The Future of Self Storage: Auctions, Automation and More With iBidOnStorage

Hello and welcome to our latest podcast episode. I've got Grant Daniels in the podcast studio here in Belfast. Welcome, Grant.

Hi, Gavin, thanks for having me.

First question, Grant, what on earth are you doing in Belfast?

Well, a long story. You'll hear some of it now. But I'm actually developing a new self storage facility in Belfast. Totally automated, completely different to what we currently doing. And we have some physical sites in South Africa which I'll tell you about too. But basically, yeah, we're setting up a new site, totally automated. We'll see how it goes. Great.

Well, yeah, thanks for coming in, Grant. So great to have you here. So I think, yeah, if we talk. So Grant, you also maybe you could do a little bit of introduction to yourself.

Sure.

Because you have a few things you're working on in self storage, so it'll be great to hear.

So life started out very differently actually. I'm a chartered accountant. I spent 10 years in London as in private equity and corporate finance. And it's the, those huge London bonuses everybody talks about, I never seem to get those. So I felt that it was time to sort of maybe head back into, or go into the family business, which was self storage. My dad set up his first site in the mid-90s, actually I think he was one of the first five storage facilities in South Africa. So it sort of felt right to sort of try to grow those businesses that he had set up. And they were really nice, sizable facilities that had low hanging fruit, easy to easy to increase the profitability and the revenue and hopefully some of the skills I'd learned from my accounting background. I could, you know, help my dad improve the bottom line. And then as time went by I, yeah, I sort of manage, I now manage them. We have four sites in South Africa. I manage the one really large site, our largest one, and then with my cousin, he manages the, the other two sites and, and from there, you know, the sort of, in terms of operating it, we came across some of the sort of pitfalls or you know, risks that we thought were quite risky and how, and we looked at ways to try and improve those to, to sort of make the business less risky and more profitable.

And that probably contributed towards the auction.

Exactly. And so one of the, one of the things we came up against, well, that all storage operators have to deal with is how do you deal with bad debt and the, and abandoned storage units? You know, those units aren't earning you any revenue and they, they're very risky because you know, these are people's personal possessions that you, you know you need to be very careful because you know there's a reputational risk there. Also you obviously want to cover recover as much debt as possible and you obviously want to get your unit back as quickly as possible. And at the time what we were doing was we were bringing in, you know, basically one person who would look at the units and assess it and either say I'll take all those goods for free or you know, I'll offer you an amount of money for them. So there was no market value discussion or attempt at trying to get market value for them. Also it took a lot longer to clear those units. So in terms of clearing units was taking a long time and we weren't able to prove market value. So for us I saw there was an obvious risk there. So I tried to understand what the mature markets are doing in places like Australia and the us. And what they were doing was they had these online auctions and I think 80 to 90% of the markets of the self storage industry in those countries were doing these online auctions. So from there we ended, they were already doing it in Australia. We con, I contacted the guys, some guys in Australia, the ion storage guys in Australia. So we said let's give it a go in South Africa. And straight away for us we went from recovering around 10% on the debt to over 60% on debt at our facility. So it really made a huge difference. And as I say we could then prove the market value what, what the market value that we tried to get the best possible price and as close to market value as possible. So that's really how it all started. And from south doing it in South Africa it grew really quickly. We got the biggest brands in South Africa on board really nice and quickly as well. And then we took IT to the UK and in 2020 we started IBIT on Storage UK. And since then we've got over 140 brands in the UK. We've got 14 of the largest 20 brands in the UK. We've Got somewhere between 500 and 600 facilities all using Ibadan storage in the UK. And then a year later we went to Europe and we now have over 50 brands in Europe. We've got some of the very largest brands in Europe. I won't mention who they are, some of them want to stay quiet. But it's working really well and, and operators are now able to clear units within 72 hours of the auction closing. We, we process the payment as the auction closes and then we transfer the money to the operators within five days of the Auction closing as well. So it's made the process much easier and it's de. Risked the process for all storage operators and everybody has this problem in storage.

So it's like an online storage wars, is that. That's basically what it is, yeah. You've got a lot of people bidding on somebody's unit.

Yeah, some of the contents. Exactly.

So we've abandoned unit.

Yeah, absolutely. So we've got 20,000 storage, sorry, registered bidders in. In the. Well, just under 20,000. 18,000 in the UK and we've got about 4,000 in Europe. And it becomes a bidding war and we. Our average price across the UK is around £250.

Okay.

And in Europe it's around €200. Sweden's actually our best market, surprisingly. There must be a lot of storage.

Wars going on the TV there.

We do about €300 average price in Sweden. We've had some really amazing results.

So if you're a bidder. So if you're an operator, that's probably more relevant to our listeners. But if you're an operator, somebody disappears. You take it through the whole sort of eviction process and that comes to an end. You're left with somebody's stuff. What do you take a few pictures or how does it work?

