Stora | All-Access, 30th March 2023

Firstly, thanks everybody for joining us. So this is our first webinar in a while and we have planned it a bit more regularly but I don't know what happened. All got busy and got to set one up. But the purpose of this really is ideally share what we're up to and I suppose overall help our have more of a connection with our customers and learn more about what it is you want. Ultimately what we're building at Stora is a software product that is designed to make it easier to run your business, to grow your revenue, to grow your sales. And so you know, we just want to have as much contact as we can with our customers. And this is a really, I mean the last time we did this it was a great way to, to do that and to get questions and to give everyone a chance to ask us questions. Most of our team or our whole team are on the call here so we're all here to listen and also I suppose share some of the stuff we've been up to as well. So we have been up to quite a lot and so a few things on this call, Stephen's going to talk us through a few of the releases. We've released a few things just in the past half hour that we're going to talk you through. So if you're a store a customer you'll actually see these things in your account if you're in them at the moment. So Stephen's going to go through those. I'm going to go through a few sort of just top tips that will only be hopefully a five minute quick run through for it's just for customers, some top tips about how some of the newish things we've released and just making sure you've turned those on to get a bit more out of Stora Joshua then going to make a bit of an announcement about this cross thing we've got planned for May I won't say anymore. And then we're going to run into a Q and A and that Q and A is for anybody. So we have some customers on here, some non customers so feel free to ask your questions if anything you want to ask me or any of the other team about. So we're all here to take those questions. So Stephen, why don't you, I'll hand over to you and you can go through the new, these new features we've released.

Yeah. Cheers Gavin. Okay. Hi everyone, thanks for turning up. Great to see you all. So yes, today I'm going to be talking about a bit about the evolution of Stora and I suppose today what we've been focused on is building things that give you the core tools you need to sell online, take payments and manage your business. But in the background Stora has been amassing quite a lot of data and insights around your business that we haven't quite exposed to you yet. And today we're going to show you a few ways that we're going to start exposing that data to you to make your life a bit easier. And that's going to be take the form of two features and the first one is the home screen. So this is something that's going to make your day to day life easier than ever in Stora. And I'm going to show you an actual live walkthrough of this now. So I'm going to stop presenting that and share my screen and screen if you give me a second. Okay, so it should just be loading now. Can you guys see that? Yep, that's it now. Okay, so this is the Stora home screen and this gives you key insights across your business, different actions you can perform which are auto populated here by Stora and it also gives you at a glance a look at your different sites on a day to day basis. So I'll quickly talk through some of the elements you can see here. So at the top here we have occupancy and this is you'll know from other parcel store. So this gives you your occupancy level across your business across any site you have. And if I click into that this will filter you down through into your occupancy view. This is an updated version that we launched today which showcases the actual unit breakdown over time and you can see the change over time on this now which wasn't there before then. If I go back to the home screen the next stat you'll see here is month to date revenue. So what this is, this is monthly revenue. All the invoices that have opened since the first of the month until the current date and at the end of the month I should reset. But it gives you like a really quick way to see all the money you've made on a specific month. The next one here is a waiting payment and what this is is all open invoices that have an outstanding balance. So this makes it easy for you to know what you're owed and chase up any missed payments. So again if I click on this, this will take you through to a filtered view of your invoices to see this invoices with this open state that has an outstanding Balance. The next thing I'm going to show you is the actions section. So this is something we realize has been missing from store for quite a while, but hopefully it's going to be a very useful feature for everyone. So actions are things which will help you manage your leads and help manage your subscriptions. So Storefront leads you can see here is the first one. Any new leads that come to your website from say the pop up form which you released recently or registering interested unit will appear here to highlight things that you need to follow up on. The other three actions then are all related to allocations. So if you have a forthcoming move in, you will be notified that you need to allocate it if it hasn't been allocated. If you have an active subscription that isn't allocated, you'll be notified here. And if you have somebody who's moved out but you haven't managed to deallocate yet, you'll be notified here too. And as soon as you action these things, these actions will disappear. So it'll always only show you what you need to do. So I'll click here on Storefront leads just to show you again, takes you straight to what you need to see. So everything now will be much easier to find in store because it's all just accessible from your home screen. Okay, so that's the top section and next I will show you here the site specific section. So this is a site that we've set up called Leicester. And as you can see here, we also have an option that you can select other sites. So if you have more than one you'll have a drop down here to pick your sites. This gives you a quick view of your map and that feature we released at the end of last year. And this move in move out panel is a new thing we're launching today which gives you from the current date into the future a list of all future move ins and move outs. So we can see there's two move outs today and one move in and we can see if they're allocated or not. So again, this is a quick and easy way to decide what you need to do about allocation. So I can come into this one for example, and see that it's allocated and allocated. And lastly on this view we have the unit availability table. So this is quite similar to what you see in the unit types table, but it's streamlined and made accessible on your home screen. So this is perfect for if say you have a customer who's on the phone and you need to tell them a price or check which availability of different unit types you have. This is all now on your home screen ready to be used. So that's the home screen, this is the first version of it and at the end we'd love to hear your own ideas about what else we could put here that will make your day to day life easier. The next feature I'm going to show you is a special preview. So it's not quite live in your account yet, but it will be soon. So it's related to reporting. Reporting is probably the most requested feature we have in store and it's something we've been thinking about for a while is how do we present reporting in a really, really useful, advanced way. And we've done a lot of work on the groundwork to get our vision of reporting online. And I'm going to give you a quick run through here of a first report. So now you'll see this new report section whenever you get access to this. And the first report I'll show you is allocated square foot over time. So this is a report which is showing you here on the Leicester site, data for the last three months grouped by week. So if I hover over any of these columns, you'll see how much, how many square foot has been allocated in that column, how many square foot has been deallocated and the net change in that period of time. So for example, if I see here, this one's been 209 allocated, 99 deallocated, so the change is 110 in that period. But the thing that's really interesting about this is the flexibility and the filterability of it all. So say I want to go in and change that to six months, it'll instantly change to show you the progress over the last six months. And then if I want to change the time period by which it's grouped, we can do that too. So you can do it by day, but I'll do it by month here just to show you. So when that loads in here you can see it's now grouped by month so you can get a really quick glance at what's been allocated and deallocated in terms of square foot over any given month. And this trend line is showing you again the net, so you can sort of see the progress that's happened over time. And just down below that we also have the data in a table format. And finally if you go up to the export and export like you would elsewhere in Stora, you'll get a CSV of whatever the current selection you've got for your report is. So this is our first report that we'll be going live with, but we plan to add many more over the future, the near future. And again at the end of this, this call, we would like to know what you want to see next. But yeah, so that is most of what I was going to talk about today. I'll hand over to Gavin who's going to talk to you about some top tips.

