How to Thrive as a Solo Self Storage Operator

I still get that buzz bookings yesterday.

And I was like, yes, even now I still, you know, I've got five emails in my inbox for smartbox. I bet one of those is a booking. That's, that's a bit of a buzz actually.

Hello and welcome and thanks for joining our latest podcast. We're joined today by Roger Canham who is from Smartbox Self Storage. They have four sites in their base in Corby in Northamptonshire. I've known Roger for four years almost when they're within the self storage with their first site. So they've been rapidly growing. Roger, welcome to the podcast. Thanks very much for joining us.

Thank you. Thank you very much for inviting me.

Okay, so we're gonna got a bunch of questions to dig into. Let's start with just your journey, like how did you get into self storage? What's a bit of your background? How have you got to foresights in less than four years?

Yeah, yeah, probably 20 years ago, I started a property investment business. Commercial and residential property. Probably started off as a buy to let business actually, and then just grew from there. What that meant was in 2020, one of our sites was about an acre, acre and a half of land with some industrial units on it. And I was fed up with seeing the people that were in those units just dumping their stuff on the land that surrounded the industrial units. So they were like, I don't know, there was, if there were car people, there'd be tires and there'd be broken down vehicles and there'd be all sorts of crap that really sort of degraded the site. And so I thought, I thought we really got to do something about this. So we cleared the land and initially actually I parked a few vehicles on it and charged for parking, which was, you know, that was getting me something rather than having this isil. And then I don't know where the idea came to me and it wasn't some great moment of inspiration, but I thought, okay, well let's get some containers on there and rent the containers out to where customers so hunted around and I thought I was doing a really smart thing. I bought some secondhand containers, cleared a bit of land, put these on it, and within three or four weeks our existing commercial customers rented them all out. And that was great. So, okay, we should be doing some more of this. But what was this self storage business? So we cleared a bit more land, put a few more containers down and then, you know, we, I had somebody in the office who runs that commercial business who was having spreadsheets and Bits of paper, raising invoices. At that time we were charging a deposit, we were charging for the padlocks. We had a whole load of paraphernalia around. Probably approaching it from a sort of a commercial property rental perspective rather than the way that self storage is with licenses. So I guess we quickly got to the point where we thought we need to do something different. It was about this time that I thought, okay, I want some software to run this. We can't go with spreadsheets and all of that nonsense. So I think at that time, I think I was talking to Dave Davis and said, look, I need to find a bit of software here that will run this for me. And there was a number of candidates out there and somehow Storer was mentioned to me. And so I sort of hunted around, looked at your software and actually back then, I don't know, I don't know. August 21st. I think Stora is probably quite a sort of embryonic business at that time. I don't know how many customers you had at that time, Gavin.

Not too many. That was only really about five months after we took on our first customer. So not many.

Yeah. But for me this was great because we had a website out of the box. You took care of all of the back end payments, all of the stuff that we were wrestling with. How do we invoice customers, how do we then process the payments, how do we then chase up those payments? For me it was manna from heaven that there was a piece of software here that I could literally just plug in and within sort of it. I mean, you know, you'd probably say within an hour you can be up and running it probably. Probably more hour in than yours. It probably took us a week to get up and running. But then all of a sudden there was a, there was a solution here that meant I could add more containers and not have more pain of having to sort of, you know, manage that process. And it was great for us. We were getting income from land that we didn't before it tidied up the site. So actually our commercial customers were coming to a site that looked smarter. So it kind of felt, well, you know, why wouldn't we do this, you know? Yeah, it felt like it's quite a good place to be.

Tell us how you run your business. Do you run it kind of by yourself? Do you have a small team? What's the setup with four sites now? How do you think about staffing the business?

