's why we've spent the last few months building a brand new mobile optimized checkout. And it's designed to help you capture more leads, convert more of them and increase the revenue from every order. We're calling it Advanced checkout. And here's exactly how it will help you grow. So firstly, it's going to break the journey down into clear, digestible steps that drive action on every device, desktop and mobile. It will also get you more leads. So we are capturing the visitor data earlier in the journey. So even if someone doesn't finish the booking, you still have their details and you can follow up. It's going to help you grow your protection revenue. So our smart defaults that are contextual to the unit sizes and our minimums will guide customers to the right level of coverage. And we've made some changes to discounts as well. To make this a lot better for your revenue, you're also going to be able to easily upsell one off extras. I know a lot of you want to do this. Things like padlocks, boxes, even services like van rental added straight to the checkout for instant extra revenue. And finally recurring upsells. So these help you unlock the hidden value within your offer. Operators focused on maximizing revenue aren't just selling space anymore. And Gavin will touch on this at his Talk tomorrow at 3 o'.

Clock.

They're looking at every aspect of the storage sale differently. So advanced checkout makes this possible and with recurring upsells it means you can sell things like 247 access, things like no notice periods, ground floor units as premium instead of giving them all away as standard. And of course advanced checkout adapts to your brand and it looks great on nice and it will look and feel great on every device. So yeah, that's advanced checkout. You can request access in your store account today if you're a store customer. If you're not, we'll be here for the next few days. You want to talk to us about it. And whilst you're all here, it would be rude to not give you a little bit of a peek into what's coming next with upsells and add ons and our checkout. So I've been speaking to some of our customers over the last few months, many of you, and one of the insights that we gained from speaking to you was that the sale doesn't end when you make the booking. The sale is ongoing until they move in, even while they're a customer. And many of you check in with your customers closer to the time. Right. Do you need anything? Do you have everything you need? And whether that's extra cover, whether that's a different unit, whether that's extra services, doesn't matter what it is. But what we're doing is we are adding the ability for you to reach out to customers automatically before they move in, while they're a customer and when they're about to move out to help them along their journey. We're calling this post Booking Upsells and it's coming soon. And we're going to give you more tools to help increase your revenue per customer. So that's your website and websites are important, they will be for a long time. But like Gavin said earlier, we know that some of you need more, some bigger customers need more. You don't have to be a big customer to need more. Whether that's more connections with Your existing tools, workflows, more tailored experiences, or just more control. And that's why today we're taking the next step of our journey. We're making store and not just powerful out of the box, but extendable. So what does that mean up until now and today as well? What sets Stora apart, in my opinion, is our commitment to design and user experience. And we're going to apply all that same thinking and our DNA to the developer experience. So today we're launching the Stora Public API like Gavin said, and it's going to give you that control and flexibility that you need. So APIs are very abstract things. Today I'm going to walk through some use cases that we're covering that we'll support right out of the gate, hopefully give you some ideas and some inspiration. So starting with this one, custom booking journeys. So not everybody wants to use the store checkout experience out of the box. And I get that, I understand why. And so now what you're going to be able to do is create your own booking journey powered by Stora in the background. So let's take some examples. Using the API, you'll be able to build full custom booking experiences on your own website. The API will allow you to fetch things like unit availability, prices, billing periods, insurance options, apply discounts, all from the API, all happening in the background. You'll be able to do this in real time. You're going to be able to pull different prices for different billing periods. So in other words, things that we actually haven't even built into the platform yet, but are still available as features, you're going to be able to integrate those into your own customer journey. So in this example, longer billing periods, different prices, and there's no end to the types of booking experiences you could create powered by Stora. So again, even if you wanted a booking experience that is nothing like what we have today, like say you wanted to implement something like, and we see people do this in the industry, a time based, like hold a unit, low commitment style booking experience. You can do that again, pulling that pricing, unit availability, location data into your own website captures, delete first before getting them to pay. You're going to be able to do that and you're going to be able to do things like forward that information to other systems. So we know some of you are experimenting with AI voice agents, other sorts of AI agents. You could even configure the system to follow up those incomplete bookings and forward it to them for follow up calls. And you don't have to Do a thing. But custom doesn't always mean complex. Sometimes people want simpler booking experiences, simple customer journeys. And it's not about building complex things, it's about building the things you want to build for the customer. So giving you the tools you need to create the customer experience you want. So in this example, this is a situation where you, you sell one type of container or one size and there's no choice in the matter and you just want to say, let me get a price for this container, search by postcode, pull information back and show me the price. That's all possible with store API. So giving you the tools you need to create the customer experience you want.

To.

