Adam Jarrell, General Manager at American Self Storage in North Carolina, is as technically sophisticated a storage operator as there is in the industry. He'd been steeped in real estate from his time working in multifamily in college. He built his career optimizing the little things that make a real estate operation work, day after day, year after year.

When he landed at a fledgling American Storage operation over seven years ago, he did the best he could with what the tools he had at his disposal. As that operation grew from 7 to 15 facilities, he wrestled with desktop software that treated each facility as a loose federation of independent databases.

The first problem he was frustrated by was an every day occurrence. When a renter called, it took his site managers more than 30 seconds to boot up the software, fumbling to identify whether the person on the other end of the line was a tenant. If that renter was calling about a facility other than the one the site manager was logged into, another minute was spent waiting to load up the next database for the other facility. Something as simple as taking a payment over the phone turned into a frustrating waiting game for each renter.

Adam encountered problems like this at virtually every step of every process in his team's operation. In an effort to alleviate some of the operational challenges he found with his legacy software, he had to cobble together homegrown applications that plugged into an unreliable data feed. The end result was difficult to maintain and required his team to leverage multiple applications to access the data needed to accomplish simple tasks.

Adam heard about Cubby from another vendor who recommended he take a look at the platform. When he did, he was immediately struck by the design and speed of the platform.

Driving efficiency across multiple facilities

He noticed how Cubby made it simple for one user to serve multiple facilities. This was critical, as American's bottom line was being impacted by the inability to effectively collaborate across the growing portfolio.

"You're gonna have a hard time making money if you're paying a manager to serve a 20,000 SF facility. Our goal was for each manager to service at least 150k-200k SF across 1-4 facilities.

Previously that cap was about 90k SF across 2-3 facilities. With Cubby, we're more than achieving our goal. We now have the ability to acquire more facilities without adding headcount."

-Adam Jarrell

With a system in place that managers could use to service multiple facilities, the economics of American's storage model are looking much more attractive. Doubling down on that momentum, Adam targeted a new goal: reducing receivables.

Streamlining collections

In the first two full months on Cubby, American set records for their best collections months ever. Adam attributed this to the simplicity of making payments via Cubby's one click magic links for collections, a simple IVR pay-by-phone option for renters who may be a bit tech averse, and the ease with which his team could filter to tenants overdue and send templated collections texts and emails.

"We immediately felt the impact on receivables. We had phenomenal collections numbers in the first few months on Cubby."

-Adam Jarrell

Getting the most out of Cubby

With his team freed up and his payments rolling in, Adam turned his attention to getting even more from Cubby. He's now rolling out processes for managing incoming phone calls, relying on Cubby integrations with his phone numbers so that tenant and lead profiles automatically appear for his team when the phone rings.

He's pulling real-time data out of Cubby to create his own reporting and visualizations.

He's built out facial recognition functionality on top of his security system so that he can link tenant traffic to their records in Cubby. This is helping audit facility usage and identify problematic tenants.

He's beginning to leverage Cubby's new pricing functionality to understand his competition's rates, inform street rate adjustments, and automate tenant rate increase communications.

Taking control of his online presence

On top of that, he's taken control over his web presence with an e-commerce experience he can iterate on, making changes as he learns from his markets.

"The holy grail for me was anybody who's interested, we should capture that information and follow up with them to close the business or at least understand why we weren't the right fit.

Our prior website checkout required a lot of steps before we captured any usable information. I can only imagine the number of people that walked away from that flow. With Cubby, it's a totally different renting process. If information gets entered, it's saved as an abandoned checkout. That was huge to me. That's a big difference. It's just the ease of an online checkout mirrors what you'd expect if you were buying on Amazon, right?

I think another huge change on the marketing front is being able to have more control over the website. Before, to make a change, you've gotta go talk to a developer and they've got to submit a case and it's days to wait even when it's a small request… we want to change some tax, we want to change some pictures. These are not things that we need to pay a web developer time and effort for.

With Cubby, we can be responsive to that stuff. A huge pain point in the past was dealing with the inventory pricing and specials having significant lag, or big data mismatches where the website says the unit's available when it's not. I had to set an alarm to remind myself tomorrow at 9am to go check the website and see if it's updated. And then if it's not, holy cow, the website provider is going to point fingers at the software provider and visa versa and it's just excruciating. All of that is just gone now."

-Adam Jarrell

Within days of Cubby rolling out a new feature, you can be sure Adam's team is leveraging the functionality to drive more value into American Self-Storage's business.

Adam credits American's speed of execution to the fact that they were able to hit the ground running quickly on Cubby.

"Cubby's promises have been fulfilled. Having been through software transitions before, I learned a lot. And this one went really well. It was smooth. We didn't really miss a beat."

-Adam Jarrell

Today, American Self-Storage is equipped to scale, getting the most from their people, their tech, and capturing every bit of demand available to them. With the team Adam has in place, there's no limit to what American Self-Storage can accomplish.