Yeah.

So.

So either you can get a professional inventory done of the unit and our recommendation is always to do as thorough and detailed inventory as you can.

Okay.

Or you can do and which is our most cost effective way is to get your own staff to photograph the units and draft up a. And a detailed inventory. And then you list the, the photographs and the inventory on our platform, which takes literally 60 seconds. And. And then your. The auction's live and you run the auction for seven to 10 days. Some do it for. For 14 days. If your, if your facility is really full, you can do it for. We've got enough bidders on the website now that, you know, we're getting 90% success rate across the board. So yeah, once the auction closes, we'll process the payment for the bidder, we'll email the storage operator the name of the name and phone number of the winning bidder and the bidder will receive the same. They'll get the contact number for the storage facility and it's up to both parties then to ARR collection and it has to be done within 72 hours. And then within 72 hours your unit's clear. If they leave anything behind, there's a cleaning deposit that's charged. So they'll use the cleaning deposit. So you know, probably 95% of the time the goods are cleared and on the very rare occasion when they're not cleared, well, you get to keep the cleaning deposit to ensure that you've got enough money to clear that unit or, and you set the cleaning deposit yourself. So most operators will set it at say 100 pounds or 100 Euros and then you, after that or you can, you can, as I was saying, you can actually make it a lot higher if you want to. You know, if you've got something in there that's expensive to clear, you can make that, you know, £500 or a thousand. We've actually got a unit up at the moment with really heavy marble inside it and that's a thousand pounds on a cleaning deposit.

Okay. Yeah. So if you're a bidder, so I'm just thinking of like, is this a good way to make money? You can go online, you see the pictures, you see an inventory. Yes. So it might just say fridge or whatever and you know, all this stuff and then you, you put a bid on. Have you any, have you any stories of somebody, you know, getting, you know, opening up a unit and $10 million of cash sitting there on a pallet? Have any interesting stories of people getting stuff for really good value?

I know they're out there. Bidders also don't really want those interesting stories to get out there because they're trying to, you know, keep more people off the platform. But we, there are a lot of stories of, you know, high end watches being sold. So, and you know, there's always antique goods. But I, I, I'm not a person that I, I, I don't understand what, what is really valuable and, and what is not. So I'm not the expert on what the, where the huge value is there. But there have been a lot of stories of, there's always the, the high end branded goods, you know, handbags and all sorts of various interesting things on there. So we've sold units for 10,000 plus pounds.

Wow.

But, so there's been, there is value and, but yeah, so okay, so if.

You'Re an operator listening to this and you have this issue where you have lots of empty units coming up, you can check out IBIT on storage. What's the word?

Ibadstorage.co.uk okay. In the UK and in Europe it's ibadonstorage EU.

Okay, okay, brilliant. Okay, so let's go back to the South Africa self storage business. So you've, is it four sites you said there in South Africa? Three sites we have. It's, it's.

There are four sites but there's two sites at one location.

Okay.

And then we've got two sites, so another two sites about 60 kilometers away in a little town called Somerset West. And then we're building a brand new site in a holiday town. Actually it's one of the fastest growing towns in South Africa in Amanus. So we're building a brand new site there. So that'll be our fifth site in South Africa. And yeah, so we hope to have a TH000 units at that site. It's a nice big one.

Oh wow. Right.

About 10,000 square meters of land.

Okay. Okay. And so the, then, so the three that you have three that three plus four, three plus one that are open at the moment. And what are the sizes of them? What different sizes have you got? How many units?

We have about a thousand units at our site in Cape Town. That's the sort of one plus one site. So it's one single, it's one location with two sites on it.

Okay.

And then we have about 600 units in Somerset west and about 200 units in a little holiday resort in town called Gordon's Bay.

And then. So then they have a thousand more units opening up soon. And then in Belfast. How many units are you opening up here?

200 units in Belfast. Okay. With.

Okay. And so the, so my understanding is the, the Belfast site plan is running it relatively remotely. How do you run the businesses in South Africa? Do you have, are they staffed? How do you. Yeah, what sort of sites are they? So it.

In South Africa, it's, it's. We see it as a slightly different model. Whereas you know, labor in South Africa is really quite inexpensive. So our sites in South Africa are. I wouldn't say they're labor intensive. We have maybe five guys. Five guys for a thousand units doesn't sound like a labor intensive business. So five guys in Cape Town. And then we have a similar. And then five guys I'd say in Somerset west and, and only two guys in, in Gordon's Bay. So I've spent a lot more time in Cape Town. So for me I'm very hands on. I can be there whenever I want to. I spend sort of half the week working going through to the sites, physically inspecting it, you know, making sure everything's running as it should. And then most of my actual time is spent on ibit, on storage. But in terms of I can physically be there whenever I want to. And they're mature site. So there's. It's not a lot of, you know, hard work going into, you know, making sure that we're getting new clients. And you know, all our sites are operating at about 95% occupancy.

