Breaking down Warehouse Anywhere's stunning acquisition of XPS. What’s it mean for both companies!

STORAGE UNLOCKED — EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Presented on The Self-Storage Report Episode: Breaking down Warehouse Anywhere's stunning acquisition of XPS. What's it mean for both companies! Host: Thaddeus Campbell — Storage Unlocked Guests: Laura Holmes — CEO, Warehouse Anywhere; Shannon Charbonneau — Vice President, Client Relations, XPS Solutions Recorded: July 2026 (premiered July 31, 2026) Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0VsI_p8qs8 Sponsor: P.B. Brown General Contractors Key topics: Warehouse Anywhere's acquisition of XPS Solutions, announced July 7, 2026; XPS call center support expanding from 104 to 168 hours weekly under 24/7 operations; 2 a.m. service calls from field technicians; the free Warehouse Anywhere partner network and plans to tier it; business tenants staying 2 plus years with no consumer seasonality; 4-month seasonal units for retail customers; mid-market operator pricing beating the REITs; Warehouse Anywhere's origins as a Life Storage division and the 2023 Extra Space merger; XPS founded in 2000 and named best call center of 2026; John Traver's move from CEO to board adviser; private equity backing on both sides; why live phone answering volumes are holding steady against AI. Note: Speaker attribution reconstructed from raw captions. Light cleanup of transcription errors only; wording preserved. Timestamps, music cues and YouTube chapter markers removed. Turns marked [attribution inferred] could not be attributed with certainty. ————————————————————————————— Thaddeus Campbell: Usually I have this fancy intro for the show. There's Thaddeus Campbell and I was going to talk about Laura Holmes' vision and how she saw something in a little known division of Life Storage after the merger, but I wanted to take a second with my granddaughter. So this is Estelle Rose. She's Shannon Charbonneau and she's Laura Holmes. I'm going to hand this one off now because she's getting a little cranky. But Shannon asked me if she could see the baby in our LinkedIn post. So I wanted to introduce my new favorite human being on the planet. As much as I love you ladies, I'm going to give her to her aunt real quick so that we can talk uninterrupted by this little bundle of joy. Thaddeus Campbell: And now I'm going to come back and we're going to have an actual real conversation. First and foremost, thank you guys for joining me. Very excited to talk about the acquisition of XPS Solutions by Warehouse Anywhere. It took me a little bit to get over a little bit of my — my ego was bruised as a journalist. Laura, I think I told you that I reached out. I was like, you were on my other podcast a few weeks ago and literally like 2 or 3 days after that, the announcement comes out. You didn't even give the littlest hint of it. So I was feeling like maybe I wasn't doing very well as a journalist digging for dirt. But really excited to have you two on. And I guess the first question I'm going to ask you, Laura, is why XPS Solutions? Why did this acquisition make sense for you guys? And what does it do to help Warehouse Anywhere and the growth you guys have been going through? Laura Holmes: Yeah. So first of all, I'm sorry I couldn't say a word about the acquisition to you. And I'm glad you weren't able to pull it out of me. We had been talking to XPS about a potential of purchasing their business actually in spring, and one of the things that their former CEO John Traver and I saw instantly were the synergies between our two companies. Much of what we've already built on our new platform when we retired our legacy platform earlier this year is exactly what XPS needs to fuel the next stage of their growth. So with these two companies combined, we're now able to provide a solution end to end for our business customers that is better than it's ever been before. Laura Holmes: We're switching to 24/7 operations in our call center on the XPS side. So we're also going to be able to provide, instead of the 104 hours of weekly support that XPS was previously providing to its customer base, 168 hours, full 24/7 support for storage operators. When tenants call in and they need help, they can reach us any time of the night. And that is something that our business customers have been asking us for years. We have field technicians that go to these storage units or they pick up their trucks in the middle of the night. A lot of them are doing like 2 a.m., 3 a.m. service calls, and when there's no one on site to help them, it's a very frustrating experience. And so we're going to be able to solve that issue for our business customers while at the same time bring the technology for XPS into what the market needs going forward on the storage operator side. So we're super excited about it. Thaddeus Campbell: Ah, that makes a lot of sense. Shannon, I'm going to come over to you now, and I know how passionate you are about operations as it pertains to self storage. You spend a lot of time obviously at XPS, but at SSA shows. We were talking off camera about the work you do at SSA shows around the country helping operators to better run their stores. Talk to me about how important it is right now to have this opportunity to piggyback off of Warehouse Anywhere's technology platform to be able to better serve the customers that you guys are acting as a call center for. Shannon Charbonneau: 100%. So, you know, I am never going to have a microphone in front of me where I don't tell operators: the tenant experience is the only thing that matters. If you do that poorly, it doesn't matter what else you do. And if you do that well, the rest will fall into place, right? So being able to partner together with a larger operator is absolutely going to make us able to elevate that to the next level. And I am so excited, you guys. Just even in — you know, we've