So that's custom booking journeys. But we know there are other needs when it comes to integrations. So you're also going to be able to sync contacts to and from external CRMs. So we're going to have, you're going to have the ability to pull contacts directly out of Stora, sync them with the tools like HubSpot and Pipedrive that you use for CRMs and pull push new leads from your CRM to Stora. So yeah, pull contacts out of Stora and push updated leads from your CRM into Stora. So two way, that's read and write, you don't get that everywhere. So yeah, it means you're going to be able to keep customer names, details, phone numbers, all in sync and consistent across systems. So this is great for other things like automating the lead follow up and building that kind of unified customer journey. Our API also lets you update prices programmatically. So there's lots of things you can do with this. One thing is you're going to be able to adjust base prices of unit types on the fly, create custom products prices, or if you use pricing intelligent tools like StoreTrack or ProRise, you're going to be able to integrate those into your own pricing, dynamic pricing strategies and rules. So again, this is great for experimenting with prices, optimizing your revenue and reducing manual pricing updates. So creating prices programmatically, another key use case. So we're supporting quite a lot out of the gate. When we started this project, we weren't sure how many use cases we were going to cover and we just kept going and there's more. So we're also going to allow you to pull invoice and credit note data out of Stora and push it into your accounting tools like Xero, Sage, QuickBooks. Whatever accounting software you use, you're also going to be able to use that data to Run your own financial reports. So again, all that accessible from the Store API, and this is just the start. So we're starting to onboard customers and they're going to start building custom integrations. Talk to us about it over the next few days, if you're interested. And over the coming months, we're going to expand this functionality further. So this is the foundational layer. This is just starting and it's already great. So from here we are going to include a zapier app. We're going to build a zapier app to make it even easier to connect Stora with the tools you use every day. So this will be coming well before the end of the year. We can't wait to see what you make with it. And just let me leave you one final thought about the API and how are we thinking about it and how we're thinking about the future? Some of you may have seen this. Patrick Collison, your boss, he posted this last night and it was that stripe will power the checkout inside ChatGPT. And this is exactly how. This is the perfect analogy and example for how we're thinking about the API. So it's a clear signal that the future isn't just about building destinations like your website. You know, it's about building flexible connected systems. So this is somebody booking or somebody buying something from Etsy inside ChatGPT available today. And, you know, you see people experiment with AI chatbots on their own website, but I'm not sure why you would do that when everyone's hanging out over here. So that's exactly the direction we're taking with the Store API. We're giving you the power to plug in the plug storage into whatever experience you want to create, giving you the tools to meet your customers wherever they are, not, you know, not just at your front door. That is your website. So that's how we're thinking about it. And if you want to get access to the API, talk to us or go to this URL. And thank you for listening. And a massive thank you to the team who are standing outside because they brought this all to life. And. Yeah, and I'm going to hand back to Gavin. Do you want a clicker?

Yeah. How's it working? Yes, thank you.

There's a left button and a right button.

Ooh, complicated.

Yeah.

Thanks, David. I think David has the flu, by the way. Or he's cold anyway, so actually, yeah, well done for doing that. But don't go near him either, in case you get sick. Oh, sniffle. Okay, well, thanks well done, David. Thanks very much. Yeah, look, I think we're going to move on shortly to, I think, the most interesting part of this, hopefully for lots of you, which is our interview with Irish rugby legend Jimmy Heeslip, who's just here. I'm actually pretty nervous about that myself. I've watched Jimmy play rugby for years and years, so I'm a little bit in awe. But we're going to move on to that. Just before we do, just want to just touch on this. A massive thank you to the team. It's been brilliant and I suppose we've talked for 15 minutes and one of the reasons, I suppose we want to talk about this stuff is we want to share just how focused we are on these things. We think these things are really, really important, not just of using store, but just for the industry as a whole. How are you selling your self storage and how's that going to change over the next few years? We obsess over it. We think it's a really interesting problem to be thinking about and working on. And I hope, no matter what you're using or if you're building your own stuff, I hope you've picked something off from the way we are thinking about how these checkout flows work and the direction they're going in. So I hope it's been helpful. The final thing I was going to say, we also know operators who are considering moving software. It is a daunting prospect, we know that. We're just announcing today we're launching a new service with Stora, our full service migration, which is designed to help operators, especially some of the larger ones with more complex systems, kind of go through the process of shifting things across to store because we want to make that obviously as easy as we possibly can for you. So we have a. We're putting this team in place. It's available now for operators. We can even come on site. We can do it remotely, but it's there to kind of make sure the whole thing runs as smoothly as possible. Everyone knows that these moves always have their challenges. This is there to make that as easy as we possibly can. So that'll hopefully help as well. Okay, we'll move on now, I think to. Oh, I'm going to pass back to Rob, who's going to introduce his friend Jimmy. Hello.

Oh, lovely.

So, yeah, I basically got rolled out to bring Jamie up on stage for any really, really big rugby fans here would know. In 2005, myself and Jamie were relative teammates. But just don't Google it because you're not going to see me on the pitch in the same time as him. Our journeys went on different directions after that, but I've known Jamie ever since. Since I remember in third year in school, we were playing against Newbridge College and it was like they had this big number eight and it was like, christ, who's this guy? We got our asses kicked. And it was mainly due to him and their number nine at the time. Who ref?

