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ISS BLOG – Challenge Accepted! How I Plan to Confront 3 Key Impediments for My Self-Storage Business This YearISS BLOG – Challenge Accepted! How I Plan to Confront 3 Key Impediments for My Self-Storage Business This Year
Do you have big plans for your self-storage business this year? Many owners and managers do. Maybe you want to attract more tenants, increase revenue, add technology, complete an expansion, hire more staff or achieve a personal performance goal. Of course, there may be roadblocks, too. In this post, an owner discusses the three major challenges his business is tackling in 2025.
5 Min Read
As we enter 2025, most self-storage operators, including me, are facing three major challenges in our business. The first is marketing, which is really on the list every year. The other two are customer retention and the technology stack, specifically, how to improve and simplify it. Not that we’re going to ignore collections, door repairs and security upgrades; but those are routine, consistent activities that have a proven process.
Here’s how I’m confronting these three objectives. Hopefully, my thoughts and suggestions will help you improve your self-storage operation as well.
Marketing
My company’s approach to marketing has always been focused on two things: advertising and brand-building. The first has been fairly simple. We figure out how much we want to spend, then apply it. In recent years, our strategy has become more surgical, though.
In 2025, our goal is to get even more specific as algorithms and data can better pinpoint who our future tenant will be. Our advertising needs to keep up. I’m no longer interested in marketing to entire ZIP codes. I instead want to reach certain neighborhoods or, better yet, a particular apartment complex. I don’t need every living, breathing person to see our ad. I only want it to be seen by our future tenant. That’s efficient and thrifty.
Furthermore, I want the prospect to see our ad three minutes before they determine their need for self-storage. That means diving into the data again. Is there a specific time of month that people from X neighborhood are more likely to rent storage? Or a specific time of day? When we get a better handle on that, we can allocate more spending to those moments. Again, efficient and thrifty.
Brand-building is a lot harder. It’s a long-term play, and some self-storage facilities aren’t meant to be kept for the long haul. Building a brand involves establishing community relationships and public knowledge of your business. If your goal is to flip a property in two years, it’s harder to justify spending the necessary time and money.
In our company, most self-storage facilities are run without onsite managers, so it can be even harder to build those community bridges. Forming a sustainable approach to this work is one of our bigger challenges in 2025.
Customer Retention
Why bother marketing if we can just keep our existing self-storage tenants? If no one moves out, it’s easier to achieve our occupancy goals. Makes sense, right? I’m not sure how to test that theory, though, outside of locking down our facilities and refusing to let anyone leave.
We can all do more to retain tenants, but we also need to increase rent. What if we do something in the middle? Instead of waiving an increase to keep a customer, maybe give them 24-hour access without an upcharge, or drop the monthly cost of an add-on product such as tenant insurance. Isn’t it better to offer a concession and preserve a paying tenant than to make 100% of possible revenue? That’s the challenge, I guess—figuring out how much we can give up to hold on to a good customer.
The other side of retention is deciding how much leeway we give our self-storage facility staff. How do we empower them to bargain and yet ensure they never give away too much? Most companies look at waived fees and discounts. How can we implement a standardized policy that is, by nature, a flexible negotiation?
Technology
The other task we’re tackling at my company in 2025 is making our tech stack work better for us. Over the last few years, we’ve seen a lot of new tools and upgrades enter the self-storage industry. We’ve been selective about adding new products to improve our operations.
Our first goal is to reduce the number of logins our team must use. For instance, what if we found a platform that can bring all our security cameras into a single dashboard? No longer would we need logins for every team member to each major security platform. What else can we get that platform to manage? Gate control? External alarms if someone props a door open? What about environmental settings allowing us to check the air temperature inside our buildings from 500 miles away? Wouldn’t that be nice!
We’re also wondering, how can we better utilize our existing management software? And when do we need to start seeking new features? Facility marketing is now a big part of industry software development, it seems. This is great, as we want to be better able to market to past tenants while adding new products and services for existing ones. If we can find a software to help us with all that, maybe we can eliminate a couple of the programs we use now, which will simplify our operation.
Looking at these challenges, I see a lot of opportunity for our self-storage company. If we can successfully meet them, our facilities will see some real improvement. That’s a big if, though. It’s always difficult to take time away from broken gate systems and negative reviews to focus on the things that’ll truly make an impact on your business. Check with me in December and ask how we did on these items. Hold me accountable!
Gary Edmonds is the owner of 22 self-storage facilities in Illinois, Iowa, Ohio, Minnesota and Wisconsin. In 2020, he launched The Storage Manager, a third-party management company specializing in remote operation. With nearly 20 years of industry experience, Gary has extensive knowledge related to running unmanned properties. To reach him, email [email protected].
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