How Many Hours a Week Should a Self-Storage Owner Work for Premium Profits?

By Marc Goodin

We are going to start by assuming you have or will have a trained manager who has perfected the basic skills to operate and market a self-storage facility.  Secondly, we assume your goal is to make premium profits versus doing ok. And lastly a managmentt will never gett you premium profits.

Three things are required to make sure self-storage does not become a full-time job. A detailed Manager’s Operations Manual?  A detailed manager's Sales and Marketing Manual and a detailed monthly and yearly marketing plan.  If your manuals, systems, and marketing plan are not thorough, you will be spending an extra 20 hours a week answering basic questions and putting out fires and not getting better or making maximum profits. Or worse, there are no questions or fires that you know about to correct, but profits are not anywhere as fantastic as they could be.

The third item is how well your manager follows directions, the facility manuals and systems.  The importance of following directions/systems/manuals should be a major consideration in every hire.  And then as long as you do not waiver from requiring mandatory items like use of scripts and that daily and weekly tasks and marketing is done routinely, you can save the 20 hours noted above,

You will be spending most of your time doing these 5 items:

1) Regular communications with your manager.

2) Doing things a typical manager does not do.

3) Working on planning and marketing items with your manager.

4) assisting your manager with first-time items.

5) Doing things, you love to do or things you manager just can’t or won’t do. 

Now is the best time to be ready!

Each one is important. All are a must for top profits.  Let’s look at the time for each item.  Certain items will occur every week, and others will be minimal weekly but multiple hours when they do occur.

Item 1) Regular Communications and training with your manager: (3 hrs./week)

More communication with your manager is the main item that will lead you to higher profits.

It is good practice to have a weekly onsite meeting for a couple of hours with your manager to review the past week, the upcoming week and marketing.

Your job is to continuously encourage, educate, train and motivate your staff.  One to two hours a week is the minimum. Reviewing and responding to the manager end of day email is a must to get more done and keep on tract.  Top owners in any given area also spend time being part of the local community in one fashion or another and this takes directed time every week. 

Item 2) Owners Responsibilities: (100 hours a Year = 2 hours if weekly) As an owner there are a host of items that are not often delegated to the managers.  Some could be weekly items like calling in payroll and paying the bills, but the vast majority are not required weekly but when the hours taken together, they can add up to over two hours a week.

Reviewing/addressing/improving your monthly reports and statements takes several hours every month. This would include reviewing financial reports, occupancy reports, variance reports, planning reports, marketing reports, banking statements and website reports, etc.. Dealing with certain issues with the company attorney, accountant and banker are also typically done by the owner.

Owners are always going to be responsible for training and keeping the staff accountable to the operating and marketing systems and platforms.  When staff skip the basics, new training is required.  Your manager will take care of many problems and even the tough tenants but sometimes a decision is so big you will want to be a part of it, and sometimes the best way to address a renter’s concerns is with a call from the owner.

A good manager will do a year-end review and update the monthly marketing calendar and may even develop goals and a marketing plan for the upcoming year, but a team effort, including the owner, is required for the best results.  

Item 3) Planning & Marketing: (1 hr./week) 

You have done your yearly planning and monthly marketing calendar.  That big picture is a huge step in the right direction, but it will take many weekly actions, manager reminders, midcourse corrections and even new ideas for maximum profits.

For example, we love to put out a couple of dozen small US flags on July 4th, Labor Day & Veterans Day.  Without a reminder by the owner to check the quality, quantity and exact dates the flags are to be put out they can easily be forgotten.  The same goes for all the Holiday and seasonal marketing.  I learned the hard way that reminders are always required. I asked my manager how the end-of-season visits/emails/mailings went to the campgrounds for RV storage. Even though they did a super job last year and it is in the monthly calendar, they skipped it, and we lost out on a dozen rentals.  I believe for every hour the owner spends on planning and marketing; they will be paid back multiple thousands of dollars.  Remember, the average rental is a $2,000 value.

Item 4)– Managers Guidance: (1 hrs./week) It is just impossible to put every situation and every little detail in a manual so there are areas that require the owner’s guidance.  Also, many things only happen once or twice a year, and managers forget the answer is in the manual.

Item 5) You Like To Do, or Manager Won’t Do: (1 hrs./week) If you’re lucky, it is an hour a week of things you like to do or help with.  You may enjoy doing the landscaping or a regular deep dive into the data.  It may sound odd by my wife GP likes calling the late people.  She says they owe her the money, so there is no reason for them not to have paid.  If you're unlucky, it could be calling the auction people because you will get 80% of them to pay before the auction vs 10% payment when your manager calls.  Often, managers were not told when hired the importance of doing the local community one on one marketing and they simply object so the owner must do it.

If you add up the hours above, you get 8 hours a week.  Many owners are not even putting in 4 hours a week, but they get away with it because their facility was built over 10 years ago and they do not have nearly the mortgage a new facility will have.  And for some, they are satisfied making $200,000 a year profit and are simply not willing to take the time to develop a high-end operations, sales, and marketing system that would result in much, much higher profits. 

Many people work 40 or even 50 hours a week and will never make the profits a self-storage will. Where else can you make a great six-figure income and have multiple millions of dollars in your pocket when you sell (or better yet refinance) for just 8 hours a week? 

Once you get the system running on all cylinders, there are ways to cut your time back to 4 hours a week, but that is for another article, or you are welcome to call to review these options. Think technology hiring a 4 – 8 hour a week manager supervisor.

AI is starting to help with many aspects of self storage.

If you are not willing to put in the time to become an expert so you can develop and build the systems, platforms, and manuals you need to run a top-notch facility, you may be better off buying self-storage stocks, have a management firm run your facility, or be a part self-storage franchise.

To Success! Marc

As CEO of Storage Authority Franchising, Marc Goodin shares his passion, expertise, and unconventional wisdom with busy professionals to help them develop their own self storage while they continue their careers. He owns 3 self-storage he designed, built, and manages. He can be reached at  marc@StorageAuthority.com or directly at 860-830-6764 to answer your franchising, development, marketing, sales and operations questions.  His best-selling self-storage books are available at Amazon.