The Top Features Your Self Storage Management Software Needs

I think a mistake by operators in general is not just giving your customers what they want, which is the ability to book and pay online. Hello and welcome to the latest edition of our Self Storage Explained podcast where today I'm joined by Stora's head of Product David Hughes. David, welcome. David, tell us what are we here to discuss today?

Sometimes we get asked a question. What are the top features that your self storage software needs? And whilst all software needs features, I'm not sure our customers wake up in the morning thinking what features they need. I think what they actually want are outcomes. So I think they want outcomes like more move ins, more revenue, less admin, things like that. But yeah, I'd like to ask you when you were starting out on your self storage journey, what was it you were looking to accomplish? What were the outcomes you wanted when you were setting up your self storage business?

The things that were in my mind were I wanted to, I wanted to totally automate as much of the admin as I could. I didn't want to be at another job, I wanted to just. I didn't want to be raising invoices, didn't want to be processing payments, didn't want to be checking contracts. I wanted all that sort of stuff automated so I wanted all of that automated. So that was important. I also didn't want to have to spend a lot of time with customers like taking bank details or car details. So I wanted online bookings and I also wanted my customers to be able to move in themselves. So I did meet customers at the start but I wanted the whole thing to work so that if I didn't, if I couldn't meet them, they could, they'd get a code and they could move in. So I suppose I was thinking I was looking for online bookings, recurring invoicing, automated payments, some of the contract stuff and then connection to access control. So those are the I suppose features or outcomes I was looking for.

Yeah, a lot in that. Great. So yeah, the features are the means to the end. But for you, you touched on a couple of things there that I think will be interesting to our customers like reducing admin saving time, reducing overheads and the features enable that. The features enable the outcomes. So let's talk about why did you want online bookings?

I wanted that because I book hotels flights, those are probably the two things I booked the most online. And just a book like, I don't know, jump box, like a jump, a trampoline park for my kids, I do all that online. The idea that I would prefer I would never prefer to ring somebody and kind of deal with that over the phone. I always like to do it online. So when I thought about self storage I thought well people in general I believe are going to want to, are going to prefer to book online. Some people will phone so we'll still have a phone number. I wanted that and I also, I was thinking that you know, stuff like on a Sunday afternoon or you know, when the people look for self storage like this sort of thing I do is the evenings I'm not working. So I was thinking if I'm looking for self storage at 9pm and I come to a website where I have to fill in a form and wait and somebody's going to call me tomorrow morning, sometime around 9 or 10 in the morning. Yep. I'm thinking to myself I'm going to miss that call. I'm not going to be able to answer it. I'll not get this sorted. I want to be able to book online now. So I was thinking I want to give that to my customers. I want my customers to be able to come to the website, book tick off their list books from self storage. And ultimately that was about for me I was thinking from how do I maximize my sales?

So that's exactly. So that's the interesting part. So there's probably 100 features in that. But what you're trying to do there is reduce admin overhead and grow your revenue while you're sleeping, while you're not having to do anything about it. So increasing revenue, maximizing revenue is a big part of why we exist. We exist to help our customers grow better businesses. So I think that's a very interesting set of features inside the idea of maximizing revenue. What have you learned in the last six years from operating a self storage business and a self storage software business that help operators, people listening to this maximize their revenue?

Yeah. So I think maximizing revenue is probably one of the number one things that people really care about when you're running a self storage business. Maximizing revenue and reducing admin are the two things. Ultimately I think where we exist stora exists to try and help operators achieve so growing revenue. Like I don't know, I mean high, high, high what?

How can they grow revenue?

How can you grow revenue? Well I think there's a couple of different ways. So like how do you maximize the number of bookings you get? Y okay, so some people think about it as like you know, you get a, you request a quote on the website and then you convert and look at the Conversion rate of quote to move in. But that's missing a part of the whole funnel which is website visitors, people who don't want to fill in a form. So when I think about that, I think how do you maximize the number of bookings you get? And I think when you think about that, you're thinking your website has to do a brilliant job of that. If people phone up, you want to do a good job of it. People text or whatever other way to get in touch. You want to make sure you're doing a really good job. Maximize your number of new bookings at the same time maximize the size of the basket that those people are taking on board. So are they in the right unit size? Do they need a bigger space? Are you selling? Do they have insurance? Do you want to sell insurance to them? Do they need packaging or tape or whatever it might be? Do they need, do they do. Is there a customer who wants to be able to access a place seven days a week from 6 in the morning to 11 at night, are they prepared to pay more for that access versus somebody who's moving in and going away for a year to live, you know, live abroad and just wants, just wants to come back in a year and access the place will come anytime. Other ways to maximize your basket size so number of convert people into customers, maximize the basket size and then over time as they are customers, how do you ensure that you're maximizing the revenue from that customer over time as well? So I suppose there's three parts that answer interesting and there's probably about a thousand features in there. Well that's so it's just kind of like. But the outcome, like you put it, is those are the three things I want to try and try and do.