Me, O'.

Donnell.

But it was pretty much from about 15, it was like, this guy's gonna be big. But if you look at what he did then afterwards, obviously had a fantastic rugby career. But from, you know, pubs to drone delivery services to going into Google, now into Stripe, his work ethic and what he's doing is very, very good. And you'll see when we talk to him here today. He has his head skirt on. He's a knowledgeable guy. So, like to introduce Jamie and Gav up on stage here. We're going to talk.

Thank you.

There we go.

Well, thank you very much for joining us, Jamie. Yeah, really great to have you here.

Well, I was scared of Chop, but I called him Chops. Chops chased me around Dublin, so I had no choice but to be here. But, no, I'm very excited to be here. I love a lot of things, but I love boring things. And what do I mean by that? I love people who look at an industry. Sorry, I don't mean to say storage is boring. Right. But sorry, I need to win over. I need to win over the audience first. But I love people who look at an industry and say, you can do this better. And it's the same way I approach rugby. So when myself and Chops came through the system at the very start, it was very old school. The training methodology around it was like, okay, what's your fitness test? It's like, do a 3k run. But like, you never run more than 70 meters in one. Like, you're lucky if you run 70 meters and one go in rugby. So I was like, what's. It's not applicable to it. So how do you look at. Just because something's done the way it's done doesn't mean it's right going forward. So I love meeting people like yourself who are looking at an industry and say, hey, we can change this. We can do this better. We can evolve this so everyone else can operate at a higher level. And I always jump at the opportunity to talk to people like yourself who are solving these problems, these problems in industries that are around a long Long time. So very excited to be here. So thank you. Quick sense, check who does follow rugby. Okay. So we have some people who know it's not a round ball, it's an oval ball.

Okay.

And I can give you a TLDR on Rugby 101 throughout this conversation, but we're here to talk about storage. Sorry.

Well, I can see Chris here and he's South African, so I don't know if it counts.

Well, he has all the bragging rights. You have no bragging rights as an Ulsterman. Right. But any lenser fans? No, I won't start there. No Munster fans. They love me anyway. Go on.

Cool. Well, the things you've said there about what we're doing Stripe, I've been doing that for 15 years, so I'm interested. It's one of the things we talk about a lot is lots of different payment processors out there. Why as a self storage operator, why would you suggest, why do people use Stripe? What's the benefit of Stripe over other.

Well, I'll stop you right there. Right. So if you said Stripe was a payment processor 10, 15 years ago, I would say you're right. Now it's very different. It's a financial infrastructure platform. It sounds like it's just wordage or like, you know, whatever that is, it's a reframing, but it's actually because the company is very, very different now versus then. And when you're a platform, you got to think differently over it. It's not just a processor. Like if you think at a very high level, what does Stripe do? It does every. Like it moves money from A to B and everything in between. And people think that's not complex. But I don't know, go like, I part own a couple of pubs and stuff, stuff like that. Go do your banking with the banks and see how hard it is to move money around the place easily in a quick manner. And also not have the burden of all the admin that comes with that. Right. And the time spent on that. And so when I'm talking to people at a very high level, then I kind of go, okay, why? How is Stripe different? I go, okay, well, we grew up in the stock startup space. It was very dev centric, so it's very developer friendly. You talked a lot about like an open API there. API documentation is publicly available. You have everything from low code, no code solutions for people all the way up to API first. Okay. And we pride ourselves on making sure that documentation and user experience. And it's very user friendly. Right. Our Overriding principle is user friendly first actually. And every week our LT team, so like Patrick and John and their leadership team meeting on a Monday morning. The first thing they do on a Monday morning is they have a user on the call and they actually don't want to hear about, they don't want to hear about like how good the product is or anything like that. They're actually like, tell us all the bad stuff. Because we want to find out the edge cases, we want to see what we can do better, we want to see what we can fix or what we can build forward for at scale. And then actually on a Friday, which now it's the last thing for us on a Friday because it's like 5 o' clock in the evening. But it's like first thing on west coast we have an all hands and the first thing on the all hands is a user call. So a user is put on it in front of. We have 10,000 people globally now in the company. And the same thing, they talk, they like their quote, quite manic in their fascination. Don't tell us the good stuff, tell us the bad stuff, tell us the bad stuff, tell us your experience, how was it, what was good, what was bad, how can you better all that sort of good stuff. So that's top of mind. Also everything we do with our APIs is global. So we don't think of just one market per se, or we don't think of just Ireland or just the eu. We think, okay, how do we make this available on a global scale? Because companies like yourself aren't just dealing in Ireland or the uk. You're expanding into Europe, you're looking at the us, you know, all the different markets and the nuance that comes with that. So how do we move money throughout the globe? And also how do we think of the different users in different markets? How do we make sure that we're serving them okay? So that's kind of tough. And then also last thing is the processing rate isn't the cost that you got to think about, okay, you got to think about, okay, the lost revenue you have. So that's everything to do with failed payments. The amount of time you spend in terms of reconciling all the money coming in across multiple accounts, the missed opportunity about exploring new business models, a lot of stuff that you actually showed there, okay, that's what we think the cost is. So what we focus on then is like, how do we, on the front end, let's call it, how do we get that acceptance rate? So when they click buy. That payment goes through. Because you've done so much work in terms of like my past previous, my first job out of rugby was in Google. And like I've seen how much people pay around like the cost per acquisition in terms of getting that customer with the advertising, everything to drive them through the pipeline. You don't want them to fall out of the basket then. So we want you. When you press go, we're able to get that money into your bank account. And then also on the back end, how do we minimize a lot of the manual processes that people have for whatever different reason in terms of like reconciling that payment or automating how they chase like invoices and all that sort of stuff? So that's kind of where I start with it. And then also knowing that we manically spend our time focused on, like I said, moving money from A to B. But also we're constantly thinking of what's coming down the line the next 5, 10, 20 years and helping future proof your business for those changes. So you can just like focus on whatever your competitive advantage is. You keep focusing on that. We'll take care of the money movement part.

