A few Big Wins for Tron Jordheim in the Self Storage Business
Tron Jordheim has been a leader and innovator in the self storage business since 2000. Here is a partial list of some of his accomplishments. Some of the processes, systems, and standard procedures in the current self storage business world are a result of work Tron did with the talented, forward-looking teams he was fortunate to be a part of.
Self Storage Call Centers: Tron helped to create the first of the outsource call centers in 2000. It was a subsidiary of an influential self storage brand. At its peak, there were over 100 employees and it handled calls for 1,000 direct client sites….and took all the calls for one of the largest online lead aggregators. The call center fielded calls in English, Spanish, Québécois French, and had distributed agents handling calls in Mandarin and Punjabi.
Telephone Rentals: Tron helped pioneer and perfect a full telephone rental years before any other operators were doing that. The “Rent it Now” was a game-changer for the stakeholders and for the industry.
Online Rentals: As the head of Marketing for one of the largest privately held self storage operators, Tron helped lead the way in creating the first full online rental system.
Automated un-staffed properties: Tron’s teams were testing a “Kiosk in the pocket” mobile customer experience in 2008 driven by QR codes.
2-way video offices: Tron’s teams developed some of the first two-way video rental and customer service experiences in the storage business using video studios in the call center.
Dynamic & Variable Pricing: Tron was on the team that helped create an updated pricing strategy model that has become standard in the industry.
Lead aggregator websites: Tron helped develop one of the earliest lead aggregators, Storage Concierge. The service faxed leads and called leads to storage sites around the country. It was a precursor to more tech-savvy versions. Storage Concierge was scrapped as inefficient before technology had progressed enough to make the model workable.
Search Engine Optimization: As a Sr. VP of Sales and Marketing in the self storage business, Tron was an early pioneer in SEO. There was a time that any Google search on “self-storage’ in the USA brought up at least three page-one results for sites Tron’s teams were managing. His case studies were presented at PubCon and other marketing conferences.
Integrated Analytics: Tron was an early champion of business intelligence tools in the storage industry which helped move to a forward-looking, rather than a backward-looking predictive model.
Social Media Advertising: Under Tron’s leadership, his stakeholders became the first self-storage advertiser on Yelp, and at one time were in the top 10% of Facebook advertisers.
Mobile-friendly websites: Tron’s teams developed some of the first “mobile-first” and mobile-friendly websites in the storage business.
Website Conversion Science: Tron’s teams were some of the first in the storage business to focus on website conversion science, A/B testing, and dynamic content.
Protection Plans: Tron led and managed a large in-house protection plan that was a model for many other in-house protection plans. His testimony defending protection plans as a non-insurance contractual arrangement to the Kentucky Board of Insurance helped lay the groundwork for the successful 2018 finding by the California Supreme Court that self-storage protection plans are not subject to insurance codes. Tron also led the settlement of one of 2008’s most bizarre and unfortunate self-storage catastrophes, when an interior mezzanine inside a Brooklyn, NY self storage building collapsed, destroying two floors of units and flooding 600 others from broken sprinkler pipes.
Tron called the great recession: After looking at the results from the April, May, and June 2007 store-level and call-center performance data, Tron went to the upper management team and warned that the economy was about to crash and that preparations needed to be made for a serious and prolonged downturn. Those preparations saved the company and the companies of many clients.
One of the best deals of 2008: Tron was part of the leadership team that managed the M&A process of a take-over of 60 Storage sites in Canada in 2008. This included taking over an existing call center infrastructure, and sales and marketing programs for French Quebec, as well as the rest of English speaking Canada.
One of the best deals in 2017: Tron was a part of the management team that acquired, managed, and marketed a 27 store portfolio that was purchased with an exit IRR for investors that anyone would be proud of.
Off Market acquisitions: Tron uncovered and helped negotiate the acquisition of two very well-performing assets in 2017 and 2018.
Successful New York City eminent domain negotiations: Tron was a part of the team that negotiated the 2014 eminent domain settlement with the city/private partnership that was building the Barclay Center. A large self storage operation was subject to the take-over. But, in part because of Tron’s efforts, the value of the action was very favorably factored over many years of lost income, and accommodations were made for the expense and chaos of moving 1,200 self-storage tenants out of a building.
Acquiring strategic partners: Tron successfully found, signed up, and on-boarded several strategic partners with multiple sites for third party management services.
Startup and turnaround: Tron led the successful startups and successful turnarounds for a variety of self storage projects in a variety of markets. His insights on self storage feasibility studies have helped many self storage investors make good decisions about moving ahead on acquisitions, or moving on to other opportunities.
Tron has had long string of successful self storage consulting projects: You can look at www.jordheimconsulting.com and www.selfstoragestrategies.com for more detail on clients and projects.
