Merry Christmas from StorMan Australia
About the Author
Ben He also looks after most of our Australian training, so he's frequently found all over Australia on training missions, attending or hosting our live events, or just meeting up with our clients.
You can get in touch with Ben via our Contact page.
Merry Christmas and happy New Year from myself and all the staff at StorMan! This year has seen a few challenges for our industry and yet we still continue to show our resilience. Firstly this year we had the challenge of the Queensland floods and their impact on some of our members followed by the earthquakes in New Zealand that affected many more.
Through all of this I was somewhat amazed to find people very optimistic with regards to how their businesses were going to cope and get back on their feet. Since then, we have had operators re-open flooded stores and continue where they left off, we have had many people re-open earthquake damaged stores and be supported by their clients both new and old. It certainly seems that as an industry we have and continue to support fellow competitors and stores and I think this reflects our fantastic spirit.
During this period, StorMan has also undergone challenges and changes; making us reassess our team, our processes and our product. All of you know that we are constantly striving to deliver to you, our users, the very best that we can deliver. I am pleased to say that I believe we have looked at our business this year and decided that we could improve in some areas.
As directors of the company, we sat down and analysed our processes & feedback from clients and made changes to our business that hopefully will result in a much better product and level of service moving forward. We were extremely pleased and excited to be recognised by our industry peers at the 2011 SSAA awards night when we shared in the Innovation Award for our new product that allows people to sign up on an iPad or other mobile device.
StorMan has experienced very strong growth this year despite a recovering market in self storage. I am encouraged as I move around the country speaking with various operators that, like the rest of the country, we seem to have a two-speed self storage economy. Whilst areas like Western Australia and Victoria are leading the growth of new operators and sites in Australia, we have other states that are staying steady.
To keep your customers and maintain your occupancy in the current economic environment is a great result in itself. StorMan has been able to assist many of these operators as they consolidate their sites, top-up units and streamline the processes that will enable them to capitalize on their hard work once the market improves. We have had many people critically examine their software and I am pleased to see a lot of people moving from American products like RentPlus, Winsen and SiteLink to StorMan and we have worked hard to make the converters for these products as good as we can make them to minimise the pain involved in changing over.
Given that we have had almost 30 sites changeover I can honestly say that the process has never been better or smoother than it is now. So finally to close, I would wish you all a Merry Christmas and a restful and happy New Year and I am really looking forward to seeing you all in 2012.
Regards,
Ben (General Manager, StorMan Australia).
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