I think that's one of the reasons we showed that tweet from Patrick Collison yesterday.

He's worse than me on Twitter.

That's why we took this, because he's thinking about how are people going to order stuff in the future? Is it going to be in your chatgpt and how do you make that look at how simple that was to get the purchase done. And you know, that's, that's one of the big things I always liked with Stripe. You're. You're thinking about those things, you're pushing them forward. One of the things with Self Storage as well, that's that I only like the reason I get into self storage was I realized it's a nice recurring revenue business.

Oh yeah.

So recurring billing so important for all the, you know, all the operators. You know, Stripe does a lot there as well. Talk us a little bit about how, how it compares to traditional systems when it comes to recurring.

I love SaaS businesses and I love businesses like Storj because I spend a lot of time in the startup space. Right. And Paper Never Refuse Inc. In the startup space in terms of their ambition and what they're going to change and stuff like that. I love businesses that have actual hard revenue. That's why I'm in the pub game. Right. As well. There's hard. It's quick turnover of like turning your inventory into actual cash and all that sort of good stuff. I love cash SaaS type recurring business. Just personally, we all like cash. Yeah, cash is king. I think everyone can relate to that in this crowd. So when we talk about SaaS, okay, we talk about, what do we talk about there? We kind of look at, when we look at SaaS businesses, okay. We're not going to be the experts in said domain, okay. So vertical SaaS is. We're not going to be the experts in storage, right? And that's where you're going to have the industry knowledge on it. Okay. But what we have when you think of us operating at a global scale is that we have a great viewpoint on how we, how we look at SaaS businesses and what we think challenges are. So we think like, okay, how do you really, we think, how do we fight churn with automation in a SaaS world? Okay. And we can talk about it later about the evolution of SaaS and how it's gone from like SAS 1.0 to where I think it is as SAS 3.0. But I think there's two things we're looking at there. We're looking at automation and retention. Okay. So when we're looking at automation, we're going, okay, how do we, the features that we bring out in terms of like smart retry. So how do we look? I'll take a card as an example, right? But we can do, you know, we automate direct debits, bank transfers, all different payment methods. But let's just take cards as an example. So someone, we all have a card, right? And let's say you're paying for your storage, but let's say you don't get paid till the end of the month, but you're pulling it. Or you get paid in the first of the month, you're pulling your payment at the end of the month as an example, right? Because of our global scale. So we have millions of customers around the world. We can see, let's say you try and pull that card and it says declined insufficient funds or something like that. If we see that card then turn up a couple of days later on our global network somewhere else, then you kind of go, we can pull that payment automatically or we can look at card account update. So I do a thing every year, you can call it scabby of me or whatever you want. Every January I'll cancel all my cards to see what subscriptions I have and all that sort of stuff. And I also, this is my own little kind of Own business lead thing where I look at who has card Account updater as a feature. So you can, the bank will automatically issue your new card if you lost it or whatever and obviously the numbers change or stuff's changed on it. We can automatically update that in the background. So all that kind of thing around involuntary churn, we can do a lot of really smart automation around to negate that. We can also then look at how we embed, embed different types of flexibility into a payment system for SaaS business. So yes, there's like we can enable you then for your customer, come on and upgrade the options that they have or downgrade or add. You have a lot of cool features there that you're adding. How do we give you the flexibility to do that in the SaaS world as well as provide an ability to do one off payments for different things. So that's how we kind of look at it from a SaaS, a SaaS world. My personal looking at vertical SaaS businesses is they're on a bit of a journey where you know, it was like just take a booking fee at the start and it turned in to take a reoccurring fee. And now what a lot of them are like what store is doing, which I think is really cool, is embedding financial services into your platform so collecting payment on behalf of someone else. There's other features that we can do in terms of issuing capital to them, kind of like a merchant cash advance type thing and pull that back on a per kind of payment basis. But what does that enable your platform is enabling these businesses here then to go, okay, all the administration part of the business we don't have to worry about. We can focus on our customers, we can focus on what our USP is or what our competitive advantage is to win in the market and not worry about collecting the payment or fail payment or chasing an invoice or making sure the checkout is slick or all the stuff that comes with the administration or reconciling all the payments coming in across maybe multiple sites. That's the direction of travel I'm seeing in vertical SaaS probably. I don't know. I kind of went on a bit of a tangent there. So I don't know if that answers your question.

