Self Storage Intervention Update #1 - Phone calls, prices, ads & drones!

Hi. This is my first update on the intervention I am trying to make at my self storage facility business store stuff in Northern Ireland. I have two sites and over the past three to six months the rate of bookings has practically dried up completely. And I've been sort of ignoring the business. It's kind of running, been running on autopilot and I'm just trying to make a few changes now to see if I can, can make a difference to the booking rates and if we can get some more bookings and try and get this, this facility getting on the filled up again. So the first thing I did was I checked our booking flow, checked the website, make sure there was nothing wrong there and there wasn't. That was all going through fine. I then decided to phone our the phone number and make a, make a phone call to the business. So I was trying to see what customers experience when they do that and I started listening to a bunch of recordings of calls and we've been using a service recently as answering our calls and I find that some of the calls weren't being handled the way I would have liked. You know, I've always been a big proponent of letting people book online but a lot of customers have questions so they will phone and they will have questions and want to know how does it work, what size do I need? You can't get away from that in self storage. That is going to continue. We've always answered phone calls and we've always wanted to do a good job on those calls. We've also wanted to let people who get it on the website go ahead and book. But when I listened to the calls I just don't think we were handling them well enough at all. And so we've made a couple of changes. One is I've changed it so that if a customer phones us well the instant change was I put it through straight through to my phone. So for the first four or five days after I looked at that I took all the calls that was one a day. So we had one call a day and that was with one inquiry a day, with one or two other calls, people moving out. And I took the inquiries and it gave me the impression that we probably will get some bookings quite soon. I felt like there was a bit of demand there. Maybe it's coming into summertime, maybe there's going to be more house moves. I took those calls. Unfortunately that's not sustainable for me to be always answering the calls. So. And I've changed that now. So it's going to Call me and a colleague of mine, Brian, who I also run store stuff with first and then if we can't answer, it will go through then to where we're taking those calls. And we're just going to see how those calls go with that third party service over time, see if they improve. And I just don't want that to be an issue. I want to make sure if somebody phones, we do as great a job as we possibly can. So I've done that and there's a few things I've done to try and make it more attractive as well. So we used to do Free Van Haer on all bookings and just from taking phone calls at the time two years ago, I knew people really liked it, so we've reintroduced that. So we've introduced free Van Hiren all bookings. So if somebody books a unit, they will get a van on the day of their move for free and they get it for 24 hours. I've arranged that with a third party, the same one we used before. We used to have to ring them every time somebody books booked a unit and kind of make the sort of make the booking directly with them. What I've done is built a little form so that form is going to be sent out to our customers when they book. Automatically, they'll fill out the form and the Vanhaar company has access to that form and they will see when somebody comes in. So whenever somebody fills out the form, the Vanha company will see it and they will then contact our customer and arrange the Vanhire directly. So that takes us out of the loop and saves us a bit of time. The Vanhaar costs something, anything from £40 for the smallest van to £70, I think it is for the biggest, maybe £80. And we just pay that to the Vanhaar company. They've got our car details that they just charge us, so it doesn't take any time really, apart from getting the email sent, we will need to keep an eye just on that, but that should be fine. So that's Free Vanhaar for all bookings. We've introduced that. I also looked at all the pricing, so I took a look at prices for Portale and on Gannon and you know, frankly I brought a lot of them down a little bit, not too much. I just don't want to overreact. So I brought prices down a bit and I made it clear just I think we'd maybe some units didn't have a 50% off. I've made with that on all of the units. So we now have price. I've also tried to round the pricing a bit to kind of. We had a lot of sort of pence numbers here and I just decided to take that out and just try and make it all easier to kind of see. Easier to see with the eye and just simplify prices a bit. Same with Tungana, so we made that a little bit simpler looking, hopefully for customers. So we've done that. I've also introduced only by the figure at the top here. So we've said 20% discount for annual stays. So if anyone calls us, we can take a booking over the phone. We'll take the payment up front for the year. But that payment works at a 20% discount, so it's a pretty good discount. I've had a couple of people ask about it, but nobody's booked that with me yet. And actually there are no bookings on that either yet. But it's there and we're going to try that and see what happens. I've also changed the layout a bit here, so you'll see this is the homepage for store stuff. NI just changed the storage system, just allows you to change the layout a bit quite easily. And I've just put this image in. I want to make sure that people understand this is a high quality storage facility and just as a differentiator, you know, it's not containers, it's not something else. And just want to make sure people saw that and hopefully that can justify some of the price as