Wow.

And. But you know, once you've been going for 25 years, we've got a lot, a lot of customers that have been there for, you know, five plus years.

Yeah.

So it's, it's actually a very easy business to run. It made sense to now start adding on new locations.

Okay. Okay. And so in, in South Africa, like how do you, you're in Cape Town, you're, you're moving house. How do you, how do you reach people? Like, how do you start? Like, how do you market the business to people there?

So we, we market well. We make sure we are signage on the buildings is really good. You know, I think a lot of people overlook that and everyone speaks about my next step that I'm. That we do. But you know, for us, you know, make sure that your signage is excellent. It's well lit up at night and hopefully in an area where there's a lot of passing traffic. And then your signage will bring customers to you as well. And then the obvious other method is Google Ads. So we spend. We have a Google Ads campaign manager sort of third party that we use Kerry at Storagebox Marketing actually, and she helps us in South Africa and she's going to be helping us in Belfast. And then. Yeah, so, so yeah, so I'd go, I'd say it's Google Ads is the main thing. We used to use Facebook, but we, we found it was good building the brand but wasn't really bringing in any, any new customers.

Okay. Okay, cool. So then Belfast. What, what on earth. Because I remember you told me this a couple of years ago when we first met.

Yeah.

That you'd bought a site in Belfast and I kind of thought you were joking. So what, what brought you to getting a site here in Belfast?

So I knew I wanted to expand the sort of our storage portfolio. And having lived in London for 10 years, I felt I understood the market here very well. And I should also probably add being South African, as a South African, we're always looking to diversify a property portfolio, if that's your game, you know, overseas, you know, South Africa. We. There's a number of political risks. There's also currency risk in South Africa. So we felt that it make logical sense to expand offshore if we could afford it. So we were limited by the cost of. And the capital expansion of a storage facility. So we looked at area and we also, we knew that we needed to be a certain size to have a profitable storage operation. Yeah. So after spending about two years once I got moved back to South Africa permanently after we spent about two years looking for the ideal site which needed to be a certain size and looking at a certain population in a, you know, in a town or a city. And we looked at various town, large towns in the UK and eventually we fell on Belfast being, you know, a sizable population. I think there's 600,000 plus in the wider Belfast and there's not a lot of storage here.

Yeah.

And the land and buildings were a lot cheaper than, than mainland uk so we could afford to buy something substantial enough to convert to storage in a, in a highly urbanized area. So yeah, we took the plunge in, I think it was 2018. And it also, one of the great things about the building we purchased, it had a, it had a tenant. It was tenanted, earning a great yield for five years, which gave us the opportunity to try and pay back some of the loan that we took out.

Okay.

And, and that lease has just come to an end now at the beginning of this year and we're now converting. So we're converting half of the building to about 20,000 square foot of storage space. And the idea is in five years time, when the new lease for the other half of the building expires, to convert the other half of the building to storage space.

Okay. Okay. And this is fully remote? This is your first fully remote site? Yes. With no staff on site?

Yes.

Are you nervous? You look nervous.

I am nervous. You know, it's, it's actually a completely different model to what we currently doing, obviously. And it almost feels like I'm moving back into the storage game for the first time, although our family have been a part of it for, you know, almost 30 years now. And it's probably the one being fully automated and not having someone there on the ground telling me what's going wrong. What's going right is, is the, probably the one thing that's really got me a little bit worried about it because I know the site's in a good location, it's got a lot of passing traffic, we're going to have excellent signage up, we're going to be spending on Google Ads. But not having anybody there does, does keep me up at night a little bit.

So what are you doing then too? So if you think. When I, when I think about my sites, I sort of think about people finding me like driving up prospects, getting them in the door, on the phone, whatever, and then converting them into a customer. How are you thinking about that? How do you de, risk that being found? So you can probably do a lot of that from South Africa and advertising, all that sort of stuff. How are you going to handle them when inquiries do come in?

Yes.

What are you doing there to kind of make sure that you're providing a good service there and converting leads into customers.

So the first thing is we're lucky that the other half of the building that we've tenanted out is actually to a tiling shop. So I'm hoping that that's going to drive a lot of customers that are renovating their houses to, you know, hopefully that also drives quite a few customers to us. Like I said earlier, we're going to make sure we have really good signage on a busy road so that should drive customers to us. And we, we, we have staff who've been in the industry in South Africa for 10 plus years. They will be manning the phones.

Okay.