Not at all, no. I think the recurring billing part of of stripe is a really important part of our product. I have a site of my own in Northern Ireland now and stripe actually shows you in the dashboard kind of the revenue that it's saved from the card updater and the Retries and it's in the thousands for one little site I have. So it's a very, very valuable thing. Now, of course, you could be calling the customer and ask them for the card number and maybe you'd get the money eventually. But it just removes all that.

That's time. Right. And time businesses is money. And it could be a headcount that you could redeploy somewhere else in your business or not have to get that headcount. Because a lot of people in the payment world, they'll just focus on the cost of the process and payment, but not look at the cost across their entire business in terms of processes that.

They can automate the reconciliation. It's almost something I don't even think about because it's always been there. I've always sort of used Stripe for everything done. Ever. Yeah. And you know, you never have to, you know, if you're using something else just processing payments, you have to go and look at the list of payments and reconcile it against an invoice.

Yes.

Like I don't even. I've never really talked about. But Stripe does that automatically.

Yeah.

And that itself is a huge time saver if you're not doing already.

And a lot of people think of just cards for us. Right. But our biggest SEPA bank transfer user is based in Dublin, actually.

Oh, okay.

And they came to their. Their process in about three years. They've done about one and a half billion in bank transfer to this. Right. And why they've done it is to your point. So like I'll just use that. But you can do it for backs or ACH or whatever. Right, but we're able to spin up a unique V band per customer.

Yes.

Okay, so then. So that, that V band is unique.

Virtual. A virtual number that. And your customer pays to that iban.

Yeah. And then we can automatically reconcile it in the back end and it doesn't matter if they don't put a reference code in or something like that. Okay. But it's not finished yet in terms of like that product suite we call Revenue Finance Automation, it's not finished. Even on Friday we had a massive billing user or FA user on the call call and they were saying just. Even that dashboard, they were saying like, we. There's loads of other features they'd love to see in terms of resource truth. So yes, you can see what your ARR Mr. Is and churn rate and stuff like that. But then they weren't like, oh, can we see what the amount of net new MRR we have today and all these other features. So we're constantly trying to tweak.

The.

Product suite that we have directed by our users because they're the ones, if I'm honest, who are directing our product roadmap. And it's the only way that we'll grow and grow as a business.

One of the things that post by Patrick, I think it touched on something very interesting for us, which is just thinking about how consumer behaviors are changing, about how they can pay online. How do you see that evolving over the next few years? And do you think there's an opportunity for self storage to take advantage of any of these changes?

I think every business has to adapt to the change of habits that we're seeing. And I'm seeing this, I'm seeing this in the large, large enterprise, legacy type businesses as well because the demographic is changing and the buying habits are changing. So everyone now is like a Uber user, Amazon Prime, Airbnb type user. Okay. They expect kind of seamlessness and speed in everything that they touch in every industry that they touch. And that for me creates like a kind of a zero friction type opportunity for businesses, no matter the industry. So I don't want to focus on, I think this is just across the market and everything from like how you pay your insurance premium to how you pay for storage to how you order food, people's expectations are changing in terms of how they deal with a business. And then also you're looking at particularly like as you grow into Europe for an example, like payment methods that people use in Ireland is not the same as as in Holland, as France, as Italy. Everyone has their own kind of local payment method that they like to use and that will affect the kind of checkout rate that you have. So how do you, if you don't have that industry knowledge, how do you automatically serve those different payment methods up for people? Okay, so even simple like having Apple pay there because people, people don't want to type in their four digits or they don't want to put in their bank, whatever it is. And the one you saw up there was Link, which is our kind of one click checkout payment method. And what that does is so now that you've seen it, you're going to see it turn up whenever you're shopping online. That's on our global payment network. So if you sign up the link on any other site where you see it, that payment method then will automatically be shown on a stripe site like yourself or something like that, and you just click link, you get a six digit Code sent to your phone, automatically put it in, boom, it's done. Because it has the, it has your billing address, has the payment method, has all the details and it's seamless. It's like six, eight seconds, give or take. And I think. So that kind of customization per market for the user I think is really, really important. And then we're seeing, seen a shift and I think what, what that shows in with the OpenAI partnership, it shows a shift to self serve. Yeah. From customers. They kind of want to do it themselves pretty seamlessly. Don't really want to talk to anyone. If anyone has kids, you can see they don't even really want to talk to you. They just want to talk to you through their phone or something like that. So I don't think that shift is going to change. And again, it comes back to the world that people are living in now in terms of how they engage with companies. I think Covid had a big shift for that in terms of buying habits for people. So I can't see that going away. And it was like, it was Gavin, wasn't it, showing us the stuff there, like even like seeing how it's not just desktop now. What 2/3, you said is via mobile.

