Industry Innovators: Australia’s R6 Digital Puts All Hands On Tech

In April 1984, the first non-stop commercial flight between the U.S. and Australia took off, making the countries more accessible to one another than ever before. With that, American pop culture exploded with Australian influence. We ate at Outback Steakhouse, drank Foster’s Beer, and teased our locks with Aussie Hairspray. Mad Max and Crocodile Dundee became household names, Rick Springfield and Elle MacPherson adorned bedroom walls, and the sounds of Olivia Newton-John, INXS, and Men At Work’s “Land Down Under” hit the airwaves.  

Around that time, while Americans were embracing Australian culture, Dallas Dogger was instead taking a cue from the U.S., which had begun embracing self-storage as a viable business. He may have even been one of those passengers on that first non-stop Qantas flight. “I had already been involved in advertising, marketing, and media,” he says, “but it was around that time that I zeroed in on the self-storage industry.”  

Making Connections 

Dallas, who, as a founding member, was recently awarded life membership of the Self Storage Association of Australasia, visited the first ISS show in the U.S. in 1992, and there he started making important industry connections that are still solid today. He returned to Australia with newfound confidence in the industry. “I had already been working in Canberra, our nation’s capital, helping develop Capital Self Storage with Ian Oliver and the late Frank Timmer,” he says. Ultimately, the trio sold to National Storage in 2014, the group leading with their website and online move-ins.  

In 1994, Dallas moved to Brisbane to start Storage Technology Pty Ltd, serving the growing self-storage industry from the technical side. While there, he worked to develop the Mini Storage Plus, RentPlus, and PTI brands in Australia, helping to internationalize them and turning them into brand leaders.  

The millennium ushered in new endeavors. In 2000, Dallas founded Infrasmart Solutions Asia Pacific, taking on Storman from New Zealand with less than 20 customers. He developed the business into StorMan International, a self-storage management platform. “I took this fledgling software brand to market dominance locally in five years, and also my own branded access security product called AccessEzy,” he says. Of course, times were changing, with new tech on the horizon and the internet developing fast. So in 2007, the Centreforce Technology Group was created, which included R6 Digital, a full-service marketing agency specializing in the self-storage industry. The company built some of the first self-storage websites, and today is Australia’s most awarded supplier of tech solutions for the self-storage industry.  

During this time, Centreforce developed a strong relationship with SiteLink, bringing their subscription-based software to market, a first locally, and helping to internationalize the software, something essential for local tax compliance. “Even now, there are international brands sold and used locally that are still not compliant and just asking for trouble,” he says. Today, the SiteLink software is used by more than 17,000 sites in 14 countries, and Centreforce Technology Group represents its Web Edition in the Asia Pacific Region, while also representing Storage Income Pros (District Manager).   

Like Father, Like Son 

In those earlier years, the Dogger family would sit around the family dinner table and assemble software manuals; this is when the business turned into a family business. “I was ready to dive in,” says Michael Dogger, Dallas’ son, who joined the R6 Digital team in 2009 and now runs the show as the company’s CEO. Making the matter even more of a family affair, both Curt Dogger and Brad Dogger, Michael’s brothers, soon came aboard to work on self-storage projects.  

“I’m very proud of what my father accomplished,” Michael says. “He’d always been a tech guy, but the self-storage market was so nascent there wasn’t any tech to use. To fly to America, attend the first ISS Tradeshow, hook up with U.S. software companies and experts … it doesn’t get more entrepreneurial than that.” 

Michael expounds on the many relationships his father built over the years. “Because the self-storage market was small in Australia, he took U.S.-based products and internationalized them,” he says, citing PTI Security Systems, MSP, and RentPlus.  

Perhaps his father’s biggest challenge was convincing U.S. manufacturers that investing in the Southern Hemisphere market was worthwhile. “Our entire market isn’t even the size of Florida,” says Michael. “But Dad always believed that self-storage would develop into a global market, and the early effrots done in Australia helped the brands he worked with forge a path into the U.K. and Europe.” 

