Investment Real Estate LLC (IRE), a property management and consulting firm specializing in the self-storage industry, has hired Colleen Vrankin as accounting manager. Vrankin will work directly with Joe Braun, chief financial officer, and be responsible for managing the day-to-day accounting functions for the Investment Real Estate Group of Cos. (IREGC), including self-storage facilities managed by Investment Real Estate Management LLC. Vrankin will also provide IREGC support and administration in banking and treasury, financial reporting, and human resources.

Vrankin has more than 26 years of experience in accounting and customer service. She was most recently a staff accountant for a company in New Freedom, Pa., where she processed accounts payable and receivable and handled employee payroll. She has also held positions in teaching as well as computer support and training. She is a graduate of York College of Pennsylvania with a bachelors degree in accounting.

I look forward to working with a great team of people at the Investment Real Estate Group of Cos., Vrankin said. The accounting functions do not change a lot from company to company, but the process and environment does. I am enjoying learning about the self-storage industry and am eager to streamline some of our processes.

Founded in 1998, IRE provides self-storage brokerage, feasibility and construction services to owners and investors.

Update 10/18/13 The Texas Self Storage Association (TSSA) Board of Directors recently elected its executive officers for 2013-14. The officers, who began their term on Oct. 1, are:

• President Mike Gately (Daughtry Properties, San Antonio)
• Vice President Amy Nolan (The Storage Place, Corpus Christi)
• Treasurer Paul Glover (Storage Choice, Dallas)
• Secretary Clint Wynn (Hixon Properties, San Antonio)
• Immediate-Past President Mark Skeans (Mission Road Mini-Storage, San Antonio)

Like the new board members, the officers will be introduced at the upcoming TSSA conference.

---

The Texas Self Storage Association (TSSA) recently elected three new members to its board of directors and re-elected one existing member to its executive committee for 2013-14. Newly elected to serve three-year terms on the board are Blair Valk of Assured Self Storage in Dallas and April Young of Ultimate Properties in Fort Worth, Texas. Ricky Jenkins of The Jenkins Organization was re-elected to a second three-year term and currently serves as Conference Committee Chair. Bill Bellomy of Southern Storage Group (SSG) was elected to serve a one-year term as the vendor-member representative. Both Jenkins and SSG are based in Houston.

The new and returning board members will participate in an upcoming planning meeting where they will join current board members:

• President Mark Skeans (Mission Road Mini-Storage, San Antonio)
• Vice President Mike Gately (Daughtry Properties, San Antonio)
• Treasurer Amy Nolan (The Storage Place, Corpus Christi, Texas)
• Secretary Paul Glover (Storage Choice, Dallas)
• Immediate-Past President Tom McCloskey (MC Self-Storage, Lytle, Texas)
• Director Larry Easley (Storage Management Associates, San Antonio)
• Director Jill Holbrook (Texas Self Storage, Wimberley, Texas)
• Director David Hunt (Owners Management Company, Lancaster, Texas)
• Director Clint Wynn (Hixon Properties, San Antonio)
• Ex-officio member Robert Loeb (Castle Hills Self Storage, San Antonio)

New officers will be elected prior to the next board meeting and introduced at the TSSA Big Ideas in Storage conference, Oct. 27-29, in The Woodlands, Texas. Membership information and details about the conference can be found at www.txssa.org .

Established in 1986, the TSSA is a nonprofit trade association dedicated to enhancing the quality of the self-storage industry in Texas. The association provides opportunities for members to increase their knowledge of the self-storage industry through education, research, discussion and exchange of information.

Keep It U-Lock & Storage, a self-storage facility in Cedar Lake, Ind., was recently sold to a private investor for $1.78 million. The 8.3-acre property at 13649 Wicker Ave. is comprised of 50,840 net rentable square feet. It features 291 storage units, a 4,000-square-foot warehouse, 175 boat/RV spaces and a managers office. Facility amenities include drive-up units, video cameras and wide aisles.

Investment specialists Sean M. Delaney and Matthew Duda from the Chicago/Oak Brook office of Marcus & Millichap Real Estate Investment Services represented the buyer and seller. They were assisted by broker Josh Caruana in closing the transaction.

Marcus & Millichap has more than 1,000 investment professionals in offices nationwide and closed more than 6,100 transactions last year.

