Stora Live Discussion

Thanks everyone for coming. It's great to see everybody here. We just thought it'd be useful. I suppose the idea of this kind of came from Store is evolving quite quickly and changing and lots of new features. So initially we thought it was useful to have a call with some customers to sort of share some of the things that are changing over the past few months, maybe six, even nine months. And then we just thought, well, let's expand a little bit and talk a bit more about the future of where we're going to. So we've got an hour scheduled and let's just see how it goes and feel free to ask any questions. I'm going to. It's my first time ever sort of managing, trying to manage a webinar or a zoom thing. So raise your hand. I'll see if I can see the hand raise. I'll keep an eye on things. But at the end we're going to have an FAQ or question answer session. So if you've got questions, you can always keep them to the end. But feel free to raise your hand anytime other than that. So I think the plan is I'm just going to go through a few, like a few kind of tips. So I'm going to go through 10 top tips on using Stora, which are really just around some of the things that whenever I talk to customers, I find out that a lot of people don't know about. So I just thought I'd go through a few of those. I'm going to take no more than one minute on each point, so that won't take very long. It'll also give a bit of an insight into how Store works probably too. And then we're going to move over to Mark, who's our head of sales. He's going to make a special announcement and then we're going to flick over to Stephen and he's going to run through some of the plans for the future of Stora, what we're doing, what we're working on, and then we'll just move that into then a Q and A. And that'll be a chance for you to ask any questions or even if you have any ideas or feature requests or anything like that, then be great to hear them. Good chance to kind of discuss things like that too. So that is. That's the rough plan. So let's see how we get on. So we'll start with. I'm going to go through some top tips on Stora and I'm going to share my screen here just to Check in. Chat this to Mary. You're asked. This is recorded. Yes. So we will share the recording with all participants and yeah, so you can, you can always review it again later. Okay, so I'm going to share my screen. Let's see if I can just do that now. Where am I? Okay, okay, okay. So I'm just going to minimize this because I can see what I'm doing. So tip point number one, item number one is. So let me just try and time this so 60 seconds. Part of Stora, we use Stripe and part of that is a stripe billing function. So that means that every single Stora customer, if you're using Stora, you have access to absolutely tons of data and information in Stripe. So you go into your Stripe account, you land on the homepage, you can look at tons of stuff around sales, how you're doing month to date, how you've been doing over the last 12 months. But most interestingly, if you click on reports and go to billing, this is where the real, the real stuff is. This shows you some just incredible data. So around your monthly recurring revenue, how many active subscribers you've got, where the growth is coming from, you can scroll down, you can even see things like where are you getting, what are your most important products. You can look at retention, you can even look at a retention chart over time. So Here are my 31 customers who signed up last July. How many of them were left by month? 8. 52%. So it's really, really, really, really great data in here and I'd recommend everyone come and take a look at it and you'll get some really, really important information there. Number 2.2. So we added this new feature which allows you to. So on a site level, let's say you're on a site or you have multiple sites and one of them has a gate and you want people to come to a section to meet you, to meet your staff when they turn up. The other site might have some other specific requirements like make sure and go down this road where they're second on the left or something. You can now go into your site and edit, personalize the email content for your customers that they receive on the move in date. So you can go in here and type in any sort of message you might want your customers for that location to receive when they're moving in. So that's number two. Number three, most of you probably know this, but we've got the automated identity checks now in Stora, which allows you to just turn on the ability to take your Customers through kind of a formal ID check which does it takes a photograph of their government ID photograph their face, confirms the ID against databases and differs by country, but does a confirmation and then comes back and says yes or no, pass or fail. If you want to turn that on, that is done here and you simply turn on store, check in and turn on store identity. That's pretty simple. Number four, accounting automation. So this is something that we get asked a lot, especially as customers. More and more of our customers are, you know, existing facilities and they're maturing, the businesses are growing. How do I do my accounting? Last week we released a blog article and a help article with a step by step instructions for how to get your accounting down to less than 30 minutes every month. And I'm not going to try and cover this in under one minute because it is quite complicated. But I would recommend have a read of this to get it set up. I'd probably recommend getting an accountant to help you sort of just with the setup. Talk them through, talk you through that. If you have any general questions, just give me a shout. And we can always try and help out as well. But there is now a way to get your accounting right down to less than 30 minutes. Some point in the future we'll get that down to zero, but that's down the line. For now it's 30 minutes. Okay, number five, we have also recently released one off invoices. So you can go in and you can charge a customer just a one off invoice. So if you're charging a deposit or for a padlock or some boxes, simply go in. I just realized my computer shaking all over the place, you can click on this and you can create an