Grace Kunde on Scaling a 100+ Person Team, AI in Accounting, & Leading Through Growth

In this episode of the Inside Extra Space Storage podcast, host McKall Morris sits down with Grace Kunde, Chief Accounting Officer, who has been with the company for more than 25 years. The conversation traces Kunde's path into accounting, from public accounting to eventually building a 100-plus person team at Extra Space.

Kunde shares her perspective on where AI fits into the future of accounting, what "materiality" means for a publicly traded company, and how she thinks about hiring and building a collaborative team culture. She also reflects on the mentors who shaped her career, her intentional approach to mentoring others, and the career advice she'd give to anyone starting out at Extra Space.

Transcript & Chapters

00:00 — About Inside Extra Space Storage Podcast

Kunde: It was the realization that as you grow in your leadership, people are watching you. And I guess that makes sense, but I just wouldn't have thought of it had that person not just sent the little note that was like, ‘It was great to see you get promoted to whatever it was.’ I think it was when I first got to VP. And that really inspired me to continue to grow. That was a bit of the intentionality as well — just the awareness that you can have an impact without knowing you're having an impact. So how much more if you're intentional about it?

Morris: On Inside Extra Space Storage, we sit down with the experts building, operating, and scaling Extra Space Storage to not only be the world's largest self storage operator, but one of the most trusted names in the industry. If you care about where Extra Space and the self storage industry is headed, you're in the right place.

Morris: Welcome to the podcast.

0:51 — Welcome Grace Kunde, Chief Accounting Officer

Morris: We're so glad you've joined us as a listener. Today we're lucky — we've got Grace Kunde sitting with us. Grace is our chief accounting officer. She's been with Extra Space over 25 years and has been a leader in our accounting group pretty much that whole time, if I've looked at your resume recently. So we're super excited to have you here to talk about leadership at Extra Space and our accounting department. Welcome to the show.

Kunde: Thank you. I'm so excited to be here.

1:17 — Leading a 100+ Person Accounting Team

Morris: Yeah, so to start — your accounting team has over a hundred accountants, right? It's a big team. How do you think about leading such a large team?

Kunde: Oh, that's a good question. I think because I've been here just over 20 years, I've kind of grown into it, so it's hard to think that now it is so big.

Morris: Yeah, when you started, how many accountants were here?

Kunde: Maybe all of us in the department, maybe 40.

Morris: Yeah.

Kunde: So yeah, it's definitely a lot bigger now. And honestly, the reason it's probably easy to lead now is I have great leaders that work with me, so they make my job easy.

Morris: So you built a killer team. You really have.

Kunde: I have an amazing team.

2:04 — Building a Fun, Collaborative Team Culture

Morris: And I know the perception of accounting is maybe not that they're the most exciting team there is, but I love collaborating with your team. I feel like you guys have a really fun and great energy. How do you build a team culture where, while you're doing something kind of serious and technical, you're still able to be collaborative and fun?

Kunde: I think over the years it's paying attention to what people want. Figuring out — we've always teased marketing, Dana knows that, as being the cool kids, kind of the cheerleaders, if we're equating things back to high school — and yeah, accountants weren't known for being super exciting. We're considered nerdy, which is okay, we embrace it. But I think it's just paying attention to what's important to your team. Over the years, in our surveys and things like that, people like to get together, we like to do activities, so we've tried to lean into that. I think figuring out as a leader — it doesn't matter necessarily what's important to you, but what does your team want. So we've done games over the years, we've done random things, we go bowling, we do a barbecue every summer — just things that make you get to know people. I think relationships are super important. And you're looking at what your team values. It's not like another team might value some flashier thing over here — it's like your group is, we want to spend time together, we want to get together regularly.

3:25 — How the Annual Accounting Conference Began

Morris: And I know you guys also do kind of an annual conference where you get together and learn together and network together. It always seems really interesting, and it's so well reviewed by your team.

Kunde: Yeah, that was kind of a fluke how we fell into it. The year we transitioned — we were transitioning accounting systems, and we had to shut the system, our accounting system, down for two days. And we're like, what are you going to do with everybody for two days? You can't just send them home — I think that would have been frowned upon, although they would have voted yes for that. Andrea Kerman came up with this awesome idea, and it went over so well that we've just kept doing it. I think this year was the fourth or fifth year in a row.