Thanks, Stephen. Yeah, I think before I do, I just was going to say about the reporting, you know, Stephen mentioned it is one of the most requested features in Stora that we develop our reporting solution and we take that very seriously. And what Stephen showed you there is kind of report number one. But over the next few months we're going to be adding more and more reports there. And ultimately what we want that to get to is all the reports that you need to run your business are right there for you. So they're right there, just easy to get, easy to see. You can download the data, you can see the data, it's all shown to you and a nice easy to understand chart or graph. And also eventually you want to get to the point where you can even build and customize your own. But this is all, we've done a lot of work over the past six months to get the foundations in place for this solution. So, you know, a lot of stuff's been happening without kind of being able to show anything. So this is, it's exciting for us as a team to be able to show you the first one. But you know, you'll see over the next few months, you know, a lot of development from the reporting point of view because a lot of the groundwork has now been put in place. So that's great. And I think from the home screen perspective, the new home screen, I think I still have two sites and I think one of the drawbacks of Stora has been you kind of get dropped into these subscriptions when you log in. So this is the start of us trying to help make your day to day life easier and highlight your tasks and the step next, one of the next steps that we'll go onto later in this call is helping you to automate some of those tasks and sort of remove some of the things that you shouldn't really have to do Anyway, so this is kind of step, a step in that direction towards even more automation.

So.

Okay, cool. So I'm going to see, actually I get my screen up here. Okay, I'm just going to share my screen now.

Okay.

