FEDESSA Conference & Trade Show 2026

Mark Durden-Smith

Event Host

Mark Durden-Smith is a seasoned British television presenter with a diverse career spanning sports, entertainment, and lifestyle programming. Educated at Radley College and Durham University, he began his career as a researcher for "Clive Anderson Talks Back" before transitioning to presenting roles. Mark has hosted various shows, including Sky Sports' rugby coverage, ITV's "I'm a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here! NOW!", and Channel 5's rugby union coverage.

As the host of the FEDESSA Conference in Dublin, Mark's engaging and lively style adds a layer of excitement to the event, making it both informative and entertaining. Attendees can look forward to his ability to connect with the audience, bringing humour and energy to the sessions. His extensive experience ensures the conference proceedings will be smooth and lots of fun.

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Janine Krakow

CEO Storemore

Janine Krakow is a seasoned professional with a passion for technology and a varied career path. Starting in marketing, she gained invaluable experience in event marketing in the US before excelling in experiential marketing at makai Europe. Moving into the PV industry, Janine thrived in online marketing. In 2012, she embraced the dynamic self-storage sector at Selbstlagerbox. While steering the company’s growth, she pursued an MBA to hone her strategic acumen. Leading the dedicated team at storemore, Janine continues to pioneer the evolution of the industry, reshaping standards with unparalleled innovation and service.

Involved in the self-storage industry since 2012

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Ken Huges

Ken Hughes — known as The King of Customer Experience — is one of the world's leading authorities on consumer behaviour and customer experience strategy. Blending consumer psychology, digital anthropology and retail futurology, he helps global brands understand and connect with today's new consumer.

A TED speaker, author, actor and part-time university professor, Ken's presentations are as energetic as they are insightful — and always delivered with a healthy dose of Irish wit.

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Ollie Saunders

Head of Self Storage, Savills

A real estate professional with a leading profile in the self storage sector having worked across the UK and EMEA since the 1990s from a valuation, agency and corporate finance perspective.  He is head of self storage at Savills which is Europe’s largest and leading team of advisors to the sector.
 
Ollie has a deep sector knowledge, bringing together his first-hand transactional experience and creativity, together with an analytical professionalism

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Sam Kennard

Chief Executive Officer , Kennards Self Storage

Sam is Chief Executive Officer of Kennards Self Storage; a private family-owned and market leading self storage business.

Sam joined the family business in 1991 and was appointed to lead the business in 1994. Under his stewardship Kennards Self Storage has grown from 14 storage centres to 129 operating today. The company now has over 935,000 square metres of rentable space available and market value over $4 billion; over 80,000 customers and 402 employees with its activities spanning Australia and New Zealand.

Current expansion plans include 19 new self storage projects and numerous expansions with a total construction cost investment of over $400 million.

Kennards Self Storage is now one of the largest privately owned self storage companies in the world.

He has extensive experience in management, leadership, marketing, culture and property acquisition and development, specialising in self storage and mixed-use development.

 

Sam is on the Board of the Self Storage Association of Australasia, the Wenona Foundation and The Centre for Independent Studies.

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Bonita Norris

Bonita Norris is one of the world's most compelling keynote speakers. At just 22, she became the youngest person to reach both the summit of Mount Everest and the North Pole — having never climbed a mountain just two years before.

Bonita's message is simple but powerful: we all have mountains to climb. Whether navigating market uncertainty, driving growth in competitive landscapes, or leading

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Jörg Rocholl

Jörg Rocholl is President of ESMT Berlin and Chair of the Scientific Advisory Board at the German Federal Ministry of Finance, as well as one of Europe’s leading voices in corporate finance and sustainable financial systems. A distinguished economist with a PhD from Columbia University, he combines academic excellence with real-world influence, advising major institutions while shaping debate on governance, banking and sustainable finance. Clear, authoritative and globally respected, he brings rigorous insight to the future of finance and economic policy.

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John McGlynn

founder of Scottish Capital, Scottish Capital

John McGlynn is the founder of Scottish Capital, a privately held family investment office established in 1994, and the founder of Storage Vault — Scotland's largest self-storage brand. Since launching Storage Vault in 2014, he has expanded the platform into flexible workspace with CoVault and, in 2026, micro-workspace brand LOCKUP.

Through Scottish Capital, John invests long-term capital across operating businesses, real assets and public markets, with a focus on durable, cash-generative businesses. The group's holdings span real estate, healthcare, technology, finance and mining.

He holds degrees in Accountancy and Law, has studied at Harvard Business School, and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the University of the West of Scotland. Beyond business, John is an executive producer in film and television, with credits including a Brian Cox directorial debut shot in Scotland.

