Faraz Hemani, CEO of Iron Storage, joins us for the inaugural episode of "Students of Storage." Faraz shares his journey from working at Oracle and Google to building Iron Storage’s 30-facility self-storage business. He offers valuable insights into remote management, operational systems, scaling challenges, marketing fundamentals, and more. Faraz also discusses practical strategies for lean operations, enhancing customer experiences, and maximizing lead conversions.

Key Takeaways:

• (01:07) Transitioning from a corporate career to real estate investing.

• (04:35) Building a remote-first business model to create competitive advantages.

• (07:01) Why systemization and standardization are essential for scaling operations.

• (10:05) Building effective operations by working backward from an ideal outcome.

• (14:04) Overcoming the challenges of remote management with proactive systems.

• (21:08) Optimizing local online presence to improve discoverability and trust.

• (27:37) Tracking performance metrics to strengthen lead conversion efforts.

• (29:51) Using incentive structures to boost sales team effectiveness.

• (33:00) Balancing specialization and flexibility within customer service teams. Resources Mentioned: Faraz Hemani  

Transcript

Hey everyone, welcome to the Students of Storage podcast. I'm here with my co-host Tully from the Cubby team, and today we've got a very special guest, Faraz Hammani, who is the founder and CEO of Iron Storage. They own and operate around 35 facilities based out of Houston, Texas, with a pretty broad geographic portfolio. Thanks for taking the time to join us today.

Yeah, absolutely, Michael and Tully, thanks for having me. Of course. I was really excited for this episode specifically.

I've known you for about 18 months now, and I just find your story — both your journey into storage and what you're actively doing today — to be quite interesting and compelling. Would you mind giving our audience the cliff-notes, high-level version of how you went from your prior life over to the storage world?

Yeah, no, for sure. I appreciate it. My prior life was in technology — I used to work at tech companies like Oracle and Google, which are awesome-sounding names. And people ask me, "Oh, you worked at Google" — I was not one of the brainiacs at Google, I was not coding the future of AI or anything over there. I was a sales guy there.

I was selling software, and I worked in other programs like revenue management, and I got to meet a lot of really smart people and see how some of the biggest and best businesses work, how they operate, what their processes are, how they hire, how they define success — an amazing experience I've carried with me. I was fortunate enough to have a manager who, when I got my first sales bonus, and I was a young 20-something-year-old, like, "Oh my god, I got $10,000, let's go party" —

he's like, "Hold up.

Think about investing it in rental properties."

He had a couple rental properties himself, and he showed me the process — here's how you look at a property, figure out what it rents for, what repairs or renovations you need. So with his guidance, I bought that first rental property. Then a year later bought another, and another, and grew to a few rental properties I was managing while keeping my day job, and was fortunate the

market did really well and made me and a lot of other people look really smart who owned homes pre-COVID — the market shot up, and we sold pretty much everything, all those homes. So then I was left with cash and said, okay, I like this real estate thing — I can wrap my head around it, it makes sense, you buy property, charge x rent — it just makes sense to me, much more than public equities or a lot of other things. So we had this cash and said, okay, let's try commercial real estate, let's level up,

I guess that's the next thing we're supposed to do. Looked at a lot of other asset types, did our first commercial real estate deal — bought a strip center 20 minutes from where I live — and then bought a storage facility after that. We really liked the experience of owning that storage facility. And when I say "we," at this point it was me taking the lead, but I have a partner in this business as well.

Then we started bringing other investors in when we wanted to level up to commercial real estate, needed more cash to cover those purchases, and I really enjoyed running a storage facility — which I'm sure we'll dive into here — we geeked out about it, we loved it. It was like a small business,

there were so many operational levers for us to play around with, fiddle with, get good at. We were fortunate to have a good experience on that first one, and fast forward today we've built a small business on it — got about 30 locations across the country, and continue to learn more about it every day. It's such a fascinating niche in real estate, talking about self storage. Yeah, absolutely.

And you and I have always gotten along pretty well, because here at Cubby we're doing what you're doing on the operations side, which is applying stuff that works in other industries and adjacent verticals to self storage — that's the name of the game, finding areas of improvement and potential inefficiency. I think one thing really unique about your model is you've taken a very remote-first approach. You've got those 30 facilities, but you don't have site managers sitting behind a desk somewhere.

