Gavin Shields' Portadown storage facility dropped from 77% to 55% occupancy in nine months. He's launching multiple fixes at once: Google Ads, local sponsorships, social media, direct mail, and site improvements, spending around £1,000 monthly per location to reverse the decline.
Questions this video answers
About three and a half years ago.
12,000 square feet of gross space.
About 76–77%.
Approximately 54.96% (decline of over 1,000 sq ft in the last six months).
One booking (one person booked 200 square feet).
Chapters
Hi, this is Gavin here. I am recording this because I wanted to share my experience at the moment for my facility business. So I have two sites you can see here, Portadown and Dungannon. And I opened up Portadown three and a half years ago and it has done very well through Covid. Really filled up really quickly. 12,000 square feet of gross space, full upgrade. We were at about 76, 77% occupancy about nine months ago. And Dungannon opened about a year and a half ago. And the reason I'm recording this video is I was looking at some data. So we've just released some new reporting in Stora and looked at our Portado Insight. And this is Portadyne over the last six months. So let me just remove this. This is Portadone over the last six months and we have gone down by over a thousand square feet. Not only that, but the past six weeks we've had one booking that was one person who booked 200 square feet. We haven't had a single booking apart from that one since the start of March. And you know, this business has gone very well for a while. Kind of almost completely hands off. We've really kind of outsourced almost everything and that was fine in the boom times. And it just looks like now some kind of intervention is needed. So what I'm going to do over the next few weeks, maybe four weeks, maybe six weeks, maybe eight weeks, is I'm going to do a ton of stuff that is designed to make sure that we're maximizing our chances of seeing this number here turn positive because we can't keep bleeding occupancy. I'll show you my occupancy data. You can see here occupancy rates. So occupancy at Porta down, is it 40, 54.96%. I mean, that is so down. So far down. It was 75% not long ago. And I've just. I've just been sort of not watching what's been going on. This or some of our new reporting has just shown kind of really what's happening and has helped me to identify this issue and it just can't continue. Dungannon is similar. It's also down, but not quite as bad. But I. I really want to do something about Ganond 2. We need to get that filled up. And I think there are probably four or five or six things I can do over the next while to really make a big difference here. And I'm going to. I'm going to Share everything I do and we'll look at what happens. I'm going to do everything at once. I'm not going to. We're not going to make one change and then watch and see what happens. We don't have enough time. I also don't have enough data to really try and have some sort of scientific experiment. I'm going to do a bunch of stuff. So some of the things I'm thinking about doing are. First of all, I'm going to check that there's no problem with our bookings. I'm just going to make a booking myself here. Just make sure there's nothing stopping it. I don't think there is. We would know that. I would know for running store there's a problem. So that won't be the case. But it's always the first place to check. Is there some problem with customers making a booking? So if you have online bookings, go and make an online booking. If you do it, phone the phone number and see what happens whenever people ring the phone. We have an outsourced call center and we have this kind of virtual receptionist thing. So it's press one for this, press two for that. And I'm thinking about getting rid of that, just the virtual receptionist and just letting people ring and have somebody answer the phone. I think that could be an issue. We're not really doing any Google Ads, so I'm going to probably turn those on. I'm going to start doing some sponsorship of some local teams. I want to try and get banners up around golf clubs and rugby clubs and stuff in those two towns. I'm going to also, you know, we haven't really done much social media posting. I'm going to probably create a few videos, just little promotional videos with people in them talking about the business and share those on Facebook, maybe through a little bit of money behind some ads just to get them in front of people too. I might even look into TikTok ads. I don't use TikTok. I'm going to look into that a bit and see if that's something I should be doing. I'm also going to go down to the sites and just. Just check. There's nothing. Kind of no big problems. I haven't. I don't. I have to admit, I don't go to the sites often at all. So I'm gonna go see if we need to invest a bit of money there on, I don't know, painting, painting some stuff. Changing the. The experience when people arrive to make sure there's Nothing going wrong there. And I'm probably also going to do some of the Royal Mail direct to. I think it's door to door, day to day deliveries. I'm going to start doing those. I think maybe if I do one of those every month for maybe six months. So that's going to be about £1,000 for two sites. It'll be £2,000amonth. So it's going to be a relatively big investment. But I need to try and grow awareness of this business in the local community a bit better. So I'm going to do all these things, I'm going to talk through everything, I'm going to share my results, I'm going to share this chart as we progress. Let's look at the last 12 months to see what's happened at Dungannon. So in Dungannon, actually, over the last 12 months, we are up. That's because we had a pretty good time over, actually over what is normally a quiet time over the winter. But put it down, let's bring up. Put it down here. You can put down 1250 square feet. I mean, that's just too much and we'd have to do something about it. So I'm going to keep recording videos, I'm going to share. Hike it on, please. If. If you are experiencing something similar, and I have a feeling there might be quite a few operators experiencing some similar stuff at the moment, reduced bookings. I think my feeling is that with interest rates a lot higher, house moves probably are down a bit and that. I bet that's having an impact on my sites. But I'd love to hear what other people are doing, I'd love to hear your thoughts and if you are experiencing a similar thing, then you, you know, let's go through this together and try bits and pieces together. Let me know what's working for you and if you have any ideas on what I can do as well. Ultimately, this may lead to, you know, us making some changes to store it. So, you know, hopefully we can. We find some things, maybe there's some services or whatever we can add because, you know, we want to help all our operators too. But I'm going to go through this myself because I have to get this fixed for my own business. So let's see how we get on. Any comments, please let me know or give me a shout anytime. I'd love to hear what you're up to and yeah, thanks. Speak soon.