been here for a little less than 30 days as part of the Warehouse Anywhere family. A lot of changes in a short period of time. As you can imagine, with any change, there's a lot of change, right? But all good things. Such a high trajectory, such good, solid, fast business decisions that are able to be made. I'm telling you guys, by spring, look out. Look out. Thaddeus Campbell: Laura, I'm going to come back to you for a second. I want to talk about your business clients. That was the core of Warehouse Anywhere. But now you've all of a sudden jumped into not only the business of finding spaces for big businesses — that is your wheelhouse — you're also now running a business that connects with a bunch of owners that use XPS as their call center. How do you manage that combination of kind of businesses with a little bit different clientele that you're handling? How is that synergistic for what you guys are doing? Laura Holmes: So if you remember the last time I was on your podcast, Thaddeus, I said, "Join our partner network. It's free," right? It's still free to join our partner network. That hasn't changed. But what has changed is we can provide even more value to those storage operators than we were able to before. We can provide them with sticky business customers, and at the same time we can provide them with round-the-clock support so they don't have to hire staff to be in that front office at 2 in the morning, which most storage operators aren't going to do that, right? And so it just seemed like a win-win all around. Laura Holmes: I do see us tiering our partner network over time. If you're going to join our network and you're also going to be part of XPS's service offerings, there's probably going to be more of a premium on how many rentals you receive from our business customers, right? But the reason we're doing that is not just because you're purchasing those services from us. It's because we know we're going to be able to guarantee our business customers a better experience at those locations because we've got control of that end to end now. So — I think I answered your question, Thaddeus. Thaddeus Campbell: You gave me 3 or 4 more questions I want to ask. I'm going to get to those right after a quick break. I want to take 30 seconds to give a shout out to our sponsor of the show, P.B. Brown. Thaddeus Campbell: Storage Unlocked is brought to you by P.B. Brown. Over $1 billion in ground-up construction delivered, from single-story to Manhattan high-rise. Institutional grade, engineered for performance, and designed to stand out. Great storage catches the consumer's eye, drives traffic, and helps lease-up happen faster. From Manhattan to Miami, California to Hawaii, P.B. Brown is the GC to trust for your multi-million dollar storage development. Thaddeus Campbell: Shannon, I apologize. I'm going to get to you in a second, but I have one more question I want to ask Laura before I move back to you. And I'm a geek about storage. Extra Space did their earnings call two days — or their earnings report two days ago, their earnings call yesterday. Public Storage did their report yesterday, their earnings call is later today. One thing that jumped out at me from both of their earnings calls was that they're living off of longer stays from customers, right? They're not seeing a whole lot more demand in the short term, but what's going up is their length of stay. And so one of the things I want to ask you is what you're seeing from business owners as far as how often, or how long are they holding on to these units, and is that making a tangible difference in storage owners' ability to kind of ride out what's been a terrible 3-year stretch? We know housing movement hasn't improved hardly at all. If anything, interest rates look like they're going to go up a little bit in the near term. So that's not going to be a relief. Is this core idea of longer stays in storage something that's fundamentally important to operators being able to exist right now? Laura Holmes: So we've always said, and this is what we find every time we look at our data set, our business customers don't have the same seasonality that consumers have in self storage. Our customers' demand cycle varies and it's more based on the needs of the business, and we find that our customers, they have short-term needs, right? And they have long-term needs. On the long-term side, our customers are still staying in their units 2 plus years. On the short-term side, we have customers that now, through our technology and our partner network, they're able to stand up seasonal units to meet seasonal demand. If they're in retail, they might be getting ready for the holiday season, right? And so they'll stay in those units for 4 months on average. But they've also got this set that they're using long term, that they're staying in for years, to meet just their regular business operations. Laura Holmes: So it's a little tricky to answer your question, Thaddeus, just because we've got these different contexts for using self storage. But I will say that the mid-market operators, their pricing has become increasingly attractive compared to the larger REITs. We've been placing a lot more customers at the mid-market operators lately. And we've been finding that customers who have stayed in their units for a very long period of time, they are looking at the pricing of these storage units in comparison to what they can get on the market today, and we're having more of those conversations. We've been finding the last few months than we've been having, you know, in the past couple of years here. Thaddeus Campbell: Shannon, I'm going to come back to you and I'm going to kind of continue on this theme of length of stay being kind of a savior for operators. How important is it for you — and how exciting, I guess, as well — with the direction that XPS is going with the acquisition, to be able to provide the technology along