And in fact, as far as I know, you don't have any full-time US-based employees, basically.

So talk to me about how you decided to go remote-first — maybe somewhere after facility number one, but before facility number ten — and what your experience has been like building out that remote-oriented team. Yeah, absolutely.

So we went remote-oriented for a few reasons. I think the first is — and continues to be our focus — we are buying facilities that we feel, as operators, are like the forgotten middle, right? There are facilities that are large, 40, 50, 60,000 square feet, even 30,000 and above, let's say. Because they produce a certain revenue on that large square footage, they can afford to absorb certain fixed costs. In plain English, a bigger facility means I can afford to have a manager on my payroll sitting there.

But in our case, when our average facility is maybe 15 or 20,000 square feet, the economics don't support having someone sit there for 40 hours a week, of which maybe seven hours are working and 30-33 hours are them sitting waiting for a customer to walk in, right? Our facilities can't afford those.

And that creates opportunity, because then only certain types of buyers who are willing and able and have the capability to manage a facility remotely are the ones competing on those assets, and we get a lot of good deals — we get to take kind of a large sophisticated operator playbook and apply it to assets that sophisticated operators can't always go after, giving us a nice little edge in a niche within that niche of self storage. But the other reason is exactly what I said earlier —

things have changed. Pre-COVID, a lot of customers expected to walk into any business and interact with a human and get what they need. But when COVID happened and we had lockdowns, everything became contactless — the pizza driver doesn't hand you the pizza anymore, leaves it at your front door — everything became a self-checkout process, and the customer, from a user experience point of view, became used to that. That created this opportunity we felt in self storage.

We said, even customers who traditionally want to walk in and talk to a manager, I think they became accustomed to not doing that, and just paying online or calling someone, talking on the phone, or renting on a website. This might be a good opportunity or moment in time to apply that across our storage portfolio and operations. And the advantage of running things that way is you run much leaner — cut payroll from 40 hours a week down to maybe four or five hours a week, and in those hours, they're all high-leverage tasks.

There's no wasted time — when we send somebody out to our property, one of our managers pops up. So we run a lot leaner, it unlocks the ability to buy properties we probably couldn't buy because their economics didn't support a full-time manager. I think we found a really good niche in doing that — a good little space for us.

Yeah, 100%. And your growth has been pretty phenomenal, as a company, as a portfolio — even since I've known you, you've really scaled the portfolio. Talk to us a bit more about how you're taking learnings at four facilities and applying them when you're doubling to eight, then doubling to 15, and continuing to grow the portfolio. Talk to us about how you're applying those lessons at scale.

Yeah, I mean, we just screw up, and learn, screw up, and we just — let's not try to make the same mistake two or three times if possible.

And that's why I say we're still learning a lot every day, because there continue to be things we're like, oh, we could have done that better, or we could have probably avoided this problem had we done X, Y, Z. I think that's what like 90% of our operations today are, probably just a reaction to a past screw-up we've made. So the big thing we learned — I talk to a lot of other operators — as you scale up more and more, systems, technology, and standardization become super important.

I'll put it this way — when we had two facilities, it wasn't too bad, because I had two part-time managers I needed to send tasks to. If they needed to text me a question, I could reply. If one wanted to submit completion of tasks by texting them to me, that was cool.

And if the other guy wanted to email them, that's fine, or if one wanted to call me and ask a question, that was okay — I didn't need a lot of standardization, managing two people at two facilities. Problem is, as we grow to four, five, six, seven, and now 30, I can't have one person who wants to call me and ask questions, one who wants to text me, one who wants to email me Sunday nights. It becomes hard to stay on top of.

As we've grown, the common theme we've seen that's key to scaling is — as much as possible, without sacrificing quality at a site, without making it a robotic relationship between us and our employees and contractors — we want standardization.

We want to make sure everyone is held to a certain high standard in terms of care for the facility, communication both internally, to a customer, or a third-party vendor. We want to make sure the same things get done at every property without falling through the cracks. It's tough at this scale, with 35 properties, to be like, "Did we make sure the leaves got raked and blown off at property 17?" We don't have time to think about these one-off questions for every property.