Yeah, so I was keen when we started the business that actually it was Just a side hustle. So I didn't actually want to take any time. I didn't want to invest a whole load of resources into it. The margins were good. If I could run it. Not hands off, because that's clearly not possible when you're starting a new business and growing it. But nevertheless, if I could keep the people element of it as tight as possible, that would be. One headache is probably the wrong way to put it, but nevertheless, one distraction from managing the business, that would help. And very quickly I came to conclusion that looking at how I react with buying stuff, and there's a whole debate around this, Gavin, that I know goes on in the industry about should it be prices shown, should it be on information wall? Should you have to apply for a quote? For me, it felt like when I interact with businesses, I just want the price, I want to transact, I want to get onto the next thing. Now, there's a lot of bias around that. I appreciate that, but that's kind of where I came to. And my sense was maybe not this year, maybe not next year, but sometime in the next five years. That's where this industry is going to. So I could have sort of gone down the pathway of hiding behind an information wall and having staff then call customers back, but then I'd have to create a team that works seven days a week and you got holiday cover. So essentially, you go from me running a business with a piece of software and people just booking online to having to probably employ three people to effectively follow up on customer inquiries and deal with that. And I just didn't want to be employing people. And I didn't feel as though, longer term I'd want to be in that place where I employ people. And then eventually online bookings come along and those people, then I have to redeploy them to do something else. So people talk about manless stores. I'm not quite sure. That's a bit of a misnomer, really. There are stores that don't require people all day, every day, but nevertheless, somebody needs to sweep the unit, somebody needs to make sure that the yard looks smart for the next customer, or your curb appeal is where it should be. So you'll always need people. Um, but I guess that's sort of a less heavy overhead when people are doing it within a schedule rather than having to be online the whole time. So I guess, end of 23, sorry, to cut a long story short, we employed somebody full time just to work on storage then. And then in 24, we opened 23 we opened a site in Stamford which is probably three quarters full now and about 30,000 square feet. But that was, that was, it was a warehouse with storage containers inside it and there's a whole story about why that's the case, but that's just how that site worked.

Was that your second site, Roger?

Yeah, that was my second site, yeah. Yeah. And then our third site was in a place called Oundle, which was a market town in Cambridgeshire. That was a purely indoor site and that was our first sort of straight indoor site, no key automated gates. So in theory, in fact there's a nice little story that made me sort of smile was when I was there, sort of maybe sweeping up or doing something there, this customer walked into the door and said, you know, can I find Unit 012? And I said, well, you know, you know where it is, it's where it always is. And said, well we just booked. I said, oh, you just booked? Yes. He said, we've just come to the gate, we've scanned a QR code, we've booked the unit and we've got the stuff in the car and can we put it away please? And for me that was, that was beautiful that it worked that way and you know, that they don't, you know, that's unusual in many respects, but just the notion that somebody can roll up to a gate, scan a code and I thought this is how it should work. This is, you know, for me, particularly when I want a lean business, if this is how it could be, that's absolutely great. This year we're opening where we've just signed the details on a site in Leicester that'll be again purely an indoor site. So it'll be Nokia operated obviously with Storer and we hope to use somebody like DSOC to remotely monitor. So that's kind of the model, I think that we're going to go down. That requires not a lot of input and we have one, one employee, Alex, who works in the office, he's our self storage manager, he runs the business for me, allows me to step back now. So he takes care of all the day to day stuff. So that's our team. One person. Yeah, well, me and one person in the office.

So you and one person and four sites. And it's funny, you kind of opened all different types of sites so you started off with containers, then you've got containers in a warehouse, then you have a pure indoor site and then your fourth site was indoor and outdoor. So of the four different types there, all quite different.

Yeah, yeah.

Do you see them as different or do you kind of see them all as kind of the same thing?

Yeah, it's my cunning business plan. Part of what I haven't done actually is have a clear plan. But nevertheless, I was quite struck by early conversations with you and the notion of the two stores that you had, which was just open, an automated store in a town that's got 30,000 people or less. That model for me really resonated, you know, this is all financed by me, my own cash, which brings a certain focus. I can't go head to head with the big guys. I can't spend millions of pounds on a site. But what I can do is find a small market town and be the only game in town in that particular place.

