Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Marketing Technology Insights and Intelligence from Go Local Interactive, a technology marketing company.
Shane Adams: [00:00:00] This is the Go local brief. Brought to you by Go Local Interactive. Every episode we dig into digital marketing, technology, and ai and pull out what self storage operators actually need to know. Today we're checking in from the Go local booth at the Inside Self Storage World Expo in Las Vegas, and talking with Grace Totty, the VP of Marketing and Sales at Absolute Storage Management.
Let's get to it.
Welcome to the Go Local brief here from ISS, uh, this is The Local Front where we're gonna talk about the news, uh, what's going on. Yeah. I'm Shane Adams. I'm the Director of marketing at Go Local, uh, with me as always.
Jason Barrett, CEO, uh, Jason, how's the show been?
Jason: It's been good. It's really, uh, uh, busy. It's, uh, there's a lot of energy, I would say. Um, it's not that I didn't think there would be, I just always forget how big the industry is and how friendly it [00:01:00] is, and, and I don't know. It's been a good show. Yeah. There's just a lot going on.
Shane Adams: It is. It felt, it felt really, really steady.
Jason: Yeah.
Shane Adams: Uh, from a traffic perspective.
Jason: Yeah. And I think,
Shane Adams: so the first thing we were talking about, we started talking about this at SSA and Yep. And it's still in the news. Yeah. Uh, public storage acquires, NSAT, I mean, I like
Jason: the T
Shane Adams: Yeah.
Jason: I've always known 'em as NSAI
Shane Adams: know.
Uh, I started seeing it in stories. Uh, yeah, because it's a trust.
Jason: Yeah, it is. And, and by the way, like, uh, hey Dave Kramer, um, I watched this thing get put together years ago. Like years ago it was secure care and the, uh, there was just a group that kind of came together and then they started, um, getting bigger and bigger and bigger.
And here they are today and it's quite the story.
Shane Adams: Well, yeah, a 10 and a half billion dollars story. I mean, it's huge.
Jason: Yep, yep, yep. Just, just a little bigger than go local.
Shane Adams: I mean, not a
Jason: lot,
Shane Adams: a little, A little. Yeah. Yeah.
Jason: There's like that deal and then. Us.
Shane Adams: Right. So, but, but what, what does it mean, I mean, we [00:02:00] talked about this a little bit at, at SSA, uh, but I've, I've not been in the industry nearly as long as you have.
So I wanted to get your thoughts. What do you feel like that acquisition really means for the industry when it comes to how they gonna compete? How, how the big get the big, get bigger.
Jason: They always do. Yeah. And I, I mean this is very, uh, this is an active industry from an m and a perspective, and it always has been where, you know, one of the playbooks is to, uh, build or acquire and put together a portfolio, and then those start to just roll out and other people acquire a, a, you know, book, uh, uh, you know, 20 facilities or whatever.
And it just rolls up and rolls out. And, um, so I mean, it's not anything that's new. It's just such a sizable transaction. And I think that's really where the waves come from, I think, for the rest of the industry.
Shane Adams: Right.
Jason: I mean, you could see that you're gonna have to be competitive as always with your spend, with your marketing, with your, I mean, everything gets, uh, driven by those big companies like that, right?
[00:03:00] Public storage, extra space. I mean, it, it, nothing changes there. And, um. A lot of this room kind of follows along behind with pricing, with deal structure, with uh, you know, even, even like free lock, free first month's rent, even the way they move their rates, et cetera.
Shane Adams: Yeah.
Jason: And so, you know. It's just another one of those instances where, to your point, the big, the big companies are out there making big moves and everybody's leading, uh, or I'm sorry, following those leaders.
Shane Adams: Yeah.
Jason: Yeah.
Shane Adams: We, we even talked about this a little bit, uh, when it came to the U-Haul move to, to do the price lock guarantee. Yeah. I think in, in the subsequent weeks I saw, uh, a couple of smaller operators who were, who were following that lead and, and offering price lock guarantees as well. Absolutely. Yeah.
And I, and I think that's. There's, there's a way to follow.
Jason: Yeah.
Shane Adams: But there's also a way to lead and, and I think the advantage to me for of a smaller operator when it comes to the REITs is you have the ability to be [00:04:00] a little bit more nimble.
Jason: Yeah. You do the, the interesting thing right now, uh, you know, if you're looking for a crack in the armor somewhere.
For what it's worth, um, if you bringing in AI a little bit, like, so those LLMs like a, a Chat GPT or a Claude or a Gemini or someone like that, they are, um, they're almost trained to be a little bit. Uh, what's the right word? They, they like, they don't want to give you the stock answer.
Shane Adams: Hmm. Yeah.
Jason: So some of these other folks are winning in that space right now simply because they're not the big one or two or three.
