Episode 261: The AI Competitive Advantage for Self-Storage Operators | Peter Smyth

Announcer [00:03]

This is the Self Storage Podcast with the original self storage expert, Scott Meyers.

Scott Meyers [00:11]

Hello everyone and welcome back to the Self Storage Podcast. I’m your host Scott Meyers and we have in the house Peter with White Label Storage. Peter, we’ve been talking for 20 minutes and we probably should have been rolling the tape — always the case when we get together. First of all, how are you doing? All right, thanks for having me on. Always fun being on here. Yeah, well welcome back, and fresh off of the Florida show. I think we should just dive right back into the conversation that we were having. You were on a panel — to set this up — and the discussion was, of all things, AI. No surprise. And there are many ways that owners can approach this, whether it be a one-off something they’re doing on their own, a software that runs behind the scenes that has AI performing a function, or all of the above. But tell us a little bit about — if you can share some of the discussion that was had both on stage while you were on the panel as well as off — and then throughout the show with regards to, I guess, anything that just really caught your attention with regards to AI and storage and where we sit right now here in 2026.

Peter Smyth [01:10]

Sure. Yeah, it was a good discussion. It was hosted by White Label, 10 Federal, and Swivel.

Peter Smyth [01:18]

And we sat down beforehand and sort of acknowledged to ourselves that technology and AI could be leveraged by us in different ways than by who we’re speaking to. So we wanted to level-set at the top of the discussion and say, look, as a typical owner-operator in the industry, you’re probably looking at AI the same way you would have looked at any other software vendor or service provider five years ago. At the end of the day, you probably don’t have an engineering team and you’re not going to be building AI-native products, and therefore you should start by looking at the infrastructure that you have in place and the team that you have in place — really the infrastructure, team, and technology that you have. And then look at what are the workflows that need to be performed at the facility level. So that’s marketing, customer service, revenue management, maintenance — and make your decisions on how you’re going to leverage AI based on where your gaps are and where you need leverage.

Peter Smyth [02:17]

As an example, the one you and I were just discussing — if you have somebody on site who is pretty good at closing sales and can handle facility maintenance and checklist-oriented things on site, that probably means that’s not the same person you want doing the pricing at your facility. And so your gap might be, hey, I want to focus on — maybe you own another business or maybe you’re trying to buy the next facility — I want to put revenue management on auto-drive. So then you probably want to use AI and automation to focus on that gap, and that’s where your leverage is going to be. Or on the flip side, you might have a good knowledge worker in your office, but you might not want that person taking calls or focusing on what you would consider to be low-value work. So maybe you want to take a lot of the customer service-oriented functions out of the workflow so that that person can focus on running surveys, doing pricing, and ECRIs. So I think that was how we framed the discussion, and then there were some pretty good questions that fed off of that. But at the end of the day, it’s not going to be the same for everyone, and you’re probably not building your own tools. So you just need to look at where your gaps are and where you can get leverage to run a better business.

Scott Meyers [03:23]

So folks that are starting out — or even folks who are just now starting out with AI — there’s software, there are apps, there are companies and vendors that can run things behind the scenes. You can teach your staff member on site to do some one-offs. Revenue management is one of those areas we were talking about, where somebody can just go out and assess the market, and as long as they can write a good prompt, they can get most of that information without perhaps having to pay a vendor. But that’s one of the questions in the discussion. What are you seeing in the marketplace right now? Because it seems like people are hesitant to even spend money with a vendor that is AI-related because they feel like they can do it themselves — this chicken-and-egg scenario that we’re seeing with AI right now. What are you seeing currently with regards to how people are really approaching this? Are they doing it in-house and trying to figure it out, or are they primarily utilizing vendors to run these things behind the scenes?

Peter Smyth [04:18]

Yeah. Well, first off, a lot of this stuff — probably some of the things that these tools are designed to do — you might actually be able to do better yourself. I mean, at its core, AI is most effective at knowledge retrieval, summarization, and processing, and therefore those are the things you should probably have it do. So for us, for example, we are trying to solve different problems than a typical operator would. We answer close to 30,000 calls a month, and therefore there is a major function that we had to build out around QA and call assessment for our customer service talent.