invoice and charge them instantly against a payment method or it can send an email to them to, to take the payment. So that's number five. We can now, you can now charge one off, one off fees. Number six is I would always recommend you just take a look at whether your pricing is right. If you're, if you're finding out your places, your location is getting filled really quickly, that's great. That's a great sign that you've got demand. But there's probably, if that is happening, there's probably room to review your pricing. There might be room for you to increase your prices. So just take a look and make sure that just constantly review kind of where your prices are sitting versus competitors and just always take a look at that. And don't forget to look at your insurance pricing too because that's often around 10% of your revenue. So don't be afraid to look at this and think about increasing the prices there too, if you think it's appropriate and if you think you can, your business can handle that. Number seven then is something we get asked quite a bit, which is if you've got a customer who has an existing unit and they want to take a second unit, what's the best way to do that? And there actually are two ways to do that in store. One is if you want the customer to be charged on the same invoice. So often that's the case. The customer wants to add a second subscription to the same invoice. That's really simple. So we click on. Let's click on. This is just a demo account. So click on myself. If you want to have it all in the same invoice in the same subscription, you go to the subscription and you add an additional unit to it. So it's really, really simple. You can have it apply immediately on the next renewal or even backdated. So let's just preview that. I'm just going to add that. So that's going to add an extra charge to my invoice from today for that additional unit. That's one way to do it. And the nice thing with doing that is it keeps one invoice for your customer and it also tends to keep your payment processing fees a little bit lower because typically people are charged on a per. There's a per charge transaction. The second way to do it is if they want separate invoices. So it may be a business and they want two different invoices for different things. So in that case you can go to subscriptions, create a subscription manually inside Stora and you can really just pick an existing contact and add a new subscription against that customer. And that will have the effect of the same effect really, but it'll be two separate invoices. So that's how you, how we would the two ways to handle adding new units. If you're ever looking at that number eight is just looking at your storefront. So we'd always encourage people to take a look at your storefront which if you click on this, you can see. So this is just a demo account, but it's just kind of good practice to try and keep this clean very focused. Sometimes you might see quite a lot of capital letters or a lot of text here in this part of the page. It's always good to just think about it from a customer point of view and just try and Keep things clean, Stephen banging this into me for 10 years. But just keep things clean and make sure the user experience is really good. Don't try and get too much across here. Get the really, really important points across. And the same, you know, same here. So one of the other things, I think it's a. Yeah, same sort of point really is try and keep sort of. It's always better to have less unit types. So for example, in my facility, I have probably, you know, 47 square feet, 49 square feet, 51 square feet and 53 square feet. It's just the way it ends up being. And I just grouped them all together as 50s and if I had all of them, it'd be a massive list here. And I suppose the underlying point here is to try and make it really easy for your customers to make a decision. So the easier decision is for your customers, the more likely they are to make a decision, the more likely they are to go ahead and book. So just keep that in mind as well about your unit types, which is this list here. Okay, I've only two left. I'll have a third little bonus. So final three are if you want to add links into your header, that's another thing that's pretty, I think, pretty important. So you can add additional things up in your header bar here. You can add some to your footer. So it might be a blog, which is a great way obviously to increase your. Do well with your SEO. It might be a phone number. So here's a phone number here. It's pretty good to have that up in the header too. So it's really easy to do if you go to Online Store, store settings and I'm going to go here and you can add links to the header. So it's really simple. If you want to add a page, you can go and create a page. So that's a separate thing. But if you go to pages, you can add a new page here. But to add stuff to the header, simply add a link here and you can add. Let's add the phone number. So let's just make one up and then you can. So this would appear at the top. I think it's actually, if you do this, you follow that. Let's create that. If now we go back to the website and refresh that. Now you can see the phone number appears here. What that means is just if your customers are on this website, if you want people to phone you, you know, if there's any questions, it just highlights the number. If they're on their Mobile phone, they can just click on that and it will, it'll phone your, your actual number for you as well. So it makes their life easy. So that's tip number nine. Tip ten is price increases. So obviously, you know, it's a. It's a kind of an industry norm to review customers who've been with you for a while, review their prices and put through price increases to reflect the fact that your costs are also increasing. So there are ways to do that in store. We're going to have an automated way of doing it that's in the plan for this year, so you will be able to set rules and it'll automate it. But until, until that comes out, I would recommend everyone just think about price increases because we did our first ones back in October. What you have to do is just send an email to your customer a month in advance and then go in and change the price in storer.