Yes, two thirds. Yeah.

So you got to think, you can't just think one channel via desktop. You've got to think multiple channels now of how you're integrating with them. You got to think, okay, maybe when they're on the premise how you do it via an app or something like that, you know, all these different kind of touch points. You have a customer journey and you need a seamless kind of back end to manage all that, those different touch points with the journey. So I don't think. Sorry, that's what I see as kind of like the, the three main trends but like anchored by kind of seamlessness and speed, I think is the best way to frame it.

Yep, yep. One of the things I find now in the past year I've noticed if I'm on my phone, like I probably check out almost always on my phone now, like it backs up the data we're seeing as well. But it can be very frustrating if you've been asked to put a card in. Yeah. And most of the time it actually is on my phone. So I just have to like kind of do my face ID and it does appear sometimes, but I just, I don't even want to have. That takes an extra couple of seconds. I just want Apple pay well.

I'm so bad. I'm so bad. Now that I don't even know where half my cards are in the house. And so when it prompts me to put in a number, I'm like, shit, I have to go find my card. Yeah. As opposed to if it's Apple Pay, I just go, boom. Don't click. Done.

That's an interesting shift because we went from cash to cards.

Yeah.

And I've gone from cash to mobile.

Well, you know, what's next? It's actually quite. I don't want to talk about the pubs so much, but it's funny, even seeing in the post, it's usually traditionally be a cash game. Right. But I would say now about 97% of our revenue is cards, which kills me in the pub game in terms of getting cash out of the business. But.

What would you want that for?

I hope revenue aren't here. Sorry, revenue, but. And no media. But it's just the habits are changing and you have to adapt to it. And if you want to use the sport analogy, like I constantly said in sport to guys and Chops is probably sick of me saying this. It's like, evolve or die. You know what I mean? Because in sport it happens on a weekly basis. Everyone's learning in rugby, sorry, in soccer, it's like every three days or something to play a game. Right. But rugby, it's every week you're playing a game, people are learning your strengths, your weaknesses. Everyone gets to whatever competitive advantage you have. They all get there within a couple of months anyway, or a season. And it's like, how do you constantly evolve to stay ahead?

Well, that's leads on to my next question. Like, you know, you've played rugby in front of 80,000 people. How do you. Do you have any lessons for a business owner to something like that? How do you evolve quickly? How do you learn quickly? But also, like, how do you. The thing I always think is, how do you stay calm under the pressure of 80,000 people watching you? How do you stay calm? You make decisions and make good decisions under pressure.

How do you make good decisions? Well, it depends. The audience might say, I made more worse decisions than good on the field. George Hook would definitely say that. But the thing, clarity of purpose is a big thing. So you gotta. What do I mean by that? You've gotta have an overarching goal or mission. And I just don't mean like, hey, win the season or win said trophy. It's gotta be like a North star that you're all driving towards. So in Leinster, in Ireland, my thing was kind of like Leave the jersey in a better place. So, you know, when you, you don't own the jersey per se, it's get an opportunity to wear it on that day. Because sport is quite fickle. You can get injured in an instant. There could be latest and greatest kid coming through. So when you put that jersey back on the peg after the game, have you left that in a better place? That's what kind of drove me for Stripe. They want to grow the GDP of the Internet, right. So they're a big believer in online commerce and how we help grow that. It's about, I think globally, I think about 19% or something like that is online, I think anyway. But I think you need a good North Star and clarity of purpose around that and everyone bought in. And then like really good kind of core values that you hold yourself accountable every day. It's not to say you can't have arguments. I think you need healthy conflict and debate amongst kind of the product or whatever, like direction that you're going. If I think that's. That's quite important. And then you also. And with that, you've got to give a little bit of. How do I put this? You got to give on the edges, you got to give a bit of autonomy to people to try things out. So in, in, in. In rugby, you've got like, I couldn't do what I keep point that Chops here. I couldn't do what Chops did in like in his role.

Right.