Lots in that maximizing revenue per customer is something that we're thinking about a lot right now. Store and what do you think, where do you think people go wrong with this? Where do you think people, where do you think they don't maximize opportunity? What do they, what do they not do that they should be doing to help maximize revenue per customer?

Well, I suppose the thing we come across the most in the way I've just pitched there the three areas, new bookings, maximizing basket size and then maximizing ongoing revenue from a new booking perspective. You know, I think we've had, we've had customers with us for years and they've flip flopped between I'm going to show prices and let people book, I'm going to hide prices behind a quote form and almost everyone who's done that? They've now come back to I'm going to show prices. Because what they found actually is that the bookings end up ultimately being higher because people can book online. So I think one of the, I think a mistake by operators in general is not just giving your customers what they want, which is the ability to book and pay online. So I think that's one way anybody can increase bookings is with a really, really well optimized and converting website booking flow. And that's the key. Sometimes people might try it, but it's not built well enough so it's not converting. And so then they give up and they think it's not working. But actually it's a, it's the booking flow, the views that hasn't worked, not the fact that it's online booking. So that's one area. And then I think with basket size, I think there, there is probably I, I'm guilty of this at my side because I don't, I don't kind of haven't set up to do this. But you know, you give everybody everything and actually a lot of people don't want everything. The people who want access every day they will pay more. The businesses, they would pay more. So you know, I'm probably losing out in revenue there by not having, you know, bits of sort of additional add ons and probably not extras and add ons. Yeah, probably not doing that well enough. And then I suppose there's also like optimizing your price. Like is my price, am I charging enough for my units? Am I too expensive for some units? I need to keep an eye on that too. The third area where you know, we see existing customers is in doing price increases, carrying out price increases on their existing customers. And this is, this is one of the key areas that differentiates, I think people who are running a self storage business as a business and people who are running it as maybe almost like a hobby or accidental business. Because the ones who, operators who are carrying out price increases, they will see huge increases in revenue like 10, 20, 30, 40, 50% over the course of a year or two after they've started implementing this. And some, some operators view it. And I can see, I do get the argument. I know the customers, I see them when they come in and you know, I'm a local business, you know, I know everybody in the town. I don't want to do it. Y and that's okay. Look, we're not telling people how to run their business. Y But if you want to optimize your revenue, then that's a key, key tool in your armory of, of being able to do that. Because you know, every other service you, you have does it, you know, your tv, your Internet, your gas, your electricity, the cost of everything is going up and your cost as an operator going up. It is fair that you'd be passing that on to your customers over time.

Not all features are created equally. And I think that's another important thing to point out when choosing a self storage software platform. Well, yeah, something might do something, but how well does it do it? How easy is it to use? How much time does it save me? And I think that's an important part that comes into play when you're evaluating a tool to use in your armory.

I think that, can I just add one thing to there? I think that's one of the things that we do spend a lot of time on this sort of thing, David, figuring out where do we spend our limited resources. So our price increase feature, for example, which we released, I think it was March, the month it was released. On average, every customer turned it on, grew the revenue the next month by 9.96%.

Some as high as 40, some as high as 40.

Yeah. So on average 10% revenue increase across everybody from one month to the next. You could say, well, but every software product, you can do price increases in any of them. But what we tried to do with our product there is we tried to build a feature that made it easy to do so that it's easy enough that you actually do it. You or your team will do it every month and it'll actually happen. So it's not like you have to set reminders and build a spreadsheet and track this and send emails and trying to figure out when do I change that invoice? Like, oh, I remember in 30 days, change that invoice. I need to send the email today. I need to go into my email system and send email. We've automated all of that so that it's so easy you'll do it.

There are a few other tools, capabilities, things that help you maximize revenue that I think are as easy to use as something like price increases. Another one that springs to mind is dynamic pricing. So maximizing revenue per customer or per square foot, you know, you can literally click a few buttons and have, you know, your prices increase based on occupancy. Every customer I speak to who turns it on, the first thing they say is, why didn't I do this earlier? Why didn't I do this earlier?