Interesting. Yeah. You know, it, they want to be, they want to have a clever and an intelligent response. So when you say, for example. Um, who's a great self storage provider near me. Mm-hmm. Clearly the answer could be A and B, but they want to give you something you might not have thought about that you're like, Hey, there's a, there's a facility right around the corner that, that you may or may not have heard of.
That's [00:05:00] doing very well, that're, highly thought of, and, and you know, so there are always opportunities to go and win.
Shane Adams: Yeah.
Jason: Um, there, you know, size definitely does. Play well in the space. Um, from an SEO perspective, for example, they ranked so well
Shane Adams: Yeah. In
Jason: all of the major metros from all the categories.
Like, but you know, you can chip away at that too, right? Some people don't want to work with, they don't want to go to McDonald's. They don't want to go to Burger King. They want something else.
Shane Adams: Yeah, yeah, yeah. They, they want a vegan burger.
Jason: They want a vegan burger,
Shane Adams: man. Yeah, right.
Jason: I keep messing that up. So Shane here if that's okay, Shane.
Yeah,
Shane Adams: no, it's fine. I
Jason: is a vegan.
Shane Adams: Yeah.
Jason: And when we come to Las Vegas, we, we go get some steak.
Shane Adams: Yeah.
Jason: I mean, we went to Mastros, tried to get into Ruth's Chris last night.
Shane Adams: Yeah.
Jason: Uh, and every time I look at Shane and like, oh dude, sorry.
Shane Adams: But you know what's funny is, so this morning everybody went out to breakfast and, uh, I, I was like, I, I know that there's a vegan place.
Nearby 'cause. [00:06:00] 'cause Steve Wynn is, is vegan.
Jason: Oh, okay.
Shane Adams: And so, uh, but, but I ended up having to go to the Venetian.
Jason: Okay.
Shane Adams: And inside the Venetian, in the spa, there's an incredible Okay. Like, mostly vegan spot. Okay. Uh, shout out to, uh, I think it was called Truth and Tonic. Truth and Tonic. Who, who served me well, they were.
Jason: I went and sought out, um, some acai bowls yesterday.
Shane Adams: Oh, nice.
Jason: And ended up over at Aria and tried two different places.
Shane Adams: No, right on. This is now a food blog.
Jason: Yeah, it's a
Shane Adams: food blog.
Jason: Um,
Shane Adams: and, uh, so, uh, you, you talked, you mentioned ai.
Jason: Yeah.
Shane Adams: So 10 federal, uh, player in, in the self storage industry just announced that they hired a Chief AI officer and they hired him from Nvidia.
I mean, like. That's not a, that's not a small hire.
Jason: No, that's not a small
Shane Adams: hire. And this is a guy who probably could have gone to any of the Silicon Valley folks. Yeah. And he chose to go into self storage. I mean,
Jason: yeah.
Shane Adams: Do you think that that's an indicator of what we're gonna see, uh, other [00:07:00] companies, particularly the technology company, the technology forward companies?
Do
Jason: I, I think so, man. I mean, I really do. It's funny because to me it's another aspect. Of technology, so could fit into a CTO role. CIO role. That's my background, as you know.
Shane Adams: Yeah.
Jason: Um, and I think it fits in there nicely, but what it does is, is it kind of sections it off as like this aspect of technology is extremely important,
Shane Adams: right.
And,
Jason: um, kudos.
Shane Adams: And it's moving so fast.
Jason: It's moving so fast. Uh, we were talking about that this morning. So Melanie Terschak, one of our, uh, great employees is, uh, did a, uh, talk this morning at nine o'clock about GEO, which we were just kind of talking about, which for everybody at home is generative engine optimization, which is how do you rank, um,
Shane Adams: on Chat GPT
Jason: on chat GPT?
How do you, how do you become the response,
Shane Adams: right?
Jason: Um, and where I was going with that was ISS. The show had asked for her presentation, I want to say back in [00:08:00] October.
Shane Adams: Yeah,
Jason: six months
Shane Adams: ago. Yeah. It was a while. It was a while ago.
Jason: It was six months ago.
Shane Adams: Yeah,
Jason: it's six months ago is an eternity. Anyway, like it, it it is, it is a long since forgotten.
Yeah. Think about that. We didn't have, uh, we didn't have four, five clock like opus, 4, 5, 4 sixes out. We didn't have Chat GPT We were significantly back in the past.
Shane Adams: We didn't, we didn't have. Projects. We didn't, I don't think cowork even existed. We did not six months ago.
We
Jason: did not. And
so,
Shane Adams: I mean, we're, we're talking about like open
Jason: claw had not been up
Shane Adams: the speed with which things were moving.
Jason: And so
Shane Adams: to have somebody dedicated
Jason: to that, think about how, uh, like outdated her presentation. Thankfully there's some pieces in there that the informational aspects of it are, are a little more timeless, a little more evergreen. But in terms of like. Stats or latest models, it's, it's old.
Shane Adams: Oh yeah.