4:02 — Where AI Fits Into Accounting

Morris: So yeah, taking a day or two to really dive in and learn. And I know one of the topics this year that your team talked about was AI. I'm kind of interested in your perspective — where do you think AI fits in with accounting?

Kunde: Yes, that is the topic du jour. It's interesting — there are a lot of articles that essentially say it's going to wipe accounting out over the next however many years. And you're right — in our accounting department conference this year, we just thought, let's hit it head-on. It's what everybody wants to know, it's what people are thinking about, and it will change what we're going to do. We've already implemented AI as part of our accounts payable system, where AI is inputting all of the information and sending it directly to the store managers. There's a lot of repetitive things we do that are very transactional, and those are the things I think will impact us over time. But I think you will always need people. You have to be able to understand the data, you have to be able to decide, is it right? And we have partners too — so for our business in particular, it's not like retail, where you're selling a bunch of things and you could completely move that into AI. We have to be able to give answers on how the stores are performing and why their expenses look a certain way. So giving those answers to our partners — you can't replace that with AI.

Morris: The personal touch on that.

Kunde: Yes. Well, and accounting has some creativity to it, right? Like you guys are problem solving, I think, in a way that sometimes we look at accounting, we're like, okay, it's just like this spreadsheet and that spreadsheet. But it's like no, there's a lot more collaboration and problem solving than I think people anticipate.

Kunde: Yeah, I think technical accounting is one of those areas that, obviously, anyone who's not an accountant isn't going to think about. Although the research side of AI is definitely easier, too. So if there's a unique deal that our investment team comes up with, and we have to understand what the accounting impacts are, AI definitely makes it easier to research, but you still have to know enough about accounting to say, is it giving me the right answer, and how do I interpret that to say what our answer should be. And we do some really unique deals — for being storage, we come up with a lot of creativity.

Morris: Yeah, I was going to say the research might bring you some of the way there, but there's always some interesting things that our team is innovating on — we'll frame it that way.

Kunde: Yes.

6:20 — Reporting as a Publicly Traded Company

Morris: So kind of talking also — part of our structure is, as a publicly traded company, our accounting systems have become so important with how we disclose. I know your team does a lot of our SEC reporting as well. How do you think about reporting and being a publicly traded company within the scope of an accounting team?

Kunde: Yeah, obviously it's very important for us — there's the regulatory side and the controls that go along with being a public company, and the deadlines, which is the world we live in, right? We have the same deadlines over and over, and we live and die by those. I think it's interesting — the thing that we've talked about in the accounting department is, we talk about our partners, and that's one group's focus, and we're very detailed for them and what we have to account for them. And then you've got our wholly owned stores and all of the other activity and the corporate expenses and things like that, and that all rolls up to the public company. So it's interesting to try to balance all of that and help — I don't know, we use the word materiality, right? As a public company, you have materiality, so you may not need to worry about something from a reporting perspective — something we might disclose in a 10-Q or 10-K because it's not material. But if I'm talking about that same thing at a partner level, it's going to be very material.

7:42 — What “Materiality” Means

Morris: There's just — for dummies, explain what material means when you're using it in that way.

Kunde: So, from the SEC and an accountant's perspective, from the auditors, right? Because as a public company, that's one of the factors we get audited — it's a requirement. And there's levels of dollars that, below a threshold, the auditors quite frankly wouldn't care about, right? Because it can't negatively impact the financial statements.

Morris: Exactly.

Kunde: And so that's materiality. It's kind of where that threshold is — these are the things we care really, really, really in detail about, versus these are the things that can just kind of go in a bucket, and we look at it, but it's noted.

Morris: So, for example, if it's below a materiality threshold — if it's low enough to not change the decision someone would make looking at our financials — it might be, if I put it in the wrong expense account, one bucket versus another. If it's below a materiality threshold, it's not going to change anything, so I can fix it in another period. It's not impacting how our investors see our financial statements, compared to some of these numbers that are really material.

Kunde: Correct. [laughs] Yes.

Morris: I think about the work you guys do on, you know, our earnings — we just did an earnings report right after we're filming, recording this. But the work your team does to make sure we have all the data we can report — just everything rolls up to that FFO number, and that's very material stuff, right?