They will be driving a lot of the, the sort of the, the advertising from there. We know what we're doing. So I don't, I don't think the storage industry in Belfast is hugely different to the storage industry in any other city. Yeah, you know we know what, what, what drives customers to us. We know it's life changing events. So we know and we've also been on advertising on Google Ads for a long time now. So I think we've got a good grasp of that. So yeah, you know, putting all of that together hopefully means that, you know, it's just, although it's in a different city and it's fully automated, I think the drivers are all there to ensure their success.

And then what about, so somebody, you get somebody on the phone or online. Yes, they book and go through all that process. How are you going to handle move ins with nobody there? What's the plan there?

So we are actually going to have a kiosk at the site. So when a customer arrives at the front door there's a large kiosk that will light up and if a customer hasn't pre booked on, on online, which is I think the way most people would do that, and they'll get the instructions, you know, the app and I think it'll all be very clear. But if it's a new walk in customer we will have a kiosk on site that if a customer wants to speak to one of my staff press the button on the kiosk and one of my staff members will pop up and it'll be like, exactly like having a staff member right there. Okay, yeah, so that will help. Are we also going to have you know, 30 plus CCTV cameras with two way speaker systems? So if a customer's lost or there's a problem, you know, we can direct them through the facility, take them to where they need to be.

And who's going to be monitoring that? Are you doing that yourselves or somebody else here?

So the, in terms of the security aspect, DSOC will be doing that. Okay, we're doing that for me. But so, but in terms of the actual operational side, the staff back home will actually will be doing that. Okay, yeah, so the staff will be answering all of the calls that coming in from South Africa.

Okay. Okay, cool. So what about locks on the doors? So I guess if somebody turns up, how are you, how are you opening doors for them? How are they going to let themselves in? How are they getting into the unit?

Yes, so we're using the new OpenTech automated locks. Actually I think we one of the first sites to be using them. And that's going to be in every.

Single door on every single. As well as the entry entrance doors.

Exactly.

Okay.

So when a staff, when, sorry when a client arrives at site, you know, using the OpenTech software, they'll be able to access into the building as long as they've paid. They will have been allocated their unit number. They'll get to the unit number, they'll. On the OpenTech locks you can actually type in if you, a PIN code if you don't have your phone with you. So you know, you can access your unit using a pin code or you can use your phone to get direct access straight into the unit. And obviously with, if a client stops paying then access will be denied at the front door and also obviously you won't be able to get into your unit.

Yeah, yeah. And then if they continue not to pay, their stuff's going to get auctioned off as well.

Exactly.

So you've been in self storage for what, 10, 10 years?

Yeah, so I joined the family business in 2017. So just under 10 years.

Okay.

But it's been sort of part of the DNA. You know, my father was actually in construction. I grew up with, it was in construction until the mid-90s and there was a lot of political upheaval in, in, in South Africa in the mid-90s and he pivoted and he went into self storage and fortunately did because it was, it proved to be very successful.

Yeah.

And so I joined the business in 2017, a year after moving back to.

South Africa and you know, since, so that's, what's that, seven years or more. Have you seen, have you noticed any big changes, customer needs or demands or have you noticed any sort of big changes, any trends?

To be honest, I haven't seen changes from the customer side. You know, it's, it's for us it's, it's especially at the sites that, that we've been operating that are my sites. I don't think it's a lifestyle choice yet where it is in America. It's more of a, it's a need. And also I must say that at our sites we actually focus on the more price conscious customer. We're not the high end customer. We don't compete with the top storage brand in South Africa. We are focusing more on the price conscious customer that that is, requires storage. We always see, we certainly in the past we saw storage as, as a, as, as a requirement for somebody. It's nobody wants, nobody really wants to spend money on storing their goods. Yeah, you know it's, it's, it's a requirement when you, when you need to, you know, when, when something's happened in life, if there's been a divorce, someone's got married, you've left home, there's been a death, you know, that's I think the market we are more catered for and those are I think maybe and, and also very much the price conscious customer. So we're the cheapest storage facility in our area and we, we are, we. Our occupancy rates are 95 plus all year round. So it's working for us. But you know the, but you were asking about what changes and I think the big changes is, is the software change. You know, guys like you store are coming into the market enabling us to you know, up our prices. You know Rennie would probably say to you if you operating all year round, 95% of the year, you actually, you're not really operating your business as well as you could. You know, you should be increasing your prices and you won't see a huge loss in customers and, and software like store allows you to use demand pricing, increase the prices and so actually for, we've just changed our software provider and for the last two months we have now started using demand pricing. We haven't seen any drop in customer base and we have our churn at our main facility we have about 50 new customers a month and we, we drop obviously around 40 to 50 customers a month. That's 50 new customers paying 10% more than the previous customers were paying. Yeah. So you know, it's hitting our bottom line. There's no difference in the costs in the business, it's just moving straight to the bottom line. So it really does make sense to use these new software platforms that really do help the bottom line and then automation. You know, I'm now able to spend, continue spending 70 to 80% of my time on IBIT on storage and I'm still able to open new facilities by using, utilizing the software that's fully, allows fully automated sites and using a team that I've had in place for 10 years. You know, it makes sense to use guys that have been doing this for 10 years and trying to train up somebody brand new into, into the, into the industry. So for me I think the real change in the industry has actually been the automation of it and specifically the software because the software allows the automation. You know, it all talks to each other.

