No trend-chasing, no vendor talking points. These are the things I find myself explaining to operators over and over, written down once.
AI & Automation
Before You Buy an AI Tool for Your Storage Business, Write Two Files
The vendor's demo works because the vendor's data is clean. Yours will not be. Two documents, written before you buy, fix the order most operators get wrong.
Reporting
Nobody Keeps a Copy of the Market Data They Pay For
Green Street bought StorTrack and bolted AI onto the feed. The risk isn't the AI. It's that you rent market data and keep none of it.
AI & Automation
The Open API Isn't the Green Light You Think It Is
An open API doesn't create clean data. It creates a faster path from the data you actually have to a decision someone will act on.
Systems Architecture
The REIT Advantage Isn't Capital. It's That Every Site Runs the Same System.
Public Storage's $10.5 billion NSA acquisition proves REITs standardize before they acquire, not after. The sequencing is the part worth copying.
Systems Architecture
The Self-Storage Tech Stack, by Scale: What Changes at 5, 15, and 40 Sites
The software that runs a five-site operation quietly breaks a forty-site one. What has to change, and when, so growth does not outrun your systems.
Systems Architecture
Your Software Vendor Is Not Your CTO
The company selling you the software should not be the company designing your systems strategy. Why that conflict costs growing self-storage operators.
Customer Operations
The Calls You Never See Are the Ones That Cost You
A missed call is the most valuable event your business will never record. Answered calls become move-ins. Missed ones become silence.
Customer Operations
Self-Storage Doesn't Need a CRM. It Needs a Ticketing System.
Most multi-site operators run their sales on a B2B CRM. It is the wrong tool, and it has been the wrong tool since day one.
Reporting
You're Steering Last Month's Business
The problem is rarely which numbers you track. It is that you see them weeks after they could have changed a decision.
Reporting
Your Cheapest Campaign Is Probably Your Most Expensive
The campaign with the lowest cost per lead is the one your agency will tell you to protect. It is often the one bleeding you.
Customer Experience
Spend Your People Where They Change the Outcome
The argument against automation is really an argument about where a person is worth having. Most operators put them in the wrong place.
AI & Automation
The Boring AI Is the AI That Pays
Skip the smart-facility keynote. The AI that returns money in storage today is unglamorous, already available, and mostly about the queue.
Operations
Would a Customer Notice? The Only Build-or-Buy Test You Need
Stop asking whether to build or buy. Ask whether a customer would ever notice the thing you are about to build.
Operations
How Operators End Up With Custom Software They Never Meant to Build
You picked SaaS over developers and thought the build-or-buy question was closed. It just moved somewhere you cannot see it.
Operations
Stop Buying Storage Software by the Badge
Cloud-native, modern UI, AI-powered, mobile-first. Every one of them wins the demo and predicts almost nothing about whether the software will run your business.
Operations
The Migration That Fixes Nothing
Six months, real money, a new platform live - and the original problem is still sitting exactly where it was. Because it was never in the software.
Reporting
Run Your Operation Like a Watch: The Data Discipline Behind Precision
Operations don't drift because the data is missing. They drift because the data isn't connected.
These run for credibility, not clicks. If you got here from an email or an introduction, this is the long version of how I think.