Published: August 01, 2018

Catching Up With the UNITS San Antonio Managers

The past couple of months have been a time of transition for UNITS Moving and Portable Storage here in San Antonio. Adam Martin, our manager in San Diego, helped transition the team to a new manager, Renee Rios, who transitions into her new role after working in StratProp’s apartments division. We had to ask Adam how he was able to manage both the San Diego and the San Antonio markets simultaneously.

“I remotely operated San Antonio’s UNITS for about a month, month and a half,” Adam said. “Cathy jumped in and helped too. We recently hired Renee Rios. She was with the Texas Apartment portfolio that we recently sold to another company. But we were able to extract her and bring her on as the new manager for San Antonio.”

“It’s been great so far,” said Renee, who was officially transitioned into her new role on June 11th. “I still have a lot to learn but I’m really enjoying it.”

While working remotely is all the rage in the tech industry you probably don’t think of the storage industry, especially portable storage, to be anything even close to resembling a remote job. But according to Adam, the nature of the business as well as the the technology he has to work with made it all possible.

“In our business they don’t come to us–we go to them,” Adam explained. “That’s the big difference between portable storage versus standard storage. I almost never see the client face to face. It’s email, it’s text messaging, it’s phone calls. So it’s very possible to manage multiple markets remotely.”

Even with that being said, we were curious how San Antonio differed from what he was used to in San Diego.

“We rely on Google Maps when routing deliveries. San Antonio is actually a lot easier to make deliveries in than San Diego where you have clearance issues regularly downtown, as well as beach related geography being a little tricky. The only other thing was just working with all new customers. I’m used to my clientele. People talk to each other a little differently, conversationally, and people in Texas wanted to feel like they were dealing with a local Texan, so I tried my best to make sure they felt taken care of as though I were actually there.”

Being there wasn’t necessary as Adam was able to hold down the fort in both cities. Through a management app on his phone, he and the San Antonio team can cover for each other in case of illness or some other issue. So long as there is good communication with the driving team, everything else takes care of itself.

“It’s a lot of interaction over the phone,” said Renee. “I learned a lot from Adam over the phone. Kathy really helped me a lot too. I just kind of got thrown in and had to learn fast but that’s not a problem for me.”

We’re impressed with Adam, Cathy and Renee for their hard work, as well as the efficient business model UNITS Moving and Portable Storage operates. A major congratulations to all three and of course, the drivers, who worked hard to make sure our customers’ experience was still top notch despite internal transitioning. We’re also excited to see what Renee can accomplish in her new role as well moving forward!