Beyond business, film and television are a genuine passion. John made a cameo appearance in Blue Mountain State: The Rise of Thadland and was appointed an executive producer by Alan Ritchson, who now plays Jack Reacher in the Amazon series Reacher. In 2025 he took a
cameo role in, and was appointed co-executive producer of, Glenrothan, a film made in Scotland and the feature directorial debut of Brian Cox. He is also an investor in and executive producer of Flickers Films Ltd.

: linkedin.com/in/johnmcglynn1
: @johnmcglynn

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Neil Newman-Shepherd

NNS Consulting

With almost 25 years’ experience in the UK and European self-storage markets, Neil Newman-Shepherd has a wealth of knowledge in developing and operating self-storage assets and platforms - delivering significant investor return. As Managing Director of Lok’nStore in the UK, he was the driving force behind the growth of the business, creating a market leading portfolio and platform in the UK which was purchased by Shurgard in 2024 for £385m. As a Self-Storage Investment Consultant Neil works with Institutional Investors, Owners and Platform Operators across Europe, Neil brings a unique perspective on the transaction market and how institutional capital thinks about self-storage opportunities and returns.

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Isabel Neumann

COO Shurgard

Isabel Neumann joined Shurgard in August 2021 as Chief Investment Officer. In this capacity, she is responsible for all aspects of Shurgard’s capital allocation as it relates to real estate, including all development and mergers and acquisitions.

In 2026, Isabel took up the additional role of Chief Operating Officer. She is leading the field and commercial operations, translating strategy into scalable execution across a multi-site network – driving growth, operational excellence, customer experience, and profitability.

Previously, Isabel was a Managing Director at Bank of America Merrill Lynch in London for 16 years, where she held a range of senior positions across EMEA Investment Banking.

Before Bank of America, she worked as Business Development Manager at Starlab and started her career in Consulting with Arthur Andersen. Isabel is a member of the Board of Directors of Belfius Bank & Insurance. She holds an MBA from the University of Chicago GSB Booth and studied Commercial Engineering at the KU Leuven (Belgium).

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Thomas Blangy

QuadReal

Thomas is a Senior Vice President at QuadReal, International Real Estate and joined in May 2019. He forms part of the investment team, which is focused on building the international portfolio, with an emphasis on investing in Global Cities in the UK and Europe. Thomas joined QuadReal, having spent eight years at Morgan Stanley Real Estate Investing (MSREI) in London, where he was originally hired as an Analyst and was promoted to Vice President prior to joining QuadReal. At MSREI, he was a part of the pan-European acquisitions team, where he invested in Western Europe and CEE. Thomas graduated from HEC Paris with a specialisation in Economics.

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Federico Rölz

CEO , Mr.[B] Self Storage

Federico Rölz is CEO of Mr.[B] Self Storage, a vertically integrated self-storage platform operating across Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. Over 15 years, he has led the company's expansion across five countries — Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Costa Rica, and the Dominican Republic — growing it to 19 facilities, 72,000m² and over 7,300 units, with a pipeline targeting 100,000m² and 10,500+ units by 2028.

A recognised industry voice, Federico has spoken and moderated at events across the US, Europe, and Asia, and co-founded the self-storage association in Guatemala. Mr.[B] is a four-time winner of the Modern Storage Media International Facility of the Year Award and the only Latin American operator with a meaningful footprint across five countries.

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Tron Jordheim

Tron Jordheim is an internationally experienced self-storage strategist, operator, and consultant with more than 30 years of leadership across sales, marketing, operations, and portfolio growth. He is the Managing Partner of Self Storage Strategies, working hands-on with owners, operators, and investors to solve real operational and revenue challenges.
Tron is a proven international speaker, with keynote and consulting engagements in Hong Kong, Spain, the United Kingdom, Italy, and Mexico, as well as extensive work across North America. He is known for translating complex market conditions and operational practices into clear, practical strategies that work across cultures and operating environments.
His experience includes senior leadership roles as Senior Vice President of Sales & Marketing for a major multinational self-storage operator and President of Operations for a multi-country self-storage call-center business, contributing to billions of dollars in asset value through operational and customer-experience innovation.

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Robbie Cameron

Director of Search, Digital First

Robbie Cameron is Director of Search at Digital First, a specialist performance marketing agency focused exclusively on self storage demand generation.

With more than 20 years of industry experience spanning operations, digital marketing and performance strategy, Robbie combines hands-on operational knowledge with deep expertise in SEO, paid media, consumer behaviour and AI-driven marketing.

At Digital First, he leads global search and performance strategies for self storage operators across the globe, helping businesses generate high-intent enquiries and scale more efficiently in increasingly competitive markets.

