What Does Best-in-Class Look Like in 2026? | Stora Summit 2026

Next up is a panel discussion on what best in class looks like in self-storage in 2026. I'm pleased to introduce our chair for this panel, Graham Lomax, Head of Strategic Sales at Janus International, who has worked with hundreds of operators and sites for nearly 20 years. Please put your hands together for Graham. And quickly, just our panelists as well. First, Mathieu Bonin from BNSUR, one of our very first customers who has grown with us from a single site to now 3 sites since joining and has helped shape the platform with consistently thoughtful feedback along the way. Mark Drummond from Now Storage, one of our newer customers and a well-known UK storage brand with 16 sites across the country and growing, and 19. And finally, Anne Kristin Hartmann, CEO of Spectrum Storage Group, which includes Storebox, one of the UK's top 10 self-storage operators, and Lovespace, the UK's leading buy-the-box storage business.

Thank you.

Thanks, Gavin Shields.

Thank you very much. So this session, we are— what we're looking at is what does best in class look like in 2026? So obviously we've got 3 very different businesses that are going to be speaking for us, giving us different ideas as they run their businesses very differently. They're unpacking growth in a completely different way. How do they deal with pricing? So I think that's going to be quite interesting from some of the questions we've already had. Uh, the reality of scaling across multiple sites— the point of difference generally is the contrast. And we've got 3 very different growth models, uh, different geographies, and all 3 businesses are at very different stages of maturity. So the same question is probably going to produce 3 completely different but legitimate answers. Panel, if I could probably ask you to actually introduce yourselves first, if that's okay. If we can start with Mattéo.

Yep.

Hi everyone. So I'm Matt, the founder of Bien Sûr. So we're a Paris-based self-storage operator.

We—

I created the company maybe 5 years ago, and now we have 3 facilities in the Paris suburbs, so close to Versailles. For about 1,500 units in total.

Hi everyone, I'm Mark Drummond. I, with my brother Guy, run Now Self Storage. We started in 2009. We bought 2 shipping containers and gave it a go and now operating over 19 locations sort of over the southeast of England, West Midlands and Wales.

My name is Anne-Christine. I'm the Group CEO of Spectrum Storage Group. So Spectrum Storage Group is the combination of Storebox self-storage, traditional self-storage, and Lovespace, which is a tech and logistics-based business. They've been operating individually since 2009, 2011, but they merged together to form Spectrum Storage Group in 2024. So we have, in Storebox, we have 6,000 units roughly, counting, sort of adding every day, building out, just over 580,000 square feet units. And in LoveSpace, we have 35 warehouses, warehouse partners across the UK, and just over 100 vans out on roads every day now collecting thousands of boxes.

Excellent, thank you. So we can see we've got 3 very different types of businesses. I think what we would like to try and look at is if we can talk a little bit about what growth looks like, the difference in pricing, automation technology, and then what multi-site scaling and operations actually looks like for each type of business. So if we start with growth, if I start with yourself, monsieur, you've gone from a single site to 3 across France. It's a pretty short period of time for an independent. Obviously, you picked up a French SSA award. Congratulations for that. Take us through what growth, you know, is for you. What's allowed you to move so fast as an independent? What would you tell someone that's trying to do the same or any advice you could give them?

Okay, well, um, I guess we were able to go fast partly because we had, um, access to capital, right? Capital is obviously a big constraint in our industry, especially when you're starting off. So I was lucky to have worked, well, to know some people who were willing to invest in us. That was a big one. And then I think we were maybe We tried to be quite flexible on what kind of, let's say, real estate we could, we would use. I guess that's another big bottleneck in self-storage is finding the right real estate, especially in dense places like Paris and suburbs where land is scarce. So actually, all 3 of our facilities are leasehold, so that also reduced the need for capital and also made it easier to find real estate. And it happens that in France, where we like regulation a lot, and so actually leases are very protective of tenants, a lot more so than they are here. So actually, for example, 9-year leases, but where you're very protected as a tenant, a lot more than you would here. So yeah, and then, and I'd say also that people matter a ton. I mean, I was lucky to, to meet so many people who would, who were helpful and who were nice and who, who knew self-storage well. And that saved me from making so many mistakes. So, so yeah, that was a huge accelerator too.