Okay. So I'm just going to run through this, will be quite quick. It's just really wanted to highlight some of the more recent features of Stora and just wanted to go through quickly because there's probably some stuff that you are using and maybe some things you aren't. And some of these things hopefully will help you too get more from Stora and hopefully even grow sales and improve your business ultimately. So the first thing I want to say number one is about your storefront best practices. So we have a lot of people who use our storefront, which is the website and there are different ways everyone can customize it. So there's lots of different people customize in lots of different ways. And one of the things we just wanted to highlight is it is really worth taking a look at some best practices for website to increase conversion. So whenever you look at your own storefront it is worth looking at it and saying am I doing the right things here? So for example, a good example is store stuff. So here we have another example. A customer I'm sure, I think Matt is on here. Woah. Storage. We think they do a great job of, of showing the site. And also this is one of our demo accounts here, 100 self storage. So some of the things to look out for are, you know, not using all capitals, not repeating the same thing multiple times. Like for example a phone number. You know, if you have your phone number in one place, don't put it in two or three more places on the, on the first page. Most people don't do that. But just it's just worth having a check just to make sure that you're implementing some of the best practices so that it doesn't damage the conversions on your website. Okay. Number two was maps. So Stephen already showed this a little bit. Most people are using maps. If you aren't, I highly recommend you use it. Our map product is. It is a fantastic product. It's up for the Innovation award of the UK Conference in May. And one of the nicest things about it is it's just completely live. So you can click into this and this gives you an instant graphical view of how your business is performing. So the green units are all who's in there. You can click straight through to the customer, their subscription, you can deallocate it. Anybody who isn't paying you can see they're overlooked. This is completely live. So if anything changes now, it'll instantly update. I really would recommend everyone turning this on. It's easy to build. This is the builder here. It's A really simple tool. If you have any questions or problems or issues, we can help. So give us a shout if you'd like some help. But it's designed to be really simple and easy to use. That's maps. I was also going to say then on ID checks been around for a while and a lot of customers do use it. Some don't. We built this because I had a. Originally I had a customer in my first site who left a pile of drugs on the site and I had to call the police and it turned out he'd used a fake ID to get in and we weren't checking those IDs. So store identity is a way of stopping people from using a stolen identification. It does a photograph of their face, a photograph of the id. It checks at the photo, pictures match and then it sends it away for an external check. So if you want to turn that on, it's in check in. Just flick it on here. So that's ID checks. This is a kind of a smallish thing, but if you have, if you have specific instructions. Sorry, let me just close this. If you have specific instructions you would like to your customers to receive on their move in email. So your customers get an email from Stora on the morning of their move in. If you want to add specific instructions to that email, you can. So this is within the site. So this is within the site editing. You can go in and simply in here include a custom message in your move in day email. So might be that you know, you want people to report to reception so they can sign a contract. If you're not already doing online contract signature or you want to meet them, maybe that's the way you run your business. You can add that stuff in here and that'll be included in the email sets. That's customizing your move in day emails. Another thing to check out, the fifth thing I was going to say is sometimes you'll also have issues with a unit. So for example, I had units a couple of years ago where I had leaks in some of my units. Water got into them and I had to sort of track the status of those in an Excel spreadsheet. Whereas now if you go into a unit, you can actually add notes now. So let's say had a leak, you could put in the date 30th of March, you know, workman called out, you can save that, that'll save it against that unit and it will always be there now. And you'll be able to go back and see, you know, the date of that Note and who did it and everything else. So it's a way of tracking units if you have something you want to manage with units. So number five unit notes, number six is the ability to set prices on different, different periods now. So whenever we initially launched Storo, you could only bill every month. We now support every week, every four weeks, every month, every three months, every six months and every year. And you can go in and turn those on and off in your system. So you know, if you want, for example, if somebody wants to pay annually, you turn this on, you can go then and set a price for the unit. You can set an annual price, let's say we go in here and set the annual price for this unit, let's call it £1,500 for the year. You can then sign them up to a subscription at £1,500 annually and it will recurr, will take care of that again for you. So that is just different timings on your subscriptions if you want to set that up. Okay, so I think of three left. We also know by default your customers can go to the customer portal, which is the store, a customer portal, and they can cancel their subscription. And most people like doing that. They like the fact that customers can just go ahead and do it. But if you have say some different kind of notice period, or if you kind of want to make it a little bit harder for people to cancel, you can turn off that as well. So you can by default, this is on. If you want to, you can turn it off. So people will not be able to log in. Your customers won't be able to cancel in the portal. If you turn this off, they'll have to phone you. So give them a note, call or whatever it might be so they can call you and do that. So that's turning off or turning on cancellations in your portal. So two final things on stripe, I was going to say stripe have a payment method called Lync. So I would encourage everyone to go into your Stripe account and just make sure this is turned on. There are two benefits to Lync payments. Lync is a stripe based payment that allows people to pay across hundreds of thousands of websites. If you have this turned on, apparently your conversion rates could increase by 7%. So of course we want to increase conversion rates. And the second thing is the processing fees if you use link are significantly lower. I think it's maybe 1.2%. So it's 0.3% lower than normal card payments. I don't know exactly. I think it's that, but don't quote me on that, but it is lower, it's cheaper. Final thing on Stripe is make sure and turn on retries for your subscription. So this is if somebody's card payment or direct debit payment fields, you want to retry it and you want to automatically retry it. Make sure you've turned that on and that's done inside your settings, subscription and emails and then under manage field payments. So make sure you went in and set it up the way you want.

To set that up.

So that's kind of it. The only two final things I want to say is we have our help center here, so, you know, feel free to go in there if you've got questions. It's a great place to go. We're also downloading down here, so lots of you, I'm sure in touch with Brian or some of our team down here. We're there too to help you. And also if you've got questions about the industry or I don't know about where you're buying insurance or where to get doors from or whatever it might be, feel free to ask it in our community here. So that's at Community Store Co, there's lots of people in here asking questions about the industry in general. So it's a great place to learn about what other people are doing and ask questions too. So I would also encourage you to take a look at that. I think that's me for now. So I think we will skip. Next is. I think we're going to skip over to Josh who's going to make a very exciting announcement. Josh, thanks.

Let me just bring up my slide. I mean, my profile picture alone was one of the key things here. So last year I was able to attend the store of social that we hosted, or I say we hosted, not yet joined. So the team had hosted a very successful event in London last year and I was keen as soon as I joined to find out when we could do the next one. So I can confirm we've got our next door social lined up. It's going to be on the eve of the SSA show in Birmingham in May. So on the Monday night, if you're planning on arriving the day before then we're going to have a social event for everyone that's willing to come along. It's going to be a nice, relaxed, informal affair before the big hullabaloo that is the SSA show for two days. So you can come along, have a drink, get to meet the whole team. We'll Be bringing everyone over from Stora so you can ask us questions, find out what we're working on or, you know, just have a chat. One of the key things we are going to be running though is a live podcast between Gavin and Dean from the Hacking Self Storage podcast. Thanks, Stefan. And so they've got, you know, chance to run through some things and just, yeah, get, get to know us a bit more and hopefully there'll be some, some key insights and things for you as well. You can register straight away. It's completely free. Just head to Story Co Social and we'll also be sending the link out soon afterwards as well along with the recording. So you'll get all the links to the relevant things shortly from us. But looking forward to meeting you all and tying all in and hopefully it all works with travel arrangements if people are already planning on attending. So excited to be part of this one. A bit more.