Peter Smyth [04:59]

We can process that — that’s a lot of data to process, and that’s something AI can do. That’s probably not a product you would sign up for as a one-off operator. So I’d say, taking revenue management as an example, where I would start is with places where AI can actually eliminate a lot of your bottlenecks or cost centers. I don’t know if that’s where everyone is starting, but that’s where I would start. What I’d say, though, is some of these tools are only as good as you allow them to be, based on the knowledge base you have. So customer service, for example — that’s probably been one of the better use cases where you’ve seen AI proliferation across every industry. Well, again, back to what somebody can do on site: the person on site is going to have a more intimate, unstructured knowledge of that facility than any AI agent

Peter Smyth [05:59]

could — unless you are maintaining the best database you could possibly imagine. And that’s everything from which door sometimes doesn’t work to how the unit numbers are a little odd at this facility. So if you just let an agent run your customer service without having a very good knowledge base, you’re going to struggle. I would start with the things that aren’t going to require a lot of your own work but will have major processing and leverage advantages.

Scott Meyers [06:27]

And that’s really the approach we’ve taken, quite honestly. The sites that we run — and given the size and the degree of responsibilities that these folks have — we can’t just turn them over. We are not running unmanned facilities in most locations. Some we do. We have a hub-and-spoke scenario in which we’re utilizing AI to give these folks at those sites better information and tools, and also teaching them how to basically write a prompt for anything they’re struggling with or running into, just allowing them to be more efficient. And so I know people will push back and argue about that, but if you’re running a site that requires — or that is your business model, where you truly have a number of different profit centers and there’s a fair amount of traffic and it’s a sizable facility, say 60,000 to 70,000 square feet and above — for us, we’re going to have one to one-and-a-half folks at those sites, and we’re just going to utilize some AI to assist them in what they’re already doing.

Scott Meyers [07:25]

As you just said, there are personal nuances too. Every single site, every single facility just can’t be run without having somebody there for a fair number of hours. And even now, as good as we’re seeing these AI-powered bots in the sales cycle — as we were talking about offline — I was in Tokyo last year and witnessed a couple of sales automation tools where you can still tell, but boy, I think a lot of folks would be hard-pressed to discern whether they’re talking with a human being or with an AI agent that was walking them through that customer journey. And they built a platform — even more importantly — that allows the client to go all the way through the customer journey, all the way through. And if there is a lead and a sale, the entire process is automated on this platform. And I’ll give you a second to respond here, Peter. But here’s what I’m seeing right now: I don’t think it really matters in our industry. I think we’re going to see the proliferation of AI agents everywhere, and for these low-level, commodity-type transactions like renting a storage unit,

Scott Meyers [08:38]

I think people are going to — even if they recognize it — I don’t think they’re going to care. They just want to get further down the path more efficiently. They don’t care if it’s not a human being. If they’ve got a problem that truly needs customer service, then we’ll give them a reason or a way to opt out to another channel to handle that. But I think for just a basic, low-level transaction, I think people are going to become accustomed to this, and they’ll recognize it and they really won’t care.

Peter Smyth [09:02]

So we’ve actually had that as an internal dialogue — and even an argument — about this. We’re building an agentic piece of our call center. So again, back to what we talked about: assuming your knowledge base is never going to be perfect, there are certain types of calls that are going to be challenging to answer and will just frustrate the customer. So we looked at all our calls, and 30% of them are tied up in either people trying to get prices or retrieve their access code. Those are use cases that the agent should handle perfectly, and therefore we’re fine letting the agent run those — because that means the agent can answer on the first ring with perfect information. You don’t even need to QA that. But what that also does is create a ripple effect down the queue, so that call is no longer tying up your queue. That’s true leverage. But then once we started rolling this out, we started asking ourselves — man, we do operate in a number of markets where maybe it’s a more senior customer base or people are still calling from landlines. And in that case, if they can tell — because you can still tell — yeah, sure.

Peter Smyth [10:19]

Would you rather it just sound like your typical AT&T agent — that’s just a better and faster virtual agent — saying, ‘I’m your virtual agent and I will take your payment; if you have any other question, let me escalate you out of the queue’? Because it is a trust matter. Back to your question, it is a trust matter. It’s a good question, and not everyone on our team is falling one way or the other. I think it’s something we’re going to test a bit. I do think at the end of the day you should let them know.