We need confidence in the assumption that it's getting done. To do that, we need a standard system in place for execution, checks and balances, and reviews. So a lot of things we might have thought was foolish or unnecessary, or that we don't need to be that nitty-gritty about — you learn that at a certain scale you have to be. It's the only way to survive, otherwise you're just reacting all the time. That's probably the biggest theme in the lessons we've learned scaling up over the years. Yeah, and you all have done such a good job of that.

It's truly impressive to watch from my seat. If you were talking to, say, a 10-facility operator with a site manager everywhere, that's been in business 20, 30, 40 years, and they're going to look at standardizing some processes and making things a little smoother with technology, optimizing, finding bottlenecks — talk to the audience a bit

about how you'd go about finding areas of inefficiency to tighten up, regardless of the model you run.

Yeah, I think you work backwards, honestly, from — okay, what's my ideal state of a storage facility? If I did a site visit and wanted to walk away saying, "Wow, everything is perfect, we nailed it" — what would that look like? I would nail things like: we have a really clean facility, no trash or debris, every unit is accounted for, if it's vacant we've tagged it and done what we need to make sure it's ready for the next customer.

There's no deferred repairs or maintenance, and we haven't had a break-in event in a long time. Think about your ideal states — what would you love to see if the storage facility is running perfectly? And then work backwards — what do I need to do to ensure I achieve that outcome at least 95% of the time?

What do I need to do to make sure our facility is clean 90-95% of the time? What do I need to make sure we're avoiding break-ins almost all the time? What do I need to make sure our unit inventory is done correctly? That's a lot of what we did —

and those answers might be different from operator to operator, what their ideal thing or pain point is — but start there, then work backwards. If my property has a cleanliness problem and every time I go there's tons of trash, I need a system — not just a system I can hand to my manager, saying "go clean it" — because multiply that across 10 facilities and 10 managers, you have two options: either trust that all 10 people are going to take a broom on their lunch break and just do what you told them, or

you need a way to ensure checks and balances. It can't be that a couple months go by and I decide to drive to facility 8 and say, "Hey, it's not clean, but I told you 3 months ago to clean it." It doesn't work that way. You have to give the manager a plan for execution, but then you, as owner and operator, need a system of checks and balances — that's the most important part of implementing any system.

So for us, we tell our managers, you need to keep the place clean, and every month we're going to ask you to take pictures of the critical areas — drive aisles, units, gate, office area — and send us pictures to make sure they're clean. And every time you send three pictures in a row with no areas for improvement, we're going to give you a small bonus. That's our system of checks and balances, and now I don't have to constantly think, "Are 10 facilities clean?" I just look — did we get picture uploads for all 10 properties this month?

If I'm missing one, I know who to call. If there's constant areas for improvement on one every time we check, I know what to address. So think about it that way — you have to think about your outcome, give the manager an easy-to-follow system, but back that up with checks and balances so you can stay on top of 10-plus properties.

Yeah, absolutely. Tully and I talk to all sorts of operators running different models, but the best operators consistently are the ones with a plan, who implement that plan, and hold people accountable to whatever's important. Different facilities might have different issues — one might be dirty, one might have terrible online rentals, one might have high delinquency. I think actions follow incentives —

outcomes follow incentives that hold people accountable. That'll be super helpful.

You got anything else?

I was going to say, I'm going to have to get that template. A lot of people could use — put it behind a paywall for a newsletter or something.

I'm happy to share it. That's one of the cool things about the storage industry — everyone's so forthcoming. You said, "Oh, don't share the sauce" — everybody shares the sauce, and it's not even the sauce that's so important.

It's your willingness to go and actually do the work and execute it. I learned so much from talking to other people, and we're all learning from our screw-ups. I'll talk to other — I had a break-in problem at one facility, so I had to talk to another operator: dude, what do I do? He's like, let me tell you about 10 wild break-in stories, and here's how I eventually fixed the problem. That's how we all continue to get better and learn. Yeah.

Just focusing on the remote aspect of your business, which is your entire business — what would you say is the most challenging thing you've encountered, and maybe what was most challenging when you started, versus what you're still facing to this day?