And Dean is here, I believe. I think I saw him on the call there, going to Adam as a co host. So Dan, if you've done, you want to add to that, but the general plan is to record this podcast in front of everybody and hopefully everyone will have a beer in their hand or whatever and it's going to be hopefully a good bit of fun. We haven't really, we haven't really worked out exactly what we're going to do, but hopefully should be a good, a good, a good hour or so of probably debating something where Dean and I will completely disagree and then we'll all agree to agree at the end. Yeah, I'm genuinely really looking forward to it.

I've got to be careful because I'm.

In a coffee shop and I'm right near the door, so I've got my.

Hood up because it's absolutely freezing here. But yeah, I'm really looking forward to it and I feel a bit stupid talking in the coffee shop, so I'm.

Going to shut up now.

But yeah, really looking forward to it. It'll be awesome to see you guys before the event.

Fantastic. Great stuff. Thanks, Dean. Great. So, yeah, stay tuned. We'll give you more info as it comes through, but if you'd like to register, you can do so straight away while I'm here. Then I'll jump into the questions that we have. So we have had some questions come through already and really appreciate you sending those through in advance if you did have any questions based on what you've heard so far. I think we did have one in the chat and let's start with those and Then we can jump through to the ones that have been preset approved. So if you just click the hand raising icon and then we can get you unmuted and feel free to ask away if you prefer.

You could also type questions. I think there is the ability to.

Yeah, precisely. If you're also in a coffee shop and prefer to get me to read them out, then by all means I did. See, we've got one from James coming through. Stephen, you might be able to help on this one. So roughly when will the new reports be phased in?

Yeah, no problem. So we hope to get that first report live in the next few weeks. Beyond that, we have the infrastructure in place now to make it much easier for us to create these reports. So over the course of the next quarter we plan on trying to release as many as we can really. So we want to hear from you if you have an idea what would be the most valuable report that you could have in store. And that will certainly feed into our decision making on which ones that we prioritize.

Stephen, just a quick one. Where is the best place to ask that question? Is it by email? Is it in the forum? If somebody has a report that they would like us to, that they think is important for them, where would they send that to?

Yeah, anywhere really. Like you can get, just get in touch in the chat. You can. We could start a forum post after this for everybody to reply to if that's. If people want to jump on there. As long as it's sent to us, we'll make sure it gets actioned and it shouldn't matter where.

Okay, great. There was a question that came through the chat and then there's a couple of hands raised. If we start with Ewan, did you want to unmute yourself? Hey guys, how are you?

How are you? You good?

All good, thanks.

Good. It's based around move outs, cancellation dates. I know I've brought this up a few times, but we work on a 30 day notice period which we try to operate as much as we can. Obviously that, that, that because of the way the system works at the moment, that creates us some problems. So for example, if the customer, let's say their payment date is the 28th of the month, they come to us on the 24th and say they want to cancel their subscription. Cancel, you know, give us a 30 days notice. We have to then cancel their Unit as of 28th March, then do a one time charge obviously, but they are still a customer for the next, you know, until the 24th of April for example, the one thing is for us is obviously the system doesn't record that they're a customer. So reporting wise that doesn't help. Is there any way that you guys can, you know, get into a, get a system where we can basically select a move out date and the last charge or something? I'm hoping that's coming across.

Yeah. Yeah. So you. We have had this request along with lots of stuff. This is a relatively common request because different operators have different terms really for notice periods. And you're absolutely right. So at the moment, and there's a lot of things with store, you know, like for example, initially it was only monthly charging and now it's more flexible. So whenever we launched Tor, we had to make sacrifices in flexibility and one of those was the way we handled the notice period. So the way it handles the moment you in is if you cancel, there's just no more future charges. So it is in a roadmap to address that and to allow operators to sort of set it up in different ways. Because what you're describing, there is a bit of a hassle for you to kind of manage. I get that. So I would expect at some point in the near future, because we have had this discussion, you as the operator will be able to select, you know, how do you want to handle it? And then our billing system will then bill on that in that way. So whether it's 30 days notice or 60 days or whatever it might be, it would handle that. I don't have a timing on that, but it is in our, we are aware of it as a limitation and a hassle for customers. So it's something we are going to get to. I just don't have an exact date yet. Yeah.

Oh, sorry. The main thing for us is, you know, at the moment working out of one site as we do, it's okay from a staffing point of view, we're in the process just about to do head to terms on another site and we're looking at another one as well. The problem is when we get to multiple sites that's going to become difficult. And you know, we floated around a few ideas. The, the other one was to basically say to people their notice period is up until their next payment date. Obviously in some instances we could only get, you know, one or two days notice that they're moving out. And then in other instances, you know, we'll have a customer saying, well look, you know, we don't want to pay for another three weeks because we're not, you know, and, and then and we don't want to do refunds. I don't, you know, because that, that costs us and obviously other time thing. So.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I've, I've considered all these things as well because even at my own sites there's a temptation to add a notice page. So, yeah, it is something we're aware of and so hopefully by the time your new sites opened, it's something we will hopefully be able to have addressed.

Obviously. Sorry, just find a final point. Obviously, if anyone's got any other ideas or how they're doing it, you know, I'm willing to, you know, if anyone's got any advice or anything, it's one. It's probably the only thing that, that I, I would, you know, I'd like to change really. So if anyone else has got any other ideas or how they're doing it, that works best or better then, then I, that, you know. Happy to hear.

