Introducing Price Increases: A Must-Have Feature for Self Storage Growth

How this helps is it, like most things in store, adds a lot of automation to the equation. We show you a potential revenue number and the point of this number is to show you how much new revenue you could make if you were to do price increases on some of your subscriptions. I was speaking to the operator the other day and that mentioned who it was, but they said doing this manually before took them literally weeks because of all the comms, all the maths, all the spreadsheets. And when we showed them this, he says, we could have done this in an afternoon.

Hi there everyone. So today we're going to talk you through a brand new feature. It's one of probably the most requested things we've had in store since our launch, something we're really, really excited about. It's going to help you to manage your revenue, grow your revenue and build a better self storage business. And today I'm joined by our head of product, David Hughes. He is going to give us a bit of a demonstration of the feature and then we're just going to chat over a bit of the detail as well. So take it away, David.

Hello everyone. Yeah, so like Stephen said, one of the things we care most about is helping you build the best self storage business you can. A big part of that is growing your revenue, optimizing your revenue. So the feature we're going to talk about today is a feature that we're calling price increases. And this is a new area inside Stora that helps you spot opportunities to grow revenue, spot opportunities to increase tenant prices and grow your revenue over time. Great.

And so this is something that I think customers do manually quite a lot today. How does this help people improve that process and automate that?

Yeah, that's a really good point. So, yes, people do do this today manually and we hear and have seen and have experienced ourselves how much time this takes. It's painful. Someone referred to it like crawling through broken glass. So yeah, how this helps is it, like most things in store, adds a lot of automation to the equation. So we take care of some of the more manual details. So I'll show you how it works. So when you go to the subscriptions area in Sorana, you'll see this new area for price increases. And once you get in there, you're gonna see a couple of numbers. So we show you a potential revenue number and the point of this number is to show you how much new revenue you could make if you were to do price increases on some of your subscriptions. So in this example we just take A sensible default. If you're going to do a 6% increase on all your subscriptions that are over 12 months old, for example, you can change these to whatever you want, whatever suits your business. We've spoken to operators and they all work differently. But as a first pass, that's the number. And in this scenario you see that I could make an extra 811 pounds of recurring revenue if I were to do those increases on 140 subscriptions. So you'll see here down below that we list all those subscriptions for you to then go and action those increases. So say yeah, I wanted to change that to all the subscriptions that were over six months old. Instead you can use these filters and you can see that number go up. It's like, wow, look how much new potential revenue I could make from these changes alone if I were to action them. So I'll show you how easy it is to actually do an increase. So you mentioned it's manual. It's painful. This is so easy. So let's just say here I want to increase Gavin's subscription here. He's been a tenant for over six months. We actually break down some of the finer details of the subscription here just to help you make a decision without having to hop in and out of the subscription and bounce through lots of different screens. So if you hover on the subscription here we show you what the breakdown is between unit types, insurance, and you can see the total. You can see things like the billing, the billing period, just again, just to help you make a decision. So you hit the increase button. We show you these options and it's pre fills based on your presets that you can change based on your policies, based on your rules, whatever you do as a business. So I'm going to increase Gavin's subscription on 9 May, I'm going to apply the increase to the unit types only. But if you want, I can apply it to unit types and insurance, which is some people do. I can change that percentage. So if on a case by case basis someone needs a higher increase, I can just change that number to 10% right here, right now.

Is this just on the next payment or could it be into the future? What way does it work around that?

Yeah, so you can set this to whenever you want. So for example, if a new subscriber came in or a new tenant came and moved into my facility tomorrow, I could set up the price increase for them to happen in 12 months time. So you can set these up whenever you want. And it Happens automatically in the future. So, so that's where all the automation comes in. You don't have to go in and do this later. It happens, we take care of the rest. So again, I could set this increase for 9th of December. That tells you here we break down, this is a year and three months after they move in. So it gives you the context to make a decision. And then another thing on the automation side is that we know one of the biggest pain points of having to do price increases is having to contact the customer, talk to them, have that conversation, tell them what their subscription is going from and to and all those things. We take care of that for you. So we send the email from Sora automatically whenever you want. So you can send that immediately, you can decide not to send one if you've had the conversation over the phone or you can set that to 30 days before.

