Business View Magazine | February 2018

222 223 highly competitive storage industry. Business ViewMagazine recently spoke to the pair about the amazing growth and success of Platinum Storage Group and their insights into the future of the industry. The following is an edited version of that conversation: BVM: How did Platinum Storage Group evolve to become a leader in self-storage? Genevieve: “Our father, Skip Elefante, started the company in 1999. I joined in 2003, and Dane followed in 2007. Skip has been in the business more than 30 years, as a self-storage broker who also does self-storage propertymanagement. Back in the late ‘90s he thought,‘Why aren’t we putting these deals together for ourselves in an investment kind of way?’That’s when we started to syndicate; acquiring a dozen sites over the next couple years through friends and family capital.” Dane: “We’ve all been involved in the business, even before we officially joined the company.When I was 15, I was shop- ping for storage facilities.My girlfriend was taking photos while I was inside, and afterwards we’d go through the details with Skip and the other teammembers and put together feasibility studies. Back then, Genevieve was supporting our father in his capacity as a broker and in day-to-day operations. “In the early 2000s we had 90 proper- PLATINUM STORAGE GROUP ties; then we were up to 120 in the recession when we took on distressed properties that owners had bought at the height of property values and lost to the bank.We worked with the Special Receiver and began managing the properties for the banks.” BVM: How does data management impact operations? Genevie ve: “Over the years,we’ve grown from a boutique self-storage investor/property manager/owner to a much more sophisticat- ed self-storage owner/operator/developer. We’ve had to adapt to compete. It used to be anybody could build a self-storage facility and market it with a Yellow Pages ad and the tenants would come.The industry has come a long way.” Dane: “Our current portfolio is about 32 properties with 10 to 12 in the pipeline. Inter- nally,we’re very scalable and we’ve taken steps to centralize all our data with an accounting software database fromYardi. Self-storage was the forgotten real estate type until 2007,when REITs (publicly-owned Real Estate Investment Trusts) started to come into the market. Before that, the big software companies weren’t look- ing at us.We were having to build software ourselves or use small vendors that catered just to our industry. “Self-storage is now one of the top per- forming real estate types.And Yardi enabled us to go from having a different database for each property, to a single database that can push and pull information and invoices to our financials,without having to independently log in to each one.The great thing about that