Kunde: So, and then there's the control side of it too, right? So we have to go through the process every month and do the financial statements that roll up to the earnings report, to your point of what we just disclosed. And in the midst of all of that, you have to document that you've done the recording of those transactions, that you've followed a process, that someone has reviewed them, and have that documented to a level that has changed over my career — not to a level I appreciate, but to a more detailed level. So in the midst of just getting the timeliness done, you have to make sure you've documented it correctly, so that when our auditors come in and look at that, we can evidence that we've done it correctly.

Morris: Yeah, it's not just that you've done it, it's how you've done it and how documented it is.

Kunde: Exactly. It's so technical.

9:49 — Grace's Unlikely Path Into Accounting

Morris: Did you always dream of being an accountant? How did you get into this role? How did you end up the head of our accounting department? Was this kind of always your personality, where you were like, ‘Yes, let's get in the spreadsheets’? Tell me a little about your journey.

Kunde: It's funny — no. My story is definitely not that glamorous. I don't know that I thought hard about it. I got married young, and my mother-in-law and I were talking, and she introduced me to bookkeeping — that was my first foray into accounting, and I enjoyed it, so it clicked for me, and that led me to go get my accounting degree. I started my career in auditing, so that's why I feel okay speaking negatively sometimes about our auditors, because I've lived that world — this is me I'm talking about.

Morris: Yes.

Kunde: So I did public accounting — I worked for Ernst & Young for almost seven years, and then my husband and I moved to Salt Lake, which is where I got into the glamorous business of storage, and I've never looked back.

Morris: Never looked back — you said for 25 years, this is perfect.

Kunde: No, it is — it's interesting because, to me, it sounds like you found something where you're like, ‘Oh, this just makes sense in my mind.’ The systems of this, the structure of this — it's like making sense of a company, right? There's the whole company, you look at it, and you're like, I'm going to organize this and make sense of it, in a way that in the end it's a couple key numbers almost. It's very cool.

Kunde: Well, I think the thing I love most about accounting, and we try to impress this on our newer staff, is that you get to touch a little bit of all of the business. If there's a dollar amount assigned to something at the company — which is basically everything — it's got to flow through accounting. We have to figure out what to do with it. So you really get a broad view of everything that's going on in the business. And to your point, you have to make sense of it and put it into a financial order that makes sense to our investors externally, or for our owners and how they interpret their individual asset and the business. So it's fun from that perspective.

11:43 — What She Looks for When Hiring Today

Morris: Yeah, yeah, it's interesting. So you're talking about new accountants — you have a big team, you're usually looking to hire and grow that team. What are you looking for when you're hiring someone new on the accounting team? What's the skill set or personality type where you feel like, ‘Oh, they just really thrive’?

Kunde: So it's definitely changed over the years. We were talking about AI a minute ago, and I think that has changed a little bit of how we perceive what we would want. Because you have to — it's not just, I have to know where the debits and credits go, you need that foundation, and anyone who comes out of school with an accounting degree will understand that — but can you analyze data? Are you curious about it? Can you think more broadly? Are you adaptable? I think our world in accounting is going to be changing dramatically and consistently for the foreseeable future, and I don't know that any of us know exactly what it's going to look like. So I want someone who's curious, who's willing to adapt, who can look at financial data and ask, ‘How do I know that's right?’ Because you're not necessarily going to be doing the transactions anymore, but you're going to see the end result of that, and how do you get comfortable that those are the right answers?

Morris: Yeah. And so someone who can take a bit of a different viewpoint than you traditionally would be looking to hire — you know, I feel like, maybe this isn't fair, but 20 years ago you'd be like, ‘What I really want is someone who's so good at putting in the numbers.’

Kunde: Exactly. Perfect. Very detail-oriented.

Morris: Yes. And now it's like, I need someone who's going to really be a big-picture thinker and an innovator, and be able to adapt and be agile. It's interesting.

Kunde: Yeah, and I think that always would be helpful, right, regardless — 20 years ago or now — but it was less important in the job, because you could be a cost accountant for your whole career and never really have to think about it. You just needed to make sure you knew where the data went and where it was going to get reported. You didn't necessarily have to think more broadly or analyze the data quite as much, maybe.