It.

It might take a couple of minutes per customer, but we added over a thousand pounds to our top line. It's a thousand pounds straight to the profit, the bottom line of the business. So I'd recommend everyone take a look at that too and look at price increases. And final thing, if you don't already have them, don't forget to put in some customer reviews on your page. It's always a great thing. It's a helpful way to get people to convert. So you can go in here and add in some reviews and you can also just important. Another thing just to mention is that if you go into your homepage and scroll down to the review section, you can even add a link. Let me see, where is it? There we go. You can add a link which would be maybe you've got, you know, FIFO or whoever it might be, might have a page there. You can always link people out to that as well. So always a good way to help get more customers. So that was 10, 11, little kind of tips. I hope that some of them are useful and, you know, at the end of the day, it's all just about. What we're trying to do with all of our customers is help you to grow sales and automate as much as possible your business. So, you know, that's the point of most of those little things that I went through. But we're just constantly working more and Stephen will cover that in a bit. But that's me done. So I'll hand over now to Mark. So let me just stop sharing and I'll hand over to Mark now. Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Very much.

Morning all. Great to see so many of you on the call as well. As Gavin's already said, I'm head of sales at Store. I've been here about seven weeks but I've been in the self storage industry for close to three years and yeah, very excited to be doing the webinar today. So, yeah, the special announcement. So I'm very pleased to announce we're launching a self storage community. So that's going to be something that we'd all like you to join. I suppose the overarching goal with the community is just to give you a great way to help you grow your self storage business and yeah, why join? So I guess you're all going to have problems as operators you're going to need advice. So if you're struggling with anything, it's going to be a great place to share with fellow operators and ask advice and ask for help. Another reason is to upskill. So as I said, you're all in different positions probably in terms of how long you've been operating your business for. It's going to give you the chance to perhaps speak to people who are a little bit more experienced in the marketing side of things or the operational side of things. And it's just going to be a great place for you to come and ask questions and get some great advice, hopefully from people in loads of different areas of self storage. Along with that you're going to build and develop relationships with other operators and managers. And we're not just talking in the uk, we're talking about obviously globally. We're a global company where we've got customers in several other different countries now, which is exciting and everyone at different stages of the journey too. So yeah, we're excited. It's going to be a great place to share views and importantly, you can also get sneak peeks of what we're going to be launching new store features and share your insights as well into how you're using the product and just sharing tips with one another. It's all completely free and you can join right now by visiting Storer Co.

Community.

Which is obviously on the slide there as well. So please come and join it. Thank you very much. Next slide please. And another, another exciting announcement is we're planning a social event in London, so put the 26th of May in your calendar. It's going to be our first social event and really it's going to be an informal, you know, I guess, networking social event and we'll be discussing the future of self storage, will be launching More details in the next few weeks. But I think with this we'd really like you as well to put your ideas forward, ideally in the new community about what you think is I suppose, what you want to get out of the event if you've got any ideas. So please get involved in the discussion. And that's it really from me. But say great to be here and I'll hand you over to Stephen now who's going to tell you all about what the future will bring for Stora and the product.

Thank you.