Thanks again.

Great.

Okay, so we've got David, if you want to go next. And then there's another question from George in the chat. So if we start with David and then go to that question.

Yeah.

Good morning guys. I've gone greedy. I've got two questions for you, quite simple ones. First is on the welcome email that gets sent to the customers. Getting quite a few customers come back to us saying, what's my unit number? And when you look at it, it's sort of like hidden somewhere in the first line or two of text. Yeah. We need to highlight the fact this is your unit number a bit more because I'm getting it more, more, more often. So it's obviously an issue. That's number one. And the second one is just so.

You know, David, I have, I have designs ready to go for that with something we'll address in the next month or so. I'll send you a concept actually, just so you can see what you think as well.

Perfect.

Because it's already mocked up.

Perfect, thank you. And the second thing is just around customers signing contracts. I often get customers signing three or four contracts and I can only assume that's because they don't realize they've already signed it once. And we can come in in the morning and I've got four copies of contracts that have been signed by sign now. So again, just wonder if that can be made a bit more streamlined because customers are clearly getting confused with it.

Absolutely. So that's a. Dave, that the contract signature actually is an area that we are. We've done a good bit of work on Around. Well, not, we haven't actually released them but it's an area that we're going to be fixing and improving significantly over the next while as part of sort of our work for quarter two this year. So starting in a couple of days or next week, we're sort of starting a couple of new big priorities. And one of those is around the automation of the entire move in process. So that's going to involve at the moment you have to go and allocate a unit to people and we want to kind of automate as much as possible of the entire process and that includes allocating units and the ID if you turn it on and contracts if you do those. And it's right at the moment the sign now solution is not ideal. It kind of works, you get a signed contract but it doesn't feed back into the system. So I would expect some, expect some big improvements there over the next three to six months on the things.

Cool, thank you. Perfect. And then this one might be a quick one from George. Hello. Where do I find the place where I have an email sent to a customer on the day of check in?

So George, that's in the site. If you go to your site edit site setup and you scroll down, there's a customer move in day email section and that's where you can turn it on and edit the text. So go to Stora, go to your actual site and edit site and it's on that page.

Fantastic. So I'll jump through to the questions that we've received so far and then if anyone else has any more as we're going through them, feel free to. Maybe we just jump into this one. Can you share a bit more about where you stand on auto increase pricing, like pricing based on the availability of a specific unit type? I mean that actually does go through to our next question in terms of where we're going with features in the next 12 months. So Gavin, if you're happy to kind of shoehorn those two together.

Yeah, so this is what Josh is showing here is one of the questions that we got through. What features can we expect in the next 12 months? And I think what I'm going to say now is different to what I probably would have said about two months ago here because sure, a lot of you have noticed a lot of press around this revolution in software and technology and that's AI and we are, I think you know, Stora. Our goal at Stora is to help operators run the most efficient self storage businesses and to help you to grow and maximize your revenue. So really to help you run the best business possible. And we have a, a big roadmap of features that we want to build in order to help you do that. But so I'm just going to talk about AI for 10 seconds because I'm not an expert on it, but we are. We started doing quite a research into AI and what might be the impact that AI could have on self storage as a, as an industry and also what impact could it have on our ability to build world class software and features that would help you to run a better business. So we have already started doing quite a lot of work around investigation of AI and what that might mean. So that could have an impact on what we do in the next 12 months because we might find that the priorities might change. We might also find an early indications seem to suggest it will increase the speed at which we can develop to write code. And I need to be careful what I say here because a lot of engineers kick me under the table if I say too much. But it should allow us to speed things up significantly. So that's one thing. But to answer the question about pricing and features for the next 12 months we typically will work on sort of what's the next quarter and what's the quarter we're in and the quarter coming after that. What are the priorities? Our priorities for the next quarter, so starting next week are mostly around the reporting side of things and making that a lot better. And also around this, what I talked about there, the sort of the move in process and automating that as far as possible. So that's kind of the main focus at the moment of our Q2 priorities. But this pricing question is a really, really important question and that's something that comes up all the time and we have a lot of designs actually for different pricing. So the way I see this auto increase pricing, there's really in my mind three areas that we need to address here. Number one is the ability to run dynamic pricing. So that's the ability to change pricing on your website and in your system for new customers. So how do you change the price for new customers to optimize revenue? So that might be based on availability or even other things that we can pick up like what's the demand for self storage in the UK or in your area today? The second thing is automatically increasing the prices for existing customers. So that's automated price, price increases, that's the second thing. And then there's a third thing which I think we, we're also becoming more Aware of is how can you even upsell at the point of sale. So for example, could you let people choose? You know, could, could you break down your 100 square feet by good, better, best? And so you Show a price 100 pounds a month for your, your good 100 square feet. That might be at the back of the, the back of the facility, but they can actually upgrade like they can upgrade on a, a flight, they can upgrade their seat. So you know, you could charge people an extra £30, £40 for the one right by the front door. So those are three areas that we're looking at and we're doing design work around. We are, I suppose, really, really, really focused on helping you grow revenue. So this is a really important thing for us and I think whenever we come out with it, it's going to. My aspiration is it's the best model for optimizing revenue in self storage. That's the goal. So we're not rushing it because we want to get it right, but we know how important it is and it is coming at some point. So where do we stand? It's on a roadmap. We know how important it is and we intend to pick off those three things as soon as we can. I can't give an exact timeline, but I'd expect us to have at least one of those addressed this year. Whether that happens or not has been over that. We're definitely really focused on helping you do that for auto. Increase pricing. It is possible. Sorry, increasing prices is possible in store. I do it in my sites. You can do it, but you have to. It takes a bit of time as sort of manual. So we are doing it. So sorry, a bit of a ramble there, but that's where we are on prices. I'm just going to mention Anthony, you also asked about the subject of emails. Are there plans to enable operators to send custom emails from Stora and Yes, there are. So we want to build that into Stora. At the moment you can do a bit of customization which I showed there for the move in day emails, but you're probably talking about expanding that out to something more general where you can email customers. We have. That is a relatively common request and something we are looking at. Again, it's on the roadmap. There are plans. Don't know when we'll have that, but there are plans to do that too.