Excellent. Mark, obviously you're an established independent, 16 sites. Where's the growth now for yourselves? You know, new sites, you know, are you, are you looking at continuing that growth or are you concentrating more now on trying to build sort of ancillary revenue?

Yeah, I think, I think it's an interesting question. I think actually our story is probably very similar to Matt's really, of how we started. So we started leasing sites that traditionally do container storage, which served us really, really well. And I think probably hitting, you know, hitting some of those towns where you wouldn't necessarily see some of those national operators. And that strategy is still very much part of our growth. We're also moved into operating some indoor sites. We've got 4 indoor locations now, or sorry, 3. So that's probably about, we're about 5 years into that. So, you know, we still see some growth in, in that sector as well. But I think, yeah, I think growing the business through sites, you know, taking, taking on new storage businesses and starting from the beginning is probably what I'd say growth still looks like to us. And You know, pretty challenging. You know, there's a lot of competitive markets out there, so we're deploying our own capital. So, you know, we've taken 17 years to sort of get into the position we are. So we're, you know, just trying to go for really good quality. So that might be freehold stuff, certainly with the buildings, and just really trying to get those fundamentals correct. So great quality assets is what we're after.

That was going to be a question, talking about the capital, because if you've got leasehold properties, you know, raising capital for leasehold, have you found that more difficult? But you said that you're actually, you're using your own capital.

Yeah, no, it's, it's, it's, it's the, the fruits of, of 17 years of operation. You know, it's, it's, uh, I think it's a bit of a cliché, but broadly true, is that the storage isn't going to, isn't going to make you rich in the short term, but it, you know, it will reward you in the long term. And, and we're in it for the long term, and we, you know, trying to make decisions based on on long-term wins.

Excellent, thanks. And Kristin, obviously Spectrum has grown largely by merger and acquisitions. So how do you choose between building, buying, or, you know, complete portfolios or purchasing, you know, individual operators?

That's a great question. Yes, we've grown a lot. So over the last 2 years, we've grown by taking on 14 additional sites, around 300,000 square feet from those acquisitions alone. We bought one of the biggest operators in the Northeast, My Lockup, and integrated that. I don't think it's a secret that our strategy is mainly to buy either single sites or multi-site operators, and we believe it's worth paying more to buy a multi-site operator as well. Mainly looking at sort of what we're looking at criteria is buying stabilised assets with a cash flow generation coming from that. Excellent.

And if we can sort of lead on to, you know, the pricing side, obviously there's been a couple of questions on pricing already. If I can start with Matteo, how sophisticated is your pricing model today?

It's not as complicated as I'd like to pretend it is. We've learned yield management does really work, and I think we've also noticed that some facilities are more or less subject to to active yield management. I know some, I know for example Shoreguard, I think they change our prices almost every week for every single facility. We're not there yet, but we'd like to get there. But that actually requires just so much data and, and, and yeah, just very, very difficult to put in place. So we, but we have noticed on some facilities, especially where there's a lot of close-by competitions, Then indeed the demand is very dependent on your pricing. Actually, just a few weeks ago we maybe reduced our prices by 20% and I think our sales tripled. That's maybe our most competitive market. Whereas we have another facility that's a lot less competitive, so less competition around, and there when we change prices it doesn't really impact reservations that much. So, we've learned it really depends on how much competition there is around. I guess if it's an oversupplied or undersupplied market and also just how, I guess, wealthy the local population is.

Are you publishing your pricing?

Yeah, they're all online.

Yeah. So, so for with yourselves, dynamic pricing, it's a manual dynamic sort of model.

For now, yes. Very analytical, but yes, manual for now.

Excellent.