Jason: So the point in all of that is like, kudos to 10 federal for acknowledging like, oh, we better, we better make this a priority.
Right? They're a well funded organization as most are here. Um, and it's just an acknowledgement that we're going to need [00:09:00] this. You know, it was part of my table talk yesterday actually. Um, I kind of buried or moved it into the automation section, which is, uh, you know, what you're trying to balance in this space is you've got, um.
Operations people operations, and then you have your marketing and technology operations. Those are, I, I'm, I'm blending a lot of things. Mm-hmm. But you really want, you want the people to do the people things, and you want the tech to do the tech things. And, um, like there's only you, you, you people are required from move-ins, move outs for delinquency, follow ups, for somebody walking into the, the facility.
Mm-hmm. That sort of thing. But the AI and the automation can start to come in and handle off hours.
Shane Adams: Mm-hmm.
Jason: Uh, and easy, uh, requests that come through, maybe via a chat bot. Um, are you open or not? How do I change my, like our technology, you can go change your gate codes, you can go update your credit cards if you're a tenant, all those different things, right.
Yeah, so 10 federal saying like this is an important aspect, like that AI can start [00:10:00] that, that the marketing and all that tech can start to blend in with the operations. And they all just kind of start to come together. And what you need to decide is where do you, where do you direct the ai? And there's a lot of places to put it.
Shane Adams: Well, and I, I think, I think what's really important for, for organizations to think about is embrace ai. Like use it Absolutely. If you're absolutely, if you're not doing it. You're probably gonna get left behind.
Jason: You are getting left behind.
Shane Adams: But, but all but I think in, in that there is an aspect of like governance, of, of ensuring that you're using the tokens in the right way.
Yeah. And, and, and, and optimizing your usage of ai. Uh, you know, Hey, we're all going to use Claude. Yep. Because we can store all of our memories together.
Jason: That's right.
Shane Adams: Uh, or we're gonna, or we're gonna do chat GPT's version and, and I think it. Having somebody who's who that's their responsibility is a good move.
Jason: And we have that like as you know, uh, inside of Go local, but we haven't chiefed it.
Shane Adams: Right.
Jason: You [00:11:00] know, like,
Shane Adams: yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jason: Like, um, and, and what you didn't know was a couple years back, we actually had somebody who was kind of the VP of AI for Go local. Oh, okay.
Shane Adams: Were
Jason: creating our own, we were training our own models.
Cetera. Um, we decided to go a different direction there. So, but came, we still acknowledge where AI is and where it's going. And we have somebody like, exactly like you said, centralizing our intelligence, centralizing our data, um, doing a lot of the training and, and building, uh, maybe it's skills as you know, uh, maybe it's an MCP instance.
Shane Adams: Mm-hmm.
Jason: Whatever that might be that we're utilizing so that, so that the team can use one collective. Uh. Of data set or interface, or however you wanna say.
Shane Adams: Right.
Jason: Uh, and share it across the organization.
Shane Adams: Well, and, and, and like, and, and it's the same, it's the same, uh, application that you, you would see, uh, the responsibilities of say a, a chief marketing officer or, or, or chief sales officer or something like that, because it is about standardizing.
Like [00:12:00] when, when I was a CMO at the, at the university. Yeah. It. What I, one of the things I was being sure of was that we were all saying the same thing.
Jason: That's right.
Shane Adams: And, and it, it just was, we need to tell the same story. That same, the same rules apply when it comes to ai. You want people standardizing the tools, right.
Because you're gonna get more out of 'em now way
Jason: you will, you're really trying desperately to get AI to the top. To the top of the top. And so in 10 federal's situation here, like they're basically inviting it into the executive team.
Shane Adams: Mm-hmm.
Jason: And going, it's gotta be here.
Shane Adams: Right.
Jason: You know? And then we're gonna ask this person to drive that for the company.
Yeah. The Nvidia side of it, you know, we. I've kind of blown past that, but they're way into the space, clearly. Yeah. Like with the chip, uh, you know, and their card creation, like the, they're actually doing a lot of, um, what am I trying to say? Building out models and training sets that you can utilize.
They're, I mean, they're, they're, they're not only creating hardware infrastructure, but software [00:13:00] as well. Right. So
Shane Adams: Right.
Jason: Them 10 federal, getting somebody from that organization. Now, I can't tell you, I didn't look into who it was and where he was in that organization. But it's just, it's, there are certain companies that are doing like way out front tip of the spear kind of things right now and they're wonderful.
Shane Adams: That's a, I mean, it's a huge move.
Jason: Yeah.
Shane Adams: Alright, so last thing, this ISS Yep. Comes around once a year.
Jason: Yep.
Shane Adams: We've had you, you mentioned Melanie presented, you also mentioned you did a table talk. Mm-hmm. Um. Tell us a little bit about your table talk and, and, and what you, what, what you wanted people to know in that.
