What about the Budget:
The most awkward week in self storage every year.
Budget week.
I’ve done it with multiple, third-party management companies.
All the District Managers fly in.
Big conference room.
Accounting walks everyone through the template.
We each build 16 property budgets, one by one.
The process itself isn’t hard.
Look at historical trends.
Adjust for payroll, maintenance, turnover risk.
Forecast traffic and revenue.
It’s just time-consuming.
Here’s the part that never sat right with me.
I’d build budgets based on reality.
Five years of trends.
What I knew about each property.
What I actually thought would happen.
Then they’d get kicked back.
“Ownership expects X% revenue growth.”
“We need to tighten expenses.”
“Push the numbers a little more.”
So I’d go back through all 16 sites and get… "optimistic".
Maybe snow removal won’t be as bad this year.
Maybe we can share tools between sites.
Maybe those doors can limp along another year.
Maybe we skip replacing that equipment.
Maybe we make the quarterly manager meeting a semi-annual manager meeting.
Eventually the budgets would get approved.
Then the year would start.
A gate gets hit.
Snow is worse than expected.
Someone needs overtime to keep a site open.
A piece of equipment finally dies.
And now I’m on calls with owners explaining why we’re “behind budget”…
Even though:
Occupancy is strong
Rates are moving
Rentals are solid
Sales are up
The sites look great
The team is performing
Operationally, we’re winning.
But on paper?
We’re missing numbers we never should have promised in the first place.
That tension doesn’t just hurt the budget.
It slowly erodes trust.
So I made a decision.
I’d rather present a budget that’s 2–3% more conservative and defend reality... Than sell a best-case fantasy and spend the entire year explaining why real life happened.
Because long-term owner relationships aren’t built on perfect forecasts.
They’re built on credibility when things don’t go perfectly.
And in self storage…
Something always doesn’t go perfectly.