And the idea that you can from South Africa open a self storage facility in Belfast.

Yeah.

10 hour flight away.

Yeah.

No, it's amazing, you know, the fact that you bought that in 20, say you bought in 2018.

2019, 2018.

So like you had, you already had that in mind even back then. You know, I can run, I'm going to run this remotely. But you know, if you go back 10 years, 15 years ago, that just wasn't on the radar at all. You would, you know, people just wouldn't have even considered that.

Yeah, I mean I think that these automated sites are really, they're going to be, it's already happening, but it's really going to be the real driver in the industry over the next five to ten years.

That's, I, I totally agree. And I think if just looking around the uk, even here in Northern Ireland, I've sold one of my sites and we have some funds and we're thinking what should we do? Should we maybe consider we're going to expand one of the sites, but should we open up more sites and just looking around, there's so much opportunity, but the opportunity really only exists. I think the main opportunity is in the smaller urban areas where you just couldn't afford to have a staffed site.

Yes.

Especially Northern Ireland here, you know, towns of 10,000, 15,000 people. Yes. And like I'm looking at some of those places thinking like there's opportunity and I think it's the, the automation, the remotely managed sites that, that is such a big opportunity and lots of people.

Are doing it 100% and you know, the other, the other real opportunity is, you know, we, you and I both go to the FIDESA conferences in Europe and it's very clear that Europe's very underserved when it comes to self storage. I think this automation, you know, it breaks down language barriers as well.

Yeah.

So before, you know, for me to consider going to say the German market or the French market or the Italian market, you know, language was always a concern for me. Do you have to worry about that anymore? You know, now with automation, you know, we see it on iBIT, on storage, you know, the language barrier is not really there anymore. We've got customers in our best market is Sweden. You know, I didn't, I don't know how to say hello in Swedish.

It's just crazy. If you were getting started in self storage now brand new to the industry, do you have any piece of advice for people getting started?

I think one has to sort of go back to some of the basics in self storage and they always work. And I know Dean Beatty goes on about location and he's right. Make sure you're in a good location that's underserved within the self storage industry. So I think location is really important. I also think, I know I'm banging on about it a little bit too much there, but signage is also massive. You know, spend money on your signage. Spend money on a good website. You know, make sure a website, you know, is, is another employee. If you've got a great website, you're going to drive a lot of customers to your website. Yeah, so, so it's back to those basics. Make sure you've got a good website, your location must be excellent. Access is also a big one. You know, you want to make it as easy as possible. The customer journey needs to be really easy. And that is something that I am, you know, going back to the automation side I'm a little bit worried about because I haven't experienced myself. You know, I want to make sure that the customer journey from, you know, booking online to accessing his actual unit is a very easy process. Yeah, you know, my old facilities that I've got in South Africa, they drive up facilities, you know, you, you drive into the gate, you drive up to your unit and you open. It's really easy, you know, and it's, it's easy offloading goods from your car and putting them back into the car and you know, all that, you drive back out. So, you know, make sure that it's a, that the customer experience is, is an easy one and a good One and another. I'm sorry, good advice is mystery shopping your own facility. Yeah, I don't do that enough and sometimes when I do it, you know, I've done it a few times in the past and sometimes the staff, you know, your staff will actually, you know, take a little bit of umbrage at it. You know, they'll think that you're testing there. But maybe that's not a bad thing. Yeah, but I do think, you know, mystery shop your facility, you know, go, go through the whole process. Book a, book a, book a unit.

I think I would apply that to your online booking system to make sure that you know how that works.

Yes.

Do it yourself a couple of times, cancel it. You don't, you don't have to put money through it, just go through and see how that works. Yeah, no, good advice because with our store customers it's 62%. Last year, 62% of bookings came through the website. So and the majority of those are actually on mobile phones as well. So people, you know, kind of on the go, maybe outside of site, at home, whatever it might be. And you know, you got to make sure that journey's, that journey is clear and easy for people because the number of times I go to, sometimes I'm checking out other self storage operators websites and the amount of times the booking process is either really, really bad or it's broken. Yeah, it's surprising how often that happens.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, make sure that people can actually book for the Belfast site. Are you, what are your plans around booking? You're going to let people book online?

Definitely.

