The Door Is Always Open
How Reliant Storage Added 19 Office Hours a Week (a 33% Jump) Without Adding a Dollar to Payroll
Self-storage is in the middle of a once-in-a-generation operational shift. The operators who recognize it, and act on it, are the ones who will own the next cycle. Reliant Storage, a 100+ site operator across 10 states, is one of
those companies. After deploying EaseOS across their entire portfolio, Kolin Van Dyne, Vice President of Operations, who leads people and process for the company, sat down with our team to walk through what changed, and what every storage operator should be paying attention to right now.
Why is “The Door Always Open”
Every operator has lived this story: you drive a few hours to visit a property, pull on the front door, and it’s locked. Lunch break. Bank run. Manager helping a tenant on the lot. Whatever the reason, in that moment, you’re thinking the same thing every customer thinks: How many people just walked away?
“Every time a customer walks up to the door, they pull on the knob and it’s open. That used to be something that was frustrating - you’d drive a few hours to a property, the door is locked, and you’re always thinking, how many customers are we missing?”
That single question - how many customers are we missing? - is the question every storage operator should be losing sleep over. Every locked door, every voicemail, every “back in 30 minutes” sign on the office is a customer choosing the next facility down the road. Reliant decided to stop missing those customers.
With Ease Virtual Console at every facility, and Ease Connect routing every customer interaction to a real person ready to help, the door is always open. The brand presentation is consistent across the portfolio. The hours are the same. The sales experience is the same. Every facility, every shift, every time zone.
The Headline Number Behind an Always-Open Door
“We went from 58 hours a week to 77 hours a week of office availability - a 33% increase - and our payroll has not gone up at all.”
That single sentence is the entire ROI case for the EaseOS platform, told the way an operator tells it. Reliant’s offices now run 8 a.m. to 7 p.m., every day, in every time zone they operate in. That is roughly 33% more sales coverage, captured at the same labor cost as before, and without compromising the in-person customer experience.
For owners modeling NOI, the math is hard to ignore. Every hour the office is dark is an hour competitors with extended hours can take share. EaseOS closes that gap without writing another payroll check.
The Hybrid Model: Manned and Unmanned, Working Together
The most important thing to understand about Reliant’s setup is that they did not eliminate their on-site property managers. They redesigned the role. Reliant runs a true hybrid: a property manager on-site during core hours, paired with virtual managers staffing the Ease Virtual Console (VC) from open to close. But the piece that makes the whole model work, the connective tissue between the property manager on the lot, the virtual managers in the call center, and every customer touch in between, is Ease Connect.
Ease Connect: The Software Behind Reliant’s Call Center
If the Virtual Console is the storefront, Ease Connect is the operating system running the entire customer-facing organization behind it. Every call, every text, every web chat, every counter interaction at every facility lands in one unified screen, with the customer’s full context pulled in real time from Reliant’s PMS.
That single dashboard is what allows Reliant to run a centralized call center against a 100-site portfolio without losing the personal touch of a local operator. AI handles intent classification and routing - no clunky phone tree, no menus, no misroutes - and pushes each interaction to the right place: the Virtual Console at the facility, the call center, or the task queue for follow-up.
How the call center and the property managers work together Inside Ease Connect, Reliant’s virtual managers are the primary leasing agents. They handle the counter calls coming in from the VCs across the portfolio, the inbound phone calls, the payment and insurance questions, and the leasing conversations from start to finish. They are hired and trained specifically for sales, and they live in Ease Connect all day.
Property managers, meanwhile, are out doing what they should be doing - walking the property, completing audits, prepping auctions, and addressing on-site issues without being pulled back to the office every time someone walks up to a door. They’re cross-trained on Ease Connect so they can flex back in when traffic spikes:
“Anytime there’s a bump in traffic, I can reach out to one of these property managers and say, hey, please come flex in. Jump on EC, help with tasks, help with phone calls, and free up the virtual managers to handle the walk-in traffic at the counters.”
That ability to dynamically rebalance the workforce - virtual managers and property managers, manned hours and unmanned hours, on-site and centralized - in the same software, against the same task queue, against the same shared customer context, is what most operators are missing. Without Ease Connect tying it all together, a hybrid model is just two teams running in parallel. With it, they’re running as one.
Nothing falls through the cracks
Every Reliant facility runs on Ease Connect, but a subset of the portfolio is also AI-enabled. At those AI-enabled sites, when the call center is busy, Ease Connect can resolve routine issues - gate codes, payments, move-outs - automatically, so virtual managers stay focused on the high-value sales conversations. When the call center closes, the task queue catches everything across the entire portfolio: leads to follow up, payments to confirm, customers to call back. The next morning, the team picks up exactly where they left off. No voicemails, no sticky notes, no missed leads.
Hire for the Skill, Not the Swiss Army Knife
The traditional self-storage staffing model asks one person to be excellent at sales, cleaning, collections, auctions, customer service, and basic maintenance. In practice, very few people are great at all of those things, and the operators who try to find them face constant turnover and inconsistent customer experience.
The hybrid model breaks the role apart. Reliant now hires virtual managers specifically for sales - people who genuinely enjoy talking with customers all day - while property managers focus on property-level execution.
Ease Connect is the platform that lets each group play to their strengths: virtual managers stay heads-down in the queue, property managers stay heads-up on the lot, and the software keeps both pointed at the same customer.
A Data Advantage That Reaches Into Acquisitions
One outcome Reliant didn’t expect: the platform is now feeding their acquisitions team. Because every customer interaction - at the counter, on the phone, in the task queue - flows through Ease Connect, every conversation is captured, structured, and pulled into Reliant’s internal dashboards. That means Reliant doesn’t just know how many customers walked in, they know why. Which markets are asking for covered parking. Which want climate-controlled. Which want drive-up. That data now informs how they evaluate new deals and which sub-markets to target.
Why This Matters Right Now
The last twelve months have been hard on storage operators. Demand softened. Rate compression came back.
The easy growth of the prior cycle disappeared. Most operators have spent the period in survival mode. A smaller group has used the time differently, to retool, to invest in technology, and to position for the next leg up.
“We feel like we have all the pieces in place. We’re ready for a crazy amount of traffic to come at us - because we can handle it better than we ever could in the past.”
When the market turns, and it will, the operators who have already done the work will capture a disproportionate share of the upside. They’ll have the hours, the data, the sales coverage, the consistent brand experience, and the cost structure to scale into the recovery without scrambling for headcount.
That is the case for the EaseOS platform, and it is the case Reliant is making, in their own words. The technology is no longer experimental, no longer optional, and no longer something you can wait on. It is the new operating standard for self-storage.