with the call center that really helps somebody get the best possible experience from a facility, which I think today is even more important than it's ever been in the life cycle of self storage. Shannon Charbonneau: It is, and we are uniquely positioned at this point in a way that we never have been before. From our perspective, we always knew that the business tenants stay longer and pay more, right? That's common knowledge, our data bore that out forever. But we didn't really have anything that we as XPS could do to help our clients add those tenants at their facilities. We would provide consulting for them. But really it came down to how do you market that, right? Their marketing is almost always residential driven — on their website is, you know, 90% of what's out there. And that's just not what a large business is going to look for. I need, you know, I've got 500 pharmaceutical reps, let's say. They're not going on to 500 different websites to go look for 500 different units. Like, there just had to be a better way. So I'm going to piggyback just on what Laura said. That gives us the opportunity to take what we know about that experience and tie it together with that technology to help our operators get those tenants that we know stay longer and pay more. Thaddeus Campbell: I'm going to come back to Laura in a second. I would be remiss if I didn't say, for those of you watching who don't necessarily understand what Warehouse Anywhere's business model is, go on to the Stories Behind the Door podcast page on YouTube. You can watch my podcast with Laura where she breaks down — we talked a lot about what the business looks like. I haven't been deep diving into that on this podcast because I wanted to talk more about the actual acquisition. Shannon's episode's on there too. You can hear a little bit more about XPS and their core business model, as well as these two amazing ladies' individual journeys, which is well worth the listen. So you can subscribe to Stories Behind the Door podcast. We're on Storage Unlocked though, so I'm going to come back to get a little bit more news-oriented. Thaddeus Campbell: Laura, I want to ask you: when you were confronted with the opportunity and you saw there was potential to maybe acquire XPS, other than Shannon Charbonneau, when you looked inside the company, what was it that made you realize maybe this was the right acquisition versus maybe another company that does something similar, or building a call center internally to serve the needs? Laura Holmes: So I think we instantly recognized the culture that exists at XPS today is very similar to our culture. We put the customer first. We are solutions driven. We do what it takes to meet our customers' needs on both sides of the business. And even though XPS's culture has been together a lot longer than ours and what we're building here, with that commonality, we've been able to quickly integrate the two cultures in just these last 29 days. Laura Holmes: I think that other competitors in this space — we definitely looked at, we considered — but I see a huge opportunity here with being the leader in the market that XPS is today in the call center space. I mean, we just received an award, right Shannon, for best call center 2026. And so they're doing something right at XPS. And I think now with the upgraded technology, and the backing of private equity that they didn't have before, we're going to be able to bring something new to the space that both of us are on board for. Shannon Charbonneau: And I appreciate the shout out on that — that it was me personally, thank you. [laughter] Shannon Charbonneau: Here's what I would say: is that they did their homework, right? This was not a quick decision on their part. They interviewed our clients. They talked with other people in the industry. They vetted us very thoroughly. And so I would be remiss if I didn't say thank you to all of the people who participated in that. Thank you for speaking what I hope was very honestly about us, and assuming that it was very positive also, for them to make the decision to move forward with the acquisition. But just knowing that our — not, I mean, top operators of course, but across the board at every level of organization — they wanted to know what our customers thought about us. And it spoke to the relationships I think that we have with them. And you're going to hear that word from me a lot. Look for that in 2027. If they give me a microphone, you're going to hear the word relationships, because it's a huge difference maker. Thaddeus Campbell: Laura, I'm going to ask another question here. I'm amazed by an aspect of this. For those of you who don't know, Warehouse Anywhere was a division of Life Storage, right? It was a division within Life Storage that looked to support business clients that needed space. The folks at Extra Space — I have tremendous respect for Ken Woolley. Noah Springer's been on the podcast. Zack Dickens has been on the — they're really smart guys. What did they miss that you saw, that you've been able to kind of take this little known division out of Life Storage that I think you were consulting for? Tell me if I'm wrong. And you saw it and you took it and you've now built this company that's, you know, I think over 40 employees now. Now you have XPS acquired on top of that. What did Laura Holmes see that everyone else missed? And by the way, everyone else — some really smart people that are involved in that group of everyone else. Laura Holmes: I think they missed the need in the market for this service. And I mean, it's not their fault, right? There's really no well-studied data on how businesses use self storage. There's estimates on the TAM. But if you try to dig into it, no one has data like we do. And there are businesses that are finding us now that we've actually got the marketing budget to go out there and tell people about Warehouse Anywhere. And like, big