By Marty Martin

Human-resources management is an essential part of business, but have you noticed the majority of the literature on the topic focuses on the "resources" and "management" aspects but barely addresses the human element? Most self-storage owners see their employees as resources to be managed, not as whole people who can contribute so much more.

Managing the whole person means acknowledging the employee is multi-dimensional and has numerous roles to balance in lifeall of which affect job performance. However, this goes much deeper than simply work-life balance. Its about recognizing all aspects of an employee to ensure a work-life fit that benefits the company and each individual. In fact, when you focus on the whole person rather than just a person's work performance, you build more meaningful connections with staff, which results in greater loyalty and productivity. Following are some suggestions for better managing the whole employee.

See the Input, Not Just the Output

When managing the whole person, you need to look beyond the persons job description. Look past the output (the deadlines, the expectations and day-to-day job duties) and consider the input factors, as these determine the quality of the output.

Input factors are the drivers and drainers in employees lives that affect their job performance. Some typical examples include:

• The employees best time of day to get work done
• Whats going on in the employees family
• The employees physical, mental and emotional health
• Other stressors the employee has, such as being a caregiver to aging parents, being pregnant, being the only income-earner in the home, etc.
• The community or hobby events to which the employee is committed

Basically, its about paying attention to all of the different drivers and drainers that motivate employees to achieve a level of acceptable performance, go above and beyond an acceptable level, or under perform. Because all the various inputs affect the overall output, being aware of the input makes good business sense.

Acknowledge Everyone Is Multi-Dimensional

Many managers believe that finding out about their employees lives outside of the work role is intrusive. They dont want to ask personal questions for fear of appearing nosey. The good news is you dont have to ask questions to find out about people. You simply have to acknowledge the clues all around you.

For example, if you see photos of children in someones office, you dont have to ask, Are those your kids? You can simply comment, Those are beautiful children. With that one acknowledgment, most people will open up, tell you who the children are, and offer lots more personal information. Likewise, if you see sports gear stashed away in a corner of someones cubicle, you dont have to ask, Do you play tennis [or whatever sport is evident]? Instead, you can comment, Ive always been interested in tennis. Again, the person will naturally start talking about the sport, team or league hes on, accomplishments and so much more. While its true most people dont want to sit through a session of 20 questions with their boss, they do enjoy being acknowledgednot just for their work but their other interests.

Look at the Big Picture

The average full-time employee works 2,080 hours per year at the office. That doesnt include time he puts in at night and on the weekends. With all of todays technological innovations, more people are connected to work 24/7, even while on vacation. As the separation between work and life becomes narrowedwhat many people are referring to as a blur of rolesa persons ability to focus intently on any one role becomes more difficult, resulting in errors and burnout.

In many organizations, bosses set the expectation for this blur because theyre not looking at the big picture of what the organization accomplishes. Rather, theyre focusing on the day-to-day stressors, the errors, the requests for time off, or the employees lunch hour that was really an hour and a half. By keeping your eye on the day-to-day details, youre missing the big picture of what your staff really contributes. In essence, youre adding undue stress on everyoneincluding yourself. Of course, details are important, but its also vital to take a step back and look at the big picture so you can see your employees as people and not as parts of a machine to be fixed.

Take Management to a 'Whole' New Level

When you put the human element back into human-resources management, youre acknowledging the needs of the employees so they can perform better. When employees feel recognized as more than just a number on a monthly report, they tend to give you more discretionary effort or whats called citizenship behavior, where theyre supportive of other employees and of the organization as a whole.

As an added benefit, when employees are more supportive of their bosses, the bosses workload becomes less stressful, too. Ultimately, the sooner you recognize all the drivers and drainers that impact people and manage them, the sooner youll be able to create a high-performing team.

Dr. Marty Martin has been speaking and training nationally and internationally for many years. His second book, "Taming Disruptive Behavior" will be published this year, and hes working on his third book, "Do You Have Career Insurance?" Martin is an associate professor in the College of Commerce at DePaul University in Chicago. For more information, visit www.drmartymartin.com .

Investigators in Kent, England, have seized 23 boxes of fireworks that were being sold illegally from a self-storage unit. The boxes contained about 50 kilograms of gunpowder and retailed for between £300 and £500. The owners of the storage facility said they had been asked to insure the contents for £11,000.

