Self Storage and Mobile Home Park Operations Software

Many self-storage operators own and operate more than one facility.  The more facilities you have, the greater the challenge to operate them all consistently.  You may think that if your marketing materials are consistent and the sign out front of each location is enough…and you are!  But, that’s not enough.

We all know that looks can be deceiving.  When a customer walks into one of your locations, what will be the average tenure of the employee they encounter?  If your employees have been around a long time, they know the ropes.  They have been doing the job for awhile and they’ve figured things out.  That’s a good thing IF what they have figured out is consistent with the way you want them to be working.

New employees are a different matter.  They definitely need help.  You probably hired them for their skills and you may even have gotten lucky because they have some knowledge of your business, but that knowledge is almost certainly incomplete.

Business operations are nothing more than a collection of processes.  Each process has one or more specific outputs that deliver some value to either a person or another process.  When processes are well defined and optimized, you organization CAN deliver maximum value in the most efficient manner.  They WILL only when your workforce is fully trained and has the tools to execute processes as designed every time.  To achieve this, you must provide the right knowledge, ensure that all team members have the right skills, and create a collaborative environment in which the full potential of your workforce can be tapped as needed.

This is a tall order, but it is one that UnaPage has taken on.  Our web based corporate portal solution provides all the tools necessary to support optimal process execution.  If you want to be the market leader that everyone else is chasing, you must empower your people to be at their best with every customer encounter.  We can help you make that happen.  Competition in the self-storage business is only getting tougher.   Contact us today to find out how.

As I continue to learn more about the self-storage and mobile home park industries, my perspective is evolving.  Some time back, I had a revelation that would be obvious to anyone in the business — it’s all about filling units (or pads).  Business owners usually bring their own background to the job.  If they started as a machinist, they will probably end up owning a machine shop.  If they started as an accountant, they will probably have an accounting service.

Real estate is a slightly different animal.  It’s different because you must find ways to make money from your properties while you hold them in hopes that they will appreciate.  The most important aspect for the owner is making deals.  Buy low — sell high.  If you can buy a property that wasn’t making good money for the previous owner and “fill the units,” you can succeed where they failed.  Okay, so far nothing new, right?

Here’s the thing:  EVERYONE is trying to fill their units.  The answer seems to lie in good marketing.  Social media, websites and other online marketing seem like the great untapped potential.  If you could just master that, all your worries will be over!  I contend that is just the beginning.  Clearly, it is essential to have a strong marketing program, but how often do you lose business that you could have had as a result of your marketing?

There’s a good possibility that you don’t know the answer to that question.  It’s almost impossible to track.  Yet, it happens all the time.  People have a bad experience.  They tell their friends and their friends go down the road to the other storage facility or mobile home park.  So what’s the fix?  Run a tight operation.  That means getting everyone to adhere to well-defined standards that are carefully thought out to create the image you want to create.

Here’s an example from another industry.  Today, I had lunch at Chipotle, a national TexMex food chain.  As I was conversing with my lunch partner, a young man stood near our table and announced, “my name is Adam.  Please let me know if I can do anything to help you today.”  He interrupted our conversation for that unnecessary bit of information, but it made me think that these people really care about my experience.  The owners were not in that store today, but…in a way, they were.  That young man was obviously properly trained and there were mechanisms in place to ensure that he behaved accordingly.

Are your customers getting consistent professional service?  How do you know?  Having the right tools to replicate and enforce good operating practices is essential to ensure that you’re not losing customers.  There’s more to filling units than meets the eye.  Just ask the big boys.  They know that replicating the right behavior requires systems and processes.

Have you ever wondered what your organization would look like if everyone always did everything they were supposed to do when they were supposed to do it? Could you imagine how productive and well run your company would be if nobody every dropped the ball?  Dare to dream!

Of course people drop the ball for a variety of reasons, some of which are quite legitimate.  And, sometimes people don’t get things done when they thought because priorities change.  Maybe the biggest problem isn’t employees being blatantly irresponsible.  The biggest problem is that those of us handing out assignments are likely to never find out why something didn’t get done unless we ask.

This wouldn’t be so bad, but even people who are good at managing their own activities are often bad at managing the activities they assign to others.  There’s something final about getting some work “off your plate” that causes you to assume it will take care of itself.  These tasks can fall into what I like to call the “black hole.”  If the person you assigned the task to doesn’t do it and you didn’t have a way of tracking the assignment, it’s gone forever…into the black hole.

One of the challenges of avoiding the black hole is noting the source of task assignments.  Most tasks are process driven.  Basically, they’re part of a routine.  Some tasks are driven by projects or initiatives.  These often result from a “meeting” in which tasks are generated.  Some tasks are just one-up items that don’t have a project and aren’t part of a process.  Most call these ad hoc tasks.   Since all these tasks arise from different sources, you need to have a way of capturing them regardless of their source.

Do you have a way to capture all the tasks that are generated in your organization?  Who can see them?  Both the assignor and the assignee?  There are plenty of tools out there to support this capability.  If you don’t have something to hold people accountable to the tasks assigned to them, you are still a prisoner of the black hole.

As business owners, we work hard to build an operating system that can handle a wide range of scenarios without disruptions. We fail. It’s inevitable. The environment that our businesses operate within are full of disruption and variation. Sometimes it’s intentional, like the guy who shows up in the wee hours of the morning with a pair of bolt cutters and a pickup truck. Sometimes it is just life happening, like a lightening strike that blows a hole in the roof of one of your units.

When you have a lot of locations, the rate at which life happens (intentional or otherwise) seems to be faster.  One of the most important things you can do is have a closed loop system to keep track of these issues.  People should be able to report an issue easily and provide sufficient detail for it to be properly addressed.  The people that need to handle it need to be alerted that there is an issue to be handled.

Meanwhile, the person that reported the issue in the first place wants to know what is being done about it.  Depending on the size and complexity of the issue, this feedback loop between the reporter and the handler can go on for some time.  It saves everyone a lot of time and effort if there is a mechanism in place to automate the tracking of this process.

A good corporate intranet portal can help handle the issue tracking process.  Whether you’re running a self storage operation or a mobile home park, this tool can be invaluable.  Of course, we know where you might get a good system if you don’t have one.

It’s the end of the year again and so we all seize the opportunity to reflect on our performance for the year and try to anticipate what we will do in the coming year.  I recently read a very influential book called The Black Swan by Nassim Nicolas Taleb.  Taleb was one of those Wall Street guys with the job of predicting the future.

He points out that the problem with using the past to predict the future is unanticipated events that radically change the direction of history.  He calls them Black Swans.  Of course, on most days, there are no Black Swans.  On those days, the future looks very similar to the past.

So, as you plan for the new year, the changes you will be making are either designed to catch up on changes you should have already made because you have already comprehended the need for them, or they are in anticipation of something you probably can’t predict with much accuracy.  The reality is: we are usually playing catch-up.  The Internet has expanded our fields of influence and caused the spread of good ideas to occur more widely and much faster than ever before.  This makes ideas cheap and execution at a premium.  Ideas can appear at the flick of a mouse, but execution always takes time if it involves changes to your operating practices.

How do you roll process changes through your organization?  Do you have a “process” for process change?  At UnaPage, process change is our passion.  Our tools are designed to allow you to turn on a dime (maybe a nickel, but who’s keeping score).  We figure that if you can’t anticipate the future, you can at least have the tools to react quickly when it comes.  And, while you’re waiting for the future to show up, why not catch up on the implementation of some of those ideas already waiting in the queue?