Morris: Yeah, and now everyone's kind of got to zoom out a little bit, as everything shifts and changes. But you've talked about, in the 25 years you've been here, how much accounting has changed, and the way we have to report, and the way public companies have to report — you've seen so much change over your career. To pivot that to a fun question — what are you most proud of over the last 20 years? Is there a project you've worked on, or something you've gotten to do, where you're like, ‘Oh, that was a really exciting change,’ or just something really cool you've done in the 25 years you want to give an extra shout-out to?

14:14 — The Scalability Project That Prepared the Team for LSI

Kunde: Yeah, I think there's probably — well, probably the biggest one, and it's a little bit recent. We started working on something we called our scalability project in 2019. We were ready to roll it out in 2020 — the year no one wants to talk about. So to back up a little, the way we were structured prior to this project, we had a one-to-19 ratio — one person for every 19 stores, and that included all of management — but people were doing 35 stores, doing the accounting from start to finish for a property at a property level. And because I had been here for a while, it was always kind of gnawing in the back of my mind — this can't be sustainable. I can't hire a person every time we add 35 more properties, or our department would just get astronomically huge. So it had been working in the back of my mind — is this how we always do it, or is this how we have to do it? And how can we do it more efficiently but still come up with just as accurate data?

Morris: Yeah.

Kunde: So we'd probably spent all of 2019 brainstorming how to go about this. As accountants, again, we tend to think very linear, so we tried to make our goal so egregious — like, okay, if we're at a 1-to-19 ratio right now, let's double that — how do we double it, what do we have to do — and tried to really force ourselves to think broadly. There were definitely a couple of iterations. We kicked it off in 2020, COVID hit, we all went home, and as a management team we got together and said, do we still do this? Is this the right time? We've done so much work to get to this point — I was like, let's just do it. And we pushed forward. It was definitely an iterative process — we rolled it out, we learned some things. How we managed it with the teams was a little clunky at first, and you're probably not getting feedback the same way as when you're in the office. And even just managing, because the structure was so different — but it worked. We probably finished it in '21, once we'd worked out all the kinks. And then, fast forward — if you think about 2023, we bought LSI.

Morris: Like, we all looked back on that and thought, man, if we had still been under the same structure and brought on 1,200 stores, I don't know how we could have done it—

Kunde: Yeah, as efficiently, as quickly, without all hating life. If we had been under the other structure, it would have just been so much more challenging. So it was kind of nice to have an idea, think it through with your team, come up with a plan, execute on it — knowing there was some growth in the future, but not knowing what it was going to be — and then seeing the results of it. That was so gratifying.

Morris: Yeah, there's not very often you have a project where you're like, ‘I'm doing this because I know it would be nice to do, but I'm not exactly sure when the huge ROI will hit,’ and then it's like, surprise, the huge ROI hit one year later, and it was extremely successful that you did that. It made you look like a genius that you had done that a couple years earlier and had worked it out. But the scalability — I mean, your team is now very scalable. We have over 4,000 properties, I think we're at like 4,400 last I looked, and your team is able to manage that, which is just really impressive.

Kunde: And our team has stayed mostly flat. When we brought on LSI, we brought on maybe 10 people. So when you grow by 50% and your team doesn't have to—

Morris: That was the success of it. It's a huge win for the organization, and it means your team — I'm just thinking, as an accountant on your team, there's so many opportunities in that team, you've had a lot of leaders you've been able to promote.

Kunde: Yes, it's been very cool to see.

Morris: Yeah.

17:49 — The 2015 ERP Transition

Morris: So you said that was one of two projects you were really proud of. What was your other one?

Kunde: Yes — the other project, and it's probably more proud of it, but also a lot of learnings — was in 2015, we transitioned from Great Plains, which was the ERP, or accounting system, that we'd been on from when I started, and we needed to — we had outgrown it, and so we switched ERPs. And nowadays it feels like switching software isn't a big deal, but—

Morris: But figuring out the structure of it, the way you've done it for so long, I can imagine it being a big deal.

