Gabfocus Spotlight: How do you implement automation at your storage business?

Automation means many things. It's a spectrum that covers everything from very simple communication with customers to advanced systems that allow you to operate a storage facility with very little direct interaction on even a weekly basis.

Implementing automation doesn't need to mean your facility is remotely managed or otherwise hands-off. It can just mean making your life (or your manager's life) easier by reducing daily tasks that take up time and energy better spent elsewhere.

In this Gabfocus Spotlight, Raheem Amer (Mini Mall Storage) and Chuck Gordon (Storable) give their advice on how to implement your shade of automation at your storage facility.

Question: "How do you implement automation at your storage business?"

Check out the video clip below to hear their answers:

In this Gabfocus Session: Storage Tech Summit, Tommy and Melissa are joined by Raheem Amer of Mini Mall Storage and Storable's Chuck Gordon. They get into the weeds about all things tech, including where the industry is with tech, how to best utilize it, and how to fix some common problems.

Check out the full Session to dive deeper! 

Don't want to watch the clip? Here's what Chuck and Raheem had to say:

Good website and a good PMS system. Let's start with those two first and foremost, because if you don't have those two, nothing else matters.

And then access control and insurance and marketing like SpareFoot and Google and payments and the list goes on, call center technology, auctions. I think that all of those things are really important.

And of course my somewhat biased pitch is that the more you can get in one place, the simpler it is, the easier it is, the more efficient it is. So that's kind of our whole value prop with Storable, right, is we make it easy by having everything together.

One thing that I would note though, is in going back to your comments about being super narrow minded about what does it mean to be automated, something Raheem and I definitely agree on is there is no one size fits all approach.

And being dogmatic about automated means that there are no people in my building and that our customers will never speak to a human being, ever. And so I have to have all these systems and tools in place to make that true. 

That's not really true.

We have a kind of unique view across literally 30,000 facilities. We just crossed that line this month using one of our FMS products and or PMS products. And there are so many flavors of automation. And you have some people who are going all the way to the big fancy options of putting Nokē locks on every door, and you have other people who are basically putting little plastic tags on vacant units and just leaving a lock inside. And when the tenant comes in, they just cut the plastic and get the lock out and that's it.

And there's a ton of variations in between.

So I think that you have to figure out what works for your location, for your staff, or if it's just you who own the facility on your own, how much time you want to be there. It all depends and there is no right answer. So I think having the tools that let you do what you need to do is the way to think about it."

—Chuck Gordon

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"Unmanned does not mean unmanaged.

And I think when we say automate, when we say, hey, we're going to go unmanned, it's extremely important that you need to understand that every property that does not have a manager on the property needs to be, to the nth degree, looking and feeling better than your manned properties, right?

Your location with the office, it needs to look better. It needs to be pristine. Because when a customer walks up to that property, there is nobody else there to sell them that property.

So unless you're investing and have a program in place on how you're going to make sure that those unmanned properties are managed properly, they have the visits, the property is pristine, clean, organized, any customer can walk up.

We've seen a huge increase in millennials and Gen Z renting from us.

They don't want to talk to you.

They want to go through the whole process, and as Melissa said, unless there's an issue. When there's an issue, they want immediate answers. And if you're not there, do you have a plan? Have you tapped into technology so you can make sure that they get the answer and they get routed to the appropriate person so they can get immediate answers?

Because if not, now you're going to get hit all over social media on how bad your performance is, how bad your property is, and you're going to shoot yourself in the foot.

So it's extremely important that you approach it correctly and you have a system in place of how you're going to address different issues, different concerns, how you're going to manage your property. You need to take all of those things and make sure that all those check boxes have been checked.

And as Chuck said, it's not for everybody, because you need to really dive into it and really understand where are all the bottlenecks that your customers are going to go through, and how do you make sure that you have fixed those bottlenecks?"

—Raheem Amer