The hardest part of remote management is the plain, painfully obvious one. It sucks not having a person available at your property at a moment's notice whenever you need something.

Right? Customer comes in and says, "I can't get my unit door to open,

I've tried everything." We can troubleshoot as much as we can over the phone, but God, wouldn't it be so much easier if I could just say, "There's a manager 20 feet over there, just grab him, he'll help you out." Or we see a piece of trash — someone left a mattress and it's sitting there on our security cameras, and I've got to call somebody to come pick it up, and it sits in the main driveway the whole day. Wouldn't it be amazing if I had a manager sitting there to go deal with it.

Especially people new to the storage world think, "It's easy, I'll just remote manage, everyone does it," but it's really hard not having a person there to handle every crisis that comes up. It makes you realize how many little things actually go wrong when you don't have a person there who can just deal with most of it. If you have a manager sitting there, there are so many things they'd take care of without you ever knowing it happened.

But because you don't have a person there, you're made aware of every little thing you have to call someone about. So it's tough, but that goes back to the system forcing you to be really organized — a proactive system of monitoring your properties, because there's no manager who's going to call and say, "Hey, I noticed this thing on the aisle." No one's going to tell me that. I've got to proactively look at it myself. Otherwise, maybe I'm waiting a week because my manager only shows up one or two days a week part-time.

In our model, I don't want a mattress sitting out there for a week, and it took a week for somebody to tell me. I want to be proactive about it. So I think that's the challenging part of remote management — you don't have someone there to deal with every little thing that pops up. You have to be very proactive about monitoring a property that might be a thousand miles away, and have systems to deal with issues quickly. That was the hardest part when I first started — everything felt like we were reacting. Customer trying to get into the gate,

it's not working, and I'm like, okay, we're going to have to call somebody out. Guy needs something right now — and that times 100, customer can't get into his unit, he needs to get in right now, I'm like, sorry, I don't have anyone there right now. As a new operator, I was like, oh my god, we're making customers so upset, we're doing such a bad job running this place, it feels like. And that forces you to learn — okay, I don't like getting these calls, I don't like our customer service team dealing with angry customers, we want to deliver a really good customer experience.

So it goes back to learning from our screw-ups — what do we need to do to make sure these things stop happening, what do we need to be more proactive about? And then systems get better. That's how we've gotten more comfortable in that world of remote management.

Totally. Yeah, great answer.

Awesome. Let's switch gears a little, because something I wanted to touch on is the marketing side — everything from websites to SEO to PPC to other creative advertising. In terms of our audience, as a podcast guest, you're kind of a unicorn — as far as I've met traveling to these conferences, you have the experience of working at places like Google, coming from a technology

background, and applying that to a remote, self-service-almost model for customers in terms of renting units, paying bills, and so on. Can you tell us about early on how you set up the foundation for your web presence to be what you wanted, and then some learnings down the line of what you've been rolling in on top of it? Yeah, absolutely. It's funny, because people always in the storage world say, "Oh, you used to work at Google,

can you ask them to make my site rank higher? Can you tell me why they're not putting my ads up there?" And I'm like, dude, if I knew how to do that, I wouldn't be running storage facilities, man, I'd be doing that and making a lot more money.

There's some Wizard of Oz behind the counter pulling Google search. Exactly.

Exactly, it happens all the time. The other day I was wearing one of my Google Cloud shirts, walked outside my office, someone's like, "Oh, you work at Google?" I'm like, "No." "Oh, dude, can you tell them to verify my account or something?" I'm like, "Dude, who do you think I am, man?" But anyways, digital marketing —

yeah, I've learned a lot, through a lot of trial and error, seeing what works and doesn't, where's the best return on effort and time and money in marketing, because it's hard to know where to start a lot of times — you just rattled off PPC and SEO, and there are so many

acronyms that your first hurdle as an operator in storage is learning what these things mean, then figuring out where to spend time and money, then maybe deciding to hire a marketing agency — but then how do I know they're doing a good job, because I don't understand what they're supposed to be doing? How do I know if they're doing it well or not? And the agency tells me it'll take six months to see any results on SEO — am I supposed to just sit there? It's so difficult, such a black box. I posted about this on LinkedIn the other day.