Hello everyone. Good to see you all here today. So yeah, I'm going to be briefly talking about what's coming in the near future Restora, so I'll get started. So to start I'd like to talk a little bit about what we've been doing. So for the past year, since we launched, which was just in February last year, we've released a lot of things to the community already. So here's just a few of the things that we've launched in the last year. Some high level features that Gavin's already mentioned like one off invoices and automated identity checks. But so this is where we've been with a small team and now I'd like to show you where we're going we which is now a bigger team in Stora. So today you'll actually be able to see all of these things now live in your Stora account. So we've released these new features. The first one is Exporting Subscriptions that lets you go to your subscriptions view and export a CSV of everything that's in that current view that you've selected. You'll also then be able to export your subscriptions, invoices and contacts contextually. So you'll be able to export them based on what settings you have selected. The next thing here that we're launching is the Customer Source Customer type, use case and marketing source contact data fields. So this is more data you can manually add to your contacts when you edit them in store. So for now this is just in the back office, but in the future we'll expose that into the booking forms, optionally if you wish. And that will enable you to start capturing more data about customers and using that to inform the decisions you make going forward. Next we have this new mobile price summary in the bottom left. This is a way to really just give a better experience to customers on mobile. So before the price summary was below the form, now it'll be above the form and truncated down into a little nice price summary and this is a great way to kind of make sure they're aware of the price they're about to pay, but also not distract them too much from the actual booking form. And the last thing we have here in the bottom right is you can now edit your site via titles. So before this was being auto generated for you, but now you can customize that to whatever way you want. You just go to the site page, press edit, and you'll be able to pick a title from there. So next, before I get started on the feature features, I wanted to touch briefly on what it is we're trying to do at store and ultimately how we prioritize the features we develop. So what we want to do is we want you to help you earn more and focus on growth. That's because it's aligned with us and we want to see you succeed. So this is just worth keeping in mind whenever we decide what we're going to work on. This is what we're trying to think about at all times. So the first big new feature we're going to be releasing in the next month is billing periods. Billing periods is a new feature that lets you start charging your customers for periods other than one month. So today you can only charge for a month basis, but in, in the near future, you'll be able to set prices for different unit types, but on a weekly basis, four weekly basis, everything up to a year. And best of all, you can pick any of these you wish to be on your storefront as well. So on your storefront you'll be able to have say, four weekly pricing, but you could also still choose to display the price weekly, anything you want really. So you'll be able to find the combination that works best for you and that will give you more flexibility to sell to your customers. Next up, we have smart entry enhancements. So we already offer great providers like Noki and Barebox to you if you have those in your facility. But in future, we're going to launch new integrations and more automated tools to make your life easier. So we'll be launching a store Access API. And through that we'll be developing more integrations for tools such as PTI and PAX and some of the ones you see mentioned here. And more importantly, we'll be opening up those other tools to integrate with us. So that would be really any tool, in theory, could integrate into store, giving you all of the access options you could possibly want. As part of this work, we'll be introducing auto syncing. So we'll be removing the current syncing buttons from the system and I'll all just happen instantly when you save any change in storage so you don't never have to think about that ever again. And extra bonus from this work as well will be that we will introduce the option to turn on auto allocation. So that will mean when your customers book if you have this option turned on, they'll become automatically allocated to a unit that fits what they've booked. And an extension of that is auto deallocation, so when they've cancelled and moved out they'll be automatically removed. So you don't have to remember to do that. Next up is Storefront 2.0. So the storefront is obviously a big feature of Stora, and it's one that we have so many plans for that we haven't got to yet. We're excited to share with you today some of the things that we have in the pipeline. So there's going to be new ways to help you guide and convert your visitors to become customers. So you can see here on the right this is an example of a new updated site page. On this we're showing you how you'll be able to group your different unit types. You'll also be able to offer free perks, free what we call splash badges. So this is for example maybe saying that the unit is running out of stock, or there's a free welcome gift, just little nudges that help convince the customer that this is the right unit type for them. We'll also help you to capture contact details from people who just maybe aren't sure about what's the right unit size for them via email capture forms. And we'll notify you instantly to get in touch with those people. And lastly, we already integrate with Calcimate, and we'll offer you a way to better integrate through a custom flow that takes you from the home page to Calcimate, perhaps instead of this page if you choose. Or as well as just as another option, we'll also be giving you these new tools to increase your revenue. So this is very important to us and it's why we've been focused a lot in the billing periods work recently. So while billing periods will initially launch in the back office, in the future you will be able to optionally decide to offer these to your customers. That'll help you to collect rent up front for longer periods, and it'll also just generally give your customers more options to save money over time. If you wish to price that way, we'll also let you add extras on to bookings. Product sales is a big request that we've wanted to get to for a long time. So we'll help you sell the products that you have available such as boxes or padlocks during the booking process. And we'll also let you define what we're calling the moment upsell add ons. So these are things that you could define totally up to you how you do this. But for example, 24 hour access could be something you charge more for compared to like 9 to 5 access. Or you might want to offer a standard two month notice period and charge an extra fee for no notice period for customers. And it's not illustrated here, but we'll also be letting you place custom booking charges on bookings like cleaning fees and collect deposits in the booking flow. Next up we have the new and improved design options that will be coming. So this is just some of the customization that we'll be letting you have in future. So this will give you much more ways to make your brand stand out with Stora. And our goal is to make every single aspect of the visuals of Stora completely customizable. But we'll gradually over time be iterating in changes that let you do things like this. So that's the last thing I was going to show you today. If you want, you can visit our roadmap at this URL to find out more and vote on your favorite features. But more importantly today I would highly recommend you go to the community and you'll find posts already there about the product updates that went live today and future product updates coming too. So I'm going to hand back to Gavin, he's going to take you through the Q and A.

Okay, thanks very much Stephen. That was really the most interesting part of it all, I thought. Same as common, I suppose it's worth saying. Just about the community and the event is what we've kind of developed those because we have had quite a few customers sort of bring up the idea that we're all kind of with a lot of customers now dotted especially around the UK and increasingly now in other countries. But in the UK at the moment for sure, we're all dealing with kind of similar problems, similar issues and we're all sort of asking the same questions about how do I improve my conversions, how do I get more customers, what's the best way to take people through the website flow. And on top of that a lot of people are running maybe a business by themselves. So we have a lot of people who are operating themselves towards business and it's just them and it can be a bit lonely obviously for people. And so part of the idea of this was just to kind of help us all come together and hopefully share learnings and just all together kind of improve each other's businesses. You know, one of the nicest things about the self storage industry I've noticed from the very start was that everyone's there to help. Everyone is, you know, great at sharing information. Especially you know, like Dean Buddy for example, his podcast. He's brilliant at sharing information. It's so helpful to people who are getting into industry and I just thought, we all thought it would be a useful way to get people together and hopefully we can all learn and improve together as a result. So yeah, so Q and A session. So just so it'll be useful just if you have any questions, please feel free to either raise your hand or type them into the chat window and I will be keeping an eye on those. So whatever is. If you have any questions, feel free to do whatever you prefer. And let me just see where. Okay, here we go. So we have a question from Carl Walker. Will there be an option to have a splash message front and center? That is reviews? I want more BLAM on the homepage. Not sure what BLAM stands for. Stephen, can you answer that?