The joint investigation was conducted by Kent County Council Trading Standards and Kent police. Lawful sale of fireworks in the area is between Oct. 15 and Nov. 11, but investigators said the storing conditions at the self-storage facility were unsafe.

"To picture that amount of explosive, that's two wholesale-size sacks of potatoes of pure gunpowder; which would make a fairly significant explosion, said Trading Standards manager Mark Rolfe. "The storage conditions were totally unsafe with standard electrical fittings running above the fireworks. The expert advice we have been given is that one spark from a failing fluorescent tube could have destroyed the building."

The fireworks were being sold through a Facebook account. A 34-year-old male suspect has been questioned in the case, but the investigation is ongoing.

U.K. self-storage company Lok'nStore Group PLC has sold a facility in Reading, England, in principle for £2.9 million. The purchase price is 7.4 percent above a July 31 property valuation of £2.7 million, and will be paid in cash when the location is vacated in 2014, according to the source.

In addition to the sale price, LoknStore will receive overage dependent on the value of sales achieved on the development of residential properties, the source reported. The self-storage company owns an adjacent site in Reading on which it is building a new facility to replace the current location.

The new facility is expected to have 48,000 square feet of self-storage space, 20 percent more than the current property. The site is directly accessible from a busy main road which connects the town center with the M4 highway.

The company is also developing new U.K. facilities in Crawley, Maidenhead and Aldershot. LoknStore builds, buys or leases large warehouses or industrial buildings and rents storage units to customers on a weekly basis. Around 60 percent of the company's 7,000 customers are residential and 40 percent commercial. LoknStore has more than 920,000 square feet of net rentable space, which is evenly split between freehold and leasehold.

Self-storage management company Storage Investment Management Inc. (SIMI) held its annual managers conference and awards recognition dinner on Sept. 19 at the Trumbull Marriott Merritt Parkway in Trumbull, Conn. The setting was central for the more than 30 self-storage facilities SIMI manages throughout New England.

The conference portion focused on roundtable presentations covering marketing, company procedures and policies, best practices, and other topics.

During the recognition dinner, SIMI recognized top-performing managers with a variety of awards including Highest Volume of Merchandise Sales, Best Budget Income Variance and Most Improved Facility. The 2013 manager of the year was Michele Johnson-Sealy, manager of Planet Self Storage in Hyde Park, Mass. The No. 1 ranked "power rating" went to Ron Tortora, manager of Storage America in Garden City Park, N.Y. SIMI also recognized eight employees for their extended length of service ranging from five to 20 years.

In addition, the company released second-quarter 2013 operating performance for its managed facilities. Collectively, the properties averaged an increase in same-store sales of 9.48 percent over the same period last year. Net operating income jumped by 13.67 percent. SIMI attributes the rise to an increase of 595 basis points in occupancy over the same period in 2012.

Headquartered in New York, SIMI is led by principals Charlie Fritts, president, and David Inman, chief operating officer, who have a combined 75 years of self-storage industry experience. The company manages facilities in Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island.

Devon Self Storage, a California-based operator that owns or manages 32 facilities nationwide, has appointed Robert Francis as regional vice president of operations, responsible for the companys southeastern self-storage assets. Francis will oversee 23 facilities in six states comprising more than 1.6 million square feet. Direct reports include 44 employees, a regional director and two area managers. Francis will report to Angus Morrison, Devons executive vice president.

A 25-year industry veteran, Francis is president of The Heron Group, a Kissimmee, Fla.-based self-storage management company that also offers consulting and feasibility services. He began his career with Storage USA and has also worked with Public Storage Inc. and Southern Self Storage. He formed Heron Group in 2004.

Francis previously served nine years on the national Self Storage Association (SSA) board of directors, serving as chairman in 2008. He also has served on the Florida Self Storage Association board of directors and the SSAs southeast regional board. He is a licensed real estate broker in Florida and is a co-instructor for the SSAs Advanced Class on Valuation & Acquisition.

Devon Self Storage was 45th on the Inside Self-Storage 2013 Top-Operators List, an annual ranking of the industrys 100 largest operators based on net rentable square feet. Devons entire portfolio comprises more than 2.35 million square feet in 12 states.