You talked about there earlier not being able to compete with the big guys, but you're still building a very viable business with your strategy. What would you say is the biggest advantage of the way you're doing this versus kind of some of your larger competitors?

Well, maybe that pragmatism, I think, and not hunting for the perfect sign, but being flexible, the ability to change tack quickly is important. There's a whole piece around dealing with customers day in, day out. You get a real sense of what's working right. Early on, you know, we took deposits and we charged for padlocks. Well, you know, it didn't seem like a good idea. So I just changed it, you know, and we don't charge for padlocks and we don't have a deposit. And guess what? That's had very little impact on, you know, issues within our business. So I think it allows us to be flexible. When we were negotiating for one of our sites recently, spoke to the agent and this site had had a problem a couple of times where people said, yeah, we're going to have it. And then, you know, down the line with the illegals that they put on their bed. And he said to me, look, this has fallen through twice now. I want to know what the decision making process is your end, so that I can go to the client and go, look, we've got a potential tenant here and they can move relatively quickly. But he said, I need to know what the decision making process is to get, you know, an agreement with you. And I said, okay, well, if you like the terms, I'll speak to my wife Mary tonight and I'll tell you tomorrow whether we want it or not and send the details. And that was. There was no sort of layers of, well, we've got to go to the investment board and we'll come back to you in a week and then you're going to have lawyers sort of drilling you for detail. So I think that flexibility as well is really important, allowed us to, because we all know sites are hard to come by. But I think that's an advantage for a small business like us is that we can have that flexibility and we can adapt. Rather than have this templated business plan that, well, it's got to look like this and we've got to have 30,000 cars passing past the door every day. And if it's not, I think being fleet of foot is agile is really important for small businesses and they should do everything they can to retain that.

Yeah, that's really, really interesting and I'm sure for a lot of our listeners who are running a similar sized business, it's a great perspective. Makes a lot of sense. What about then, as a business you've gone from kind of just getting started to four sites, a fifth site opening this year. How do you handle customer service? Like any admin stuff and maintenance, you know, you've got, you've got your member of staff. You talked about clean out units. How do you handle all that? What's that like now compared to what it was like four years ago?

Yeah, so I, so I think.

Sorry Roger, one other, one other thing to ask. I presume even though people can book online, you still take customer calls presumably, and those are routed to your member of staff, is that right?

Yeah, that's right, yeah. We have, you know, the one member of staff but they're simple things, you know, it's not rocket science these days. You know, we, we have an agency that, you know, if the phone rings three times, it then goes through to a, it's not a virtual PA, but necessarily that, you know, you could, you can employ. There are people out there that will handle calls for you. You give them the script, you give them the knowledge bank, they take a message and then, you know, you get, you get the opportunity to call those people back. So you can still good response levels but it doesn't mean that you have somebody sat there waiting for that phone call. Those phone calls can overflow to an agency service. It's a bit like the live chat online. We'll move to a system where Alex will be the first person on live chat. But guess what? If somebody goes into live chat and doesn't speak to somebody within five seconds, it diverts to a live chat agency. We won't use bots. We don't, you know, we might use bots, but I don't think we need to. You can get 24 hour agency service for live chat and I think, you know, for me as a, as a consumer when, when you go into live chat and you know you're talking to a bot, it's, it's your heart sinks and you, you try and find a different way of contacting that business. So that, that's just us. You know, I know other businesses are having a lot of success with automated chat but that's just the route that we're traveling and I'm sure everybody will have their own way of doing it and it will work equally successfully for everybody. So I guess every opportunity where we think we need to add staff and until we believe it would be a full person, then we'll find other ways of outsourcing if you like that extra piece of work that we need to do.

Okay, what about who cleans out sites? Could you get force? Are they all relatively close? Do you have one maintenance person or is it, is it Alex as well or how do you handle that?

