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We keep weighing a management company for our storage sites in Aiken. Candidly, it's because occupancy has been a grind.
The hope is that they run it better than we do and fill us up. I'd stop staring at empty units and get some time back.
What keeps me from signing is the bill that shows up later. Once I saw it, it pointed straight back at my own team.
In this issue:
Why employee KPIs are a data problem first
The exports to pull for one employee scorecard
What I still haven't measured on my own team
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IN THE KNOW
The short version: Holding your team to KPIs is a data problem before it's a management problem. If the numbers live in systems that don't talk to each other, you're handing off the work and hoping, which is what I'd be doing if I signed with a management company.
A management contract trades upside for hope
CubeSmart's owner FAQ says its fee is based on gross revenue, and the site's expenses pass through to the owner. So the manager gets paid on the top line, and I live on what's left after the bills.
That's the trade I'm weighing. I'd buy short-term comfort and give up long-term upside. Once a site fills up and stabilizes, the fee keeps coming, and from there it's all gravy for them.
Storage also has a hard ceiling. Overhead is already low, and a site can't rent more units than it has. A manager might fill us faster than we can, but they can't grow the business past the building.
An ops hire at an electrical company is a different bet. That person can keep more crews moving and help the shop take on more jobs. The upside is bigger, and so is the cost of not knowing whether it's working.
If you aren't tracking your employees' KPIs, you're me signing that contract and hoping it works out.
The KPIs worth tracking live in two systems at once
KPIs sound like a management habit. They start as a data job, because the useful ones need numbers from two places:
Booking rate: calls from your phone system, booked jobs from your field software.
Revenue per tech hour: job revenue from your field software, hours from payroll or time tracking.
Gross margin by tech: job revenue from your field software, labor and parts cost from QuickBooks.
Callback rate: your field software, as long as callbacks get tagged as callbacks.
Each system holds its own half. None of them does the division for you, so the number never shows up on a screen.
Booking rate alone shows how wide the spread can be. In ServiceTitan's June 2022 data on more than 3,000 of its trades customers, cited by Claire Research, shops with fewer than five techs booked 24% of calls. Shops with 25 or more booked 59%.
24% of calls booked at shops under five techs
You can't coach a booking rate you've never calculated.
My VA's scorecard is split across two systems
Our VA gets great reviews from our customers. He answers the phones and handles a pile of tasks across a few sites.
We've never held him to occupancy, and I think we should. But it may not be fair to hang occupancy on one person who's juggling everything else, since price, ads, and the market move it too.
So I'd measure the part he controls: calls answered, and how many of those turn into move-ins. The calls live in our phone system, and the move-ins live in our storage software.
The ratio lives nowhere until someone builds it.
I'd demand that number from a management company before I signed. I haven't asked it of my own team.
Your CSR, your lead tech, and your office manager are the same setup. Gather the data first, then hold them to it.
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MAKE IT MODERN
Pull the data for one employee scorecard this week. All it takes is your exports and a Google Sheet.
Pick one role and two or three KPIs it controls. A CSR might get booking rate, and a tech might get average ticket and callback rate.
List where each half lives. Calls come from your phone system, jobs and tickets from your field software, and hours from payroll or time tracking.
Export the last eight weeks of each, and put each export on its own tab in one Google Sheet.
Build one summary tab. Give it one row per person per week and a formula for each KPI, like booked jobs divided by answered calls.
Circle what won't line up. Look for names spelled two ways, calls with no job, and jobs with no tech. That list is your first finding.
Then review the sheet with that person for five minutes a week.
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FROM THE STOICS
There are things which are within our power, and there are things which are beyond our power.
I can't make a manager or a VA fill my sites. I can decide what I measure and look at it every week.
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BEFORE YOU GO
If you want help pulling your team's numbers from each system into one scorecard, reply "diagnostic" and I'll send the details.
P.S. If you already keep a scorecard on someone, reply and tell me what's on it. I'm still deciding what goes on our VA's, and I'd happily steal a column.