Sorry Gavin, I'm gonna make you talk next because I can't answer this one. So is all business slow right now or is it just us?

Well, you know, we've got a lot of operators on the call here, so we might have other people who can contribute to this. My site, my first site. So I have two sites now. My first site in Northern Ireland, it's gone from 75% occupancy down to 60% occupancy in the past six months. So I have seen a significant drop off in occupancy. 60% still fine. You know, it's still going well, but that is a significant drop in revenue as well. So I'm seeing that would expect, I would hope, Q2. So April, May, June, we'll see, we'll see, you know, hopefully see things kind of come back. But I don't know, I'm not seeing signs of increased bookings myself from my sites here. But you know, if anybody else wants to comment, feel free on that and how they're getting on.

I was just going to say let me launch a very quick firepole here.

So Dana's just said quotes are picking up now across my sites. This is good. Oh, and Anthony said much more like a pre Covid year for us.

Okay.

Yeah, yeah, interesting.

That's 5050 at the moment. But I'll leave the poll running for a little bit having just realized it's only two votes so far. So next question. When we have limited variability on small units, is there a way to temporarily promote larger units at a discounted price for the first three months, as an example?

Okay, so I think this is connected to sort of dynamic pricing, the ability to automatically change prices based on availability, which is something that we are working on to do this exact thing. So if you wanted to promote larger units at discount prices for the first three months, then you can do that by creating a new discount code on Stora manually and attaching it to those unit types. So it is possible. It's going to take you five minutes to go and set up in the future our dynamic pricing model. What it should do, probably will do at the very least will be increase the price of the units where there's limited availability, which would be a similar way of achieving, I think what this question is trying to achieve.

Got you. Now, I believe we ticked off the move updates with Ewan and then the next one will be can we have move in move out weekly reporting, which I think Stephen probably ties in with what we're talking about having kind of reporting priority in the forum. So if this is one of them that can be added in.

Well, whoever asked that, I'd be interested. The report that Stephen showed it does show allocations on a weekly basis, monthly basis, daily basis. So you know, allocations are sort of the same as should be the same as move in, move outs apart from in some exceptional circumstances. So if that is not. If our report we've built isn't achieving that, isn't the answer to that question, then I'd be interested to know what additional we need to do to get that.

Okay, perfect one that I can jump in on as it relates back to marketing. So my Google Ads manager believes my story website has a lower success rate requiring a higher spend to see the desired results. What could be causing this? So this one I found very interesting. So from a technical standpoint, in terms of how Google is reviewing and crawling your website, whether that's for SEO or ppc, it should be even straight out of the box office on par if not higher than most self storage websites or just websites in general, you know, page loads quickly, it's mobile responsive elements are not banded around too close together. So it's got usability. So for all kind of Google's technical aspects, it should be ticking all the right boxes straight out the box. So if for whatever reason your Google Ads account is underperforming for your site, either you're not receiving the right amount of leads or or the leads that are being brought through aren't converting well enough. So maybe they're low quality leads. I would want to be taking a look more in lines with what Gavin mentioned about his top tips. Looking at the content that's actually being displayed from you at the start. So have you got too many call to actions, have you got the phone number blasted around and really you want them to be coming through the booking process and getting the contact details that way, you know, is the site visually appealing? I'd be having a look at what campaigns aren't running, aren't running well and thinking what could you do to add things and start running some experiments. The one thing that I think is a common mistake that people do is they'll push everything to their homepage regardless of what the person searched. So if they search for local storage, it's really simple in your storefront to create a new page that's specific for your local area. And you can say, you know, if you're looking for storage around X, then you know we're nearby to Y and Z, so we're the solution. So you can just create a separate page and have your Google Ad pointing to that one. So your homepage alone isn't necessarily the way to go. So Your account should allow you to run a lot of experiments, but from a technical point of view I would. Yeah, I'd be surprised. And I'd want to find out a bit more from your app manager what it is that they think the current setup's lacking because I would point it more towards the content that's being displayed. Hopefully that answers that one. I can see we just had a bunch of questions coming through, so what I'm going to do is bring the chat open, leaving the poll running for a little bit more. Well, it seems like the sentiment is broadly the same in terms of the kind of pre Covid occupancy and Ewan's.

Doing something right anyway. 95% occupancy. What are you doing? It's brilliant.