It's not currently in our plans, but what is in our plans is to let you customize the homepage more, move the sections around, provide maybe more visual interest in the reviews and provide more reviews. So we'll definitely be doing things to help you get, get your reviews more front and center.

Will there be an option for same day move in? So that, that's a good question, Carl, there. So at, at the moment you can, in the, in the store settings, you can on, on a per site level, you can set when you want people to. When you want to allow your customers to book and you can actually set it so that customers can book on the same day at the moment. So you can, you can take same day bookings on the website. You can allow people to book for the same day on, on your store store website already. And so you can do that. The. I suppose the. There's another part of, to that answer really which is one of the reasons that we by default have that sort of turned off so you have to go in and turn it on is that we don't have this auto allocation. So one of the risks there is, let's say if somebody comes to your website at 10 o' clock at night and you're open till 11, they come at 10 o' clock at night and they book for the same day expecting to be able to move in right away. But you might be at 10 o' clock at night if you're me with three young kids in bed asleep at that stage, probably not going to be able to handle kind of the manual, you know, manually allocating a unit to that person. So that's why we by default have it turned off with the auto allocation feature that Stephen already mentioned. It actually will facilitate that a lot better. So you know, turning on same day bookings, although you can do it already, it would actually mean that even if somebody did book at 10 o' clock at night, they could be auto allocated that unit and as long as you have a smart entry system in place, it'll send them the code and let them move in. So that means if somebody drives up to your unit at 10 o' clock at night, books on the, on the phone, they could just move in straight away. So that will be possible. So I think, Carl, I think what you mean there, Carl, is he says done. So I presume you've actually turned that already so people can book same day. So that's good. So we have a question then from Jonathan. Is it possible for discount only to be applied to the room rate as opposed to the room and insurance price? So great question and that's something we've been asked quite a bit. So by at the moment the answer to that is no. And that is purely down to an early decision of how we built the sort of built some of the billing stuff. However I don't have exact timing but in a lot of the payments work we're working on at the moment, we will be decoupling insurance from room rate and that will mean that by default you will not be passing on your insurance discount to customers on the storefront. So. So the short answer there is Jonathan, at the moment the answer is no, but soon that will not be the case. Jonathan, when has asked when will the automated feature for price increases be released? And so if I try and answer that I'll get in a lot of trouble. So I don't know if Stephen, if you have anything to add, feel free to unmute and, and jump in here, which it looks like you want to do. So I'll let you answer that if you.

Yeah, I suppose we desperately want to get automated price rises in there. It's something that's really, really important to us. But the thing we find when we come around to trying to prioritize it we feel like there's so much extra value we could give you that it's not possible to do today like selling add ons and letting customers pick billing periods that that provides you with new value. And while it's a little bit of a pain today to go in and manually update prices for customers and email them, you can still do it. And I suppose we will definitely get to it and it will become a priority in the next few months. But it's just something where we feel like we can give you so much more unique new value that you couldn't do possibly today. So that's why I suppose not we don't have exact date for it as yet.

That's a good, that's a good point. Actually we could probably, we could probably do it for releasing a blog article or a help article. Just explaining at the moment here is the, here is, here's the sort of step by step instructions for doing a price increase because it really isn't that complex once you know how it's three or four steps and you do it on a per customer level. So if you've got 50 customers it might, yeah it might take you a couple hours to do it but that is great, great way to increase your revenue. So maybe let's do that to help people understand how to do it or make it easier for people to do it.

Now what we will be releasing next month is a way to make it easier to change the price for customers than it currently is today. So it'll just be a matter of typing in a price and hit and save and the price will change so that will become even easier.

Yeah. Yeah, good question Jonathan. It's an important one that I wanted to. But for my own self storage facility. But yeah, it's just something. We're just taking care of it the way Stephen mentioned for now. So we have a question in from John and it's. I seem to have too many options on my price sizes because I have different prices for the ground floor as I do for the first floor. Very common issue. So will there be an option to go into one size category and then choose from the first floor or ground floor at different prices? Yeah. So that again that's something that, that comes up a bit. And Stephen, you kind of touched a little bit on this but. Or like different categories. But we haven't. You didn't talk about that specifically. That is something that we, we talk about but. Any comment on that?

Yes, we would refer to this as unit type variations and I suppose the prospect of Charging differently for variations of units. There's something over the next few months we want to talk to our customers about to understand better I suppose there's different amp cell add ons and the different variations that they charge more for. We want to learn before we commit to how we handle it but it is something we will be facilitating one way or another. You will build we'll be able to do it this year. So you'll be able to pick a 50 square foot and then say I want the ground floor, the first floor and maybe it's plus £10amonth for ground floor for example.