And yourself, Mark? Yeah, really, really similar. You know, we are doing— we're gated pricing. We've got the ability to display pricing on our website. But I think, yeah, it's a—

it's a— so you've got the ability to—

does that mean you don't? We don't do it, but we could do it. We've trialed it a little bit. But, you know, I think it's a really interesting debate and, you know, a great question earlier on about should we display prices and should we discount? And I'm, you know, I'm— what we've done predominantly for the last 10 years, I'd say, is gate the price. And where we need to, we are discounting. We're not using dynamic pricing as in, yeah, changing our prices that, that often. We're using— we use StoreTrack to track competitive pricing, and that's 100% a factor in, in what we're trying to do. But I think it's, it's really the sort of underwriting process of when you, you find a deal and you're looking at the price you think you want to charge, that, that, that sort of element never stops. You know, you need to, you need to be looking at what your competition is charging because ultimately you know, that is a massive deciding factor. And we're optimising for long-term customers. You know, I think if we were to— I just would have thought there's probably like 30-40% of our units that don't have a discount on at the moment, and they would be— they'd just be in that higher occupancy class. But, you know, predominantly customers are just getting a discount on the way in. Now, I think we are giving away margin, but I think one thing that everybody needs to look at carefully is their average length of stays of of a move-out. And, and that can, that can, that can differ massively on the time of year that you acquire a customer and on the location. And that's very difficult to gauge that before you take on a site. But, you know, I think at the moment in our student towns, average length of stay for a move-in, you know, it could be as low as 3 months. If you, if you're discounting at 50%, then, um, you know, you've got to make sure that you're, you're happy with what you're going to make in 3 months. You know, so the big argument for small units in student towns, that we're not discounting on those and willing to walk away from, from customers if we don't feel that we're going to make the correct margin out.

It's interesting, so I think on Andrew's slides before, you know, on one of his, he was talking about dynamic pricing, and I think the first 3 things he said was local, seasonal, and event-driven, which is exactly what you're saying there with, you know, how you've obviously regard your discounted 100%, which is trying to keep things simple.

I think, I think 100% that will, when it makes sense, that we'll move to systems like ProRise and, and, and let it dictate its pricing. But, you know, I'm, I'm still, I'm still sort of setting prices on a, on a sort of weekly, biweekly basis. And if you get it wrong, if you're keeping, if you're, if you're out of the bidding on, on being competitive, then, you know, you can see sales drop quite quickly.

Anne?

Yeah, so we use dynamic pricing. It's still a fairly manual process for us, but we also like having the ability to make those assumptions around certain sites based on performance or competitors showing up and things going on in the area. We obviously price very different products. We price our storage units, we price our by-the-box products in Lovspace, and they're all available to all customers. So we really try and navigate the customer to, see what kind of product or what kind of service is right for them, so that they're not ending up getting confused or comparing the prices across the product groups. Yeah, we have prices online, but they're behind an info wall, they're gated. And coming from the Nordics, that's actually— because I'm from Norway— that is a very different scenario. I think if you did that in the Nordics, people would not like it. We're very used to getting prices instantly and finding the prices that you need online, being able to compare. But actually, we saw in the UK, we've trialed both, and we saw that we were losing out on a lot of leads, and people were not converting right away necessarily. So we had to work on that, those leads further in order to convert them. So that's the best strategy for now, but it's hugely driven by larger operators naturally choosing to do that. So I'm, yeah, I feel confident that maybe we'll see a change in the future.

So you think you'll probably have your pricing ungated if others do the same?

I think yes, because there's such, there's so much competition. I say we trial both and our conversion dropped when we had the prices visible online. So you need to, yeah, you need to be aware and you need to try and stay competitive as well, actually. But mainly you need to get the data, you need to get the details. And I say in the Nordics it's very different. The bookings will convert right away. There's no leads or really follow-up in the same sense.

I think it's very interesting because picking up one of Andrew's points, wherever he's gone, sorry if I misquote Andrew, but I think one of the things you said was, which I really quite like, once price and availability are visible to all, confidence and convenience decide. I think that's possibly a really good point of how our industry can move forward. But as you say, it takes someone to start and then everybody to follow.

I think, yeah, this is very specifically for the UK compared to what I've seen in other markets.

I think most of us are very similar. If you go online, you want to buy something. Exactly. I want to know how much it costs.

The self-storage industry.

So we're just maybe a little bit behind.

We need to make sure we have the best product to sell.

Yeah, definitely. If we can just move on to talk about the automation and technology that you're using, where would you say that automation has generally moved the needle for your businesses? You know, where has it, you know, obviously worked, but also really importantly, where is it disappointed, or where do you think, you know, what do we need to make it better? If we start with you.