So, yeah, it's such a simple tool and it's a really simple premise which is if you've got 100 of a sort of a unit and you've only got 10 of them left and you've on average sold 10amonth for the past nine months and you've got 90 of them full, I know it's not that simple, but one more month and you'll have none left. So if you increase the price, you're going to increase demand a little bit. So you might not sell 10, you might sell five, but maybe you've increased the price by 30% or 50% or whatever it might be, maybe you've doubled the price and so actually your revenue is the same and you've kept the free ones and you can increase the price again. And it's really about running your business, running your self storage site as a business.

One of the other things you talked about when you said when you were setting up, one of the things you were looking for is to reduce admin time and reduce a lot of busy work. The first thing that springs to mind for me is meeting people at the gates and letting them in and showing them around. Talk to me about your journey on figuring out the access side of things like allowing people to come to the facility and get in without having to be there.

Well, the way I thought about that was just like six years ago. The way it generally happened was you would meet somebody, they might show you in, you might sign a contract there and then you might even set up your payment there and then and you might have to give an ID or get a passport photograph photocopied or something. This whole thing took maybe 15, 20, 30 minutes. Not just of me as a customer's time, but also the member of staff's time. So just time consuming and it's not a great experience. There's no direct need for any of that. It's one of the things I find when I go to hire a car. I'm like, why is this so inefficient? I'm standing in the queue waiting to hire a car. I'm just thinking like this should be one minute, up you go, off you go. But it's dragged out, takes up staff's time and it makes the customer experience just completely crap. So I just thought, well, I'm going to start just assuming none of that's needed. So I just thought, okay, I want, I want my customers to get a code or a text, whatever it might be, so they can turn up and they can move in Themselves, you could.

Like you just touched on something like the customer experience being, you know, crap. And you could argue that. You could argue that. Yet leaving them to it themselves. Self service is a much nicer experience. You don't have to. There's no anxiety about meeting someone, meeting someone at a place, having to talk to people. When I think about booking an Airbnb, when I first started using Airbnb, when it first came out, you met the person and in hindsight it was one of the most uncomfortable parts of the whole experience because you had to make small talk and do all the, the niceties. This may say more about me as a person than about the service or the customer experience. But now when you book an Airbnb, a lot of the time there's a lockbox or there's a code and I'll text you and then you're in. I personally find that much better and a much more seamless customer experience. So what we're really talking about here though is in terms of the feature, the capability, the high is really smart entry integrations. And we've done a lot of work on that over the years and we will continue to do a lot of work on that over the next few years. Much like we just said, product is never done. There's always new smart entry systems coming out. What are the top smart entry capabilities that you think make a good customer experience?

Oh, for customer experience. I think you know things. I think if you're, if you're outside a self storage facility on a Sunday evening, I need to move in, I think from a customer experience and an owner experience. Ideally that customer, if they've paid, if they've signed the contract and if they have passed an ID check, should be able to move in right away. So I think a key part of that is being able to let people move in straight away. I think for a. It doesn't mean you should, not everyone, it's not right for every site. But I think if you have it in your system so that it's possible, I think you should, you know, it's good to have it there because you might come to a time when actually let's turn that on. So I think that's important. So I would say it's not quite the access, it's the auto allocation of the unit. So a system that automatically allocates a unit and then immediately will send the code or whatever they need to get to get in. So I think that's a key thing. And then I think also as an operator from an Operator's perspective, I think like overlocking. So somebody hasn't paid the ability to like just automatically turn off access. I think that's a really important way of staying on top of people paying.

Their invoices and it reduces a whole bunch of admin. You don't have to chase, you don't have to message. And it all happens automatically because Stora speaks to the, the smart entity provider and it does it all for you.

Yeah, yeah. I'd love us some time to be able to say when people come in and out of the facility. That'll be nice. I don't have that yet, but that'd be a cool thing to have.

Yeah.

Sort of a timeline showing, oh, this person came in this day, this, this time.

If we're going to dream up features, I have another one for you. Even though I said I don't like the word feature, but imagine you get that just to combine the two things that we've been talking about. Imagine you could get that information about when they're coming and going and how often. Surely that could feed into who's a good fit for maybe a price increase or upselling some other service. When you have that information, you have that data, you can then send a targeted email that says, hey, do you want 24 hour access? Looks like you're using this a lot. Or hey, I'm going to put your prices up. You're here every day, maybe unlikely to churn. I think that those extra data points from the smart entry provider would be great.

Absolutely.

Another topic that I find interesting and I see a lot of our customers coming up against is growth. Like we provide you tools to help you grow. Right? We help you, we just talk about helping you grow your revenue and maximizing revenue and more revenue per customer, building a better business. Ultimately the mega outcome of all that is that is growth scale. You grow. Maybe you open a second site, maybe you open a third site. Some of our operators have 10 sites. Scaling is another challenge and another thing that we need to consider for our customers when we're building software product. What are some of the scaling challenges that you see us helping with or any software provider helping with?

