Automation
Since starting Red Dot Storage in 2013, I have been a vocal proponent of automated management solutions in the self-storage industry. For Red Dot, automation created a highly scalable management platform that facilitated rapid growth from a single property to over 180 locations, throughout 16 states.
Red Dot’s ability to quickly integrate assets into the platform to create a consistent and standardized customer interface was critical in supporting the company’s growth trajectory. During my position as CEO of Red Dot, I benefited from economic expansion, low unemployment, and strong wage growth. Given these factors, I had the luxury of focusing almost exclusively on growth and gave little thought to defensive management. Unfortunately, those favorable market conditions have changed in the blink of an eye.
As a result of COVID-19, our nation has been challenged with some extraordinary circumstances. Unlike the Great Recession of 2008-09, which was rooted in our financial system, we are now facing a threat to health and safety. In an attempt to mitigate the impact of this pandemic, our nation has been tasked with social distancing, which presents a myriad of obstacles and challenges as evidence by the temporary closing of all “non-essential” businesses, along with schools, museums, sporting events, and so on. The pain being inflicted on small businesses across the country is unfathomable.
This new challenge requires storage operators to utilize a different set of tools and strategies. By implementing social distancing, owners must rethink customer interaction. For the time being, office hours are essentially non-existent, which means rentals, payments, and customer communication are being forced into a remote format. Furthermore, owners must be prepared to rethink the role of their facility managers, the tools they need to do their job, and how to measure their success.
This could prove to be an almost insurmountable challenge for operators that have relied on a traditional on-site manager model, however, I encourage every storage owner to consider incorporating some level of automation into their operations as a solution. As the COVID-19 ...
Seth Bent
April 27th, 2020