Yeah, start with me. I think if we just go back to basics, obviously having online bookings is a huge part of automation. It allows the customers to book online, gain access right away. There's no paper trail or anything you need to sign or fill out. Access control, of course, is another thing. I think for us, when we first started having online bookings, which is quite a few years ago now, that was a game changer, naturally. I think where we've seen challenges maybe is that with access control, for example, we have some gates that are still on older keypads with maglocks. There is no advanced technology necessarily and nothing to break. It's stable, it works 99.9% of the time. Otherwise you have integrations, you have APIs and all these things to consider and things do break. So yeah.

Have you seen a big difference? Because obviously you've got a lot of experience from the Nordics. That compared to, say, the UK and Ireland?

For automation and technology, I think the Nordics are quite far ahead when it comes to technology, self-serve, automation, all these things for the customers. Yeah, but I don't know if there are huge differences. I was asked the same question in a webinar, actually. I'm struggling to find that, maybe there's some of the differences. But yeah, some customer markets are further ahead than others, especially when it comes to self-serve. Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think, I think the big wins that we've probably had, you know, have been, you know, as a business owner, I say you put yourself in the ability to remove all those frictions for the customer. So I think, you know, one of the slides from the last talk was great on it. You know, that's sort of our job is to, is to make sure that that customer gets to the point they want to quickly. So, you know, we're about to go live with online booking in the next few months. It's not something we have done. So really looking forward to that. You know, I think, I think what I get excited about would be is the idea of all of our tech stack really communicating properly with itself and, and that, you know, we're not manually inputting data. So website comes from our website and, you know, that's ultimately being populated where it should be. You know, we're using like software and systems and all those kind of things to really have our staff focused on on the job in hand. You know, I think things that have disappointed me, no, no, I think not loads of things, you know, like, you know, we're always thinking about padlocks and access control, but we, you know, we are just trying to keep things really, really simple.

It's—

we're not trying to reinvent the wheel always. And, you know, sometimes less things are better, I'd say.

So, so although you're implementing, say, as you say, different tech stacks within the business, At the moment, is that actually benefiting you or is it actually creating more work for your existing staff to manage these systems? So you say you'd like to see something that can take over and monitor everything together. Is that an issue for you, for the business?

I mean, we use— we're using HubSpot CRM, which is sort of where we're managing our customer, you know, managing and communicating with the customer from, you know, what it gives you is, you know, it gives you— just gives you a lot of data on what is actually happening in your in your sales process. Um, and, you know, if we were to take that away, you know, if we take that away and, and, um, you know, it just wouldn't work as well. I think our staff love using it, and I think, I think that's a, that's a, that's a big consideration, is actually what does staff like engaging and using, and, and the customer as well. Um, you know, that's, that's really important, and, and customers are going to, are going to expect this. And so, you know, we've got to move with the times.

So would you say, is it— you're doing it, is it customer-driven, or is there also an element of, yeah, can it do what staff would do?

Yeah, I would say, I think it's interesting when you read people's reviews, you know, read your reviews, read your competitors' reviews, what are they— what's that actually sort of saying? Um, and you know, we don't get lots of reviews saying, oh, the online booking process wasn't great or anything like that. We're still quite manual in the sense that we're talking people through. But what customers actually like is still interacting with our staff. That tends to be what we get the best feedback from. So we're not trying to remove that element of us being available to customers to talk to. But ultimately, probably things like AirCall, we use— yeah, mainly AirCall is what we're using to call customers on. That is driven more by us. You know, there's no real difference for the customer and what what phone system we use, you know, that there's no compromise. So yeah, we're, we're trying to make decisions that are good for the business, but not, you know, definitely not compromising with the customer.

And the same for you, Matt, obviously with a smaller operation, you know, are you finding the same issues?

And yeah, well, I think definitely automation does help reduce customer friction. I guess that's what we've said. And, and I really believe that sales staff should be spending most of their time selling as opposed to taking care of admin, like filling out contracts. It's true. I think I was quite shocked when maybe even just 4 years ago, I think I rented a storage unit for myself at the largest operator in France. As they have 100 facilities and to sign the contract, they physically printed it out and they highlighted stuff in yellow. Then I spent some time reading it, signing it, and they had to go back and scan it.