Do you want to answer that or not?

Oh, well, yes, any.

Now that we. Obviously we opened September 21st so was it 21? Yeah, September. The last few years have just been an absolute mashup, haven't they? You know, we, we only. I was well aware we came in, in good times and saw it really good but it's never really seemed to drop off. For example, yesterday, you know, four inquiries for, for small units. But you know, not just an inquiry, oh, what's the price? But no, I want one, you know, and we just haven't got. We just haven't got any. So there's another site here in the same town as well, they got 270, 280 containers down there. So they're a lot bigger than we are. You know, I wouldn't say we're cheap but you know, we're not cheap either. You know, I looked at another site the other day in another town, you know, they're doing a 20 foot container for 150amonth. You know, we're at 190 and that's only 15, 20 miles away. So we're not, we're not cheap.

So it's interesting you and it'd be. We might actually have the data somewhere but in our system. But I wonder whether container storage tends to be lower price per square foot than indoor storage and I wonder whether, you know, if there is kind of people are tighter with cash. Are they more inclined to go for the container storage than the indoor storage? It'll be interesting to know if container storage has maybe not seen. Whether indoor storage has seen more of a hit potentially. I don't know but it's just interesting to know that because that might be one of the factors too.

Yeah, we're hot on the. As soon as Customer makes an inquiry. We have the sort of know, 10, 15 minute rule of getting in contact. We, we use text message a lot. I, I saw. Was it David just mentioned then something about the, about the customer when they get the, the unit number? What, what we do is we send a text message the day before and it says, hi, you know Gavin, tomorrow's your move in day. This is your unit number, this is your site access code. You will also receive this information tomorrow via email. These are our site opening times, this is our address. We look forward to seeing you and you know, it's a simple thing, takes two minutes. I always send it out the day before, you know, text. We use text message a lot. Even for quotes as well. No, we've got a template. We send back. If we get a quote, you know, we can't get hold of the customer, we send them a text message. Yeah, the online chat as well. I don't know, do you guys, you know, we use an online chat on our website. That's something, you know, we've had great success from that as well.

Cool. So thanks Jim. That's helpful.

Right, just running through the final chat questions. I find a lot of drop offs when people go to book. Seems they don't want to enter the card details. I won't comment on the car details, but one thing I'll say, if you are seeing a lot of drop offs on your website, we have just launched the pop up feature and that's got kind of exit intent in there for you. So if you know that's completely free to add to your storefront, you can just plug that on and it's got tracking. So if it feels like the person's about to drop off your website, it could be that last ditch attempt to get the email address or phone number for you. Whatever they've kind of lacked that not allow them to commit, then there's, there's that kind of safety net that you could add onto your site and that's readily available now.

Josh, can I just add to that. Anthony's suggestion about letting people book without payment method is an interesting one. It is something we looked into last year whenever we were introducing direct debits from the storefront as well. And it is something we could do, relatively straightforward. It's just a question then of what the repercussions of doing that are for check in and things like that. But if it's something people are interested in, it's certainly something we could consider.

Perfect.

What about a bull on that? Would people like us to do that.

Let me very quickly end the last one and I can probably. I can tell you that five to four businesses has been a bit slow, so it's. It seems like a bit of a mixed bag. So.

So allowing people to reserve without the car details would basically mean, you know, they pick their move in date, what unit they want, which is what they already do, and just confirm it, really. And then you would have to. There'd be some manual step there on getting payment details at some point or potentially it's sent to them by email where they can, you know, kind of complete their payment flow. So is that something. Is that something that people would like or would people be interested in that or not? Because the results of the poll won't decide what we do because maybe it's something enough operators want anyway that it's worth doing. Certainly something to consider.

There we go. I'll leave that running for minutes and just jump back to the chat. It seems like there's a lot going on with the insurance policy changes, especially in relation to Mazar. I'm not sure if there's a direct question to be asked out of this one, but if there's something of kind.

Of relevance, maybe Anthony has a. Yeah.

Anthony, if you wanted to actually bring that up.

Well, on the insurance side of things. Yeah. So there's some changes going on on the regulation side for the underwriters and as a result, a number of big underwriters that previously have backed the industry have pulled out. So the likes of Basil Fry and the other brokers are having to find new underwritings and insurance is going to be packaged differently. So things are coming. And don't quote me on this because obviously I'm not a insurance like professional in it, so I can't be. Please don't hold me accountable for anything I say, but this is what we've started to be told, is that we're going to end up selling protection plans rather than insurance. We're going much more like the American model where you're sort of. You're not selling access to insurance but a protection plan. In essence, it's exactly the same for the customer. There's a bit of movement in terms of liability and one of the big changes is we won't be charging IPT going forward. All insurance plans or protection policies will have to incur vat. Basil Fry and the likes are working quite detailed at the moment with the SSA on this and it's likely to start rolling out when you come to renewal times in the next quarter. And onwards.

Beautiful.

Thanks, that's helpful. And I was going to say one little thing to add is we are in touch with most of the insurance companies to make sure that as this transition happens, we make all the necessary changes in your checkout flow and the right boxes are being ticked and the right documents are being given your customers. So we are trying to. Well, we are making sure that that transition is made as easy as possible if you're using Stora.