Jason: So the table talks are, uh, as I lament it a little bit, they're really fast. They're fun and And they make you like get to the point quickly.
Shane Adams: Yeah.
Jason: Yeah. Because you got 10 minutes and you rotate through five sections like that. There's about two minutes to move between tables and then you're rolling. It moves fast, it's going quickly.
Um, they want you to talk for one to three, leave five to seven for questions, give or take. And, um, or seven, [00:14:00] whatever. It's seven to nine. Um, but, so anyway, what I was covering was, um, basically leaning into data and technology for marketing.
Shane Adams: Mm-hmm.
Jason: Uh, via the attribution correctly attributing and understanding where does, where does my, um, where are, where are my marketing efforts paying off in a positive way?
Shane Adams: Yep.
Jason: And the way you do that, as you know, is. Like utilizing call tracking lines, uh, tracking tags, a Google tag manager on your website, et cetera, and understanding at a cha channel level, um, where are my reservations and rentals literally coming from?
Shane Adams: Yeah. Yeah.
Jason: Um, is my spend producing. Positive results.
If so, how do I back those positive results with more spin? The second piece was the automation that I just touched on in the part about 10 federal, which was, you know, let people do people things, let the tech do the tech things. Mm-hmm. What I didn't get to was, uh, in that answer was, you know, you [00:15:00] can not only with the chat bots and things, but you can follow up on, on lost leads.
You know, where you had somebody that left, uh, in the process of a reservation or a rental. Um, reserved but never showed up. Um, you can, you can, you know, follow that up with a drip campaign, three to five message, drip campaign, text messages, et cetera. Um, we mentioned that you could also use it to, uh, cultivate ratings and reviews
Shane Adams: mm-hmm.
Jason: From existing tenants, um, that sort of thing. And then the last piece that I covered was the, um, utilization of the data around occupancy and then pricing to really drive. Better marketing and profitable results. Right. Just in general, um, understanding not only your occupancy rate at the facility, but by unit type.
So like if you have a specific unit type that, like say the facility itself is the occupancy's. Great, maybe it's 90, 95, whatever percent occupied though you have a certain unit type that is like grossly under occupied. Mm-hmm. So you move. [00:16:00] Spend, you don't turn the whole spend off. If we're talking about paid search as an, as the example, you don't turn it off at the, at the facility level.
You just simply move it to that unit type Oh
Shane Adams: yeah.
Jason: To, to bolster its success. And then, um. The last piece I was talking about was pricing. So in that same scenario, you might be down to just 3, 4, 5 more, 10 by tens. And you are aware of the pricing data in the region through, you know, something like Price Monster, which, which we have or some of the competition in the marketplace.
Um, but you have that price awareness.
Shane Adams: Yeah.
Jason: And you marry. With the occupancy and you go, we could actually raise the rates on the remaining units.
Shane Adams: Yep.
Jason: And since they're, it's like a supply and demand thing.
Shane Adams: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jason: They're in high demand. Yeah. Our supply's running out. Yep. So these last few units we're gonna charge a little bit more for them.
Shane Adams: Right.
Jason: Um, and that's what I was kind of covering in that, in that tabletop.
Shane Adams: Well, and, and you've, you've been working, you've also been working on the completely separate from [00:17:00] the Amazing Table talk You did. 'cause I watched it. It was great. Uh, but you have been working on something really fun, right? Like
Jason: Yeah.
Shane Adams: Like you're, you're, you're building out a GEO analysis tool.
Jason: Yes.
Shane Adams: Tell us a little bit about that.
Jason: Yeah. So what a lot of people may not know, um. Some of you do, but I, uh, I have an IT background and I love to code and, and work on stuff like that. Whether I should or not. It's probably up for discussion, but I have been, I don't know, the last four weeks maybe working on the development of a tool, which will help us understand how our clients are doing or even prospects for that matter.
But how are they doing? Uh. Getting themselves into the answer systems. Mm-hmm. Like the LLMs. If somebody were to, to key in to chat GPT and say, who's a great self storage facility near me or in Kansas City, Kansas or Kansas City, Missouri, or whatever, what's the response? Is it my client? Is it my [00:18:00] prospect?
Is it my competitor? Mm-hmm. And then it scores and ranks all that. Yeah. And creates a dashboard. It looks at what's this per, what's our company's share of voice. Um, it's really slick. I I, I, I know I'm saying that and I developed it, but
Shane Adams: it is, I I will, it's slick. Like I'll admit. It is very slick.
Jason: It's got a really pretty left rail and in there it's got all the analyses.
Um, it breaks it down by keyword targets. It shows you the. Prompts that it utilized. It's very intelligent on the way that it builds those prompts. Uhhuh. Um, I built in a persona piece to it too, so you can say like, uh, this is just somebody's looking for information. They're not really a buyer, or, Hey, this is actually somebody looking to buy, or this is a disgruntled.