Then they—

I just couldn't believe it. And then, you know, someone has to go and store that contract. Someone, some archive system. We're now completely paperless, so we don't have a single archive, we don't even have printers in our warehouses, and that saves just so much time. Customers again can book remotely, they can book in-store. So I think automation helps with convenience and so hence with the revenue side, but also it can help a lot on the cost side by For example, now a lot of our, I guess, handling late payments is a common issue in self-storage, and it's just very time-consuming. And the more, again, you can automate that, the less, well, I guess the benefit is, well, you, there are less mistakes that are made. And we have automatic emails that are sent. Now we can even send automatic SMS messages, even registered mail. So we have multiple steps depending on how late someone is. And so, it avoids people forgetting. Also, late payments is quite a, well, it's not the thing that staff enjoys the most. So, if you can automate a good amount of it, then that also takes, I guess, that makes your staff slightly happier. Of course, there's still the manual part, so you still need to call from time to time. Yeah, and then I'd say that the last part about automation, because all this is, let's say, digital automation, and I think one of the hardest things is also Well, self-storage is, it's still a business that's in the physical world. And so I think one of the toughest things is automating the physical world, a bit like talking about gates that can sometimes not work. I know users that will use it in an unexpected way and break it down. And so, so I think you will try to automate as much the physical side of things and also Being able to pilot as much as possible, because sometimes I know we have gates that just stop working and you just need to go to facility, you know, and switch a press button and then it just works. But if that happens like a Saturday at 10 PM and you have to send a staff member there, it's— well, they're not too happy. So now, I mean, we've actually— there's a lot of this that now we can do fully remotely. So if something breaks down, you just click a button on my phone and then it can just react to it. And that, I think, actually is It's a pretty powerful tool to help bring down costs.

Excellent. And then obviously keeping with automation technology, you know, are you implementing much in the way of AI, you know, or is there, if you could have something tomorrow that maybe is not available today, what would it be? Mark?

Yeah, obviously we're using AI, you know, sort of for probably similar ways other customers are, but yeah, it's a great sort of aggregator of data and and helping us understand some of those things we were talking earlier about, average length of stay, and great at getting through large amounts of data. You know, I think last year we engaged with a statistician about average length of stay, which, you know, was probably 2 or 3 days' work. You know, that now is taking, you know, 20 minutes of work now. So, you know, I think the danger can be that as a business owner, you've got lots to look at. And I always like fiddling with things, fiddling with prices. And, you know, it can be quite overwhelming, the amount of information that we sort of have access to now. So again, going back to the original point, trying to keep things simple. But, you know, it's great for the members of the team as well, you know, like doing deal notes and, you know, when a customer's calling us and that we've already spoken to them last week, last year, that that information is at our fingertips. And, you know, as Matt said, allowing members of the team, members of staff to sell and engage with the customer. You know, the talk earlier about Screwfix and their coupons in their letter, you know, that when you answer the customer with their name and that you know what they're talking about, then that goes a hell of a long way. Just to bring a bit of, sort of, personality to it.

And what about Xsells?

So we use AI, Susanne, mainly for analytics as well, analyzing large amounts of data, and especially within finance as well, to analyze revenue numbers, etc. We've also introduced an AI agent on our phones and chats, mainly as a trial within Lovspace, but also rolling it out to Storebox soon, which will help, and especially assisting the team when it's busy. We're not trying to replace the team, but we're trying to help them and obviously deliver the best possible customer service by customers having the answers they need and want right away. If we could automate something, I think there are already so many great solutions. For us, the next step is probably automating our dynamic pricing module, our price increases as well. And there are solutions, but we're still on the hunt for the perfect one. Yeah. One that doesn't break the bank, I guess.

When you're looking at, say, the front end of the business, are you making it obvious to the customers they're talking with AI?

Yes.

Or is it just being introduced as well as?

No. So when you call and you speak to an AI agent, it will make it very clear that this is an AI agent. And the same in emails as well, making it clear that this is an AI-generated response. Yeah. So our next sort of step is to connect that to our live orders, all of our systems, so that it can help instantaneously, no matter what you need.