Well, I think when we talk to bigger customers, the things we hear, they're different, different things. So a lot of time it comes down to reporting analytics, accounting integrations, things like that. Things that become really, really important as you scale because you've gone from one site to 10 or maybe you've got 50 sites and things are a lot more complex. So you need systems that can cope. And then there's a few other things like pricing intelligence. So data around what are your competitors doing live data around that to adjust and react in the moment. Because if you are running at one site, maybe you've time to check what are my competitors in the town doing or the city doing. Whereas when you've got 30 or 50, you need to have different tools that will automatically do that for you and adjust prices automatically so that you're not having to track all this stuff every day. So that's another area that we're looking at a lot and hearing about a lot of. And then I think the final thing we would hear is just flexibility. We do hear this tons. Obviously I want to have my own booking flow on my website. I want to integrate with HubSpot or I want to integrate directly with some other accounting package that we've never heard of. How do we enable that? That's one of the reasons we've got the API coming out in a few weeks time, so that very big operators and small operators can basically do whatever they want. They can pull in any third party tool and use it whatever way they like.

Yeah, I'm really excited about the impact and the potential of the Stora Public API. I think it's going to be great to be able to say to customers, you no longer have to wait for us to build a thing. If you have the means and ability, you can go and build a thing yourself. Yeah, I think that's, it's going to be great for, it's going to be great for bigger customers, it's going to be great for smaller operators who have the means. And yeah, flexibility is ultimately what it's going to enable. And I think as you scale, yes, your needs, your needs change as well. It's not just about big customers have a set of needs A and small customers have set of needs B. It's just your needs change over time when your operation skills and I think there's probably again probably 100 features that we could build that help you with scale. But I think the key capabilities are around the API and how we plug into other things and how other people can plug things into us. And I think that's very exciting for our future.

Yeah, absolutely. I think that's a big part of where we're going with things is letting people, people do more themselves while keeping the core parts of Stora powerful and flexible and helping them to grow the business.

So if I was an operator looking to evaluate software, I would encourage you not to think of it from a features point of view. I would try and think about it from a what I want to accomplish point of view. What are the outcomes I want to achieve? Yes, the features in the software may enable that, but what is it you're looking to accomplish? What are the outcomes? I think you touched on quite a few of them at the beginning of the conversation.

Yeah, I think that's. We would sometimes be talking to some potential customers and they might even have a list of 30. Do you have these 30 features? And a lot of them you can say yes. Some of them may be no, but ultimately I think I would basically echo what you're saying, which is if you're looking at software, think about the outcomes you want. If those outcomes are growing revenue and reducing admin, then try and look at what are the main things that are going to help you achieve that. And look at the quality of the product that you're looking at. Look at how well they do it. How are they helping other customers do it? Well, is there a proof of success? For example, just like do you support online bookings? Do you have that feature or do you not? That's not the right way to look at it because we know that ours customers who use store get 70% of their bookings through the website. We also have heard there are other systems where they might get 10 or 15% of the bookings through the website. So it can't just be a tick box. It's like, what do you want online bookings for? I want to get as many people online booking on the website as possible. Okay, what's the best system to help you achieve that outcome? Because it's the same feature.

Yep. Friend of mine's a chef and he says, you know, a knife isn't just a knife. You know, you can have a knife, you can have a knife. One's a sharp knife, one's a good knife, and one's a not so sharp, not so good knife. They're both knives, but one is. One's a better knife.

Yeah. Yeah. So it really is about outcomes. What are the outcomes you're looking to achieve? Not one of the features. The features are how the outcomes are delivered, I guess. Is that the way to think about it?

I think so.

Look at them, see, get some data, find out how well will this feature help me achieve my outcome? Not a list of 30 features. Because you can almost tick any box for features, really, can't you?

Yeah, well, that's again, the price increases example is a great one. You can do price increases without A price increases tool.

Yeah.

Right. Like one of our customers, when we showed them the price increases to like compared the time it took them before and after one was like a full. It took them a week to do the price increases prior to us rolling out the tool. And they said, we did this in an hour.

Yeah.

You know, so.

Yeah. So again, so take your price increases from a week to an hour with. With the. Right. When you think about it from the point of view of outcomes and then the feature delivering the outcome.

Yeah. And the right execution of said feature.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, thanks a lot, David. I think that was really, really interesting and thank you. Let's come back soon and talk about the API on the side as well and we can share more about what's happening there.

Plenty to come.

All right, thanks very much. At Stora, our mission is to help our customers build the best self storage businesses. Storage 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 about 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.