So if you've scheduled 12 months away, it'll send it in 11 months essentially if you picked 30 days.

Exactly. So total flexibility, send it whatever suits you. And again, before you actually action it and do that sending, we give you this high level breakdown. You can see what the subscription is currently, what it's moving to and gives you all information in order to have confidence when you press that schedule price increase button.

So, so once you've hit the schedule button, what happens next?

Yep, so I schedule the price increase and you'll see there, you'll see the number change on the left to the number on the right. So we show you all the increases that you scheduled here in this pending revenue tab. Right. So this, you click that and it takes you to wow, here's how much money I'm due to make if these price increases go through. Right, so here's 221 pounds of extra revenue and I break it down, we break it down here by all the information that you need. So again the email gets sent, what's the increase? How much am I going to get? We break it into two distinct lists. So you've got the price increase opportunities, if you want to think of it like that on the left and then the actuals that you've, they're set to come in the future.

So if you. So say I have a different approach to price increases, different after a different period of time, a different percentage. Like how do you, what's the flexibility there to actually let you customize that?

Yeah, it's a really good point. So say like we take this default, like I said, we say 6% over 12 months. We spoke to many operators A lot of them have different policies. You can go into these presets area and in here you can set against generally what the, the rule of thumb is. Right. So if it's 9%, you set this here. If it's units and insurance. Right. You can set that here and you can save those changes and this will pre fill the form every time you go to do it. So it's going to speed up that process. But like we pointed out, you can override that on a case by case basis if it comes to it. Right. Some, you know, sometimes you look at it and maybe someone got a really good deal when they first moved in and you want to, you know, up that price a little bit more. Again, the flexibility is totally there, but those presets are there to save you time.

Yeah. So if I do just have a standard policy of price increases, I could just quickly run through and apply them all to each subscription.

Yeah. So I was speaking to the operator the other day and I'll not mention who it was, but they said doing this manually before took them literally weeks because of all the comms, all the maths, all the spreadsheets. And when we showed them this, they said we could have done this in an afternoon.

Right.

So yeah, I think, I hope this is going to be helpful.

That's great. I think the real value in this as well is if you're using an automated payment method because not only is it fixing the sending the notification, recalculating the price, it's actually applying the price change and just taking the money automatically because I think 90% of store customers use automated payments and that'll just be such a smooth process for them getting their price increases in place.

Yeah, totally. It's again, it's hands free essentially. You know, it's just going to take care of that and you're going to see this new revenue come in and for very little effort. So.

Yeah. So why should you do price increases at all? Because I know that the bigger guys do it. Obviously store is here to help all self storage operators, but in particular we give smaller people, smaller operators the tools to level the playing field and hopefully be able to operate. Because you want to be competitive within the industry.

I think that's it. And like everything, like everything, you know, inflation things cost more, electricity, cost more money, you know, it's down to the individual operator. Obviously some people would say I don't do price increases because they don't want to do it because it's a competitive advantage not to or whatever. But I think like you said, it's all about providing the tools to spot these opportunities and just build the best business. So that's we're giving you the tools. You can apply them however you want.

Perfect. And if I'm a store customer today, how would I go about using this? How to get access?

Yeah, so this is going to be available on some of our higher plans. But today this is going to be available as a 90 day trial for everyone. So you can try this feature for a full three months without having to pay for it. So that's going to be available. Just go into your account and you'll see some links under the subscriptions tab. You'll see some stuff on the home screen about too perfect.

No, that's great. It's interesting to see. We'll be interested to see how people use this feature.

Absolutely.

We're always keen to get feedback from our customers to learn how we can make things better too. So this is by no means the end of price increases in storage. It's a starting point and we'll iterate in more improvements over time as we get feedback. So I think we hope that everybody enjoys the new feature and if you have any feedback, just reach out and let us know.

Yeah, I can't wait to get people to get their hands on it and see what happens.

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