Podcast
Ep 30: Transforming Urban Spaces into Profitable Storage Facilities w/ Peter Smyth from White Label Storage
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Welcome back to Self Storage Lab, the podcast where we deconstruct how operators are adapting to today’s technology-driven landscape—and what it means for the future of the industry.
This episode’s guest is Peter Smyth, co-founder of Local Locker and White Label Storage. Peter’s journey from Harvard Business School to transforming underutilized urban spaces into profitable, remotely managed storage facilities is a masterclass in modern operational thinking. With over 130 locations under management across 28 states, his team is redefining what third-party management looks like in self-storage.
In this episode, we explore:
- How Peter and his co-founder turned small, unstaffed facilities into a scalable, tech-enabled business.
- The playbooks they borrowed from real estate and tech to build a lean, efficient operating model.
- Why White Label’s approach to revenue management, customer service, and automation is resonating with both new and seasoned operators.
If you’re curious about how modern operators are using technology to scale smarter—not just bigger—this episode is for you.
Also in our queue: Episode 15: AI Guidelines & Regulations
In this episode we discussed:
(00:00:20) The journey from HBS to 130+ locations—scaling third-party storage with tech.
(00:01:40) Brand evolution—why White Label emerged from Local Locker.
(00:02:31) The NYC roots—launching with underutilized urban spaces.
(00:03:45) The conference experiment—how testing demand at industry events paid off.
(00:05:25) Why Peter chose his business partner Alex as his co-founder—business school beers and shared pain points.
(00:07:29) From beer money to $25k golf checks—early validation from a Harvard pitch comp.
(00:08:53) Real estate roots—how apartment buildings inspired a storage pivot.
(00:11:02) The WeWork model—taking lessons from asset-light expansion.
(00:13:03) New York landlord lessons—low debt, high walkaway power.
(00:14:57) From do-it-all to departmental—White Label’s organizational scaling model.
(00:17:08) Site selection criteria—unit economics, margin coverage, and hard truths.
(00:20:00) Disqualifying bad deals—when even great management can’t fix poor assets.
(00:22:29) Letting process take over—moving beyond “hero ball” operations.
(00:24:42) Org structure and team breakdown—30-person team across ops, sales, local fieldwork.
(00:26:17) Client-first DNA—why they built their own low-cost, high-performance website.
(00:27:51) Inspired by Rippling—reengineering onboarding to build trust, not checklists.
(00:30:37) Cognitive burden and the McDonald’s drive-thru—how they structured task ownership.
(00:33:11) Small tweaks, big ROI—why 30 more seconds post-call changed everything.
(00:35:18) The ideal operation—AI chat, DaVinci locks, and tech-enabled field ops.
(00:38:11) From fragmented vendors to full-stack vertical ops—the white space Peter sees.
(00:42:24) Seamless delinquency payments—how internal tools cut labor and collections.
(00:43:19) Building their own revenue management engine—scraping and pricing with logic.
(00:47:20) The one thing Peter would ban—REIT rate games and pricing opacity.
(00:49:09) What's next—more cost-focused scale and a rebound in institutional attention.
(00:51:11) Hot takes—why occupancy is overrated and CapEx is underappreciated.
Mentioned in This Episode
Internal Tools & Innovations
- Custom payment capture for delinquent tenants
- In-house revenue management engine
- Internal onboarding platform inspired by Rippling
- Slack-integrated call lead alerts
Industry Inspiration
- Danny Meyer’s Setting the Table (hospitality mindset)
- Rippling (onboarding workflows)
- McDonald’s (cognitive burden design)
- WeWork (asset-light expansion)
Favorite Nuggets
- The cognitive load of site managers and why specialization matters
- Removing friction to pay = faster collections
- CapEx isn’t a cost—it’s an investment
Miscellaneous Mentions
- Fake walls in NYC apartments, Gracie Abrams, and 50 bottles of orange liqueur.
🔗 More from Peter & Team:
If you haven’t already, go download the second edition of our industry report “The State of Technology in Self Storage”. We cover a ton of data points focused on how operators should think about putting The Modern Customer at the center of their universe.
Listen, rate, and subscribe!
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