Through trial and error and a little common sense, I think there are a few big levers a storage operator needs to focus on in 2025.

First is the website needs to be easy to use — that doesn't take a marketing genius to figure out. Anyone running a business should know you want the process to be as easy and frictionless for your customer as possible. It's a big reason we moved over to Cubby — Michael, you know what I'm talking about — it was part of our conversations.

We hated being on a storage website where a customer wants to rent a unit and we make them fill out a 30-form questionnaire before they're allowed to rent — upload your driver's license, give us the name of your firstborn son, all these questions — and the customer's just trying to rent a $60 storage unit, right? We don't buy anything online that way. When's the last time, if you went to Amazon and they made you fill out 30 questions to buy a pair of sneakers, you wouldn't buy it. That's why Amazon does so well — they make it too easy to buy something.

That's why I have Amazon packages showing up every day, and I'm like, I don't even remember ordering this one — because it's so easy, one click. So our question was, how can we make the storage experience start to feel like that, feel like how everything else feels in 2025? That's one reason we like Cubby a lot — their experience mirrors more what it feels like to buy anything online. What's your name, phone number, email, credit card — and after purchase, we'll ask other questions to fill out your lease. But let's get a really quick action to conversion.

Get a user to convert quickly, but also make it a nice, friendly-looking website where even grandma can look at it and figure out what units you have, how much it costs, and where to click to rent. That's the first, foundational part — you can spend all the money and nail everything else on marketing, but marketing is directing everyone to your website. If you haven't nailed the website, you're wasting your marketing dollars.

If I'm bringing 100 people to my site every day but my conversion process is so crappy that 90 drop out, I'm wasting money.

After that, I'd say the other things to focus on — I could go on forever, but I'll keep it short — I think the biggest thing today is what's called local SEO, local search engine optimization. When you Google, "I'm trying to go eat Mexican food near me," the first thing you look at is all the businesses that pop up, their stars, how many reviews, ratings. You click on them, look at pictures. That's how people search for local businesses. That area is where you need to spend a lot of time on your rank — get lots of reviews on Google, post lots of pictures, respond to reviews in a timely manner, do whatever you can to improve optimization of that Google Business Profile. That's where the vast majority of your leads come in.

And of course, there's so much else you can do. But if I were talking to an operator asking where to focus, it's those two things — nail your website and conversion process, and spend a lot of effort on that Google Business Profile. That'll get you 70-80% of the way there.

Yeah, that's awesome stuff, thank you for sharing that. To that end, you don't need to go it alone. Even when I joined the storage industry here at Cubby, I didn't have background in online marketing, SEO, or PPC. There are lots of self-help resources on YouTube and elsewhere about what these terms mean and basic levers you can pull yourself.

And beyond that, there are lots of storage-specific vendors and consultants who really know what best practices look like, and you can leverage their expertise for a reasonable return on cost. So don't feel like you're going it alone. We're going to ISS Las Vegas next week, and it's a crazy environment at these trade shows — hard to drink from the fire hose and know what you really need to do.

Thank you for giving those two actionable points — let's look at my website setup,

a simple exercise you can do is go through your current website checkout process and see how easy or difficult it is. I think a lot of groups we talk to haven't done that in a while, but these little things — it's not necessarily changing your tech or systems, but what little levers can I pull, do I really need to ask these four extra questions in my signup —

Totally. I know you have some thoughts on online marketing and websites — anything you want to make sure benefits us — I think obviously Google Business Profile is super important, but it's not the only place we search, and I think a lot of operators tend to forget that. I'm curious if there are any tools you found super effective — I think Yodle or Nerdstar comes to mind, a tool that lets you manage your Yelp profile, Apple Business Profile,

and Google My Business profile, as well as a handful of others. Could you speak to that, or maybe some other niche things folks might not be thinking about that have a broader impact on how tenants find them. Yeah, I'll put it this way — there are so many niche things you can do to try to improve how many places you're present online.

Mhm.

The list is endless — Apple Maps, Yelp, Foursquare, 100 other websites, BBB, Better Business Bureau. I get questions like that all the time — "Is it worth listing on the BBB?" or "Should I get my storage facility on the Chamber of Commerce for my city?" I think what helps operators is if you can zoom out and understand why these things matter in the first place, and at a basic level, what signals you're sending to Google. Why does Google care that you're on the BBB? Why does that matter?

