Rob DuBroc

My sons and I really enjoy the sand dunes. Great way to blow off steam! #polarisrzr #littlesahara

Do you ever hear people say "We're building systems to create Raving Fans?" And why not? Business owners/managers all talk about efficiency, profit, scaling through systems, AI or whatever the new buzzword trend is. I am also guilty of this... Have you ever thought that if you go above and beyond, you earn the highest value customers? Those customers are loyal and then you don't have to go compete for new customers? The best businesses are built on retention. Not chasing attrition. I **think** the best way to retain is to provide massive value.... So the question, in your business how are you providing massive value and retaining your best customers?

I pulled retention on 666 move-ins from our self storage portfolio to see who was still renting 100 days past the point every two month promo expires. No promo: 66% 20% off: 68% 30% off: 71% 50% off: 61% 75% off: 33% Deep discounts don't buy loyal tenants… They feel the jump to”normal” street rate like it is a massive rent increase… A higher percentage of these folks leave than those with a modest move-in discount. We have experimented a lot on this… recently we cut our public promo from 30-50% off to 20% across >50 facilities last week. Better retention & less rent given away. We're not in the coupon business.. we’re also not going to race to the bottom on pricing. We're trying to find customers who'll be here next year. Every pricing decision is an experiment and we will continue to iterate based on the feedback the data gives us.

I thought AI was going to be the end of virtual assistants. Turns out they are just gonna end up being 10x more productive than your best employee who isn’t leveraging AI tools. What a time to be alive.

I couldn’t agree more. These are two lies that got a lot of people into the business who did not know what they were getting into. I call it the “mailbox money fantasy”

Grateful for this one. @CubbyStorage published a case study on my company. We moved 42 locations at once. It was scary. Our team made it work, and today 77% of our phone leads turn into rentals. Thank you to our team and the Cubby crew. cubbystorage.com/clients/on-…

The arrival fallacy is the dragon that must be slayed. Spoiler alert: you will never "arrive" The journey is the destination. Practice gratitude, enjoy the process.

My boys have ridden some form of dirtbikes since 2 years old... Stacyc 12's, 16's, 20's... The PW50's.. Then the KTM Electric bikes and sometimes my CRF110 pit bike.. Now ready for moving up to 65CC bikes. I did a ton of research, and wow the advances with the e-motos is incredible. Ended up picking up two SX-E8's from RFN. High quality bike (yes china does high quality). Wish I had a affiliate code or dealer account because I could sell these all day long... My kids woke up early and were rippin' at 7AM today before school. youtu.be/uNqWuL1XswY?si=jD6m… rfnbike.com/

The ultimate source of truth is the Rent Roll. OM stands for “Owner Made-It-Up”…. Even though it’a typically brokers who are the true embellishers. There are some good brokers out there, and even they would agree with me…

Skeleton crew staffing doesn't scale. It just burns people out. If you pawn customer service off on your spouse, it also often leads to divorce… A lot of storage investors hire their own staff, work in the business themselves(or dump it on a spouse), and still spend more than they would with a third-party manager. How do I know? I talk to these guys every day, and I was one. My self-managed staffing ran an 11% expense ratio before we started taking on 3PM clients. 6-8% looks pretty good looking back. But what did I know. I didn't underwrite my deals correctly either… Probably overpaying with my own optimism when it came to staffing expenses.

As a storage operator, correct, in many cases the math doesn’t make sense. But neither do Birkin bags and there is a product/consumer for that too….

Last fall we rolled out a tenant protection program through @SafeLeaseHQ across our facilities. We kept the pricing low on purpose and priced it where we thought the market would tolerate it. We knew we'd lose some tenants. We did. In the 90 days after launch, we lost 123 tenants net in the same facilities. That's about $143K a year in rent, and it assumes every one of them left because of the program. Now the other side. Coverage went from 13% of our tenants to 76%. That's about 3,100 more tenants, and we keep ~$7.75 a month on each one. About $289K a year. Net of the lost rent, we're up about $146K a year. At a 6.5% cap rate, that's roughly $2.2M in added value… and that’s assuming everyone who moved out did so because of the protection plan, some would have moved out anyway. Would we do it again? Absolutely… I wish we made this a standard years ago. I think of the value we left on the table for several facilities we have already sold.

We pulled 9,500 rent increases across our storage portfolio and tracked who moved out within 90 days. The size of the increase didn't matter. How long they'd been renting did. Move-out rate by increase size: Under 8%: 7.5% 8 to 12%: 8.0% 12 to 18%: 7.0% 18%+: 8.4% Basically flat. Move-out rate by tenure: Under 1 year: 12.2% 1 to 2 years: 11.7% 2 to 4 years: 8.3% 4+ years: 5.1% Tenants under a year who got a small bump left at 15%. Tenants over 4 years who got 18%+ left at 5.9%. Build your ECRI schedule around tenure first. The percentage is the second question.