Are you going to expose prices initially up front or what do you, So a lot of people get prices behind a contact form. What do you think, what you're thinking there?

For me I'm going to use this, utilize the same strategy that I have in South Africa which is I, I believe that price is, is something especially on fill up stage that price is important and it's quite important to try to keep your price lower in the beginning during full up stage. So particularly if you, if you focus, if one of your, your strategies for bringing customers on board is around price you might as well expose it, show that you know the area, you know your, your potential customers that you the cheapest in town.

Yeah.

And I think the guys that are, would prefer not to show price are probably only because they're the most expensive. I can't think of a reason why you wouldn't show price unless you're the most expensive. Apart from of course being Able to convert a customer and having. Being able to actually phone someone and try to convince them to use your facility.

Yeah.

But ultimately I think for me it makes if, if my facility is going to be one of the cheaper ones, it's definitely worth exposing the price. I don't know what at Stora, what do you guys see? Do you think it's better to expose.

Price at store or. So just looking at our customers and all of them, what they're doing.

Yeah. So I didn't mean like your two facilities at using the, you know, if you look at all your current customers.

It, it totally depends. And, and we actually, it. We're only getting to the scale now where we can probably design like a scientific experiment to see what is the best way because it's so hard. For example, we've had customers, some customers who've been showing prices, just letting people go ahead and book and then they've turned that off and gated it. Because we let you do whatever you want. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter to us really. We want you to succeed. So we'll give you whatever you think you believe and you know, is making you succeed. So we have customers who've shown prices and then hidden prices and then seen bookings grow quite a lot. But then it isn't, you know, it might be they might have gone from eight bookings to 14 bookings in a month. And that could be because it's. Rather than being March, it's April.

Yes.

You know, or it could be that it's a, you know, it's a. Those numbers are so low that it's very hard to know if it's statistically significant. So I don't have an exact answer. But at some point in the future I want to have that answer and to be able to say, here's the best way to run your business in this circumstance. Because it might be that if you're trying to be a cheaper option, it may be a lot better to show your price. If you're trying to be the most expensive, it may be better to actually to hide the price and get people to phone you and have that conversation. And I do hear that sometimes people who are trying to price premium that they prefer to hide the prices because they, they see more bookings coming through because they get to talk to somebody. So it's not a great answer because we, I have a theory, but it is just a theory. And I don't know, I haven't seen anybody actually present solid data that says one way or the other, what's better. And I think it also just depend on competition, the time of the year, all sorts of stuff. I do remember a couple of years ago, Dean and another customer, they did what I was just saying. So they showed the prices and they gated them and it was like 2.2x up in their bookings. I looked at my site data for Portadown for the exact same period and I was up like 1.9x or 2x in the same period and I hadn't changed it. So I hadn't made the change. My bookings had doubled as well. So that's why it all comes down to kind of time of year and there's so many other factors, it's just hard to know. But yeah, we want to get to the point where we can tell our customers with scientific data, say here's what we found. You make the decision now based on what you want to do, but here are our findings.

Ultimately I think which sort of a conversation that carries on from what you were just saying, it actually also comes down to that follow up process. So even though my strategy is price, a lot of those customers are then phoning in just like the guys hiding their price behind a wall. If your follow up process is not stringent and almost to the point of annoying, which may be some hyperdome storage operators, you will know that I'm not scared of sending out multiple emails to try to convert the cell. But when it comes to your storage facility, and it probably goes back to when you asked about what advice would you give storage operators, make sure that your follow up process is excellent. Make sure you're phoning that customer within the first 10 minutes of getting the inquiry and then follow it up with an email and then 24 hours later do another follow up and then three days later another follow up and then a week later maybe your final follow up. So I know that Dean also goes on about having a very good follow up process, but I think that is a key to making sure that you convert those leads into sales. And I've seen actually by the way this morning on LinkedIn that you know there's a new on store, there's a new process. Well, you're making it easier for your clients to actually have a robust follow up process. So maybe you can tell me more about that.

What a good opportunity. Yeah, yeah. Well, so. Well the reason we did that. So that's our deals feature where it's kind of, we're trying to bring in things like a lot of people use HubSpot or Pipedrive and what they use those to kind of bring people through. They set up a email one email two phone call one phone call two and they bring it across from left to right across the screen and they're tracking all their deals and then they win or lose them and they give reasons for the loss and everything. We've built that into Stora because more and more of our customers are. Well, our customers are getting bigger and some of the bigger customers tend to have more of that now in my sites and lots of our customers, they don't do that. And my sites in Northern Ireland we answer the phone if somebody calls, but we don't have a follow up process. We just let people book online. And the reason for that is I think we probably would convert more like we unquestionably would convert more if we had people ringing up people, our prospects. But the sites are quite small. And so for me it's like what's the cost of hiring an additional employee to do all that? It's too high. So I'll not get a return on that additional. If we 5 sites or 10 sites it would be worth it because you'd actually have enough people coming in where you'd get a return on investment. Whereas lots of our customers are bigger customers, bigger operators. They've maybe got 10 sites. So they have these staff and they have these follow up processes and a lot of our customers are using this deals flow now. And I know of one big customer we have, they have a team in India already doing other stuff for other parts of their business and they're now using this to convert and they're seeing a huge uplift in conversion of inquiries to customers.