Scott Meyers [10:45]

Right. But we don’t have the data yet. So I mean, we’ll continue to test it. Right now we are guessing, and again, if I had to guess, I would say that people aren’t going to care. Especially if it’s something like, give me a code — I don’t care, just give me my code, get off the phone, and free up your time. I’m a business owner as well, so let’s make it more efficient for everybody. I don’t know, that’s just my take.

Peter Smyth [11:07]

So what else? Go ahead. Well, there are some quick wins, just to layer that on. What are some quick wins you can get without running the risk of relying too heavily on your knowledge base and having this thing do a bad job? Well, one of them — we’ve talked to a bunch of owners and spent a lot of time focused on the funnel of trying to convert a customer.

Peter Smyth [11:28]

It’s not that hard to quickly tap out all of the active searchers in some of these markets who are looking for self storage facilities. So your marketing and sales advantage becomes how effective you are further down the funnel. And that’s where follow-up and sales tactics come in. So one quick win would be letting a chatbot run 24/7 and actually capture every other lead — any little bit that you can get where you might be able to convert that top-of-funnel prospect before they go to the other facility. That’s a win that something like Swivel or a chatbot can give you. Similarly, for us, we’re trying to spend a lot of time and effort on follow-up — follow up right away. Even across those thousands and thousands of calls I mentioned, we pipe anything that’s been identified as a lead that didn’t convert on that first call into a channel. And we do have a pool of closer agents who are going to call those back, but on a busy day you might not get to them in the amount of time you want. Well, something agentic will get to it right away with all the information it needs to close that sale. And if it can’t get it done, it’ll wrap it up.

Peter Smyth [12:38]

That’s again thinking about where there is real value to be added here — getting a little more real-time, accurate information on rates that have changed. I mean, if you’ve run a survey once, you have four fairly accurate rates. If you factor in another price change in that same submarket, how much incremental value is actually being added? I think your real value is having a salesperson just close the deal. You probably know roughly what the market rates are, and maybe that other rate will come in and shift you from $40 to $41 on a given day. So that’s how we’re trying to think about these things. Let’s try to get some real leverage and wins.

Scott Meyers [13:21]

I’ve got a good friend of mine who operates in the sales space primarily, and he also has some support tools and has developers on staff with software that comes alongside his sales training, and he works with organizations of all types. But one of the tools and resources he’s launched recently that is getting a lot of traction is just honing in on this one specific piece, which is scheduling the callback. It’s a slightly higher-level sale than a storage unit, and I think the average is still whatever seven touches for a sale at a certain level, but the salesperson has to call back. Well, salespeople are always going to go where they can find the most money, and smiling and dialing or calling back referrals isn’t always the best use of their time, and they get tired of hearing no.

Scott Meyers [14:07]

And so this dialer just goes and schedules the next appointment. If a sale hasn’t been closed on that first call, it goes into the call matrix, and the AI bots then just schedule the next appointment. That’s all they do — they follow up in a certain sequence and dial and dial and dial until they get to that person to be able to either get them on the line or push them to schedule a call via Calendly or some other platform to get back in touch with the salesperson. And he’s seeing a lot of traction with that and a lot of good results. So you’re still getting the salesperson on the call — all this is doing is scheduling the appointment or patching them through immediately once they get in touch with them for that second, third, fourth, fifth touch.

Peter Smyth [14:49]

Yeah. Yeah, so taking what was maybe a low-value prospect — as soon as you increase the probability that you’re going to close that prospect, the value has increased.

Scott Meyers [14:59]

Exactly.

Peter Smyth [15:00]

That kind of reminds me about other use cases. AI has enabled us to focus on things that maybe we otherwise would not have. So the 10 Federal guys had a cool example — and we are doing a different version of what they’re doing — but they have the luxury of all of their stores having the same infrastructure, and this is back to what is your infrastructure: they have the same security cameras, the same access control. And so they’ve built an agent that is just testing gates once or twice a day. As you know, if your gate goes down, you can crowdsource that — your tenants are going to be the ones who feed that information back to you before anyone at the facility, even somebody on site, notices. And if you get an influx of calls at that time, that is costly, right? You’re going to miss leads because your customer service line is going to be jammed up. Similarly, for us, we’re trying to identify if there’s a facility that has some type of call happening frequently. If we can eliminate that call volume, it will one, increase our pickup rate and resolution time, two, result in happier tenants, and three, let us focus more on leads. So it’s just something we couldn’t have done otherwise.

