There are five types of facility crises that every self storage business should prepare for whether you own one facility or manage a regional or multi-city operation.
Potential self storage facility crisis types are:
Building-Related: power outage, fire, water main or line break
Natural Disaster: thunderstorms & lightning strikes, tornadoes, flooding, hurricanes, earthquakes
Tenant-Related: criminal activity, death by suicide, murder
Human Resources: employee theft (front-line, supervisors)
Technology: deferred maintenance & updates, ransomware, viruses, hardware failure
Remember: It’s how you and your team prepare and react to a facility crisis that matters most.
It’s mission-critical to have plans in place, act quickly, resolve the situation, and get your business back to normal generating income as soon as possible. Then your team must conduct a non-confrontational post-mortem to learn from the crisis and better prepare for the future.
Working at all levels of the self storage industry, sometimes I’ll lull myself into thinking, “I’ve seen it all,” and “I’m ready for anything.” Then like clockwork, when you least expect it, something unanticipated, something peculiar, just happens. A sprinkler head is broken. An electrical grid shuts down. Crises happen.