Interesting.

So that's the reason we've done that is because just more and more people, it's to try and make that easier.

Yes.

Ultimately we want to help people make more revenue, get more customers in and that's why it's there.

No, it makes a lot of sense. I mean so we doing something similar to what you've made look and feel and make the process much better. We use Excel spreadsheets.

Oh yeah.

So as a customer inquiry comes in we he's the first one on the board and then we have Columns for the 10 minutes phone call back. And I want, and it's a shared Excel spreadsheet and you know, I want to be able to log in whenever I want to and then if the staff haven't, you know, I need to see each of those timelines that they've hit Them. So you're just making that a lot easier and not having to as a owner, not having to go into multiple different areas of managing the process. If it's all done under one software provider, it just makes the process much easier too to manage.

You mentioned 10 minutes. Why is it 10 minutes? Why is it, why, what's the need for speed there?

I think it's. Well, from my, my thoughts around that is just that, you know, while the lead is hot.

Yeah.

And you've paid for it. You know, it's cost me money to get that person to phone into to the site and while they're thinking about it and probably phoning competitors, you know, let's get our foot in the door and actually make sure that, you know, we, we following up with them while they're thinking about self storage, maybe in, you know, in two hours time and you know, they're fetching their kids from school and you know, it's the furthest thing from their mind and, and you know what, and your competitor, he's phoned them.

Yeah.

So that's the other thing.

And it's likely that they're on Google, they've searched self Storage, Cape Town or whatever.

Yes.

There's probably five results. They might have called the first three.

Exactly.

And you know, if you're not. If it's likely, I imagine I've heard this many times, the first one they talk to, if, if they're going to talk to somebody, it's the first one to talk to that they'll probably go with.

Yes.

Because I know for various reasons, especially with software sales, that's one of the things that we focus on. If, if somebody gets in touch with us, we want to get back to them really quickly to talk about Stora because we know that there's a much better chance if, you know, if we get a conversation with them.

Yes.

They'll become a customer.

It makes sense. Unless it's the price conscious customer that I was talking about. Then they will phone around everywhere.

Yep. And sometimes you don't maybe want those customers all the time, you know, and self storage, because I buy self storage sites. I was in Porta down in Dungannon. The most expensive compared to container sites.

Yes.

And people ring up and they want a good deal. You just say look, we can't match that. Like that's. Yeah, you're better. Here's. Here's a container site nearby that's probably going to be the right price for you. And I've often been tempted, especially during the Philip phase at My first site when I was nervous, like you probably are, but Belfast, it's like, oh my God, how am I ever going to, am I going to lose a lot of money here? Yeah, I started, I remember one time at Christmas I put together this like 20 foot container deal even though like I was an indoor site and I priced it to match a local container site.

Interesting. Okay.

And after a couple of weeks I took it off and I thought, why am I doing that? That's, you know, I'm underselling my product here. I've invested to build a much superior, yes. Storage facility here. And you know, if somebody's price conscious, I should be confident enough not to let them go somewhere else, you know.

And you know, I think you hit the nail on the head when it comes to, you know, the maturity of the facility. And if it's a, you know, a facility where you're in growth phase, I think you're willing to take any customer that comes along just to get some money in the door, start paying off that debt and you know, making the, the, the business wash its face. But you know, at our mature sites, you know, we used to do a lot of discounting and at our mature sites we don't discount at all anymore. In fact, we have a customer right now who's got 40 units and we, at one stage we were thinking to ourselves, well, let's give this guy, you know, 5% discount on all on, you know, each unit to make him stay. And then, you know, when I started thinking about the numbers, it just doesn't make sense to be giving this, this person a discount. We, we're 100% full on those particular units. The only units why we 95 and not 100% is because of our parking, actually.

Okay.

But otherwise we're 100% full. And to be giving somebody discounts when you 100% filled, this makes no sense at all. So now what I do is I use software like yours to go to run a report which customers are getting discounts. And you can see straight away there's a list of 25 customers, they're all getting discounts. And now I can go, you know, very quickly. Well, that's not going to stay like that. You know, they're not going to get discounts anymore.

Okay. Yeah, interesting. We've, we've a really cool feature coming up soon, actually. About, we're building a pricing tool which is going to bring a lot of that information up and allow customers to really quickly change. Well, not necessarily change, but you can decide yourself yes. It'll bring up and show, you know, here's who's below list price here. You know, just so you know, this person's at 20%. Maybe it's because Sony moved in two years ago.

