Get to Know Steven Jeffers, Regional Manager – West Region

Recognizing the importance of having knowledgeable and effective leaders supporting our FreeUp properties, we’ve welcomed several new team members in recent months to ensure our on-site teams are equipped with the skills and resources they need to succeed. 

Earlier this year, we welcomed Steven Jeffers to the team as the Western Regional Manager. In his role, Steven oversees operations for FreeUp Storage properties located throughout the Western region—including the DFW portfolio.

We sat down with Steven to learn more about his prior experiences, passion for customer service and goals for the year ahead.

Tell us a bit about yourself.

I grew up in Clemson, South Carolina, and am a big Clemson Tigers fan—my dad is a professor at the university—go Tigers! I graduated from Indiana University with a bachelor’s degree in sports management and communications and later earned my master's degree in counseling from Liberty University.

I got started in the self-storage industry by working at a mom-and-pop facility in Clemson while I was attending graduate school. I fell in love instantly and have been working in the industry for over 10 years now. 

How have prior experiences prepared you to take on your new role?

My first role in self storage was as an assistant property manager. I enjoyed working on-site with customers and eventually worked my way up the ladder and transitioned to other companies.

About four years ago, I made the corporate jump to work at Be Safe Storage & Wine Cellar in Greensboro, South Carolina. As the facility manager, I oversaw and was our liaison for the third-party management company we worked with for some properties within our portfolio. I later led our effort to bring management in-house, transitioning away from third-party management, as we expanded our footprint.

What do you enjoy most about working in the self-storage industry?

Over the years, I’ve become very passionate about providing an exceptional and memorable customer experience—thanks in part to my mother who emphasized the importance of helping others and giving back to the community. Seeing a smile on a customer's face after having helped them resolve a stressful situation gives me great pride and motivates me to keep doing the work that I'm doing. 

Aside from that, I’m also a numbers guy. I love digging into all the different reports to put together a story about how the property is performing and fulfilling the needs of the community. I also use those numbers to motivate the store teams. It's an easy way to show them how we can improve together. 

From an industry perspective, the self-storage industry is not like any other that I know of. There is tremendous rapid growth, but it’s still small enough that you can easily make connections. I've made countless friends over the years and know that I can count on them. From reaching out for advice to attending trade shows together, there’s great camaraderie across the board.

What drew you to Spartan?

The culture that Scott, Ryan, Ben and everyone else on the Spartan team has fostered intrigued me. The passion that everyone has for what they are doing is infectious. And, honestly, that’s rare in this industry. 

Another thing that attracted me to Spartan was the opportunity to level up my career and performance. In my initial touchpoints with the Spartan team, I knew that this role would present new challenges for me—ones that I am excited to tackle.

What are you looking forward to achieving in this role in 2023? 

As mentioned before, I love helping people and this role allows me to do just that. I am excited to work directly with our property and district-level managers, training them on the best ways to tend to customers. When you look at it from a high level, I'm essentially helping people learn how to help more people. 

I would say that my goal for this year is to have a team in place that is invested in and sold on the Spartan way of life. I want our team members across the region to be engaged and committed to not only leveling up our properties and customer experience but also leveling up their performance and development. It's one thing to hit a goal just for the sake of hitting a goal, but it’s even better when a team hits and exceeds goals because they are driven by them.

When looking at the DFW portfolio in particular, we have some really exciting expansion and improvement projects underway. In addition to these projects, I’m looking forward to building a  consistent, dedicated on-site team. We’ve struggled with this in the past, but I believe we have the potential to build it up again and make the portfolio even stronger.