The way to zoom out and think about it: Google's task is — somebody searches "storage units near me," or anything, and Google's job is to determine which links to show the user, and which are most relevant to that user —

which one is the user most likely to click and say, "This is actually the thing I was looking for.

This solved my problem." Second, what's the most credible link? They don't want to show something scammy or unreliable — they want people to enjoy their experience on Google. If you search for something, Google wants to quickly give you exactly the thing you needed from a legitimate business. So those are the two signals you need to nail. Relevancy — that's where SEO work comes in.

Make sure your web page mentions the city you're in a lot — "storage units in Sheboygan" or "storage units in Tulsa, Oklahoma" — lots of relevant content, climate control storage, all of these things. That sends the signal to Google, this is exactly what that person was searching for. Second part is credibility — how does Google know you're a credible business?

That's where all these other things come in — not only do I have my website, but I'm on Apple Maps,

Google Maps, Yelp, Foursquare, Better Business Bureau, local Chamber of Commerce, 100 five-star reviews,

reviews as recent as last week, talking about how great the experience was renting storage. As many signals as you can send to Google, saying, "Not only is this exactly what the customer is looking for, but it's really credible."

There's evidence, even as recent as last week, confirming this is a credible business.

That's when Google decides, okay, I'll go ahead and show them this result, probably over this other person's storage facility, because they're not sending as many signals. So signing up for as many free citations as you can is good, because it's basically Better Business Bureau telling Google, "I vouch for this guy." Apple Maps says, "I vouch for this guy." Yelp says, "I vouch for this guy." And Google says, "Okay, I don't know Iron Storage, but there seem to be a hundred credible websites that mention them, so I'll assume they're credible."

That is, at a high level, how search engine optimization works. So when you think about it that way, that gives you an idea of, should I be on Yelp,

should I be here, should I be there — yes, go to any website that's credible, that gives you an opportunity to mention your website there. Think about it that way — if I sign up and put my business on this website, what signal do I think that sends to Google? That's how you make those decisions. Awesome. Yeah, appreciate you diving in there.

Awesome. Last question, top of mind, and then we can wrap up.

Really appreciate all the time today.

But I think where these two things overlap is lead conversion. You've driven interest to your website, or driven somebody to call you by ranking highly, and then your operations folks talk to that person and try to convert them into a lead.

Can you talk about a few KPIs you like to track for your team, and the impact they've had on the business? Any KPIs around leads and converting them, in this soft demand environment we're in. Yeah, 100%. I think, at least in our business, there are two ways to convert a rental —

somebody comes on your website and rents a unit, or starts the process, calls you, and then a human on your team intervenes and finishes the process. The closer, in either case, is either your website or a human. When it comes to the website, again, make sure it's as conversion-optimized as possible. But beyond that, there's not much you can do — if a customer goes to the web experience and decides not to rent, what more can you do, except try to — Cubby has that cool feature —

if someone starts a rental but doesn't finish, it gives you as the operator, "This person with this name and email started a rental but didn't finish." There's not much I can coach my website to do better, but what I can do is coach my people. So a lot of the KPIs, a lot of our work, is around: if a human intervenes, if we get an inbound call from someone wanting to rent, or we're following up on someone who reserved a unit, how can we train our reps to do as good a job as possible closing that lead? It starts with, in my opinion, measuring it.

A ton of operators don't do this. It's not easy to get all these metrics, but when I say measure it, I need to know, for each sales rep or customer service rep, how many leads, how many people did they talk to about renting a storage unit, and how many did they close?

If we're not measuring that, I don't know where my strengths and weaknesses are within my own team. I don't know where the areas of improvement are. I don't know if we're even doing a good job.

Again, you have to nail these things — even more important than marketing, in my opinion, because we can do a great job bringing 100 leads in, but if I'm only closing 20 every time because we haven't done a good job on lead conversion, I'm wasting that marketing money — pointless, setting it on fire. So first is measuring it, making sure you can say for each person on your team, I know their close rate and who my best closers are. Then, empowering those reps.