Peter Smyth [16:12]

It would have been so costly to sit there and have a senior agent listen to every single call, but now we can process that information much faster.

Scott Meyers [16:21]

I’ll tell you, those pieces that we haven’t focused on as much as we should have in the past — the satisfied customer — it doesn’t mean that we neglected them once they came in. It’s just that Google reviews are more important than we ever anticipated, and even more so now. And so spending time on what people may think is low-priority, like, well, let’s get these calls handled quicker — like that gate example, if the security gate goes down, that’s a bigger deal. Those types of items are getting moved up further and faster in our queue now so we can knock them out, because we can utilize technology and some type of AI platform to handle this. Because when they leave — and we don’t want them to leave because of poor customer service, or because this is the third or fourth issue they’ve had with us and we didn’t respond fast enough — and then the Google reviews come in, well, those are real dollars. We may not think so, but Google reviews are huge in our industry right now, more than ever. And so yeah, we’re no longer running out those ground balls and saying, ah, it’s low priority, let’s kick the can down the road to next week, next month. No, we’re beginning to address those because they’re important.

Peter Smyth [17:30]

And I guess one other way — I don’t know if this is exactly what you’re saying — but in terms of the people you want to reach out to for reviews: if you want high-value review opportunities, again, AI can process information and identify sentiment. If you could just say, hey, we’re only going to reach out to people who appear to have had happy calls with us — where they got a quick resolution and probably left with a smile on their face — we’re only going to ask those people for reviews. That’s another area where you can get real leverage. One hundred

Scott Meyers [18:01]

percent. What else stood out? What else? For the folks who weren’t at the show — what do they need to hear, what do they need to see, or what were one of the bigger takeaways? Maybe your top two or three?

Peter Smyth [18:12]

Yeah, so man — I think New York City is top of mind with this kind of consumer complaint. There’s this lawsuit against Extra Space, and I don’t care to get into that because I have no control over it, but I do think everyone’s talking about how we treat the customer service experience on the tenant side of things. Because

Peter Smyth [18:37]

like you said, Google reviews — there are limited ways to have a competitive advantage in this industry, and if you have technology giving you leverage elsewhere, you probably can spend more time focusing on something closer to a hospitality approach: providing a better customer service experience, teaching your salespeople — hey, take the time to, if somebody’s going to complain or leave, maybe you can meet them halfway or follow up and spend a little more time making sure they had a good experience. I’m on an operator call with a bunch of senior guys in the industry and that’s what we’ve been talking about: how can we do a better job building a better name in this industry? At the end of the day, ECRIs are going to happen and you’re going to roll out tenant protection — there are things tenants are going to be upset about. It’s just part of the business. But what else can you do to focus on service delivery? That’s a topic of conversation and it’s a tough one because at the end of the day, if you’re going to roll out any strategy like that, it is going to add a line item — it’s going to be a cost center. You need to truly believe there’s some sort of value there.

Peter Smyth [19:51]

And self storage from coast to coast — mostly on the coasts — is kind of getting a bad name and getting scrutinized right now.

Scott Meyers [20:01]

I will pull on that thread just a little more and then we’ll move on. Two years ago at the ISS show, my speaking session was on the top 10 threats facing us as an industry, the top 10 things heading into what at that time would have been 2025. And my number one was the practices of the larger operators. I don’t want to lump them all in and make them the big bad wolf in all of this, but everybody else that followed suit — going online and reducing rates by 40, 50% to buy occupancy, and then within a few months raising them back up with these egregious rate increases. And yes, it was gaining a lot of traction because we were in the news at that time. In California — not we as in us, but the industry was coming under fire — and a couple of local news stations in California were going after these facilities and some of the big names in our industry because there were enough consumers complaining about it, and so it was starting to get traction.

