Faraz Hemani left a stable and promising career at Google to found Pebble Ridge Capital Group with his partner Raheel Khawaja, doing business as Iron Storage, because he wanted to prove to himself he could win as an entrepreneur in real estate. They had confidence that their unique experience coupled with a quietly relentless work ethic would prove to be a winning formula. Just a few years after founding, Iron Storage has grown to 25 facilities and become one of the most fascinating stories in self-storage. Many of Faraz's followers in the active self-storage Twitter community would tell you he's made it look easy. He'd tell you it's been anything but.

Struggling to outfit growing scale with reliable tech

For a portfolio growing as fast as Iron Storage, minor papercuts in the technology stack become business blockers. Payment outages and website speeds are not something most modern industries struggle with but Iron Storage employees and customers were regularly dealing with issues affecting their ability to accomplish these ordinary business-critical tasks. Faraz found it increasingly difficult to operate his self-storage business with reliable technology and dependable partners.

He was intrigued by Cubby early on but waited to complete a blitz of acquisitions before making the jump to the new platform. He recognized in Cubby an opportunity to boost move-ins while maintaining top-notch speed and reliability for his team and renters.

Standing up a new way

The period preparing for implementation of business critical software is always an anxious time. But Faraz was organized and prepared and was grateful to have a team that matched his urgency in a critical moment for his business.

"The implementation was smoother than I expected. Cubby's team spent a lot of time ensuring that all my historical data made it over to their system. We had all of our notes, payment history, and customer payment info migrated over seamlessly. We barely missed a beat the day that we went live, and as a result the transition was easy on our customers and on the business." -Faraz Hemani

Iron Storage was implemented quickly and seamlessly because they were ready and had a partner who worked hand-in-hand with their team to ensure success.

Standing up a modern e-commerce experience

Iron Storage had invested significant time, money, and deep SEO experience into a website they measured for effectiveness in converting visitors into renters. There aren't many with more expertise in the area and they knew they needed to control their customer facing experience to ensure continued performance over time. The problem was that their previous management software couldn't integrate with that website in a way that would allow them to maximize online rentals. Their marketing expertise was effectively blunted.

Moving to Cubby allowed them to drop Cubby's storefront components directly onto their website and measure every step. No longer did they have to kick users out to a slow-loading, generic rental center that provided limited visibility into marketing metrics. Faraz actually implemented Cubby's easy-to-use marketing components on his website in a weekend. The results upon go-live were immediate and haven't slowed since.

"Cubby's optimized platform ensured faster page load speeds and a better on-page experience. This improvement significantly boosted SEO rankings, making Iron Storage more visible to potential customers.

With an emphasis on a seamless online checkout experience, Cubby made it easier for customers to reserve units directly through the website. This explains how our website rental percentage nearly doubled.

In our opinion, a management platform that can make management easier, enhance collections, etc, is all just table stakes. The fact that Cubby is the ONLY platform with a well-thought out design and emphasis on the online check-out experience makes it worth its weight in gold, especially in an environment where online demand is harder and harder to capture." -Faraz Hemani

Partnering to push the business forward

As forward thinking operators, the Iron Storage team knows there are many improvements to be made in the technology that powers the self-storage industry. Faraz was grateful to have found a partner with vision and the deep experience required to execute at a high level today and into the future.

"The partnership and pace of development has been my favorite part of the Cubby experience. What I love about Cubby is a lot of their leadership and key players have a strong technology background. They come from places like Meta and Shopify, and understand what it takes to develop a product that tailor fits the user's needs.

They can keep up with a fast pace schedule of releases. And they genuinely listen to us when we request features or changes in the platform. And it's not just a 'oh sure we'll look into rolling that out for you someday' type of response.

Often times, we request an improvement, and it's live in the platform a few weeks later. I've never had such an incredible level of service and partnership from any tech platform I have worked with before" -Faraz Hemani

At Cubby, we're confident in the future of Pebble Ridge Capital Group under Faraz and Raheel's leadership. While we know that building a business isn't easy, we appreciate that operators like Iron Storage can make it look that way with the right partners in place.