well. So I want to get that up there too. It's also a really nice clean site. I want to be able to see that. So I've done that. A few other things just to mention quickly is in my Dungannon site, I do have still 2,600 square feet of unused space that we haven't fitted out. So I've added in, I put up, first of all, I have that here on the. On the site. But I've also chatting with another guy who runs a couple of sites here and he said a couple of things. One was that the days of shooting fish in a bucket are over for self storage. Which I thought was an interesting saying. But he also suggested, why don't you, you know, advertise sort of smaller units for businesses and see if there's demand and then if there is, I can basically get somebody in to divide out the right size here. So I'm going to see how that goes. I haven't done a whole lot of advertising on this yet. Um, but it's on the website for now. So we're going to test that out too, see if I can get that site, that part of the site filled as well. So that's a bunch of stuff I've done around pricing and the website. I've also done a couple other things I've done. Number one, I have started running some Facebook ads and I can only assume that these are. These are not working at all because this ad is for my don't gun on site. So you can see I've spent. What have I spent here? It says 11p a click. So it's suggesting I've spent £26.19 to get 11p a click. That's a lot of clicks. 243 clicks. I don't think we've had one single phone call. I haven't received a phone call. I haven't seen any of the phone logs. So I don't know what people are clicking on for this to happen. But it's certainly not coming through to our phone. This is the ad and I'm trying to optimize four phone calls. So, you know, the button is a call now button with a phone number and it's not coming through. I looked at this earlier, I was thinking, is that the wrong number? Is there something wrong? But I can't see anything wrong with this at all. So I don't know if that's working. I might just have to turn that off soon because it doesn't seem to be doing anything certainly from a creating business perspective. So I'm trying that out. One other thing I've done and this is really cool actually. I good friend of mine is a drone videographer, does a lot of BBC films and all sorts of stuff all around the world and he came over to my sites and brought us drones and we did some really cool, cool filming. So I'm just going to show you. This is what we filmed in my Port of Down site, which I just think is absolutely class when he moved me out of the road. So this is a little mini drone and he is, has flown it through the middle of the site exchange. The speed is a bit here. I'm going to speed this up for any ads but the thing that I think is really valuable here is people who've never been to a self storage facility. I'm hoping that these videos can be interesting and also drive, let people know. Here's what you're getting if you come and book here. So we've done that there. This is my Dungannon site. Here. So this is a similar sort of thing. I mean it was, it's absolutely amazing. The drones about that size and he basically flies it all the way through. Let me see if I can speed this up. Don't know if I can. He flies it. Oh, here we go. Speed. Let me use 2x. He fly, he flies the thing and on the first take he tapped the edge of this balcony and the thing fell on the ground. We thought it was broken but he flies it through the facility. People get to see what it is, how it works. And I'm going to probably put these into 10, 20 second videos like really sped up and throw them onto Facebook and Instagram and hopefully that might drive a bit of, a bit of interest and just a bit of awareness of what it is that actually stores stuff. Dungannon is stores of Portan is. So I'm going to do that and I think this is going to be really, really interesting to see how this goes. You can see I'm in all of these. There's one more here then this is the kind of a further away one format. On gallonside you can see a lovely looking site, brand new building. But you can also see there aren't any chimney pots nearby. It's about one mile from the center of the town and you know, maybe that's having an impact on this site here. But anyway we'll use these. As you can see, I'm constantly moving stuff into self storage facilities. Okay. So that's what I've done so far. Check the customer experience, change the way phone calls come through, change the website, introduce some new offers and simplify the pricing a bit. Trying to get the extra space. Actually if you look at this video, this is my Dungannon site. It's this door over here that isn't fitted out. That's where the 2,600 square feet are. So one of the biggest wins would be to get that let because that's probably a couple of thousand pounds a month. That would be great. So trying a few things to get that let. I'm running Facebook ads which don't seem to be working. I have filmed these drone ads. I'm going to pull these together today or tomorrow and get them onto Facebook and Instagram and run some ads to get those into, you know, into people's feeds. And yes, I've got a lot more stuff to try. What are the results? They're terrible so far. So I'll bring up. It hasn't made a difference yet basically. So if I bring up my allocated square feet over time. I put it down. So you'll see last month, my last video, which was two weeks ago, I did six months. You can see the square foot change at that point was 1153. It's now 1198, so it's worse. That's because we've had a couple of move outs. We've had one booking, though, thankfully, We've got a 200 square foot move in in a couple of weeks as well. But that booking was from before I filmed the video. So nothing really, a whole lot has changed yet. I'm trying stuff and I'm going to try more stuff in the next couple of weeks and I'll provide another update. Anybody at the conference next week, I'll hopefully see you there. And yeah, thanks for watching. Cheers. Bye.