I just recorded a podcast with Chris Michaels at Storage Rebellion where we talked about some of the challenges we've encountered while scaling White Label Storage.
An obvious focal point for me is the evolution of our transitions team. When we began scaling quickly, our transitions process broke.
Let me tell you what happened and how we fixed it.
Transitions = onboarding. Once we land a new client, the transitions team takes over to get their facilities up and running. It's our clients' first impression of us.
Problem is, every storage facility is different. And that variability makes speed and efficiency very challenging. A few things that make onboarding a beast:
1. The onboarding reminds tenants that they have a storage unit, which can result in move-outs.
2. Payment information does not always transfer from one software to another, meaning day one starts at effectively 100% delinquency.
3. The client relationship transitions from a team member that the owner has grown to know and trust to a new point of contact who needs to build that trust while managing an effective transition.
We've transitioned or opened over 300 facilities in a little over two years. Right now, we have over 60 in our onboarding pipeline simultaneously. Each transition involves about 100 discrete tasks, formal client meetings, and coordination across more than a dozen systems. The process spans 6 to 8 weeks on average.
Any single person can transition one facility. It is possible to brute force a transition with the right checklist. But what do you do when there are 60 running at once?
Our first instinct was that more transitions meant more project managers. Brute force at scale. That did not solve the core problem: one person handling several transitions at once requires too much context switching.
We found success when we began treating the transition like an assembly line. Breaking the work into distinct functions meant people doing the same type of work repeatedly in sequence got faster. They developed pattern recognition and caught problems earlier.
And because each function was isolated, we could measure throughput, identify bottlenecks, and know exactly where something stalled.
Today, our transitions process is a stage-gated pipeline where a facility is represented by a ticket. There are six stages, each with a defined task set and a PM sign-off that triggers the next stage. No one moves a ticket manually. With 60 facilities in flight, the system has to enforce the process, not the people.
The transition is where trust is built or broken with a new client. We have experienced both, which forced us to build a new system that's working. We now have a six-person transitions team that routinely onboards multi-facility portfolios in parallel. It'll be a constant evolution, I'm sure.
I would be happy to share a detailed breakdown of the underlying task-sets in the stages of our transition process for anyone interested in learning more.