Scott Meyers [21:00]

So my take was, okay guys, this — absolutely, whether it’s going to happen or not — could be the biggest threat we’ve seen. We’ve seen what happened when rent control came to single-family and multifamily, and we absolutely do not want to be in that position. That is one of the biggest benefits of being in this industry. We’ve got 30-day leases and we can raise rates — as long as we do it responsibly — so let’s just enjoy the freedom we have to do so. And there were a couple of fingers wagging at me from the back of the room, and then later in conversations on the trade show floor from some of the folks at the REITs — and that’s fine. It needed to be said, and apparently I was the only one in the room willing to say it. And lo and behold, it didn’t seem to really take hold. I didn’t expect it to. And here we find ourselves a couple of years later and now it’s coming to fruition. What’s going to happen is, yeah, these folks are going to get a hand slap and a fine, but it could head toward rent control, and New York is probably the most shining example of a city that loves to use that. And if that comes down the pike and sets a precedent, that could be something really bad for us.

Peter Smyth [22:08]

It could bring in, once you start going down that rabbit hole, a lot of other things too. I think they proposed some sort of insurance requirement in New York as well, which would totally change the asset class and what you’re getting into. So many other things would change, and it would probably make underwriting much harder. It’s very hard to underwrite deals in markets now with these entry rates you need to have.

Scott Meyers [22:34]

Correct.

Peter Smyth [22:35]

Unless you have an OM and a T-12 for all the facilities in the market, it’s hard to do that. Underwriting and marketing are way more expensive. There’s just going to be more churn.

Scott Meyers [22:45]

For sure.

Peter Smyth [22:46]

And then I think there’s even a chance that we’re shrinking the overall participant base in the self storage market. There are no doubt people who have exited self storage rentals because of that experience, and that is not what you want — you want to grow the market, not shrink it. So yeah, a lot of things would change if that was not best practice — or hey, common practice rather. And I do think there’s been almost a subtle nod to that from the guys on panels at these bigger REITs. I don’t have any inside information on that, but I think people who have third-party management with REITs are starting to see a more gun-shy approach, and I think that’s for the better.

Scott Meyers [23:36]

Yeah. Yeah, I would agree. I would agree. Well, what else did you see there? Perhaps what was your biggest takeaway? Was that it, or tell me what you left the show with.

Peter Smyth [23:48]

It’s kind of a state-of-the-market thing. It does seem like there’s — to me it seemed anecdotal, but maybe combined with some data from the New York show where it’s a little more robust — around things like loan maturities and the consumer. Now, they had Moody Analytics at the New York show saying, look, you combine a stronger consumer with the fact that there are always loan maturities coming through, and it’s been enough years of people going from bridge loan to bridge loan — I think many operators are going to take their lumps and maybe exit whatever business plan they’re in, and I think there will just be more transaction volume than there has been in the past. That’s great for us as an operator because we tend to get deal flow when deals change hands. So it seemed like more active participation, people getting back in the market, maybe talking about opportunities to sell deals and looking at opportunities to buy deals. I don’t think this is going to be a 2020 or 2021 market, but I do think there might be some more volume this year for those reasons.

Scott Meyers [25:02]

Yeah. Well, I’m always optimistic on the self storage market. And as I talked with one of my leading brokers the other day — yesterday, as a matter of fact — we were just chatting about the industry, gentleman, what are you seeing? And yeah, there are some folks that are exiting, as you just mentioned — exiting at a breakeven after owning facilities for two, three, or four years. Some of their equity partners got no distributions and just got a return of capital, and it’s not a good scenario for a lot of these folks. And that’s happening either with loan maturities or these folks are just recognizing their time and resources are better spent elsewhere, so they’re taking their capital back — whatever is left — and deploying it somewhere else. They see that this industry, or at least this year, is going to be pretty flat in terms of returns.

Scott Meyers [25:47]

Not a whole lot of interest rate movement, which means not a whole lot of movement in the broader economy and in housing in general, which drives 20 to 30% of our lease-up. And so for that reason — yeah, to your point, it looks like there are going to be some transactions where folks are either being forced to hang on and have now reached the end of the runway with their lease-up reserves, so they’re being forced to sell or send these things back to the bank — or they still have reserves but are waving the white flag and saying, yeah, I think my time and resources are better spent somewhere else. Which means, I think you’re right — there’s going to be opportunity there. The good news is that anytime you buy in a market like this, there’s no guarantee.