Kunde: Yes. Well, and not having ever led a software transition, right? We had to hire a program manager and outside consultants, and it was — you had a separate team, we reorged even the work so that we could have a team focused on just that and figuring out how to do it, and the rest of the team picking up the work to keep the day-to-day going. So figuring out how to help a team through that, and to even think through — again, it was probably the start of, how do you think long term? I'm going to set this thing up today, and that's going to be our system for, let's say, 10 years at least. How do you think about that? How do you think about growth? How do you think about — is there something different we need to do from a reporting perspective? And even along that way, you learn so much going through a process like that. Reporting was one of those things we didn't think about till way later in the game, and we all regretted it — but you learn from it, which is really cool.

Morris: Yeah, there are always those big stretches, right — the moments where it's like, ‘Okay, there's this project, we have to do it, I'm in charge of it, I've never done anything like this before.’ Extra Space does hand us these opportunities — I've experienced a bunch of them, where it's like, I said I could do this, and now I have to do it, and I'm going to learn a lot. And the nice thing is everyone kind of pulls together, or you get a lot of help — typically it ends up where it needs to be, but you learn a lot in doing those processes, for sure.

Kunde: But that's what I love — it's one of the things I love most about Extra Space, is that we hire good people and then we trust them to go figure things out. We don't micromanage, and we stumble, and we make mistakes, and that's okay — that's part of the learning process, and Extra Space knows that, and they support you, help you figure that out, and as long as you learn from it the next time, then it's good to go forward. So it's awesome to have such learning opportunities over a career.

Morris: Yeah, they really give you, if you want them, the opportunities are there to really run at something and try to learn and get somewhere cool with it.

20:18 — Mentors Over the Years

Morris: But when you think about your development as a leader, do you have any mentors that you think of who helped you get to the place you're at?

Kunde: I don't know that I've had one particular mentor, but I've had relationships that have really impacted me over the years, in various small ways. I will say, Scott and I — Scott Stubbs, our former CFO — he and I worked together for 20 years, so clearly he impacted my career. He gave me opportunities. I learned so much about — probably two big lessons I learned from Scott: how to think about people from a different perspective. He was a great read on people, and I learned so much from him. I'm much more of an impulsive, react kind of person, and he taught me to be a little more chill, think about things, look at the other person's perspective, and really be able to look at someone and see the whole picture, and not just the immediate reaction. So he's had the most impact. But there have been other people along the way who've just been champions, or good friends — people you can rely on to just go have that closed-door conversation, let your hair down, say what needs to be said, vent a little, whatever it is. But I think just having those people along the way to encourage you in your tough moments, as well as cheer you on in your successes, is really important.

21:48 — Grace as a Mentor to Others

Morris: Yeah, there are always those key people who you can feel are there for you. But on the flip side of that, you have been a very purposeful mentor here at Extra Space. I feel like if I asked this question to a lot of people one layer below you, they'd say, ‘Grace has been a huge mentor.’ For me, you've been a huge mentor — I remember probably my first week I was hired, you and Dana grabbed me to go to lunch and just talk about things, and it was, ‘I'm here for you.’ We've worked on committees together, and I've been like, ‘Wow, Grace is such a great mentor.’ But it's very intentional that you've done that. So how do you think about mentoring others at Extra Space? What's your philosophy around it? Because whatever it is, it's working, and I want people to know.

Kunde: I think one of the things — to your point of intentionality — I think relationships are so important to somebody's career. And secondarily, and it's not that it hasn't gone both ways, but — women in the workplace, and being a working mom — I have the fortune of having a stay-at-home dad, but it's such a challenging dynamic. There's just a uniqueness to women and our role, and being moms and full-time working women. So thinking through the struggles I had in those phases of my life, and then challenging women — we just have different personalities than men — and taking the lessons I struggled through in my career, if I can help somebody advance faster through those challenges, or just come alongside them to say, ‘I'm here to support you,’ that's important to me, so that they can be as successful as they want to be, and do what they want with their career. So just who we are as women, I think having those relationships really matters, for us to just know there's somebody there who can help you as needed. And just having someone who's been there, done that — it's nice to have that camaraderie, to just be like, ‘I know Grace went through this, I can relate with her, I can tell her, she can give me feedback.’ And on my side of that, it's like, ‘I've seen Grace manage being in this type of room, or be the only voice at this table, or speak up on these things.’ You suddenly are like, ‘Oh, I've seen someone be able to do that, so now I know I can do that.’ It gives you a lot of confidence as you're growing into your leadership roles here, to be able to see someone who's done it before.