Cool. Last couple of questions David asked. Is there a plan to auto change a storage type from lead capture to bookable when one becomes available?

That's a good question. As part of our work around dynamic pricing, we will be looking at data around availability and so it would be a natural extension of that to flow that through to automatically managing availability on the website. There's a slight complication there because some operators would not want to show a unit if it's not available. But at the same time some operators would decide just sell it anyway because they might not be moving in for two weeks and I might have an empty one by then. So we've been a little bit hesitant to kind of get something out because there are quite a lot of variables in how different operators run their business. But we'll navigate that and work out a way and at some point that will be possible. It's an extension, no doubt, of our dynamic pricing work.

Cool. And then, Ewan, you've said, when would they pay? Which I believe is in relation to the reservations without card details. So looking at the poll, three of you said, yes, you would like reservations without requiring card details, whereas five of you said no. So it sounds like there's an appetite there. But I think the, the mainstay prefer the. The card taking options. So we need to ensure we were offering both options. If we were to have this in.

We'D have to look at you. And that's a good, interesting question. When would they pay? We'd have to work that out. You know, it might be, it might be that let them book and then they get emails to confirm, you know, here's your bookings confirmed, you know, and here's a link to go and, you know, set up the payment so, you know, so, you know, we can start charging their card. Maybe it's as simple as that. Or don't know. Stephen might have more thoughts, but that's certainly something we could, we can work on. As we look at this, it's worth, it's worth us having a look at it.

Can I add some data into this? Because it's saying that I did a bit of digging on with our two store sites that we've got and it's all. I was just looking at Google Analytics and I've done as much tracking there as I could. And the thing that caught me was that whilst we got a lot of people looking at the prices and then so it was in February for one client, 48 people clicked the button to book the unit, having seen the price, but then of those 14, only seven went on to fill in the actual booking form with the card details. And obviously at that point they've got all the information. The only thing I could genuinely think that is the reason that then stops them at that point. It's something that we're asking for that's going to send them, make them decide, oh, actually I don't want to do the booking now if they're happy with the price. I couldn't quite work out what it was and hence my thought process was, is it the fact that we're asking for car details and it might be that, you know, the operations where we have it in places, they're newcomers and people going, oh, I don't know this company yet, I like their prices, I do want to book it, but am I comfortable giving away my car details straight away versus starting a conversation and then doing that later on? And it was just, is there a way that we could get that reservation, get the booking in, you know, and then the card details be handled sort of later on, so therefore giving us a bit more of that pipeline coming in with the card details not being sort of mandatory really early on.

Yeah, thanks, Anthony. I think there's, there's so many variables there, so you'll always get drop off on it, you know, as people go through the website and it may be that we're asking for cards, it may be something else. You know, it would be interesting if we do add this option in.

Does.

That 42 number get to 10 or does it get to 5? Because it might be 42, you end up with 15, set up a move in date and book without payment details. But only five of them actually ever add their details, who knows? It's certainly something I'd love to explore because if it does mean higher conversion, we of course want to facilitate that and support that for our customers, obviously. So, yeah, interesting.

I think it's a good opportunity then to give the pop up another plug. So if you're finding that you are getting those drop offs, experiment with it for a period of time, see if people aren't committed to completing the full online reservation form, but they are happy to give you the email address or phone number and then just see what your overall conversion rates do for maybe a full calendar month and then maybe that will give a bit more insight into it. I realize the timing wise, we could probably wrap up in a second. We've got an unknown question coming through though. Yes, we will provide a session so the recording will come through shortly afterwards to everyone that's registered. And when will the new pricing options be available online?

Which, sorry, which pricing options is that referring to, do you think?

Unknown. If you're still around, if you could just give us a little more context on that one.

So I can make an assumption if what they mean is, you know, you can charge monthly and you can charge annually, for example, and at the moment you pick one charge, you pick one billing period. So monthly, for example, to be shown on your website, if somebody wants to pay annually, they'd have to do it, you know, directly with you over the phone or in person. And you do it in the back end of stora. So if this question is referring to when on the website, could I let people choose to pay monthly or annually, which I'm just going to assume that's what they're referring to there, because there is benefit to that too. You can push people into the annual payment by making it more attractive. I don't have an exact timeline, but again, that's another thing that we want to get into the storefront because it is a way of increasing your cash flow. If you can encourage people to pay annually or even quarterly in advance, it's a lot better sometimes because you can give a little bit of discount, but you get the cash up front. It's one of the roadmap.

Perfect. I think that's probably about time to wrap up. I'll just make sure there's nothing else has come through. Great. Well, like I say, we'll be sending the recording for the call coming through shortly, along with the registration for the Social in May. And we'll also put in some useful links as well for the new features that Stephen's run through. Kevin, I don't know if you had any final thoughts to wrap up on.

Not really, no. Thanks everybody for being here. We'd like to do more of these maybe every few months. Our next thing is going to be the store of Social, which is in about six weeks. It's not too far away, the one in Birmingham, so it'd be great to see you all there. We're going to have drinks and nibbles, and we'll be having a good time. We're going to do this podcast. There'll hopefully be a chance to just have fun together, and we'd love it if everybody can make it. But other than that, thanks for being here. And if you have any questions or comments or concerns about Stora or what we're doing or where we're going, then email me or Stephen or anybody and let us know.