Scott Meyers [26:31]

You can’t say that you can only go up from here — do your underwriting, do your market analysis — but these are the times, traditionally and historically, when most millionaires are made, when most folks are building. And those who find themselves building a portfolio in 2026 are going to be well-served in 2028, 2029, 2030, and beyond. So I’ll be curious to see, because every recession is a little bit different in its underpinnings and what it looks like going forward. But we’ve been developing for the past year and a half to get yield that way — not a lot of acquisitions. We’ve just been focusing on operations. But we’ll be looking — we are absolutely keeping our ear to the ground, and we’re going to be pouncing and acting very quickly if there are some troubled properties coming onto the market — and only because they’re troubled properties, not a troubled market, not anything else other than, hey, we can pretty clearly identify here’s how we turn this thing around and why it’s undervalued for where it’s sitting.

Peter Smyth [27:31]

As you’re talking, that kind of reminds me — one of the stats I heard at this conference was that SSA and ISS and trade shows in general are seeing mom-and-pop percentages decrease by 10%, and I think what’s happening is — between rent control and aggregation and new entrants like ourselves — the asset class is really maturing. It’s becoming a more institutional asset class, and these are all the signs of a more mature asset class. For sure. Yeah, the 10 Federal guys are happy that folks like White Label and Atomic exist because there are just more opportunities to increase the buyer pool for their unmanned stores around the country.

Peter Smyth [28:19]

So hopefully, if that is the case, then asset values should be able to increase as well. I think there are just more options for people to get into smaller deals in tertiary markets and have real managers and an institutional experience.

Scott Meyers [28:38]

Yep, we’re seeing that as well. Of course, we have the education business and our mastermind, and there are folks who have bought one or two facilities and are holding and are happy with that. There are others who are still scaling, but they’re scaling in anticipation of then exiting to a larger player — whether that’s still a local player, a regional player, or a national player. And as that continues to happen — that has been part of our playbook as well. A bigger part of our playbook is to sell to the larger folks: buying and developing and then selling off as a group to a larger player. And I think the more we see of that, when somebody comes into the industry with the goal of picking off five or ten of these individual facilities and rolling them up to sell to somebody else — eventually we will become even more mature. Because right now I think we’re — depending on the stats and how you read them — somewhere with 30% owned by regional, national, and institutional players, and 70% by mom-and-pop, and that’s changing pretty quickly.

Scott Meyers [29:41]

When I got into the business 20 years ago, it was 90/10 — only 10% was owned by the REITs — and this was truly a mom-and-pop industry, one of the last frontiers, if you will, in the wild, wild west of commercial real estate. But we’re very quickly becoming more mature like the rest.

Peter Smyth [29:59]

Yeah, I’m curious — as software continues to evolve — I wonder

Peter Smyth [30:05]

if that changes things. Because again, if you look at Cubby — their roadmap is very much predicated on taking the entire service component of self storage and automating it over time. It can’t be done overnight, but once that’s the case, does the asset class then become easier to enter? Because knowing our clients, I think many of them are not just going to let the computer run the facility. There’s going to be some service and account management — you need somebody who is accountable at the end of the day for the P&L. But I’m curious if this wave of AI opens up another wave of buyers who want to enter the space because they think that enough of this stuff can be handled by a fully integrated agentic FMS, and they’re willing to buy in and do the other 10% that needs to be done by a person.

Scott Meyers [31:05]

I think it accelerates the business model I just mentioned — where, if I take a look at our mastermind and the conversations I’ve been having with members and beating this drum for the past five or six years: guys, the quicker we can all get onto a similar platform or similar vendors — if we’re being totally agnostic about property management, let’s say we’re all using White Label for our property management software, and if we’re all using PTI for gate access, and so on down the line — it makes it really easy for any of us: if Jim’s got two facilities he’s going to sell and Sally’s got three that are somewhat close geographically, well, let’s list them together. We’ll figure out what that looks like in terms of selling later on, or in terms of getting more vendor discounts through operating together.