Yeah and my second facility so as sure a lot of you know we also run a self storage business. We've opened our second facility back in November here in Northern Ireland and it has two floors so we also have the same same problem. We're trying to. We're also trying to deal with this too so I understand the the point of that question. So question from Mary Stripe raises an invoice and takes payment with the of the move in. It means we cannot send the welcome details codes until we know the payment is cleared. Can we take payment the day before a move in? So I suppose the quick answer to that is that well at the moment no, we don't do the payment the day before. The welcome email There is an automated welcome email that is sent out the night before they're moving by Stora. I think it's the night before. I don't know the exact time that it's sent and that would typically include a code to move in if you're using a smart entry system like Bearbox or Noki. If the payment fails our system will deactivate that access code so they wouldn't be able to move in. So but I can't recall now Mary whether you're using that or not so I can see so at the moment you cannot do a payment the day before so. Yes. Well you just have to unless you're using smart entry you'd have to just manually keep an eye on if the payment has not cleared whether you know whether they should get in or not. It's not a great answer Stephen, anything to add to that?

Well we want to I suppose make it easier so at the very least we'll email notify you when the payment feels so you can instantly make a decision on that.

Yeah Carl has asked can we have an option to search display leads by unit size. So if you've got a list of people within the 25 square foot you'd like to be able to see who's registered for that. So you can get in touch personally by clicking through each lead. That seems like a nice idea, something we can add to our discussions on the product. So that's probably something we could do that's taking your leads and be able to sort them by what size you're interested in. Good point. Alad has asked what's one thing you've learned from running Stora that has helped you with your self storage business. Hmm, tough one, Alad. Oh, I don't know, it's hard to pick one thing. I don't know. I suppose I could end myself storage three years ago and just been constant, constant learning of all sorts of stuff. I can't pick one thing. I'll have to come back to that one. Alex, Sorry. Oh, Mary said you're not using Smart entry, so to go back to your invoice, same invoice issue. So there actually I'm just thinking there might be something you could do in that if you wanted like a manual step. Let me come back to you Mary, on the invoicing thing. I might have something you could do there. Jonathan has asked can we see some aggregated analytics on sales and demand? So I presume, Jonathan, what you're talking about there is aggregating all of our customers data together and then showing it back to you to sort of show you how the industry in general is going. Yes. So yeah, that is something that I think is really going to step change how useful Stora is to all of our customers in future because really one of the things that we have unique access to is the level of demand, the level of interest from looking at happens on your website, the level of interest in your, in self storage, your facility and in unit types as well. And so I think there's a big step change and how useful storage is going to be in the future once we're able to say to you, by the way, you know, the past today seems to be a really busy day in soft storage. We've had a lot more bookings versus the normal day. You know, maybe we can say something about your data that looks like you haven't done that many bookings. You want to like check your prices or you can look back and you can say, or you can even look at. Here is what you know, here's the average price of a 20 foot container or a 75 square foot unit across the UK. Here's the average price across our 500 facilities that we're working with and it looks as if you're 23% cheaper than average and on a 50 mile radius you appear to be 40% cheaper so you know there's room for you to increase your price and still probably not have it affect your sales. So Jonathan, yes, you will be able to see that that's something we're really, really interested in and we are working on the future. I imagine the way it'll happen is there'll be some level of data that we'll make available and then there'll be an opt in where if you opt in then we can use your data to all anonymized of course, but then to provide even more data. So we're working on how that works but absolutely that is coming down the line. We may in the next few months get around to publishing some of that data just you know, in general for our customers. So it won't be kind of live but you know, we could publish some data to help, you know, just help you see what kind of what's going on across the uk. So that's something hopefully I can get something out soon, soon enough, but certainly long term. That's a really, really big differentiator I think for, for where stores looking to go. John has asked just roughly what percentage would you say are booking online without contacting you? So for our facility, my own store stuff facility, it's around 50%. So it's around half of our customers don't contact us. The other half will call with some sort of a question and then we'll either try and get the booking on the phone or they'll go and book online. We don't meet any of our customers anymore at all. So for the first year I met lots of them and, and we'd kind of meet them for move ins and ask them questions and stuff but we've just found that there's really no need for that. So we don't meet anybody. So with 50% I know there are some customers using Stora who would say it's about 10% and we have some who've said it's about 70%. So I think there's a range there and it probably depends on maybe like how you're showing your prices, your actual prices, your competitive environment in the location that you're at. There's not a lot of factors that can affect whether people call you or not. But IC50, we've a customer or two that have said 70 with some say a lot lower. Ewan has asked can a calendar feature be added onto store this way we can input move ins, move outs vanha into one system. This would be handy for the day to day operations regarding the changeover of staff, et cetera. So I think there's a feature that we've been having some early discussions about which is linked to kind of a task, a task list which would allow you to set reminders and certain things to do on certain days or certain times. We were actually discussing this yesterday, which I think possibly could be what you're looking for here. So that's something that is in the roadmap, which would allow you to kind of do a lot of stuff. Is there anything you would add to that, Stephen?

