SSA Blog

It cannot be understated how valuable a good manager is to the success of a self-storage facility. It can literally be the difference between that business surviving or not. If you’ve been in the storage business for a while, you know that employees can run the gambit between highly effective and not effective.

Today’s self storage operator relies more heavily on online visitors to their website to generate business than ever before. Smart owners should be looking at the analytics data that is derived from customer visits.

When I was brought on at West Coast about a year and a half ago, one of the goals we had as a business was to grow our website’s organic traffic (visitors to the site from search engines such as Google). To do that, we decided to take a multi-pronged approach.

You’ve done everything you can to get your storage facility in peak condition. It’s impeccably clean, the security systems are in place and functional, and your marketing, online and otherwise, is up and running.

Red Way Self-Storage in Redmond, Washington has a design feature that makes it unique among self-storage facilities in the U.S. But its creation came about in an unusual way. When local real estate firm, Nelson Legacy Group, decided to build a 578-unit storage facility, it discovered that the City of Redmond offered some very interesting “green” incentives.

We don’t have to tell you how intensely competitive the self storage market is, especially when it comes down to the local level. If your storage facility is in a larger city, you’re competing against dozens of other storage facilities for top billing in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

I recently spoke with John Eisenbarth, the Vice President of Operations for West Coast Self-Storage in Mill Creek, Washington, to get his take on how West Coast goes about finding the right types of storage properties to manage.