I was a back row. I had a certain skill set for those kind of roles. And you got to put faith in people in their role that they are the best at what they do and you got to trust them. Yes, you hold them accountable to the overarching goals and the operating principles and all that good stuff. But that's what I try and take on. And you asked about the. How do you keep evolving or evolve or die. I think a lot of that has to be boiled down to how do I frame that now. I think you've got to. You've got strangely in, particularly in rugby, in a very physical sport where there's a lot of alphas around, I think you have to be quite vulnerable and quite open and transparent with people on your strengths and on your weaknesses. You got to be open for feedback. I don't think you can run around with blinders on you. Particularly in a team sport. I think that's quite dangerous. Yes. As a founder, for example, or CEO of a business, you have to be very focused on and you have to have a point of view on direction of travel, but I don't think you can be maniacal in that. I think you have to be open for feedback either from users in the market or. I hear this a lot in the startup world where you'll have a founder going, I just don't understand that people aren't getting the product. It's all push, push, push, no pull from the market. And then it's like, well, are you talking to users? Are you iterating your product on their feedback to get product market fit before the market pulls it? They're like, no, I'm focused on this single thing. I think that's a dangerous world if you go around in blinders. And so I don't know if that's kind of. I've gone everywhere with that answer, but I think clarity of purpose and giving autonomy and trust to the edges is very important.

Yeah. Okay. I'm gonna ask one more question, then we'll see if there are any questions in the audience. My final question is like, I play hockey.

Yeah.

Still play hockey.

I think it's crazy.

Most people have played in front of us, probably a couple hundred people, and most of them are probably just walking their dog. So, like, what's it like walking out onto a pitch? How does it feel when you walk out?

So you open that the first. The previous question was like, how do you. How do you play in front of the. Like, we actually set a world record in 2015 for the most. I think we played in the Olympic stadium and there was, I think nearly 100,000 people at that. So how do you focus on your job? A lot of time in.

I'm kind of wondering what's it like to just walk out and hear the door? It's awesome. Do you suck it in? Do you block it out?

No. So two things happen, like during the weeks or that week. Right. And the output on the Saturday is measured on the inputs, not just that week, but the compounding effect of your routine and process and inputs on all the weeks leading into it. So I was quite focused on kind of how I prepared during the week. Okay. So Monday would have been review day. So you're reviewing the previous game and then you're turning the page. You're taking the learnings and you turn the page for whoever you're playing that week. It's kind of like a rehab type day. Tuesday was attack day. You're focusing on what you're going to do. Wednesday was your down day, a lot of recovery. And then Thursday was your kind of defensive day. So you're focused on what they're going to do. And then actually after Thursday lunchtime, like you did a kind of a light run on a Friday, but that's just a run through in the venue that you're playing at to get familiar with this, with the surroundings. But the reason you could make it this, because half the time you go play in the Aviva and you can't hear. You can't. Like I couldn't hear you most time on the field, right? So you got it. You. You got to have very. You're operating on. You're operating automatically, which is based on all the training that you've done and run through throughout the weeks beforehand and obviously having trust that you've done the same thing as well. And so you kind of. It's more about the inputs rather than the output on the Saturday, and that takes care of the massive base. But what happens on a Saturday when you're playing in front of like, what's the Aviva? 50 odd thousand people that gets. That gets your emotional energy up because, like, you stand out there and they're blazing a Ronda Bean or Ireland's call. Like, you go from 0 to 90 really quick in terms of where you need to be emotionally, because you're running through a brick wall. Like it's. The G force is larger than a lot of car crashes in the tackles in rugby. So you need to be. You're physically there. From all the work that you've done, you're mentioning mentally there with all the prep that you've done, you need to be emotionally there. And that's the crowd definitely help you get there. And is it cool? It is awesome being out there in front of it. And people often ask me, do I miss it? And I don't miss much from rugby, if I'm honest. I was very lucky. Long career, played a lot of great teams which had success and I was lucky to be part of. So. So I don't feel like I've left anything by our World cup, but I think Ireland generally have a thing about the World cup quarterfinals, which we won't talk about. But I do miss. Even when I do a lot of rugby coverage now and when you're on the sideline, that's the part you miss because you start the hair start coming back your neck when the crowds are roaring and the excitement's building. I do miss that part. And I miss. I miss the. This is like a side thing when you. We call it the afterlife when you come out of rugby, when you're in rugby, everyone is bought into your crap because you have to be quite selfish, actually, in all your prep. And everyone's bought into that because they're all going to be there on the Saturday and it's like a thing. And everyone outside you will put up with your crap the minute rugby stops. Like, my wife doesn't put up with any more of my crap and selfishness anymore, so I missed that part.

Cool. Thanks very much. Jamie, do you want to see. Are there any questions? Anyone have anything they'd like to ask? Jimmy, do you have a microphone of anybody?