Uh, tenant uhhuh or this is like, you know, that sort of thing,
Shane Adams: right?
Jason: And based on the personas, you can do location specific personas. Um, we can put all that in and it builds out the prompts and it runs those prompts, gets the responses back and scores out, how did my client [00:19:00] do versus their competition?
And then. It marries that up with SEO data.
Shane Adams: Okay,
Jason: so how well do they rank for specific targeted keywords? And then the last piece is all recommendations based on the data that was analyzed. The, the results above,
Shane Adams: right?
Jason: The analysis of those results. Now what,
Shane Adams: right?
Jason: So it's like, I think
Shane Adams: that's, that's always the key, right?
Jason: That's always the key. It's key. Like, so now what? That's the piece that Go Local is always trying to get back to our clients is, okay, so what do we do now? And it will suggest content. Mm-hmm. It will suggest blog posts, it will suggest a podcast like this one. It will suggest articles, maybe new location pages, maybe social media posts.
Shane Adams: Mm-hmm.
Jason: Uh, all of that stuff. And then the kind of the next level cool thing that we're doing is we're marrying that up. With another one of our internal systems that goes basically it, it then takes all of that data, which is good to know.
Shane Adams: Yeah.
Jason: And you can personally start typing away at that stuff. Yeah.
Or it will feed it over [00:20:00] into our organic system, which naturally has that content generation in it. Mm-hmm.
Shane Adams: So
Jason: it seeds that system.
Shane Adams: Right.
Jason: Here's what we need.
Shane Adams: Yeah.
Jason: And then it just schedules that out.
Shane Adams: Yep.
Jason: On, on a, on a, uh, you know, what would be considered like a comfortable and a reasonable schedule.
Shane Adams: Mm-hmm.
Jason: And then it just generates it.
Shane Adams: That's incredible.
Jason: Yep. And then the humans go in and edit that. They can say, change that schedule, modify the requirements, whatever that might be, and then get that done for the client.
Shane Adams: So one of the things we're gonna do for listeners, the podcast, I'm gonna put, I'll put a QR code like right here
Jason: or,
Shane Adams: or
Jason: right over
Shane Adams: here somewhere.
Somewhere in here, and it'll be in the show notes, A link in the show notes too. But if you, uh, if you contact us, we will do a geo analysis on a location for, for you, for free. Yep. Which is really cool. And, and, uh, opportunity for you to, to see kind of the, the neat stuff that we're working on at Go local.
Jason: Yeah. And I think it'll help you understand like, what is this thing. Uh, some people have started to hook onto it, like there were questions about it yesterday at the table talk [00:21:00] to, to their credit. Um, I mentioned, uh, that, that ISS was smart enough to include Melanie in their uh, lineup, but enough people are starting to go, well, what is that and how do I become that answer?
And we can give you more information around what, what that really is.
Shane Adams: Yeah.
Jason: Um, because just so everybody at home knows. You know, a lot of what you're trying to do there, you're, you're trying to get into the model's data set before they release the next model and they train those models. And if you ask one of 'em, check, go to chat GPT and say, how current is your data?
What, what is it current up, up to, and through? And it will say. 12, 1, 20, 25, whatever that might be. Mm-hmm. And, and then it's newer. If it's got newer information, it's literally crawling and getting that real time.
Shane Adams: Right.
Jason: But literally in the old data, in the existing data set inside of the LLM, it's only fresh to a certain point.
Shane Adams: Yeah.
Jason: It was in the training set. Um, we gotta make sure that our clients are like doing stuff now.
Shane Adams: Yeah.
Jason: So that in the next training [00:22:00] runs, you might become that answer.
Shane Adams: Right.
Jason: But you've gotta understand where are you now. And then what do I need to do to get into that?
Shane Adams: Yep.
Jason: Answer set. And just so everybody knows, I mean, right now you might go into your Google Analytics and you're only seeing 2% or less.
Shane Adams: Yeah.
Jason: Of your traffic is coming from chat, GPT or Claude or anywhere like that. But if you drill into it and you look at it on a microscopic level, it's hooking like this. So like it's growing exponentially, but the number it's. Growing on is so small. Oh yeah. One to two, two to four, four to eight, you know.
But here, before long it's gonna be, it's just gonna come on hard. Yeah. And so, and, and I would just challenge you at home to think about how are you searching for things now? Are you searching less and less? With a search engine and a little bit more and more with a chat GPT or a Claude. Right. I think, I think you are
Shane Adams: probably
Jason: secondarily, even if you are searching on Google, their responses start with an AI result
Shane Adams: They do.
Jason: Which is Gemini.
Shane Adams: Yep.
Jason: So how do you get [00:23:00] into Gemini? Yep. And become that answer. And that's the whole point of the GEO tool.
