SpareBox: Managing Industry Leading Growth With AtlasX

Prior to AtlasX, SpareBox was dealing with substantial challenges in their deal management and pipeline tracking system. Originally, the team relied on static, inflexible systems—using Excel, email, and legacy file systems to manage increasingly complex deal flow. As information accumulated, SpareBox was unable to effectively update and track historical information across their deals. According to Kate Matheny, SpareBox’s President, this problem led to a clear disconnect between the deals the team looked at and the efficient storage of files, saying “We would selectively set up folders on our network for select deals, but lost the legacy information of other deals under a mountain of emails.” This resulted in a time-consuming process for staying on-top of deal next steps and additional complexity to calculate core pipeline metrics. 

Additionally, the volume of deals and lack of centralized data management meant that substantial time was spent searching emails for deal documents, metrics, progress updates, and rationale behind decisions. Despite attempts to improve their system by adding more criteria to their Excel spreadsheet, significant gaps in information remained, making gathering leverageable insights from their pipeline a major time suck. 

Finally, when it came to sharing information across their acquisitions and operations team, collaboration faced substantial hurdles. With a lack of a centralized system of record and defined workflows within their deal management process, transitioning deals between teams became a major source of friction and as a result effective communication stalled. 

Suffered from: 

• Loss of dead deal data due to lack of organization within existing legacy systems 
• Significant time drain searching fragmented communications for deal documents and communicating updates across team
• Inefficiency reporting on pipeline metrics, resulting in historical data being lost and a lack of visibility into proprietary data

With each of these central issues, AtlasX was able to provide a substantially better solution than the status quo. SpareBox leveraged AtlasX’s pipeline standardization, task management, and robust reporting capabilities to improve both their acquisitions and operations teams’ effectiveness. 

To address the problems with collecting and inputting core information, AtlasX standardized tracking of essential deal metrics and automated key facets of data entry. AtlasX Insights enables SpareBox to auto-populate demographic details based on deal location and perform price per square foot calculations with ease. As data has accumulated, SpareBox has been able to use AtlasX’s filtering and tracking functionality to compare previous deals to newly analyzed deals. Along with this, AtlasX has allowed for the centralization of documents and notes on each deal, ensuring that it is possible to easily debrief on dead and active deal information. 

In tracking deal progress, AtlasX’s task management function allowed SpareBox to track deal timelines, standardize workflows, and loop in stakeholders across the organization to ensure consistently high visibility into deal stages. SpareBox has deployed AtlasX as a project management tool, tracking go-hard dates and closing timelines. The product empowers teams to auto-generate dependencies, track timelines in a Gantt view, and auto-assign key task assignments—making the process of tracking an intensive pipeline substantially easier. 

AtlasX made the process of reporting on key deal information, pipeline health, and historical performance substantially easier with a suite of robust reporting functionalities. Using AtlasX, SpareBox can auto generate and customize reports, using them in Board Meetings, Weekly Pipeline Updates, and to share inwardly with their Operations Team. With this, reports can be configured through an easy-to-use point and click navigator, which can filter across 75+ AtlasX metrics and provides the opportunity for users to create their own. This makes the process of performing ad hoc analysis substantially easier and enables the team to better leverage proprietary data. 

Through the implementation of AtlasX, SpareBox has rapidly scaled to over 100 self-storage locations since 2020, becoming one of the fastest growing self-storage operators in the U.S. SpareBox President, Kate Matheny, describes AtlasX impact by saying, “We’ve become both a more competitive buyer and a more efficient team using AtlasX, saving substantial time and effort managing our acquisitions process.”

Compared to their previous process, the team has seen substantial time savings and performance improvements. The team has saved an average of 15+ hours per deal by using AtlasX as their single source of truth, with the platform enabling the team to login and see updates in real time. 

Along with this, by using AtlasX’s reporting functionalities for all of their board meetings, weekly updates, and analysis, the team has saved an additional 10 hours per month. This has created more effective communication across the organization as well as greater confidence in decision making. Additionally, this has made the process of transitioning acquired deals to their operation team substantially smoother as the Ops team is consistently looped into the pipeline and has access to the most up-to-date information.  

Finally, AtlasX has enabled SpareBox to accumulate an industry leading base of proprietary data in the Self-Storage space. The team has become more effective at their bidding strategy, making them a more competitive and sophisticated buyer.