COVID impacted everyone and every industry in a wide variety of ways. So what changed for self storage, and how did owners, operators, and others in the industry adapt?
In this Gabfocus Spotlight, Alonna Ross and Chad Lundberg talk about how COVID changed the way they operated.
Question: "What changed during COVID?"
Check out the video clip below to hear their answers:
In this Gabfocus Session: Year in Review (2021), we spoke with a wide variety of guests including Chad Lundberg (The Storage Group), Alonna Ross (Storage Auctions), Jim Mooney (Freedom Storage Management), Stephanie Winfree (Interstate Self Storage), and Grace Totty (Absolute Storage Management). We had a great time discussing a variety of topics pertaining to 2021.
Check out the full Session to dive deeper!
Don't want to watch the clip? Here's what Alonna and Chad had to say:
I will say for us, some of the biggest changes were the drive that we had for tech.
We had downtime. We were probably the largest sector of self storage impacted. Everybody halted lien sales real quick. So we had some downtime, and we picked up momentum with our tech, and our abilities, and really sped up a lot of processes that were supposed to happen down the road.
But because of the downtime, we were able to knock out a lot of things. I have customers like Mr. Mooney, who sends me suggestions about once a week, so we were able to knock out quite a few of those.
And we don't plan on stopping and slowing down because of COVID. Now we're back, we're up and we're running at full capacity. But we realized that for our customers, we had to keep it going and it's every single week we have something changing, and it's been full steam ahead ever since."
—Alonna Ross
"We've pushed tech.
We really pushed online rentals for a long time. Now we are kind of rolling back a little bit. If someone wants to visit our office, they can come to our office, but just making people feel as comfortable as possible.
I mean, there are still people out there, at least in Michigan, they're still hunkered down. And other people are just kind of whatever goes with the flow. So we're just kind of tweaking as we go. And if someone needs special care or to do it a certain way, we'll do it their way to make them feel comfortable, because at the end of the day, a rental's a rental, and I'll take it any way I can get it."
—Chad Lundberg