Shane Adams: Yeah. Well, I, I, I think it's a really exciting and cool thing. Um, again, we'll, we'll put the link, uh, to, to sign up for free analysis in the show notes, uh, for the QR code. Somewhere in this region right here.
Jason: I'll be right here.
Shane Adams: Uh, but, uh, anything else? Like, I feel like we've, we've covered the news, uh, the big news for this week. Yeah. Um. We're gonna get to the rest of the show, but, uh, just wanted to say thanks for sitting down with us during ISS Thanks for doing
Jason: all this.
Shane Adams: It was a good time. And, uh, Shane's
Jason: been going to town over here in the spotlights.
Shane Adams: We're, yeah, I'm sweating. You can't see it, but, uh, but we've got the lights on this time, so. We learned from SSA we did. We thought, you know, what could we do to just take it a notch up, up it a little bit. Yeah. So that's what we're doing. So
Jason: yeah,
Shane Adams: rest of The Go Local Brief is next. Uh, we'll we'll talk to you guys soon.
Thanks.
Alright. We are here for the Go local brief.
Live from ISS here in Las Vegas, [00:24:00] and I'm here with Grace Totty, who is the Vice President of Marketing and Sales for Absolute Storage Management. Grace, it's great to have you on the show.
Grace Totty: Yeah,
Shane Adams: thank you. I'm excited to be here. We literally were walking into the, the, the booth and, and we said, Grace come beyond the show.
Uh, and and we're, this is us just first meeting, so I'm just, I'm excited to, to have you on the show. Uh, I'm, I'm brand new to Go Local Uh, you have been with Go Local forever. You've been working with us for six, seven years.
Grace Totty: It's been a while. Yeah. And
Shane Adams: it's been
Grace Totty: fun. What's,
Shane Adams: what's been your experience with.
With the Go Local team,
Grace Totty: a true partnership, I think that would be, if I had to summarize it, I would say's a true partnership. They are an extension of our marketing department, and so they've helped us through different, uh, headwinds, whether it's economic headwinds or advancements in technology that we need to stay ahead of.
Um, so coming alongside, testing what works, learning from what doesn't work, and moving forward.
Shane Adams: That's great. Mm. Uh, so everybody has a self storage origin story. How did you get your start in software?
Grace Totty: [00:25:00] It's usually not a story that starts with, I searched it out either, right? Absolutely
Shane Adams: not.
Grace Totty: No, no, no.
Storage found me much like other people in the industry. Okay. So I met two of the original partners of absolute, were a part of a mentorship program through the Univers. CI went to, um, and so met them and about a year later they needed an intern. So they called me and I said, sure, why not?
Shane Adams: Why
Grace Totty: not? And so from that just continued on.
I like to say that I bamboozled them into offering me a full-time job after, after graduation. I don't think they agree with that.
Shane Adams: Ah, yeah. That's great. So what's, what's your favorite part of coming to a show like this?
Grace Totty: My favorite part is working, uh, with vendors more closely. So the opportunity to actually sit down with the vendors we're using and just refine that partnership.
It truly is constant. Care and understanding what's working, what's not working. Yeah. And, uh, relationship building. Yeah. So I love that because so many of our vendors do come to the show, [00:26:00] but also it's walking around and seeing other operators in the industry as well. Mm-hmm. And hearing from them, you know, what are they dealing with and how are they navigating?
Right. And so it's learning from other operators, getting to see my current vendors. And then of course, meeting new members and seeing what's new.
Shane Adams: Yeah. I, I, I, I, I podcasted with, uh, Jim Mooney and he was like, it's just, I love
Grace Totty: Jim Mooney.
Shane Adams: It's just like a big family. It's a, it's a big family of people. Yep.
And I think that having that face-to-face conversation with, with folks, uh, is, is really important because you can. I used to, I used to work for, we were, I was just having this conversation with somebody else. I used to work on social media and, uh, we used to sign our tweets with our actual name when we were doing, like, it was customer service.
Uh, okay. 'cause it was hard to yell at a company when you knew there was a person behind it.
Grace Totty: Mm.
Shane Adams: Uh, and, and just personalization I think is, is really important.
Grace Totty: Yeah.
Shane Adams: So. That leads me to a question. In this world of ai, when everybody's trying to automate everything, how do we maintain that? Like really close [00:27:00] personal touch to what I think some people really still crave in this industry?
Grace Totty: That's a very good question, and I think AI is gonna make us all more effective, but I don't think it's going to replace. Human thought and, and human processes. Like if I'm looking at measuring the website's performance, I know what is important for storage and I know what is important for operations.
Mm-hmm. Like the what operations. Perspective of impact is, yeah. Like I know the clients that we manage for, they care about income. Right? And so then I need to think through how can I refine what is going on on the website?
Shane Adams: Yeah.
Grace Totty: So that it leads to income. Yeah. So I can use AI with prompts Yeah. That are generated and.