Like his father, Michael is also a tech guy, having studied electrical engineering (and finance, for good measure). So, when he joined R6, he was heavily involved in the technical aspects. “I coded booking systems and built websites. This led to the creation of RapidStor, our digital platform for self-storage customers to find and book storage.”  

The platform was built in 2009, before anyone else had jumped on the bandwagon—and when many still felt no one would book self-storage units through a website. “We tried it out on Dad and Ian’s Capital Self Storage, and the first online move-in happened only an hour after it went live on their website,” says Michael. “It has grown enormously since that first move-in.” 

What was the lightbulb moment that inspired RapidStor? “Hotels and airlines already did it, so why not give it a try?” Michael asks with a smile. “I created it to mirror sites like Expedia, which people were already familiar with. A competitor tried to create a similar platform, but it didn’t look like other booking sites at all, and people didn’t get it. So today, RapidStor still resembles other reservation sites. People like what’s familiar to them.” 

Unveiling R6 Automate 

The company’s most recent and biggest undertaking is the development of R6 Automate. It was unveiled at the Self Storage Association of Australasia’s annual GC24 convention in November of last year. Speaking to an audience of over 450 industry professionals, Michael highlighted the growing role of automation in transforming self-storage operations. “Every self-storage owner is looking to do more with less,” he said to the audience. “Remote management and automation are no longer future goals; they are essential for success today.”

R6 Automate applies to the entire tenant journey. Customers can still use RapidStor to find and book storage spaces 24/7. StorApp further enhances the experience, providing operators with tools to refine offers, onboard new customers, and easily manage existing ones. R6 Automate also integrates with SiteLink Web Edition to streamline notices, billing, and CRM processes and offer advanced reporting dashboards for operators, investor portals for performance tracking, and marketing tools to measure and drive ROI. 

“StorApp is one app that works with all self-storage solution providers,” says Michael. “The app integrates with OpenTech and Nokē, for example, replicating the functions of their own app. And it works for providers that don’t have an app, like Sentinel and PTI.” 

Michael says that a new guy coming to market with an app like this wouldn’t have had much luck garnering support from the big names they work with. “On the surface, it might look like we are competing with some of the platforms we integrate with,” he says, “but we’ve been around for almost 25 years, so they trust us.” 

Continues Michael, “There’s also the fact that an operator with multiple sites may be using different smart products across different facilities and they don’t want multiple apps but they won’t pay to retrofit thousands of units so that one app will work for all of them. So that’s when R6 Automate’s StorApp can really make a difference, because it will integrate with all the providers.”  

Self-Storage DNA 

With R6 Digital, not only can operators access premier self-storage technology, but they can also get traditional marketing support (website design, branding, social media marketing, SEO, and so on) with a self-storage focus. “Self-storage is in the company’s DNA, so knowing how the industry works makes us more effective than a typical agency,” says Stephen Hughes, CMO of R6 Digital. “We were talking to clients about advertising as it relates to cost per move-in when other agencies didn’t even know what that meant.” 

“Yeah, others would focus on ‘fluffy stuff,’” says Michael. “We were diving into the numbers in self-storage terms.” He adds that today the agency does offer that so-called fluffy stuff, especially since the agency has expanded to serving clients outside the self-storage industry who demand it. “We picked up a number of them during COVID, when other agencies went out of business.” 

Michael goes on to say that serving too many industries eventually became confusing, resulting in splitting off the tech products into R6 Automate and leaving R6 Digital with a pure marketing and creative focus. “There were too many things under one umbrella, but until we had a clear value proposition, it didn’t make sense to split. With the development of R6 Automate, it was time.” 

Of course, many operators take advantage of both R6 branches. “StoreLocal, for example, uses StorApp as well as our website, branding, and marketing services. As Stephen said, self-storage is in our DNA, and those in the industry know that’s where our heart is at.” 

Brad Hadfield is the web manager and a news writer for MSM.

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