I would just say that a calendar in the traditional calendar sense I would imagine won't exist in store anytime soon. And that's quite a huge feature and it's not something that really helped. I suppose again, it comes back to why we prioritize stuff. We want to help you earn more money and to grow faster. And so if that falls in for enough customers that the need for that, then we would consider a feature like that. But it sounds like perhaps using that feature it just makes your life a little bit easier. And unless it's making lives easier for everybody and making it easier for everybody to earn money, it's probably not something we would prioritize in our roadmap is the most honest thing I can tell you about that.

Yeah. But hopefully we can find, hopefully there's a solution, one of our features that would hopefully help you and achieve what he's trying to achieve there, I would hope. Michael has asked, is there a difference from a legal point of view between a customer agreeing to the terms and conditions or signing electronically a lease contract? So I think that's a really, really interesting question and I think it depends who you talk to. I have spoken to our own legal advisors and I know that some larger operators have also spoken to their own legal team or external legal advisors and they have been advised that you do not require both. There are other people who would say that you do require both. So. So I don't have definitive legal advice to say one way or another with Stora, what we've done is create you, let you do both or one or neither. It's up to you to decide. We facilitate both. I would expect in the next year or two with store stuff, my own facility business, we will probably get rid of contracts, but I'm not going to do that until I get kind of confirmed legal advice to say that it covers all eventualities. So. So that's an ambiguous answer because I don't want to be liable for something there. But yeah, you get my point. Joshua, Great webinar. Thank you, Josh, thanks very much. Are you planning on running more of these in the future? Well, that's a good question. Yes, we are. Thank you. Carl has asked stripe fees are expensive. Are you any further along with arranging a better fee? As you mentioned at Dean Bootiam's podcast, yes, we are. So we're going to be probably changing the way we work with Stripe over the next three to six months. Something in that timeline, hopefully. And Stephen, I can see a little smile on Steven's face because he doesn't like when I mention times because we haven't decided yet. But what we're doing at the moment is we've gone from this time last year, you know, turning over like five to ten thousand pounds a month through Stora with Stripe to now, you know, close to a quarter of a million. We're probably doing about a million a month by the end of the year at least. And that's all of our customers put together. So the way we're structured at the moment, we can't go and negotiate that million pounds a month with Stripe. So we're going to make a change which will turn that around. So we are already talking to Stripe and negotiating on fees and we think there may be quite a big movement on what we can do with card payment fees in the future. So I would hope that we might even be able to get them down to around 1 or even maybe below 1% plus a much lower fixed fee. That's the early indications I have, but we're still in that negotiation. Can Mark help me to buy my units for less from Janice?

Yeah, I saw and it made me laugh. I'm not sure how much clout I have at Janus anymore, but I'll make a call for you, Jonathan, but not making any promises for sure and then be good quality.

It's worth it, isn't it?

Yes.

It get repaid for.

Yeah. I will say we're opening a third facility shortly too. And I've had Janice and Noki in my first two facilities and it has been great. And on the third facility the plan is to go for the same. But yeah, I don't know, just a bit of plug for Janice there for no particular reason, but I've been very impressed by them. Nick has a question. Any advice or a blog to help with SEO, creating backlinks, etc. Could Stora create links between users from different areas? Obviously or the community Stora Co etc. So there is some. We do have a blog article actually which was written by. By one of our. There's a contact who does a bit of marketing and self storage. Ben from Storist. He there's a blog article on our site which is kind of. He talks through sort of four or five big things to get done to really help you with SEO and that's a really, really good article and kind of exactly the things I did with my own facility business before it opened and we were number one in the local area for the site before it even opened against a 20 year old competitor. So check that out. That's in the blog. There's a blog article in our blog on the website. I think it's. If you search for digital marketing in the blog you'll find that there's more we can do though I think Stephen, one thing I would really recommend doing is set up a blog on your website. If you're using store for your homepage it's really simple. We have another. We have an article explaining how to set up a blog. So it set up a blog. Nobody really wants to read blog articles from a self storage business. It's not that exciting let's be honest. But just having some articles up there mean that Google finds you which does help. So I would really recommend doing that. It's a half hour job and write a new one every month until you're number one in your local area. Steven's right now she would add to that.

I would just say I'll take note of that. And we're always interested in hearing what type of content you'd like us to produce because our blog and learning materials is very important to us and we want to help get that out to our customers so we can write that. I would also recommend in new community if you go there there's a section for asking questions like this and I will definitely reply to a topic like that. And I'm sure you'll find maybe hopefully some of the other people join the community with more marketing insight might be able to help too.

Yeah. And then Jack has asked what's the best way for people to request suggest features on the new community. Stephen, what would be the best way to do that?

There is a what's called a space which is just basically like a form called product requests. So that's exactly what that's designed for. So if you go there just type in what's on your mind that will come straight to us. We'll all see it. And that would be the best way.