Um, probably in a clunky manner generated. And so AI can refine kind of where I'm going to and the, and the process to get there. But AI is not gonna intuitively know that my [00:28:00] website needs to generate rentals that will then result in income because it's a tenant that's gonna actually pay on time. Right.
Or they're other, they won't fight on auto pay and they'll upgrade to the attended insurance. So I think it's gonna refine the process, but not replace the thought.
Shane Adams: Yeah, I think, I think the, the, the, the human touch there that you, that you referred to, I think is, is an important part, right? Uh, I, I, I tell a lot of folks, I'm like, look, you, you're worried that it's gonna take your job.
The truth is, is the faster you learn it, the first faster you understand how to manipulate it and do make it do what you want it to. Yes. The better off you're gonna be.
Grace Totty: Yes. I've really challenged my team, anything that is taking them as individuals, more than three hours to do, how can we get AI to do it for you?
Shane Adams: Mm-hmm.
Grace Totty: Because it can do a lot of our automations or audits and, and evaluations for us so that it spits out the data
Shane Adams: Yeah.
Grace Totty: That we then analyze.
Shane Adams: Right.
Grace Totty: But if we can, if we can expedite and speed up the analyzing part mm-hmm. Well, excuse [00:29:00] me, get to the. The data summary part. Yeah. And then I can analyze the data Right.
And make the business decision from the data.
Shane Adams: Right.
Grace Totty: That is a win.
Shane Adams: Oh, absolutely. Like having to comb through like, you know.
Grace Totty: Yes.
Shane Adams: The, the, the volumes of data that, that, that operators are collecting on a regular basis. Yep. And, and be able to at least give directional analysis so that then you can do like really detailed analysis.
Mm-hmm. I think really huge. So we're, this is day two three of ISS.
Grace Totty: I don't even know
Shane Adams: who, who knows, right? Who knows.
Grace Totty: First day of the floor opening.
Shane Adams: Yes. What are you looking forward to the most when it comes to the, the, where the industry is right now and what, what you expect to see here? At ISS,
Grace Totty: I expect to see more talk of AI and how it's improving processes, but again, I don't really care about.
Cool. Highlighting that you are using ai, I wanna know how is it impacting the [00:30:00] product that you're providing? Yep. So it's really cool that you've implemented ai and I think a lot of times we say ai, but it's really just data structuring better or it's automation through data. So it might not be AI in a true sense.
Shane Adams: Yeah.
Grace Totty: But you are leveraging data and data warehouses, right? And analysis of data and how is that improving? Yeah, the product. Yeah,
Shane Adams: for
Grace Totty: sure. For sure. That's what I really, as an operator, that's what I care about more is bells and whistles are really cool, but what is the yield at the end?
Shane Adams: Absolutely.
Absolutely. So what's the thing that you think that people are kind of keeping an eye on, uh, when it comes to that, that, like, what's the. What's the thing that people aren't saying that, that that is, that is what they're keeping an eye on, on, on the, on the operator side.
Grace Totty: Ooh. What are people not saying that they're keeping an eye on?
Well, I think right now the economic headwinds are still, it's a, it's a soft economy, and so until rates. Drop. We [00:31:00] don't really know what demand is gonna do, especially as we enter into the student season. Yeah. Or the, the, the summer rental season. And so I think that expenses are on everybody's mind right now.
Yeah. But also, how do we find those tenants or those potential tenants that will turn into that rental for us?
Shane Adams: Yeah.
Grace Totty: Making sure that we're focused on high quality leads and being discovered for those leads and then being attractive.
Shane Adams: Mm-hmm.
Grace Totty: So that we earn their business instead of my competitor.
Shane Adams: Right.
I was having this conversation with somebody. I came from higher education, and so that student market that you mentioned is really interesting because we're 18 years from the recession of 2008. And what a bunch of higher education, uh, institutions know is next year there is a massive drop in high school seniors like there, there's, we call it the enrollment cliff.
Wow. Where like there's like 8 million less. High school seniors that are gonna graduate and [00:32:00] enter into college, that'll be available to enter in college. Now, COVID accelerated that a little bit to where like the, the enrollment's kind of slowed down, but I think it, I I, I even thought about like, how is that going to affect even self storage, right.
In college towns and, and, and anywhere where there are students who, who need. Uh, who need storage in, in those, in those instances. That's, that's an impact.
Grace Totty: Well, that's not only, that is one of multiple impacts that's happening in the student season itself as well. We've also seen for the number of seasons now too, that I can recall at least, students aren't storing their stuff over the summer.
They're throwing it out.
Shane Adams: Oh,
Grace Totty: they're trashing it because it's all IKEA furniture. Oh, yeah. Or it's stuff that they just grabbed from, uh, Walmart or, or Temu, or Shein or something. Yeah. It's, it's a, it's a lower quality, so they don't even want to go through the hassle. It's not the cost of the storage unit.