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Jason Mathew

Executive Vice President and General Manager of the Nokē Division at Janus International, Janus International Europe

Jason Mathew is the Executive Vice President and General Manager of the Nokē Division at Janus International. He has 20+ years of experience in industrial goods, technology products and services with a proven track record of delivering customer impact, business growth and transformation.

 

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Oliver Close

CBRE Ltd

Oliver Close is a Senior Director at CBRE Ltd and leads the firm’s activities in the self storage sector.  Oliver has over 25 years’ experience in self storage and has provided real estate advice to many of the major operators in the industry, across both Europe and the Asian self storage markets.  
Oliver worked on the stock market flotations of both Shurgard and Safestore, and has executed a number of sale transactions in several jurisdictions.   CBRE’s activities include, in addition to valuations and transactions, general advisory, debt advisory, equity raising, capital allowance advice, corporate finance and site acquisition services.

 

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Gavin Shields

Stora

Gavin Shields is the founder and CEO of Stora, the operating system for growth-focused self storage businesses. Before founding Stora, Gavin launched and scaled startups and ran his own self storage business, giving him first-hand insight into the challenges of legacy systems, manual admin, and operational drag. Today, Stora helps operators modernise and unlock new revenue through automation, pricing intelligence, and flexible integrations — and powers hundreds of self storage businesses worldwide.

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Tom Atherton

Tom leads market intelligence for the Savills’ Self Storage team, providing insight on sector performance, investor activity, and market trends across the UK and Europe. He authors the division’s thought leadership and produces forward-looking analysis used by clients and internal teams to understand market dynamics and investment conditions. Prior to joining Savills, he worked in strategy consulting with a focus on commercial due diligence, experience that now informs his expertise in interpreting data, evaluating market fundamentals, and articulating evidence-based investment perspectives.

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Enrique Santos

Enrique Santos is a Director at Incus Capital, where he is responsible for sourcing, executing, and managing real estate investments across Europe. His experience spans debt and equity investments, including real estate lending, structured credit, and direct equity transactions across a range of asset classes, including self-storage.

Prior to joining Incus Capital in 2024, Enrique held roles at Deutsche Bank, Violy & Co., and 3i Group. He holds a double degree in Business Administration and Law from CUNEF and completed the Accelerated Development Programme (ADP) at London Business School.

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Alexandre Hamaide

Pithos Capital

Alexandre Hamaide is Managing Director and co-founder of Pithos Capital, a pan-European investor and operating partner specialising in self-storage and logistics real estate, active across France, Switzerland, Spain and the UK. Pithos takes minority equity positions alongside institutional investors — including Davidson Kempner and PGIM — acting as operating partner responsible for day-to-day asset management and value creation, and also owns and operates Zebrabox, Switzerland's largest self-storage operator.

Alexandre brings both an investor's and an operator's perspective to the sector, having spent his career sourcing, structuring and actively managing real estate SME platforms across a fragmented, fast-consolidating asset class. He holds a Master's degree from Sciences Po Paris and an MBA from the Wharton School.

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Daniel Bryant

Legal & Legislative Counsel, Self Storage Association

Daniel Bryant is the U.S. Self Storage Association’s Legal & Legislative Counsel. He advocates on behalf of the SSA membership at the federal, state, and local level to protect and advance the interests of the industry. He received his law degree from American University, Washington College of Law and his undergraduate degree in political science from Virginia Tech. He is a member of the Virginia and the District of Columbia bars. Prior to joining the SSA, he was an associate attorney with a law firm in Washington, D.C

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Andrew Cunnington

Head Of Store Operations , The Big Yellow Self Storage Company

Andrew has spent the last 30 years leading hospitality, restaurant and retail operations of well-known high street brands across a variety of trading locations. These include railway stations, airports, theme parks, highstreets and shopping centres. Andrew joined The Big Yellow Self Storage Company in January 2025 to lead the operations across 113 stores. Key aspects of focus are maintaining high levels of security, supporting the operations team, improving store commercials, ensuring high customer service and store standards along with successfully opening new stores.

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Rob Dovey

DSOC

Rob Dovey is Managing Director of DSOC, an NSI Gold Category 1 accredited CCTV Monitoring Station and Alarm Receiving Centre based in the UK. For over six years, DSOC has delivered self storage specific crime prevention through remote monitoring across the UK and Europe. Before entering the industry, Rob served 15 years as a police officer with the Police, a background that continues to shape DSOC's approach to security and risk. Rob brings an operational, front-line perspective on what genuinely reduces crime at self storage sites, and what it takes for security standards to keep pace with a fast growing industry.