Yeah, we've got, yeah, we're fortunate. We have our commercial property team, maintenance team. So we just schedule him with them that on a Friday afternoon it's go to Desborough every two weeks, then on a Tuesday afternoon it's go to Andal. But in Stanford, which is a bit further afield, we, we've just got a contract with a local guy. We pay him a retainer every week and I don't know if there's a customer that gets stuck in their unit, he'll pop out and sort it out. If units need cleaning he'll go and do that. So I suspect, and that's, you know, and I imagine everybody else is doing the same. You need in these manless sites, inverted commas, you need somebody local who can respond to A emergencies and B, just pop around to the site and make sure it's clean and tidy and presenting well for customers. So I suspect in the new site, Leicester, for example, we will employ somebody locally and there's plenty of, again, there's plenty of businesses out there that offer that sort of agency service. You don't have to employ them direct, you can just. If it's a local cleaning company or a security company or there's a number of people that have teams of people doing stuff at properties. You just need to set a contract up with them and make sure it's in place so that you know the site does still look smart, it doesn't get neglected and you only Go there once a month. Units do get swept out when they need to be, etc.

Is there anything that you know, given where you are now, is there anything you wish you'd known before getting into self storage, apart from getting into it earlier?

That's right. Wish I knew about it earlier rather than flogging myself with commercial property and residential property. I think there's the really obvious nitty gritty stuff that's been, you know, you do some hard yards when you're running your own business. You know, you have to, you learn everything from scratch, even something like digital marketing, you know, I knew nothing about that. And guess what? I couldn't afford to employ a digital marketer. And in fact there's an element of quite. Find it quite geeky learning about this stuff. So understanding the full range of things I needed to know. I guess if I'd sort of wrote a long list before I started, I could have perhaps approached them in a bit more rational way. I think the biggest ball that I dropped was really a lack of ambition and really understanding that I needed to structure a business that was scalable. So I started out really, and they're still quite modest ambitions, to be honest. I'm just sort of chugging away, adding a site here and there. But when I first started, we had, we had a bit spare land and I thought I just need to solve a problem here, guest containers on it. So I had this genius idea of calling it Corby Self Storage, because guess what, you've got the name of the company in the URL. You know, there's a whole load of SEO benefits of doing that. So, so that was great. So. Callbyselfstorage.co.uk and that was the name of the business and that was fine until you open a site in Stanford and then it's not so fine and then you open a site in Andor. So I guess if I'd have started all over again, I would think, okay, if at some point I would were to scale this, what do I need to put in place from day one now? I may not scale it, I may stay in Corby. That may just be the business and that works fine for me. But I'm sort of unraveling all of that now and it's. And to be honest, it's, yeah, it's a monumental, you know, pain to have to do that. I mean, you know, we're doing it now because guess what, we think we might grow this business still further. So we've suffered the pain of being Called myself. It wasn't pain because when we started it was great, it worked really well. But I guess if I could say if I could change something now, it would be just stop and think, how might you scale this business in the future or at least give yourself the opportunity to do it because you haven't hemmed yourself in through some dumb decisions right at the start.

That's great advice and that's something I sometimes talk about because I remember a phone call with you, Roger, a couple of years ago when, when this came up. I don't know if you remember when we were talking about your website and how to kind of make the shift and I remember thinking, oh, that's, you know, that's. Yeah, I'm sure that's a common issue for operators moving beyond the site. And you see it in other businesses too, you know, all sorts of businesses around. Even where I live, I see, you know, their businesses based in my town that are named after a time.

You.

Know, and it's just because they've done that and haven't changed the name.

So.

Very interesting. Do you have a proud moment as an operator? Is there something, is there a moment you kind of thought, you know what, this is, this is cool. Although you did talk about somebody moving into unit number 12 themselves. Yeah, that would have given me a good buzz too.