So you've got a fully integrated system that can go from end to end?

Yes, well, that's the dream, almost plan. Thank you.

If we sort of didn't just move on a little bit to talk about, you know, multi-site scaling and operations, if I start with yourself, Anne, what do you tend to find, what breaks first, you know, from having a handful of sites to go into 29, you know, now? Is it people, systems, you know, trying to keep brand consistency? You know, what, what has been the challenges with, you know, that sort of size growth?

Yeah, so I think when you're scaling either way, and you're especially when you're integrating businesses you've acquired as well, it puts pressure on all of the systems, the people, the brand, the systems, the processes you have. It all becomes very visible when you're trying to integrate something, um, based on the scale you're integrating in as well and how many sites. Um, we, we focus on all of them, of course, but we tend to focus as well, very much on our people. And I believe that people are your best brand ambassadors. They can sell your product, they can make or break the business, essentially. So, we focus a lot and invest in our people and their development as well. On a brand consistency, it's always challenging, as you say, to integrate any brand or to change a brand, definitely. We usually have a period of time where we sort of assess the local brand awareness, um, so that we can assess what kind of impact it has in the local community, um, search volumes, all those things as well before we, before we start.

So you wouldn't automatically flip, you know, from taking on another brand. You may, you may continue that brand for some, some period of time.

Yes, definitely, while assessing. As I say, the power of the brand can be quite strong in any local community, and depending on what a business has done with that local brand as well, it can have huge value.

But you'd implement your operating processes as fast as possible, I guess? Or are you still operating on different platforms for different brands?

No, as soon as possible we will integrate them into our existing platforms. And we will also— the first thing we focus on is making any location self-serve, automated, so that you can book online and you can easily get access to the information, the prices.

And has that been fairly easy to do, you know, trying to bring everything into the same platform, or you have to completely swap Or are you using like an independent?

It depends, I would say, on the platform and what we're trying to integrate. We do have a very, very good tech team in-house that handles a lot of the integration, the website. So we can, I would say we can be online website-wise fairly quickly, as quick as we want to. And then for the systems, we always know is a bit more challenging. There are different size codes, different prices, different rack rates, you're all trying to integrate in the same platform.

And if I can jump to yourself, Matt. So obviously with 3, are you sort of looking initially, as soon as you start a new site, standardization? Is that really important to you, or are you still trying to look at, you know, is it site-specific, you know, region?

Yeah, well, that's a tough question because indeed there are certain functions you want to centralize, so to have, let's say, benefits of scale, and some that you want to decentralize. And it's true, well, at least we actually try to decentralize quite a bit of customer service and sales. I think eventually that'll change. I mean, all the obvious things that you centralize, such as pricing, I guess your processes. But actually, yeah, I guess this is a big debate in any industry. What do you centralize? What you don't? And also, I think there's a question of It's true. Also, this comes back to automation. Obviously, the more you can automate, the more you can centralize. Then I know, for example, in France, there's still a lot of people do call. I think we're talking about automation and online bookings, and we let people book online, but only a quarter of our customers book online, although it's super easy to do so. Three-quarters still have questions and will usually reach out to us before they book. Again, that's probably very different to the Nordics where it's I don't know, it's probably, well, probably two-thirds, three-quarters of people that book online without any questions.

Yeah.

Um, um, but yeah, so we're still figuring the decentralization versus centralization zone out.

Obviously, you know, you're building your brand and your portfolio. When you're making these decisions, are you thinking, I'm going to have 20, so I'm setting this up so that when we've got 20, we've got, you know, this standardization? Or are you looking at Here's a new store, we're adding it to what we've already got.

Well, you definitely go step by step. We're not yet thinking about 20, we're maybe thinking more about, well, now we're at 3, we're maybe thinking more about how we get to 5 or even 4. But yes, at least our processes are pretty set. And then I think also to what Anne-Christine was saying, it's also about finding the right people as well, because you'd be Because even if you have an amazing system and you have bad people, your system won't be put in place. So again, I mean, one of the toughest things is getting good people who don't need that much of an oversight. I mean, I guess just trust is key in any business and you've got to have people you can trust.