brand names are hitting our website every single day that need our services. And it's just a matter of finding the right person to talk to within these companies. And, you know, like I explained on the last podcast, putting this whole web together so that you have a solution that works across the entire enterprise and solves this huge pain point that they have. But I think that Extra Space at the time did not recognize the opportunity that was here, and the total addressable market that we've been proving out. Thaddeus Campbell: I wonder if you're grateful that the merger happened in 2023 before really the pain period happened, where people maybe would have paid a little more attention to some ways to drive more revenue. Right? It was like the height of the glory days when the merger was announced, and maybe not as clear of a focus on those little things that, you know, as we fast forward to 2026 — and Shannon, this is something you talk about a lot when you're doing various talks, whether it's online or it's at SSAs — to be very cognizant of ways to generate revenue. So kudos to you. I love that you've done this, you know, and that you can vouch for me on this: the very first time we got introduced and we were on a call, when I heard the idea, it was like lights went off in my head instantly. What an amazing business model. Thaddeus Campbell: Shannon, I'm going to come back to you for a second. When you first started to understand that this might be an opportunity where XPS was going to get acquired by Warehouse Anywhere, and you started to meet their team, what did that feel like for you? You've had a 15-year career at XPS. Tell me the immediate feelings and what that's been like. And now, of course, flash forward 29 days into the actual acquisition. What's that feeling like? Shannon Charbonneau: Well, the good news is I completely know it all now after 29 days. So that's the good part. Just teasing, obviously. Here's what I'm going to say. I'm going to limit myself to just a few comments, because I could really go to town on that and talk about it for a while. But you guys know that I love and admire John Traver from the bottom of my heart. His family is absolutely of the utmost importance to me. And when he sat me down to tell me that this was a thing, this was for sure happening — I knew they were having conversations, but when he let me know that it was going to happen, my first comment was: don't lose us. Right? Like, business is business, but people are people. The relationships matter. So that's the first and foremost thing that I would say — that he and I will always be a unit, whether I work for him directly or not is beside the point, right? Shannon Charbonneau: The second thing I would say is that, as a human that I trust, his point was this is going to be a really good deal. So I did not need to know all of the details, because I knew that he did, and I trusted that when he said that, it was going to be true. And so far — again, 29 days in — but that is absolutely proving to be the case. Shannon Charbonneau: And then last but not least, again with all respect to John as an owner of a business, there is just a very big difference in how your business runs day-to-day when you have a single owner operator with a single wallet, and when you are part of a larger organization that has money that is coming in from investors. Those two things are simply not the same. And I know the difference very well. I came from Honeywell — like I always tease, 1836759 at your service, right? Like, that was a fantastically huge corporation. So when I came to XPS — and remember, back in the day 15 years ago, I was HR and client relations and, you know, entering accounting stuff when our guy called in sick. So it started from a very, very small, very few number of people. And just the path of that, and getting to this place — I know the difference, and this is a firm solid foundation, and I could not be more excited to be a part of it. And again: look out, look out, it's coming. Laura Holmes: John Traver, by the way — I also love that you — is also one of our board advisers. So he hasn't fully stepped away from the business. He's still involved behind the scenes guiding us. Thaddeus Campbell: Love it. Love it. Shannon, you know, when you were on the podcast the first time with me and we talked a little bit about your personal story as well as XPS, you talked about the people — and not only, and you said it and I'll remember this very clearly — you talked about the people who are your clients, the storage owners that you guys represent. You talked about the people, their renters, that you answer the phones for. But you also made sure to mention the people at XPS. And so I love that you brought that up, and that's still so near and dear to your heart, and says a lot about why you're at where you're at, quite frankly, and in what you do, and the respect that you have, that you keep people first, which is pretty awesome. Thaddeus Campbell: I feel like I know Laura pretty well now. I don't know her great yet, but I know her pretty well. And when I heard about the merger, it was one of the immediate things I thought: is what a great combination of two people that I think are going to do amazing things, because you guys have very similar personalities in that sense. So I'm excited about that part. Thaddeus Campbell: Laura, I want to come back to you. Shannon talked about starting at XPS back in 2011 when it was a very small group of people. You took over Warehouse Anywhere and it was an extremely small group of people, right? It was one person. Do you pinch yourself, like, as you now have Warehouse Anywhere with 40 plus employees, now you've acquired XPS — which is, listen, when you go to an SSA show, XPS is always one of the fanciest booths that you're going to see there. They're a pretty well-known entity in the storage space. Is that like a pinch-me moment for Laura