Morris: So I am so appreciative of the way that you do that, and I think it's been a really cool thing to have here at the company. I feel like that's a lot on you, just intentionally being like, ‘I'm making this the type of place where this happens, I'm making this the type of place where there's this kind of mentorship and camaraderie and support.’

Kunde: And I don't think I realized this was years and years ago, but — I still have the card, it was so impactful to me. Somebody left the company and wrote me a note, and just said that — and it wasn't someone I interacted with on a day-to-day basis — but it was the realization that as you grow in your leadership, people are watching you. And I guess that makes sense, but I just wouldn't have thought of it had that person not sent that little note that just said, ‘It was great to see you get promoted to whatever it was.’ I think it was when I first got to VP. And that really inspired me to continue to grow — that was a bit of the intentionality as well, just the awareness that you can have an impact without knowing you're having an impact. So how much more, if you're intentional about it?

Morris: I love that, I really do love that. It's interesting to see, and it also — I feel like it's created waves, right? I remember with that first lunch you went on, it was me and someone on the acquisitions team, and we've become friends ever since, because it was like you put the two of us together at a lunch, and now we'll have our own times where we sit down and talk about things and hash things out. And it just keeps building levels of mentoring and friendships and relationships and support throughout the organization, and it's fun to see. And it also feels very Extra Space, right — like, to me, when I think of Extra Space, I think of those things — that's like you and Dana and Gwen especially purposely added these pieces to the culture that are now, for me, just what I expect from a company. And how nice for me — thank you for all the work that you did with that, I do really appreciate it. And we're almost at time.

26:09 — Career Advice for Current and Future Employees

Morris: So I'm going to end with one final question — what career advice would you give to someone who is looking to come and start working at Extra Space?

Kunde: So I think — I mentioned relationships, and every time I'm asked that, I think relationships are important, and I wish I had known early on in my career how important they are. So being intentional to connect with people you work with — that has transformed my career. So spending the time, taking the lunch.

Morris: Sometimes it feels like, ‘Well, I should be working.’

Kunde: Take the time. Yeah, the relationships matter, and they absolutely will propel you in your career — just take that time. And then, just working hard. I know that seems probably cliché, but doing your best work every day and working hard — people take notice.

Morris: Yeah. And so I know those are very basic, but I think they're very important.

Kunde: No, nothing can replace either of those, right? Value the relationships, take time for them, and then just work hard, be that person every day.

Morris: Yeah, I love that. Thanks for sharing, and thanks for coming on this episode. We appreciate your time. And thank you to everyone who joined in and listened — we're so grateful. Hope you join us for another episode coming out soon.

Narrator: Thanks for listening to Inside Extra Space Storage. Each episode features conversations with leaders and teams behind one of the most recognizable names in the self storage industry. To connect with today's guest, reach out to them directly on LinkedIn. And don't forget to follow the show for more insights inside the industry. Until next time, have a great day and an even better tomorrow.

About the Host and Guest

Grace Kunde, Chief Accounting Officer

Grace Kunde is the Chief Accounting Officer at Extra Space Storage. She has been with Extra Space Storage for over 25 years. Kunde has overseen Extra Space's growth over time, playing a pivotal role in the Life Storage acquisition and now leading a team of more than 100 accounting professionals. She holds a Bachelor's degree in Accounting from San Diego State University.

McKall Morris, Director of Corporate Communications

McKall Morris is the Corporate Communications Director at Extra Space Storage. She joined the company in March 2019 after several years in the airline industry. Since joining Extra Space, Morris has played a key role in advancing internal and external communications initiatives, helping shape how the company is represented across all channels. She holds a Bachelor's degree in Communications from Brigham Young University and an MBA from the University of Utah.

To learn more about Extra Space Storage, visit our investor site, or explore the next step in your career by viewing current job openings. This transcript was auto-generated and edited, including paraphrasing for readability. For the full conversation and exact quotes, listen to the complete episode on YouTube, Apple, or Spotify.