How Mini-Entrepôt STG ended up running entirely from a phone.
Mini-Entrepôt STG is a facility in Terrebonne, operating since 2021. Its owner also runs Cobano Storage in Costa Rica, Stortech's first international client. Which means he is almost never on site, and even less often at a computer.
- Operating since
- 2021
- Before Stortech
- Xero and manual work
- Access control
- ICT Protege, integrated
- Sites
- Terrebonne and Costa Rica
The challenge
Xero kept the books, and nearly everything else
Leases were signed by hand. Rent was collected by hand, except for the handful of tenants set up on recurring payments.
Those ran once, or they didn't. No retry. An expired card on the first of the month, and it was on the owner to go hunting.
The rest drifted the way anything living in a spreadsheet drifts: it wasn't always certain who was in which unit.
The constraint
The owner isn't on site
Most storage software assumes an office, a counter, and someone standing behind it. STG has none of that. The owner travels, changes time zones, and rarely has his laptop with him.
So he needed two things at once: the facility had to enforce its own rules with nobody there to enforce them, and he had to be able to run it, not just watch it, from his phone.
“We always built for mobile. But until someone runs their entire operation from a phone, you don't know where the gaps are. Shawn found them one at a time, and that's when we stopped settling for a good mobile version and went for full parity with desktop.”
The solution
Set up for him, all the way to the gate
Stortech did the build: the inventory cleaned unit by unit, then the migration off Xero, tenants and payments included.
The piece that changes everything is the gate. ICT Protege GX access control was integrated directly into Stortech, putting the lease, the payment and the door in one system instead of three.
The pin no longer exists before the lease is signed: it goes out once the lease is signed, not before. A tenant who is already inside is a lot harder to get a signature from.
“I used to be the one chasing people. You call, no answer, you call again, and the tenant stretches it out as long as they can. Now if you haven't paid, you don't get in, and it wasn't me who decided that: the system tightens it up. That leaves me time to improve the business instead of chasing people.”
The results
He isn't the one chasing people anymore
Rent retries itself when it fails. A tenant who hasn't paid doesn't get in: the gate is shut before the owner has even opened his phone.
And it changes how tenants behave. A late notice, a locked gate, and the payment lands. No call, no follow-up, no being the guy phoning for the third time.
Nothing slips through, everything lives in one place, and the whole operation fits in a phone. Literally all of it: there is no companion app doing a tenth of the job. Anything you can do on a desktop, you can do on the phone: adjust a unit, unlock a door remotely, send a lease out for signature, follow occupancy and revenue.
Shawn is the operator who works from his phone more than any other on Stortech. It isn't a compromise he tolerates between trips to a desk: it's how he runs the business.
“It's exactly what I needed. I have time for my family, and the time that's left I spend working on my business instead of in it. And I do all of it from my phone, wherever I happen to be.”
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