Next-Gen Self Storage: Trends, Tech, and the Future of Automation with Nokē by Janus

You go to stadiums to watch a football match. Well, guess what? Your ticket's already on your phone. You scan, you into the stadium, you rock and roll. Why should self-storage be any different?

Hello and welcome to the latest edition of our podcast. Uh, today I'm delighted to be joined by Shallan from Nuki. Shallan, welcome.

Thank you.

I'd love to just start by, um, asking what's your role at Noki, what has brought you to Noki, or like, what's your— I'd love to hear a bit about kind of how you've got to where you are.

So it's a bit of a long-winded story. Like everyone talks about their journey, they've just fallen into self-storage and you either love it or you hate it. I'm one of those people that have fallen into self-storage and love it. About 7 or 8 years ago, Janus acquired a startup called Noki. And at that point in time, I think they really understood where the sector was heading, i.e., automation, digitalization, and so on and so forth, and the need to get involved ahead of time. Over the last 7 or 8 years, we have improved our range of products. We have understood customer requirements in terms of end-user journey and what good looks like. And we've also cut our teeth in learning, right? So today we consider ourselves the global leader in smart entry, right? Powered by Janus International, right? And we continue to scale with customers such as yourself as an operator, but most importantly, with Stora as a partner or a PMS partner that we have integrated into.

You know, Nuki is very well established. How do you see Nuki kind of moving forward? How do you see it differentiating itself in the market as it continues to grow?

That's a great question. I think working with operators and partners, again, such as yourself, we understand where the sector's going. And as such, we understand what the end user is looking for, but also what the operators are looking for. Seamless smart access is one piece of the pie, but reporting, staff or store management functionality is critical, and opening doors is paramount, right?

Mm-hmm.

And once we consider all of that, we bundle it together with new technology development, and we look to improve our range of products. So as it stands today, Nokia has an evolved range. From SecureGuard, Nokia Vault, Nokia One, which is our battery-powered lock, which you've got in your facility. And in October last year, we launched Nokia Ion. Yeah. Nokia Ion was the successor to Nokia Vault. And effectively what it is, is the hardwired low voltage solution. All right. The locks are one part of the product range.

Mm-hmm.

The cloud infrastructure is the real backbone of Noki. And effectively what that system allows is end-to-end fulfillment of the customer journey.

Mm-hmm.

Right. So let's talk about the traditional customer journey, right? Customer has a need for self-storage. They hop onto their mobile device. What's the first thing that they, uh, Google?

Mm-hmm.

As we learn, it's self-storage, right?

Yeah.

They then go through the, um, through the shopping consideration, right? At which point, generally, it's on the backbone of PMS system such as yourself, right? They would decide what— which options suit them best, and then they will progress with their booking, right? At that point in time, the PMS infrastructure communicates with our cloud infrastructure, right? And says, here's Gavin Shields Shields, and he's, uh, decided on moving forward with a 10-square-foot unit, and he wants to rock and roll. So we then, uh, push a text message, uh, to the device, to the registered device, that, um, prompts the user to, um, download the app, mm-hmm, um, and register their profile on our Noki platform, right? That information then syncs with the cloud, right? Customers ready to go effectively from the comfort of their home, mm-hmm, and they get to the facility, whip out their phone, and log into the app, and ultimately That's the engagement with a tech product, right? Because it's no longer, hey, let's ring an intercom, wait for someone to answer and roll open the gate. It's click on, click unlock, access the main gate, park your car, grab the trolley, offload your goods, get to the second point of access, which is a roller shutter, sliding doors, whatever the case is, um, unlock that from the palm of their hands, get into the building, get to the lift. But now all of a sudden they on the third floor. Cool, no problem. Unlock lift door one, get to the third floor because Noki allows for dedicated access by zoning. They get onto the third floor and again, it's the first time they're potentially in a self-storage facility. It's huge. It can be a little bit daunting, for the lack of a better term. Where's my unit? Well, guess what? I'll press the Locate My Unit button and you can hear an audible beeping. Or as you progress through the floor, you can look for the visual flashing of the LED and the customer can find the unit. If all else fails, it can default to the map that's outside the elevator if the facility has got it. But ultimately that is how Nokia improves the customer journey.

The stuff you're saying there and the way you're talking about it, it's interesting because I think we also, as a software platform, talk about some very similar things, which is ultimately about efficiency of the business, but also the customer experience and improving that, meeting the customer where they want. To be met. And the thing that we'll hear sometimes at Stora and also about Nokia is, oh, it's for a non-staffed site. What do you say to an operator who's, oh, Nokia's for a non-staffed site? I have staff, I don't need it.

So in my view and what we've learned, and we've got customers, single site operators, multi-site operators, somewhat enterprise, right? Remotely managed with sort of area managers as you would, or 2 to 3 staff members. It's not about the staffing element, it's about improvement in the efficiency, right? If you're investing in people, right, and they can provide a higher return focusing on, on benefits of function as opposed to menial tasks, they are all of a sudden more efficient within your business.