Once you can measure it, honestly, another great thing we did was incentivize them — bonuses. For people on our team closing with a great close rate, we're going to pay you more. When we started doing that, we saw a 10% jump in our conversion rate. In plain English, when we started bonusing our people, if we used to get 100 phone calls from 100 tenants, we used to close maybe 45. Now we close 60. We're squeezing 15 more rentals out of every 100 leads, just because we decided to start paying our reps on their close rate — the best money we've ever spent, in my opinion.

Then the last thing is you have to empower those reps. You can't just tell them, "Go be better at closing." You've got to give them the tools. In our opinion, it's a few things — some kind of guide or script is helpful. There needs to be a constant QA feedback process — somebody listening to those calls, because each sales rep might struggle with different things. We may need to tell one rep, "Slow it down, be more conversational." Tell another, "Give more thought to your answer when somebody asks, 'Where are you located?'" —

take the time to look at Google Maps and help them find how to get from A to B. There are different things to coach on, plus other tools — we give a lot of latitude to our reps to offer discounts where needed, offer promotions. We tell them, if there's anything else you think of live on the call that might get that customer to rent, send me a message and I'll do my best to get back within a minute or two, because I don't want that customer to get off the phone. If we had a chance of closing them and had an idea how, we should take a swing at it.

Make sure your reps feel empowered, have that latitude, and everyone shares a common understanding — when people call, we don't want to walk away without that rental, and we're going to do everything within reasonable power to get that rental. If you empower them, incentivize them, train them, let them see their own results, and measure it, you'll have a really powerful lead conversion system.

Absolutely. And something in there — measure everything, but an easy upgrade I recommend to folks all the time — if you're answering the phone in 2025 with a desk phone at every facility that doesn't record or give you any information, you can't, to your point, track what isn't there. Even upgrading to a VoIP or internet phone solution — they're very economical, pretty commoditized at this point.

They're pretty cheap and allow you to do call recording, AI transcription, call greeting, and stuff — all for not much money in the scheme of things. So setting up systems that let you hold people accountable, track things, and improve. One other thing I'd love to hear, if you've thought about or experimented with this —

this notion of specialization — I hear a lot about, you've got 10 reps, three are really good at closing, the rest are friendly and can help with payment processing, etc., but how do we get more of those leads to the killer closers versus folks who might not be as good, for whatever reason — some people are shy, whatever. Have you done any specialization among your team? Yeah, it's a good question. It's true, invariably there are people on your team who are just better closers than others — there are parts of a person's personality you cannot coach in some people, and it just makes them better at closing.

My advice to folks thinking about it — we do a little of it. The challenge is it makes you have to be really intentional about managing bandwidth. You have to think of it this way: I have 10 reps, three I think are really good closers. I'm like, okay, all new rental calls go to these three, everything else goes to the others.

There may be days when those three are sitting with nothing to do, and the other seven are getting blown up with calls, or vice versa. By not managing that bandwidth properly, you can create a suboptimal customer experience — you may have customers on hold waiting for a payment call while three reps sit there. Long story short, it can be done, and it's probably net good to put your best closers on the highest-value phone calls,

which we do as well — but it requires you to be really intentional. You can't just set it and forget it with your call center. You have to watch and stay on top of call volume, otherwise you might be shooting yourself in the foot, creating a worse customer experience.

You might have sales leads waiting on hold for 15 minutes because only three people are assigned those calls.

That's way worse — I'd rather have all 10 reps take a call.

So if you're not being intentional about managing bandwidth, it might hurt more than it helps.

Yeah, that's a great call-out. Totally.

Anything else for Faraz before we hang up? This was great, thank you so much for taking the time. I think a lot of folks will get interesting nuggets out of this to apply to their business. No, I feel like we just got the tip of the iceberg. I imagine we'll probably have future conversations, dive a little deeper.

Yeah, I hope so. You guys gave me a microphone and let me talk about storage, which I always love doing. So thank you, I hope it was helpful.

Yeah. Well, thanks, talk to you soon.

Thanks for — thank you for listening to Students of Storage. Links to any of the resources we chatted about in the episode can be found in the show notes. If you enjoyed the show, please leave a five-star review and subscribe so you don't miss out on any future episodes. Hope to see you back here soon.