Okay. Okay. Well, does anybody else. Does anyone else have any final questions? We still have some time. If anyone has anything you'd like to ask about, anything that we can do to improve things or anything that you need from Stora, anything you'd like from us beyond what we've talked about, you know, we're really, really just here to help and from a product point of view and everything, so just keen to help any way we can. So if there's anything you'd like to ask, if you'd prefer just to drop me an email or anything, just feel free to do that too. So my email is gavinstore.co. feel free to email me anytime you like or Mark or Stephen or any of our team. Feel free to do that. You know, we're always very happy to help and share learnings and hopefully all of us, you know, we're operators too. We can learn together and, you know, all do better.

I think. Can I just add, Gavin, that it'd be useful if you. If you're happy doing a poll that we choose, maybe when everyone would like the frequency of these webinars. If it's something we do quarterly or monthly or six. Monthly, maybe. Be good to get a vote on that, either through the chat, I guess, or through.

A poll.

If you can do one. Gavin, I don't know.

I'm putting one together right now for you for the first time in my life.

Let's give it a go.

Okay, let me see if I can do this, then pools. Okay. Can I. Can everyone see that?

Yeah.

No answers. No answers on the last one yet. There's better be a couple coming.

It's just saying host and panelists can't vote, so it's only going to be attendees, other attendees.

Okay.

So it looks like there's kind of reasonable interest in doing the monthly.

And.

Equally interesting every quarter. So I think, you know, it's not. One of the things I think we'd like to do is just to help foster a community together. And we'll probably set this up next time so we'll do this differently so people can talk a little bit more because we're just still trying to learn how to use this all like the webinar zoom stuff. But I think we should take away from this that we can do them a bit more regularly and specifically for our existing customers. I think it might be useful just to share some of the stuff we're working on and what's come out recently. So I think that's really good feedback John has asked. There's a couple more questions to go back to. John has asked how much does it cost for the calcimate subscription per month? Why don't I let Josh answer that? Yeah, thanks John. Perhaps we can have a conversation afterwards. But it depends on the number of facilities you have. But pricing we have a free option and then otherwise for the kind of bells and whistles it starts at 22 pounds a month. No contracts or kind of lock in setup fees. So yeah, feel free to reach out to me afterwards if you want to kind of learn more about Calculmate. But yeah, either free or 22 pounds a month is the, is the quick answer. Thanks, Josh. Michael has asked are we adding more photos for the library for images for the website? So yeah, I think that's actually something. We've been talking this Stephen for a long time. You, you know, creating our own images, self storage images that you can, you can use. You know, just even images of, you know, units and shipping containers and graphics that anyone can use. So that's something we, we should get done so that anyone can use them. So we already have a library but yeah, we should, we should get that onto the list of things to get done over the next few months. Steven, professional photos that anyone can use. Thanks, Michael. Carl has asked will you get us a store or group discount at a nice hotel in May? We are actually looking into that. So we're still trying to work out whether we start it in the afternoon and have a couple of talks and do it that way and sort of like a mini two or three hour conference and then a few drinks and dinner or maybe just drink some dinner. We're still trying to work this out so we'll probably start discussing this stuff in the, in the community online to get your feedback on that. And yeah, we'll see if we can get some, some sort of a discount that'll tell us and we'll share all that information. Ewan has asked about limited availability becoming available. Yes, that's, that's a feature that Stephen covered and yeah, that's something we're going to, it's coming soon. You'll be able to at a unit type level say, you know, limited availability and just little nudges if it might help you to drive conversions online. Okay. Well I think unless there's anything else, feel free to ask if there's any. Jonathan's asked how many store customers do it do you have now? So this time last year it was, I think it was one or maybe two now it's around 40 and I think maybe maybe 45, something like that. And six or seven of those are outside the UK and so. And every one of them is in a separate country. So we've. I think we've got four or five EU countries. Australia. Yeah, I think that's it. Australia and then four or five EU countries and quite a few more coming on. So, yeah, we're all sort of. I suppose as a community, we hope Store can continue to grow and you know, the bigger it gets, the more we can all help each other too, which is great. So, yeah, Mary's mentioned. Good to look at other websites, people using Store. Yes, there's lots of. That's another thing. Maybe one of the. Maybe the next time we do this, maybe one or two of you, your customers could come on and just talk about your experience of it or some of the things you found useful. You know, we've done all the talking on this one and it would be great to, you know, to have some of our customers doing the talking too because, you know, we're all. We can learn. I learn from that too.

Mary, maybe it'd be a good idea if you're up for. You could start a community topic about that. Just share your Store website and maybe. I'm sure a few of the other guys will happily jump on and talk through their own and some of the share their links and share what they're doing.

Good idea. So next steps, we'll be in touch very soon then to get a second one lined up. We'll probably do that in the next. Either next month or maybe in six weeks or something like that. And yeah, thank you so much everybody for coming along and making this so useful. Really appreciate it.