Storage group Big Yellow has confirmed it's continuing to trim headcount while hiking investment into automation, as it manages the cost impact of business rates changes. It's a listed company managing a national property portfolio, which makes it easy to file this under 'not relevant to me' if you run a business with a handful of sites, or one. That would be a mistake — the underlying decision Big Yellow is making is one a lot smaller businesses are quietly facing too, just at a different scale.
The decision underneath the headline
Business rates are a fixed cost that rises independently of how well a site is actually trading, and they land hardest on businesses with a meaningful physical footprint — storage facilities, shops, warehouses, anything with square footage that gets taxed whether trade is up or down that quarter. When a fixed cost like that increases, a business only has a small number of real levers: raise prices, accept a thinner margin, reduce the footprint, or reduce the cost of running what's left. Automation is that fourth lever, and it's the one that doesn't depend on customers accepting a price rise or landlords accepting a smaller rent.
A rates bill doesn't care how good your service is. The businesses managing this well aren't the ones with the best year — they're the ones that worked out earliest which of their costs were about to stop being optional.
Why smaller businesses feel this differently, not less
A national storage group can automate a booking desk or a check-in process across dozens of sites and spread the investment over serious scale. A single-site business doesn't have that luxury, which means the same rates pressure often gets absorbed a worse way — cutting hours, delaying a hire, or quietly accepting a thinner margin because there's no obvious lever to pull. That's not a reason to ignore the automation option; it's a reason to look at it earlier and smaller, before the rates bill forces a worse decision under more pressure.
What's actually worth automating at a much smaller scale
Not robotics or anything resembling Big Yellow's scale of investment. The realistic equivalent for a small business is usually much duller: online booking and payment instead of a phone call and a card machine, automated reminders and invoicing instead of someone chasing both by hand, self-service check-in or ordering where customers are genuinely happy to use it. None of it needs to be dramatic to free up the hours that a rates increase is otherwise quietly eating.
How business rates actually work, briefly
Business rates are calculated from a property's Rateable Value — the Valuation Office Agency's estimate of what it would cost to rent the property for a year — multiplied by a rate set by government (the multiplier), which is different for smaller and larger properties. Rateable Values are reassessed at periodic revaluations, and it's the jump between one revaluation and the next that produces the sudden increases businesses like Big Yellow are managing at scale, and that plenty of smaller premises quietly absorb without ever checking whether the new figure is actually right.
Reliefs and appeals most small businesses don't check
Small Business Rate Relief is the one worth confirming first — many businesses occupying a single property with a low enough Rateable Value are entitled to significant relief, in some cases paying no rates at all, and it isn't always applied automatically; it's worth confirming directly with your local council that you're actually receiving everything you're entitled to, rather than assuming the council flagged it for you. Retail, hospitality and leisure premises have also had access to specific temporary relief schemes in recent years, worth checking whether your business still qualifies under the current scheme rather than assuming last year's rules still apply. And if your Rateable Value genuinely looks wrong for the property — outdated, based on a size or use that's since changed — there's a formal process through the VOA to challenge it, called Check, Challenge, Appeal. It takes time and isn't guaranteed to succeed, but a business paying rates on a Rateable Value that's demonstrably wrong is paying a bill it doesn't actually owe.
A worked example: the corner shop weighing up self-checkout
Take a small convenience shop whose Rateable Value has jumped enough at the last revaluation to add a genuinely painful few thousand pounds a year to fixed costs, with no extra trade to show for it. The owner has the same four levers as Big Yellow, just smaller: put prices up and risk losing price-sensitive regulars to a supermarket down the road; accept the thinner margin and hope trade improves; give up part of the floor space to cut the Rateable Value, which isn't always practical for a shop that needs its current stock density; or find a way to run the same trade with fewer paid hours. A self-checkout unit or a simpler till system that lets one member of staff cover what used to need two isn't a glamorous fix, and it won't suit every kind of shop or every kind of customer — but it's the realistic, small-scale version of exactly the trade-off Big Yellow made at national scale, and it's worth costing properly against the rates increase rather than dismissing as something only a big chain would do.
What to do this week
Check three things this week, none of which need specialist help to start. First, confirm with your local council whether you're actually receiving every relief you're entitled to — Small Business Rate Relief specifically, since it's the one most commonly under-claimed. Second, look at your current Rateable Value against what you honestly think the property is worth to rent, and if it looks wrong, that's worth raising through the VOA's Check, Challenge, Appeal process rather than quietly paying a bill that might not be accurate. Third, name one task in the business currently done by paid hours that a customer would happily do themselves if it were made easy enough — that's the cheapest lever available to any business facing a rates increase it has no control over, whatever its size.