Scott Meyers [31:55]

In that instance, if everybody’s operating from the same platform, it just makes it easier to transact. Because now if somebody comes along, it’s really easy to do a turnkey acquisition when you’ve got five facilities all running the most popular vendors in the industry. And if you’re talking about Cubby, like you were — if everybody’s on that, well, then it’s real easy for joint ventures and for consolidation: people who are separate owners with separate entities can pull their resources together for a sale or be managed centrally. Whatever that looks like, the more congruent we are, I think the less friction there is to do business in the marketplace.

Peter Smyth [32:30]

Yeah. I mean, that is the hardest part. We have an entire department focused on these transitions — they’re hard. They’re all different. Everybody’s on different software, and stuff doesn’t come over clean no matter what. Especially the payment information — that’s the hardest part.

Scott Meyers [32:45]

Right, a hundred percent. Yeah.

Peter Smyth [32:48]

The vendors are getting better at it. I mean, there are more services. I think we’ve all heard the complaints enough that there are now departments at the FMS providers that will take more ownership over this process.

Scott Meyers [33:04]

Well, they’re rolling out software patches that allow us to aggregate data and transfer from one platform to the next. So that’s getting a little bit easier to use. It’s still a manual process in many instances, but at least it’s getting easier. Yeah. Alright, so what’s White Label’s focus word, mantra, or mission for 2026?

Peter Smyth [33:26]

Yeah, I mean, we’re still in growth mode, so we’re going to continue to take on more deals and more markets. I think you’ll start to see us offer some things à la carte now. We’ve spent a lot of money and a lot of time and resources building our own tools to help us run stores better. And I think we’re going to introduce a few of those products to the market — not because we want to be a pure software player, but because it’s a good way to get our name out there. And because we’re not a single-product seller, we can offer our products at a lower cost than others, since our core business at the end of the day is self storage. We could do a website and afford to charge a little bit less than the other guy just because it’s not the only thing we do. So that’s exciting for us. You’ll start to see some products roll out. And then we’re also taking on some larger stores — I mean, we used to be known, and I think on this podcast we mostly talked about running remote facilities. We’ve now

Peter Smyth [34:27]

got close to 50 facilities that are 750 units-plus — fully staffed, institutional facilities. I think there’s kind of a natural evolution to getting into that space. We have tiers of service, so depending on the type of facility you have, we would assess it and figure out how we want to manage it. So those are the two things we’ll do as we continue to grow — more of the same, just trying to get out there and apply an institutional management approach for non-institutional clients.

Scott Meyers [34:58]

Well, I mean, that sums it up and couldn’t be said any better — an institutional approach for non-institutional clients. And that’s why we’ve partnered with you guys and love what you’re doing, because you’ve just made it simple. We’ve got the best of both worlds. Same for the folks in our mastermind that you’ve come out and visited as well, who are utilizing your products. We think you’ve got a tiger by the tail, and if anything, the approach — and with you at the helm — we’re just thankful for everything that you do and for supporting us and the partnership that we have.

Peter Smyth [35:22]

Yeah, it’s been great. We love working with you guys, and it was a great seminar. You guys run a good show down there. Good people who know what they’re doing — it’s a great network.

Scott Meyers [35:32]

Yep, yep. I love what I get to do and the people I get to hang out with — yourself here on this podcast.

Peter Smyth [35:37]

Yeah, I mean, those guys love you too. I mean, clearly — there’s a reason you’ve got a growing organization there, so yeah, thanks for letting us be part of it.

Scott Meyers [35:46]

Yeah, I appreciate that. Alright, Peter, how do people get in touch with you?

Peter Smyth [35:52]

You can go to whitelabelstorage.com. My email is peter@whitelabelstorage.com. We’ll find a way to filter it — contact@whitelabelstorage.com. But yeah, just reach out to me. It’s a small enough industry — happy to take that email.

Scott Meyers [36:05]

Perfect. All right. Thank you so much, Peter. Great spending time with you and I look forward to seeing you again very soon.

Announcer [36:10]

Thanks, Scott. Likewise. This is the Self Storage Podcast with the original self storage expert, Scott Meyers.