elf-storage has the fundamentals of a major asset class. The next few years are about acting like one.

This week, a big piece of the self-storage industry is under one roof in Atlanta. It’s a good moment to ask what kind of industry we want to be.

On paper, we’re already in the big leagues. Institutional capital owns a large share of the product. Tenants stay longer every year—closer to what an apartment gets than what anyone expected when this business was built on garage doors and handshakes. Capital that used to need storage explained to it now comes looking for it.

But we have a habit. We show up late to lessons the hotel industry learned years ago: brands, revenue management, consolidation. I’ve called it being fashionably late. Roughly 10 hotel companies now flag most of the rooms in America, and plenty of those hotels are still owned by individuals flying somebody’s brand. The good news about being late is you can see where the potholes are.

There are three things big-league industries do that we still skip.

They protect the reputation of the product. Revenue management works. But just because the data says you can, doesn’t mean you should. Aggressive teaser rates followed by steep increases build short-term revenue and long-term resentment, and resentment eventually finds a regulator. Scott Zucker used this page in September to walk through the scrutiny data-driven pricing is already drawing. We should set our own standards before someone sets them for us.

They share data. The questions every operator asks are simple: How many units did I rent, and from where? We still guard numbers that are mostly public anyway, and it keeps everyone guessing. Better benchmarks help the independent with one store as much as the REIT with a thousand.

They invest in people and tools. We treat technology like an expense to cut instead of capital to deploy. It’s easy not to spend money, but it isn’t always wise. And the best tool in any facility is still a manager who has time to be on the floor renting units instead of chasing paperwork.

Every one of these is within reach of an operator with a single store. It comes down to deciding we’re a serious industry and behaving like one—on the rate page, in the data, and at the front counter.

We called this week the big leagues of self-storage. The name only matters if we play that way on Monday, when everyone is back at their desks.