You get these little moments, don't you? I guess starting any business is fun, you know, and I have got to thank you for a bit of that fun because I still get emails going, a new unit has been booked. There's nothing, nothing like the buzz of. And that's, you know, and a really sort of tiny thing, you know, and I don't know if you probably don't. You've got one site now, but when.

The email through, I still get that buzz bookings yesterday, and I was like.

Yes, yeah, we all, we all want to say we're not micromanagers, you know, we're all big picture guys and, you know, we're growing the business and looking for new sites. But even now I still, you know, I've got five, five emails in my inbox for smartbox. I, I bet one of those is a booking. That's a bit of a buzz, actually. So there is that sort of really micro thing. I think at a high level. The thing I've sort of taken a lot of pride from is just learning new stuff about digital marketing and in our space particularly, it's moving so quickly. You have to learn about AI now, but back in the day, in 2021. What was a Google business profile? No idea. Well, how does paid advertising work? No idea. Well, guess what, it's you. And if, if you don't know, then this business is not going to advertise online. So go and find out and learn about this stuff. So, so to get to a point where in Corby, which is a quite competitive market, we rank highly on a lot of the keywords and I know that just down to me just figuring it out, it's more competitive now. So I guess what, I need somebody else to help me now. But, but nevertheless, you know, running your own business and that's, that's probably why we all do it is because seeing a business grow and succeed, that, that's, that's the buzz, that's, you know, you've, it's a growing business and one day it might make a lot of money but in the meantime it's just good fun seeing the business grow.

If you could give somebody starting up now or in a similar position to yourself one piece of advice, what would it be?

Stop for a moment, think about the plan and then just cast around the industry for people to help. I found the self storage industry and the people in it just incredibly open and generous with their time and their sort of knowledge. So you know, speak to even would be competitors, go and ask them, can have a look around your unit, ask them questions, why did you do that? And they'll share it. And the SSA as well, you know, it's, I've been involved in many industries with many trade bodies and I would say the SSA is probably the best one I've had interactions with. Again, the quality of their work is outstanding. You know, the legal side of what they do, just to take one small area, you know, we're involved on our commercial side and residential side with trade bodies and they offer legal advice and some of it's not as robust as it should be, but with what the SSA do in terms of their legal work, we've yet to find a problem with it. We've yet to find a hole in it. You know, when we're following through on dealing with bad debts or contracts or whatever it is, it's outstanding. And then the, you know, the webinars they put on the show that they do, there's, there's a huge amount of knowledge you can tap into. So just, you know, before you start, sit and read through all of their guides, go online and watch all the YouTube that people showing around their facility and you know, listen to the podcasts that are out there just hoover up all the information and then figure out, okay, well this, the, this is best practice as it sits now and it's not hard to find out what best practice is that, that's the beauty of it. People are willing to share, it's not a secret. You know, people are willing to say, well have a look here or speak to this guy and they'll give you a helping hand. So, and it's changing quickly, so it's very exciting.

Thanks. Roger, have you ever, final question. Have you ever found anything very strange in an abandoned unit?

Some things of value I guess is one of the things like most people have had two or three instances of people moving into and attempting to live in a unit. It's that unit that gets booked, it's your smallest unit and it gets booked on a, I don't know, a Tuesday night at midnight and then they move in on the Wednesday morning. You think, okay, well this person unfortunately has nowhere to live and they're attempting to live in your unit. Now with cctv, you know, your alarm bells go immediately when you, you get that booking cctv you can pretty quickly track that somebody is. So we've got a couple of instances where people have been attempting to live in one of the properties in one of the units. So we've, we've obviously moved that on quite quickly. But now we've had, we haven't, you know, found any giraffes or anacondas or anything particularly interesting unfortunately. But I'm sure that day will come.

Roger, thank you so much. That was really fascinating. I think there's an awful lot to learn there from your journey and you've shared a lot of really interesting points and tips and techniques to help other people grow their business. So thanks very much. Thanks for joining us.

Great pleasure. Thanks very much.

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