And obviously the same for yourself, Mark. I mean, obviously with the amount of sites that you've got, you know, have you had to change your your systems as you've grown, or did you particularly look at this is where we want to be and you've worked towards that goal?

You want to know what's gone wrong, do you, Graham?

Yes.

Um, but I think we, we set out early on with sort of like the centralized system of having one sales team based in one place, and I think that that's obviously a great efficiency. Um, if you look at the industry reports about, you know, how many members of staff store, obviously that's falling. You know, I'd say if you looked at it on a square footage basis, we're very efficient. But what you sort of lose then would be over time is that, that nature of that when we first started out that we probably knew lots of our customers personally and our understanding of all that was going right and wrong on that location was very personal. When you scale, then you lose that. So, you know, a member of the team could be speaking about a shipping container with someone in Hereford one minute and they put down the phone and they're then talking about a first floor, 25 square foot unit in a building in Basingstoke or something.

And it's—

that's quite a challenge. So, you know, you need very robust processes in place to make sure that you're sort of trying to do the best job you can. When we've started opening our buildings, we've reversed slightly and we're actually putting members of the team into buildings now.

Okay.

Mainly because we've got a lot at stake. We've got to make it a success and we've got to still have people in the business. And I think that's just borne out by the idea that we want to bring back a little bit more of that personal touch, that we're not a completely sort of faceless business based a few hours away, that there is actually somebody there. And I suppose that there's not— I just don't think there's probably many examples of large indoor operations with 50,000 square foot that are completely, you know, centrally managed. It is tricky. So, um, we're— we're— that's where we're sort of putting people back into our indoor stores.

So yeah, well, obviously, you know, we started this saying that the question is, you know, what does best in class look like? And I, I'm going to guess best in class it looks different to each of you based on, you know, where you are in the business's development. But starting with yourself, Matt, so for you, if you had one sentence to say, what does best in class look like for you?

In one sentence, um, maybe two. Yeah, I think best in class comes down to understanding what your customer wants a bit, a bit on what are previous speaker was talking about. You've got to understand what they want, what their expectations are. Also, they won't tell you all their expectations. Some are implicit, so you need to understand those.

But for yourself, is best in class— you consider what's best in class for me, or are you thinking, I want to be best in class, you know, much my competition?

Um, well, I guess in the end, best in class is a winning customers?

Yeah, yeah, I think it's a tough question. Um, I think, I think best in class is, is really, you know, to, to think of some of those big brands that are out there that are, are very well trusted and, and recognized and doing a great job. And I think there's loads of examples of that, big operators. And I think, I think there's a great LinkedIn post from Alex Henney from Squab, um, who basically talked to that, the idea of integrity and pricing. And, you know, I think that's probably not far off best-in-class, his words. And I definitely say everyone should read them.

Excellent.

I think to me it's, well, yeah, maybe I misunderstood the question, but we'll see. No, I think it's sort of the creating that really frictionless customer experience for our customers, understanding the details around what they need and what they want and when. Having sort of automation on the side of it and the opportunity to self-serve. But as we sort of touched on, the opportunity to self-serve doesn't mean everyone, every customer wants to self-serve. So being there for your customer when they need you as well is really a big thing for us, just building trust with our customers.

Excellent.

Well, thanks very much, guys. Have we got time for questions or do you want us to finish? I was told a hard one. Yeah, any— is there any questions anyone would like to ask anyone from the panel?

Thank you very much, very interesting. My question relates to corporate structure. And whether you have standalone sites linked to one store site, or whether you have multiple store sites, multiple sites on one store platform. And, uh, you know, with regards to the corporate structure, whether you've got the standalone businesses operating in their own right whether there's a holding company above them, you know, as to whether that affects the way in which you grow.

And would you like to take that?

Oh, okay.

It's, uh, it's in operational terms, it's one brand, Now Storage. Um, you know, that's the same over every, every site. And with reference to structure, I'm sort of scratching my brain now. Effectively, it is one business. That would have, you know, we operate out of one business. Yeah, but we're always sort of looking at the idea of a slightly different model, but we're not operating like an opco, popco, or holding things separately. It is all in our storage, yeah.

Does that answer what you was after? It is.

Great, that's feedback.

Thank you.

Thanks very much. Round of applause for our panel.