Yeah.

So, so, so what I would say to somebody that has that concern is very simple. The sector's moving forward with automation, and it's not just self-storage. You go to a fast food restaurant, KFC, you can order from your app, you can order from a kiosk. Um, you go to stadiums to watch a football match, well, guess what? Your ticket's already on your phone. You scan, you into the stadium, you rock and roll. The same applies to automotive, uh, flights, etc., etc. Hotel check-in, Yeah, same. So, so, so why should self-storage be any different? Right? And I guess at the end of the day, if automation can help you as an operator achieve a desired result, you move in the right direction.

Mm-hmm.

That's the first piece. The second piece is you now don't need necessarily require staff on your site all day, every day.

Yeah.

With Noki, should you vet a customer and that customer requires out-of-hours access, you can set that schedule, you can provide it to them. So guess what? Here's Bob. Bob is a wedding DJ. But guess what? Wedding DJs need to store their goods somewhere because it's valuable. So at 2 o'clock in the morning, if Bob has the need to access his facility to drop off his, his equipment, that's fine. You're not going to necessarily have a staff member on site to facilitate that. And that's just, again, one of the additional value points from Noki is you can allow access at different times based on a verification process, because that's important, right?

I think it's like I've moved house quite a bit and I've never done it during the week. It's always the weekend and often it's on a Sunday, you know. So I think these— a system like Noki, it just allows you to be so much more flexible. People want that flexibility. You still see lots of self-storage sites that are open Monday to Friday, 9:00 to 5:00, and on a Saturday from 9:00 to 12:00. And that's fine. And a lot of those businesses are doing very well. This is about supplementing that with additional service that customers want, which I think is just increasingly important. So yeah, totally bad. And we have a similar thing sometimes with One of the things we like to facilitate with customers, because we think there's a big win, we see it in the data, is let your customers book online. Let them see the price and then book online. We're not as evangelical as we used to be, and lots of our customers don't do that, and that's fine. But we think that's the way the industry is going. That's the way all these industries you talked about, they're all going that way. So get ahead of it, learn how it works, and Sometimes people might say, well, we have staff, they can answer the phones, it's no problem. They might as well, what else will they do? And it's a challenging way to think about it because you're not thinking about your customer. A lot of customers we see, 70% of the bookings across our entire platform last year came through the website, through our booking platform. 70%, only 30% were over the phone or maybe in person. A majority of customers appear, from our data, to want to do it themselves online. If you're forcing them to phone you, some portion of them will still phone, but there's a portion who actually won't bother. They might go to a competitor who lets them book online, and you won't even know this person existed because they've gone somewhere else. It's a similar sort of thing if you're not offering these additional features like Sunday access or 2:00 AM access. These people might— these potential customers, these prospects, You might never hear from them. You don't know that you've lost them because they don't even ring you to ask because they can see and find a competitor who does it. It's really interesting just to, you know, you're talking about similar things that we think about from a different perspective.

So I think, Gavin, if you compare the 2024 Fidesa report to the 2025 Fidesa report, it was 40% in '24 and 56%, if my memory serves me correct, of users in Europe that have defaulted to mobile access.

Yes.

Right.

Yeah.

And that is a big number when you consider the amount of sites in Europe.

So is this mobile? So they're, they're on the website on a mobile phone or they're, they're accessing the facility using a mobile phone in some way.

Access. So mobile access, right?

Okay.

So, so let's take that a step further. App-based access.

Okay.

Right. Wow. And that's a big number. It talks about user penetration, right? And adoption, right? And what that enforces in our world is Nokia, and I'm sure yours is Stora, is that, hey, people want convenience, right? If you look at how that trend is on the up and up, what does that mean? That as the oldies like myself, you know, we, we filter through the system, the Gen Alphas are coming in, and again, they don't necessarily want to speak to people. They want to click, click, book, book, and get it on, get it done with. So let me just go back to a point that you've asked, right? You've referenced your booking system, right? But when a customer goes through that process, right, how seamless does Stora make it for that customer, i.e., end user?

Mhm.

And what's the benefit for the operator? Right? Nokia's cloud-based, Stora's cloud-based. Why should an operator consider Stora? What are you guys doing differently? I've watched your podcast, I follow you.

You're the one.

The one and only. But you guys are doing great things, right? How does it benefit the end user? But most importantly, how does it benefit the operator?