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Finn-Kristof Kausch

Founder and managing director $, Space4You

Finn is the founder and managing director of Space4You, a self-storage operator based in Singen, Germany, and owner of Havenbox in Bremerhaven. Through Space4You-Management he operates self-storage facilities for third-party owners (TPM) across the DACH region. He also serves on the board of the Verband deutscher Self Storage Unternehmen and leads Space4You Connect, a digital solutions division bringing AI-powered telephony to the self-storage industry.

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Christel Land

Clover 4

Christel Land is a popular business coach/consultant and an experienced sales and marketing trainer with extensive experience working in the self storage industry.  She regularly delivers sales, service, and marketing training sessions for the SSA UK and FEDESSA.  She started out in self storage over 20 years ago and since then she has worked at every level of the industry. It is this experience she brings to her training and coaching. Christel also works with web design and specializes in building smart booking systems for self storage websites. She is the author of the only book to date on sales in the self storage industry.  Combining her engaging training style with an enormous amount of industry knowledge, Christel will give you all the tools you need to grow your sales skills and improve your performance.

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Chris Oosthuizen

Senior executive, Stor-Age Property REIT

Chris Oosthuizen is a senior executive at Stor-Age Property REIT, South Africa's leading self storage property fund, with more than 110 Stor-Age and Storage King stores across South Africa and the UK.

With 16 years' experience in self storage, Chris's role spans commercial strategy, marketing and digital performance, third-party management, and international growth, giving him a broad perspective on the challenges and trends shaping the industry across both mature and developing markets.

He is also the founder of Digital First, a specialist digital marketing agency focused exclusively on self storage. The agency supports operators across multiple international markets, helping them improve digital visibility, generate demand, increase conversions and drive revenue growth.

Throughout his career, Chris has focused on the practical drivers of sustainable self storage growth, including building high-performing teams, improving operational performance, leveraging technology effectively and executing with discipline.

 

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Philippe Peyrot

Annexx

Philippe Peyrot est président d’Annexx, spécialiste du self-stockage en France. Depuis 2002, il a développé un réseau de 28 centres de stockage pensés pour simplifier la vie de ses clients en mettant l’accent sur la qualité de service et la simplicité d’usage. Il a bâti une entreprise où l’innovation et la proximité avec les clients tiennent une place essentielle. Proche de son équipe et attentif aux besoins du marché, il fait évoluer Annexx pour répondre aux attentes des particuliers comme des professionnels.

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Stephen Ramage

SSA UK

Stephen has been head of Membership Acquisitions at the SSA UK for 4 years seeing member numbers increase by nearly 50% in his time. With over 10 years of sales experience, predominantly in the motor trade, he believes in letting benefits of the Association speak for themselves rather than giving a hard-sell.

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Hunter Webb

CEO, Landlord

Hunter bought his first self storage facility at 17, coded tools to automate it, and sold it for $1M at 19. He's a GenZ storage manager, expert in LLMs & agentic AI, and his dream is to make European storage far more profitable and innovative than the United States within 10 years. He is the founder & CEO at Landlord AI - where their AI sales employees serve over 100 facilities to capture out of hours leads.
 

 

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Paul Whittaker

Flexiss Group

Paul started his Self-Storage adventure in 2012 with NorthWest based storage experts BiG Storage and was lucky enough to be initially mentored by two of the best independent operators in Kevin Murphy and Paul Fahey, whilst in his in his group sales manager role. Alongside the whole BiG team, Paul’s abilities to raise standards and in particular revenues led to the Big Yellow/Armadillo  group acquiring the business in early 2015.

After being the only member of the senior management team to be retained, Paul assisted with integration of the two businesses before being given a golden opportunity to join Mike Wilson at Smart Storage in late 2015. After implementing radical changes to the business as well as new technology and a sixth site, it was decided that with new opportunities on the horizon that they would prepare the business for sale. This occurred in early 2018 achieving a sixfold return for the investment group after less than three years involvement.

Mike and fellow storage entrepreneur Andy Wood formally of Storage Boost now had investors and capitol in place to realise the dream of creating SureStore. Paul has become a key part of developing and operating these multi-purpose facilities which not only cater for domestic and commercial storage requirements, but offering office space, drive up units, retail spaces and trade counters all in purpose-built brand new, high specification, environmentally conscious and technologically advanced sites. Bolton was the first site to open in April 2018 and seven more sites across the North West and Midlands have followed, with a substantial number of sites due to open across the UK in 2021.

Paul owes his success down to his team of hard working but life enjoying individuals and eats drinks and sleeps the wonderful world of Self-Storage. Paul has four amazing children aged between 6 and 20, with the eldest recently learning the ropes as a part sales advisor at SureStore, so he is always busy and, in his spare time enjoys disco dancing, origami and welsh poetry. 

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