Yeah.

And your price is now 20% higher. You know, this person is 20% blue. Your list price.

Yeah.

Just so you know, like. And then you can do something about it.

Yeah.

So there's a lot of cool stuff that can be done around that.

No, that sounds, that's, I mean as an, as an owner, that's the sort of information that I need to make better decisions and improve my bottom line.

Yeah. So what about the trends for the future of self storage? Where do you, if you could fast forward five or ten years, what, what trends do you see shaping it? And maybe you could even answer in the context of IBIT and storage. You know, are there.

Yes.

Other things that you're working on that are coming in the future?

So you know, I think the industry is, everyone's going to start doing online auctions at some point. It's, it's the, it's the, it's the, it's the method that makes the most sense to get rid of, you know, abandoned goods. Yeah. You can, you know, you can prove the market set the price. You can, you can clear units faster and you can get better pricing. Because ultimately, you know, the way I look at online auctions is not only am I getting a better customer for the storage operator, I'm getting a better price for the customer whose goods we're selling. In the old days, like I said with my facility, somebody would come in and they'd just pull a price out of their thin air. Whereas now at least I can help that customer pay off some of his debt. And a lot of the time we over recover on debt and at least that customer doesn't have that debt anymore. And maybe the storage operator will even pay him back some of the cost of some of the money that he earned on the unit. So I think in the future everybody will be doing online auctions in some way or another. And in terms of what we're looking at, we starting to bring AI into IBAD on storage which especially for automated facilities who don't have staff on site and when a unit is cleared, we want to bring in a new tool where the bidder can photograph the units and he needs to. That photograph is then uploaded onto the, the storage operators section of IBIT on storage which then we use AI to, to identify if there's still any objects within the unit. If, if it's a clear unit we will automatically pay the cleaning deposit back because we now taking cleaning deposits for these automated sites.

Yeah.

And if there is, if there are still goods in the unit is clean, deposits not repaid and the operator is informed and then he can organize a cleaner to come in and remove those goods. And obviously anyone who doesn't remove goods and I put on storage, their bidding profile is banned as well. So that can't happen again by the same.

Okay. Yeah, yeah, interesting. I've considered a similar thing as a part of a move out feature with Stora, you know, because even when, even if it's not an auction, it's just a move out. You want to know if the unit's clean.

Yes.

And you know, ready to rent out again. So one way to. That would be a photograph uploaded to the portal which is then checked and confirmed.

Yes. Makes sense.

We haven't done it. I can imagine it's probably hard enough because you could just download a picture of an empty self storage unit and upload.

Is something that we were. I made that comment as well. But there's various things that we were also thinking. You could put a code that. What are they called again?

Those QR code.

You could put a QR code in each of the units and then the person taking the photograph has to scan the QR code which will then identify that he is in the unit that he's saying that he's cleared.

Yeah. Oh yeah, Interesting. Good idea. Cool. Okay, well so is there anything that just to. So just finish off then just like if you can think for 10 years into the future of self storage, like if there's one big thing coming that's going to change stuff, what would you say? It is.

Probably at the risk of repeating myself but I actually think that the software providers, guys like you are changing the industry because you are allowing people like me who are managing a business that's totally separate in a maybe a faraway place to actually expand our portfolios into cities and towns in foreign countries and expand our portfolios. So I see the automation of storage is really going to be the growth. It's already the growth driver but I can see it for the next 10 years that's going to be the main driver to you making sure that we US operators remain more profitable, are able to open more sites and probably actually drive valuations as well. You know, with your, with you know, software like yours it really makes the, the, the whole, the operation very transparent and whereas before it was quite hard to, you know, when it comes to valuations, fine. You can look at your annual financial statements, but this is real time data.

Yeah.

You know, from right now. This is what we did with how many customers we had yesterday. This is what we've got today.

Yeah.

Whereas financial statements, you know, being could be, you know, 11, 12 months old, you know, it's, it's much more difficult. So, you know, I think it's, it's, it's what's, what's changed the most in the industry and what's going to continue to drive the industry is, you know, is the software and where that's going to lead us.

Yeah, interesting. Okay, thanks very much, Grant. Great to have you and yeah, good luck with your new site. Hope it goes well.

Thank you very much. Thanks for having me.

Cheers. Cheers. Bye. At Stora, our mission is to help our customers build the best self storage businesses. Self Storage Explained is here to try and bring you the best from inside and outside dentistry to help you grow your business. If you want to find out a bit more resources, go to Stora Co to sign up for a demo or find out more or you can go to Stora Co Academy for lots more resources including our financial model and other in depth guides to setting up and growing your business.