Holmes, to kind of know what you've been able to accomplish in the last couple of years with Warehouse Anywhere? Laura Holmes: Yeah, actually. And most of it was just in the last 14 months. So not even a couple of years of this. It really felt full circle going through the purchase of XPS and going through due diligence on the other side with the PE firm that had put me through the same thing the year before. And it's amazing now to be on the other side of that. You know, deals can fall apart at the last minute. And they often do. But the day that the deal closed with XPS, and we were able to go out there and have the town hall and, you know, shared the news with all the employees — just the reactions ever since about, oh, this is like a new world, things are going to change and hopefully they're going to change for the better. And there's new investors now that can bring more to the table than what XPS had before. That very much felt like what I lived through last year when we were acquired by the PE firm. So it's exciting to be able to bring that to XPS. Thaddeus Campbell: I'm going to ask a quick follow-up question, because it has been a whirlwind short time period that you've been able to build this. Were there times in there where you didn't necessarily know whether or not Warehouse Anywhere was going to make it? Laura Holmes: No. No. We've had a loyal customer base this whole time. Despite retiring this legacy platform that had been around for 10 years, and some of the bumps that came along with that earlier this year, they've stuck with us. They've had confidence in us throughout this digital transformation, and now we're on the other side of that in just a short period of time, and we're already bringing a better offering to them than what they had previously. And I would imagine it's about to be the same on the XPS side of the house. And by next year, whole different company. Thaddeus Campbell: I love it. Shannon, I want to ask you — you obviously were on with me earlier this year on Storage Unlocked. Gabriel Luna was with us, and Melissa Styles from Storage Asset Management. We were talking about the role of technology, the incredible pace that technology is picking up. Was this sort of necessary? You mentioned the idea of a single owner with a single pocketbook, and, you know, as we've seen this incredible amount of capital and private equity money come into storage — not just on the acquisition side, but on the technology side as well. Was this sort of something that XPS needed going forward? Shannon Charbonneau: I think "needed" is a strong term. Our company has grown year over year. Our revenue has continued to go up. Our client base has continued to go up. Even in the industry out there, everybody's saying, "Oh, AI is the only way. AI is the only way." I am telling you, our number of stores who have signed up for live answering has gone up, and our average calls per store has been holding steady, even though people have added additional features, right? So we know the data doesn't necessarily show what the marketplace would have for us, because it's always whatever's new, whatever is flashy — we're all going to talk about that. Shannon Charbonneau: But you know, I also say: do you know who doesn't go to all of our trade shows and sit on all of those seminars that tell all of our operators they have to use, you know, one technology or another? Is our tenants. They don't go to those. They just have a question. They just need help. And when they pick up the phone to call, it's because they want someone, right? And so I am a huge proponent of technology. Trust me, when we get out of here today, I won't talk to another living soul besides my husband. If I need something, if it's not on an app, it's probably not going to happen. Like, that's just who I am as a human — unless I need something. And then I want somebody to help me. And I just think that that's the human condition, right? I'm not going to ask unless I need to, but when I need to, I want help. So that is where we are in life. Our client base is steady. They still have calls. Use AI 100%. Use it. Use it well, and then let us know when you want help with the rest. Thaddeus Campbell: I love it. Ladies, I cannot thank you enough for taking time out of what I know is your incredibly busy schedules to come and talk about this acquisition with me. I have so much respect for both of you. I'm in awe of what both of you guys have been able to accomplish in the industry, and really looking forward to seeing how this plays out over the coming years. I have a lot of faith in what you two are going to be able to accomplish, putting your minds together to go out and do stuff. So from the bottom of my heart, I want to thank you guys for coming and sharing the details of what's going on. I feel better, because it makes much more sense to me now than it did even a half hour ago, kind of hearing it from you guys where this is going. So we just want to take a second and say thanks so much for coming and sharing on the show. Laura Holmes: Thank you. Thanks for having us, Thaddeus. [attribution inferred] Thaddeus Campbell: You guys are incredibly welcome. That's it for this week's edition of Storage Unlocked, brought to you as always by our good friends at P.B. Brown General Contractors. If you have a ground-up development project, reach out to them early in the process — pbbrown.com. Over 15 years of building legacy self-storage and small bay flex developments. Especially if you're in greater New York City, Florida, California, Hawaii — that is their absolute wheelhouse. Tell them I said hello. Get them involved early. They will help you with their years of experience. Thaddeus Campbell: She is Laura Holmes, CEO of Warehouse Anywhere. On the bottom of my screen is Shannon Charbonneau, Vice President of XPS Solutions. That's it for this week's show. We'll see everybody next week. — END OF TRANSCRIPT —