Vantaggi
The pros at Extra Space are plenty. Decent benefits, Excellent training, Decent work/life balance, and decent vacation time. You'll be trained in a vast range of areas with skills that you can definitely take elsewhere such as sales, property management, or any retail management job. The training I received at ESMI was very thorough and when you were done with 'on paper' training you got to shadow a store for a couple weeks to put it all in to practice. Ideally you should be able to run a store with little supervision. Autonomy is good as well. If you do well and you have a decent district manager there should be no micro-management. Suggestions are taken seriously and even if it may take years to implement it rarely falls on deaf ears.
Svantaggi
This is a personal con, and it may not translate over to everyone though the company, but middle management does have to step it up. District managers (in my experience) will often pick favorites and no matter how hard you work or how good your numbers are if you are not friends with your DM you're going to have a hard time. After working at ESMI for several years and being one of the top performers in my district I was looked over for promotion time and time again. Another thing that is universal company wide is the fact that you should plan on getting dirty. Often. Maintenance personnel are hard to come by so chances are you are going to have to do a LOT of cleaning, painting, and fixing yourself. For some that is not a bad thing, and at times it wasn't to me but it can get a little old. By the time I left I felt that Extra Space had gone from a small storage company to a huge corporation, making me feel like they had lost touch with what had made them great to begin with. The difficulty of the work is not that hard overall, however there is a lot that needs to be done and the pay certainly does not reflect that. Extra Space has some of the highest paid people in the storage industry but when compared to leasing agents at apartment complexes they make very little.