Right. It's the hassle of [00:33:00] getting it out of my dorm, packing it, transporting it, unpacking it, storing it. And so there's, there's a number of headwinds I think, that are just disrupting some of those normal patterns in the storage industry.
Shane Adams: Well, especially since shipping is so cheap now. Yes. And the cost of goods is so low.
Grace Totty: Yes. Amazon, I can reorder everything I need for my dorm and getting delivered to my dorm.
Shane Adams: Yep.
Grace Totty: For $200.
Shane Adams: Right. Exactly. Exactly. Alright, so looking at the next, the next 12 months, what do you think is the thing we're, we're not seeing? Like what, what's, what's coming up that we, we should be prepared for?
Grace Totty: That's a very good question as well. The next thing that we are not prepared for, I think AI in advertising is still a question mark.
Shane Adams: Mm-hmm.
Grace Totty: There's a lot of refinement going on, especially in the Google ad summary or AI summary, uh, section Google. It's not really giving us the best results in that AI summary.
Yep. Um, and so to, to think about [00:34:00] paying for placement in that summary, especially as a operator that manages multiple brands.
Shane Adams: Yeah.
Grace Totty: I don't want you swapping the wrong brand for a market that should be representative of a different portfolio. Mm-hmm. And so there's a question mark in, in the quality that it's.
Done and produced, but also it's, it's the next iteration of advertising and so we need to be there.
Shane Adams: Yeah.
Grace Totty: And so it's navigating when do you participate and at what threshold do you participate at and, and which platform. 'cause Google's not the only platform,
Shane Adams: right? Right. Mm-hmm. Right. And I think, I think, uh.
So, uh, Jason, uh, Barrett is actually building a GEO analysis tool. Okay. Uh, already, like, so he's, he's, we're, we're, we're thinking about like, what does this GEO space look like because the, the, the needs in that space are so different.
Grace Totty: Mm-hmm.
Shane Adams: Right? What your, the way your metadata is structured and, um, it requires a little bit more resourcing or, or sourcing, uh, to ensure that there's things they're pointing to.
[00:35:00] Where like, so you're ensuring your Google listings are still really solid. Right? Which is stuff that folks know, but maybe they don't, they aren't thinking about 'cause they've done it, they did it a while ago and they just aren't thinking about it now. So it, it, I think GEO is definitely that, that next thing that's gonna be, and it's gonna be fast.
I mean, I,
Grace Totty: I've actually heard some, um. Differing opinions on the version or the the difference of GEO versus SEO and really that I've heard, and I'm not an expert in this Yeah. I've heard that GEO is just a new packaging of SEO. Mm. Because data structuring has always been important with SEO. Yeah. And Backlinking has always been really important
Shane Adams: 100
Grace Totty: with SEO absolute.
And so I think the focus for absolute is writing fresh content. 'cause I still think that age old saying of content is king Yep. Is gonna help us. A GEO ranking and an SEO ranking, but making sure that the content is written in a more conversational method. I think that is gonna be some of the key differences [00:36:00] here.
Yeah. So migrating away from the old mentality of keyword stuffing.
Shane Adams: Right.
Grace Totty: And more of when somebody is using voice to search, how are they searching? What? What are they asking? Yeah. Answering questions in light of the actual conversation or the actual question that's being for
Shane Adams: sure
Grace Totty: asked. I think that's what we're gonna focus on and hopefully it gets us ranking well.
Shane Adams: Right.
Grace Totty: And also to that point, I know that other listing platforms are gonna be more important than they historically have been.
Shane Adams: Right?
Grace Totty: Because Google listings has always been the most important. I think that will maintain top priority, but the importance of. Showing up on Bing is becoming more important.
'cause Bing Powers AI Chat GPT or something. Yeah. There's all of these different models. Yeah. These large language models where people will eventually start asking questions and trying to find our product on those models. Pulls data from different sources. Right. So we can no longer really neglect Yelp, which has been really difficult to play with.
Shane Adams: I know, right?
Grace Totty: And so [00:37:00] we need to keep focusing on Yelp. Yeah. And making sure that our listings are built out and that we're asking for reviews on Yelp, where before didn't matter as much. Yeah. For a product like storage. Right. I think as users adopt different large language models, it'll become more important to pay attention to your listings.
Shane Adams: For sure. Well, I'm gonna let you go because I, you've already given me way more than Oh, you're so sweet. And I really appreciate you doing this because like I said, we literally just pulled Grace off the floor and said, come podcast with us. So we're so appreciative of that and, and we're, I'm happy to
Grace Totty: be here.
Shane Adams: So glad, uh, for our partnership and appreciate all, all that, all the work that we've done together, and we look forward to doing it more in the future.
Grace Totty: Thank you.
Shane Adams: Thank you, grace. Happy
Grace Totty: to be here.
Shane Adams: Thank you. Good
Grace Totty: to meet you.
Shane Adams: Alright.