Oh, yeah, yeah. Just a little question for Jamie. You obviously had a fantastic rugby career and you've got a good business head on you, but could you give Welsh rugby any advice? Where do they go from here? File for bankruptcy? No. Didn't think we'd go there. Look, it's. Matt. We're very lucky. In Ireland, where they took. They were a very small market when the game went professional. They're like, how do we in a small market control what we can? And they took a very different approach to the other markets, where the RFU basically own all the professional clubs. So when I played, I was actually technically contracted to rfu, not Leinster. Now, you can have a Leinster contract if you're not an international, but it doesn't matter. Like, Leinster is owned by the rfu, so it was all aligned to the kind of one goal, which was like. It was all based on the national team doing really, really well, because that's the main revenue driver, actually, for the RFU is the international game. But the other markets took a different approach. So in England, they. They gave the clubs all the power. And while that was kind of maybe beneficial at the start, a lot of clubs have had troubles over the last while because the market isn't big enough. They're competing against soccer in terms of TV rights and all that sort of stuff. But France, it's worked out because they have such a massive market in terms of TV audience and stuff like that. Wales is incredibly small market and you're in a crowded market in the UK because you're competing with soccer for eyeballs. And if I step away, I think rugby generally has a problem, has to get out of its own way, because it's stuck in how it views rugby. It's kind of precious about rugby as itself. But if they actually look at it as a business, it's an entertainment business, and I think they have to view it as entertainment and not just as rugby per se. And just look at how the NFL, they were here at the weekend with the Steelers game. Right. They're like really packaging it up as entertainment and scaling that globally. And rugby hasn't really scaled that globally. Because my personal take is I think they can't get out of their own way and they don't use entertainment because if you look at how it drives revenue, it's like broadcasting rights and ticket sales are really right now. Right. You can't really scale tickets or bums on seats unless you build more stadiums and have more games, which is not that feasible. You can only really scale the broadcasting side of it or the entertainment side of it. And I don't think they have corralled everyone into that type of thinking. But I don't know the nuance of whales, so I can't. I've kind of tried to be a politician and dodge answering your question by answering it. And like Wales is going to be struggling because, like, do they have enough professional. Does the amount of professional clubs match the kind of size of the playing market there? I think it's kind of panned out that it doesn't. And also the way that they're structured is a bit different as well than. Than Ireland. Let's not say the Ireland one's. Right. You know what I mean? I think again, it's right now, but like it will have to change at some stage. Yeah, not me anyway, I can tell you that. Go on, shout at her. Okay, well, today's session's obviously been about how technology helps business and how technology is moving very quickly.

And I'm interested.

Jamie, do you think that technology is now spoiling sport? In what way? In that I'm game of rugby now. I used to go to a game of rugby. It used to last an hour and a half and now it lasts two and a half, two hours. Yeah. And I can't celebrate a try anymore until there's 15 TMO. Yeah. Try covered again.

And the rooms change every year, so.

God knows how the players keep up, but the fans can't keep up. So technology's just taking the fun out of. So I think technology in one way has been good. So a really good interest. A lot of people here are probably watching the Ryder cup over the weekend and you see the stuff. Whoop. Were doing where they were showing like the heart rate of them while they're doing their tee shot or something like that. I think that's a really good use case of it in the entertainment lens. But again, back to what I was saying earlier, I think rugby is still struggling to see itself as entertainment. And to your point, game that was an hour and a half, is now two and a half hours with all the different stoppages and yada, yada, yada, TMO reviews, I think they're constantly looking at tweaking it and making it streamlined and a complex game. So how do you do all the rules or how do you do all the reviews? I think it's still early. You got a caveat as well. Professionally, rugby is very young. So what went professional? What, 96, 95 around then? Okay, so it's still fairly young in the scheme of things. On the playing side, the technology has been great in terms of, like, giving GPS trackers and all that, the data that's going into the game to make it better and the athletes better and look after them, all that sort of stuff. A lot of stuff around concussion, which is really, really good. But, yeah, I think they. I don't think they figured it out in terms of how they make it more entertainment using technology and not like it's so crap. You score a try and they're like, no, let's go to the tmo. And they're debating for five minutes around the blue thing, or there's a high headshot or something like that, and then you have to, again, replay it. I don't know why someone in the background can't just do that automatically with everything that's there. But I love the business of sport. But what kills me about it is that I thought I'd go that path after rugby, but they're so set in their ways of how they view it. I went, nah, I'm going somewhere that's faster. But. And that's when I went to. Went to tech.

Like, the human element of the ref, you know, makes the decision in sport and then all of a sudden that's kind of taken away as well.

Yeah. And also the refs are getting tons of abuse. Like, loads of people jump online and give them dogs abuse for whatever reason. And there's a lot of money involved around it in terms of. They get a decision wrong. So they're trying to.

The ref's not the most. He's not the highest paid in the pitch either. Like, so he's getting roasted for.

He's getting. And a lot of them are tired going, like, what's the point? But, yeah, sorry, we've gone completely down a rugby patch. I feel like I'm on. But, yeah, yeah.

Well, look, thanks very much, everybody. Thanks for coming. Thank you, Jimmy. Thank you so much for coming along. That was really interesting, especially the stuff at the end of it, the rugby. Really, really interesting to hear. Thanks, guys.

Thank you.

Thank you.