Well, it's probably a similar answer to what you gave for Nokia, but there's a lot of benefits. One of the big ones, the biggest one for us, what we really want to focus on is how do we help our customers succeed? And for us, that's about revenue and profit. So how do you grow the revenue? How do you reduce admin and cost? And ultimately, how do you drive profit? And I think what you've talked about there, the booking flow for your customers, if your customers come to your website and the booking flow on there is poor, or if you're asked a bunch of questions too soon, if you're asked, for example, upload your ID before you've even booked the thing, which we see in a lot of platforms, I think that for me is crazy and a really, really bad idea because we know there are other platforms in the market getting 2 to 10% conversions online, and ours is at 70%. So, if you think about the difference between, let's just call it 10%, let's say 10% of your bookings come through the website, 90% of your bookings are coming over the phone or in person, probably mostly over the phone. That 90%, every booking is probably, in my experience, around half an hour on the phone. So, 90% of your bookings take half an hour for a member of staff, If you're a big business, you've got multiple members of staff, what are they saying? Are they doing a good job of closing the sale? It's time and cost and ultimately lost profit. If you have a platform that seamlessly converts a prospect into a paying customer at a rate of 70%, that itself drives revenue massively because all these people looking in the local area, especially the Gen Z people you're talking about, younger people, like yourself and me, are online trying to book self-storage. I know myself, even though I'm a good bit older than Gen Z, I know myself, if I am on 3 websites and one of them lets me book online, I will book the one online. I won't even bother ringing the other 2. And so you're getting this increasing portion of the market who's going to book on your page. That if you don't let them book online, you don't even know they exist. And then it's about connecting in the Nuki system, smart access systems, making that seamless, making sure that we connect in well with it. And the customer experience is managed at that point by yourselves, by Nuki, the app. We've got to make sure that that's really easy and easy to do. And so there's all that. And then there's the admin of running the business. Managing your prices, optimising your revenue, that's stuff that we're doing, we do in Stora as well. But one of the core parts of it is that whole booking experience, which is so, so, so important. And from your point of view, from Noki's point of view, is the move-in experience, that's facilitating so much of that as well. Because lots of our customers have no staff on site on Sundays, and they let their customers come to their gate, We have about 60 customers, we have Nokia customers with Stora. Almost all of them, I'm sure, will let people book immediately from the gate on their phone and get the text message from Nokia and just move straight in. And there's a customer on a Sunday afternoon, just wants to get their storage sorted out. No staff have to be involved. And although that's a small percentage at the moment, that percentage grows and it's going to continue to grow. So, I think Nokia smart access systems in general, but Nokia in particular, and the right software package, they're very important together to drive that revenue and reduced admin. We've talked a bit about the changes that we've seen in the industry over the past 5 years. If you think forward another 5 years, do you think it's more of the same, or is there anything else that's coming down the line you think is going to change how self-storage operators should think about how they run their business?

So there's a few points to consider in my view. AI is, is a very big buzzword, as you know, right? And it's great, but it all depends on what are you trying to get out, right? So I think using AI automation to develop or further develop process We'll see a lot of that happening. Improved digital, digitalization of, uh, customer experience. Definitely. I believe there's also a lot of advancement from a technology perspective around the security aspects, as in surveillance, monitoring, and so on and so forth. So fast forward 5 years, I think the concept of self-storage will always remain true to what it is, right? But the access, the customer experience, the operator experience will continue to evolve, automate. And I think you as an operator would become a lot more educated around customer choice based on the data that is represented and how it is processed.

If you were an op— if you drew on sites, you're an operator now and you've been in this industry for a long time, so you're a good person to ask. What would you be doing today if you had a traditional business in self-storage?

So it's all about the basics. What do customers want? Clean facility, convenience from an access point of view, and non-complicated communication channels. So What would I do? I would definitely roll forward with Nokia because I see value in the product.

All right. That's an unbiased point of view. Yeah.

Well, you could tell me why you would.

I would also use Stora, which is unbiased as well. So just to kind of wrap things up a bit then. So if you're, if you're an operator and you're not using Nokia today, yeah. What are the, what are the main reasons to use Nokia?

Well, if you're an operator and you're not using Noki today, I suggest you contact me ASAP, right? But apart from that, I think it's important to do your research, right? Understand where the sector's going. And in order to understand where the sector's going, you need to understand where the— where has the sector come from? What advancement has dropped over the last 10 years? Because let's face it, the most amount of automation occurred in our sector in the last 10 years.

Mm-hmm.

Right? So once you do your research, you would then understand that if you don't get onto the journey now, right, you would have to at a later stage. Yeah, so as a budding entrepreneur or an operator that has got a facility that's looking to retrofit, understand the options. NoKey has an option for new build, we have options for retrofit, and most importantly, the value that it brings to your audience, your customer base. right? And creates that stickiness with them staying with you as opposed to them leaving you.

Sean, thanks very much. Thanks very much for joining us and welcome to Belfast. Thanks for coming over.

No, thank you for having us. It was spectacular. Had a lovely time with you and the coffee is phenomenal, right? And look forward to doing it all again. Thank you, Gavin Shields.

Thank you, Sean.

Awesome.

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