How Grocery Delivery Startup Gorillas Leveraged Occupier to Scale

Last Updated on May 24, 2024 by Morgan Beard

Challenge: Time to Streamline Operations & Systems

As Gorillas rapidly expanded into the U.S. market, the company needed a centralized real estate management system to support its aggressive growth plans. Managing lease details, rent schedules, and critical real estate information across multiple locations became increasingly complex and time-consuming leveraging traditional methods like Excel spreadsheets.

In order to quickly scale, advanced technology is needed to organize the supply lines, customer orders, communication with the Riders (folks who make the deliveries), timely deliveries, and more. The company needed a real estate solution that had the technological chops to match.“ That is part of the reason I was very excited about bringing Occupier into our fold,” Angeline says.

Solution: Real Estate Technology For Innovation

To match Gorillas’ innovative approach to grocery delivery, the company sought an advanced real estate technology solution. Alexander Angeline, head of real estate and development, selected Occupier to streamline the management of Gorillas’ growing real estate portfolio. According to Angeline, Occupier is an “incredible toolset” that allows him to stay up-to-date, nimble, and effective in an ever-changing real estate market as the company rapidly scales.

Occupier’s efficient workflows allow Gorillas to grow quickly without adding strain to the company overall. “I’m one person, and I feel very comfortable scaling our real estate portfolio across the whole country — just myself with Occupier,” Angeline says. “Occupier allows me to scale myself. I don’t have to be stuck in the weeds of pulling PDFs and tracking rent schedules.” Angeline says Occupier replaces the need to hire five or 10 lease administrators. In fact, Angeline says he can use Occupier to accomplish two to three weeks’ worth of work managing a lease in the span of only one or two days, which frees him to spend time on value-adding decisions

The Benefits of Occupier:

“Occupier has really centralized a lot of the critical supply-side information for us around our real estate footprint. It allows me to focus on the strategy piece and really figure out why we need to be in certain locations.” With Occupier, Angeline could shift his focus from administrative tasks to strategic decision-making, enabling Gorillas’ rapid expansion. Here are the specific advantages Occupier delivered:

• Up-to-data Data: Centralized real estate data and lease information across the company as a single source of truth.
• Team Collaboration: Enabled cross-functional alignment and collaboration between teams like real estate, development, accounting, and supply chain.
• Operationally Efficiency: Streamlined operational requirements, allowing one person to manage the entire real estate portfolio efficiently
• Powers Real Estate Expansion: Accelerated growth by eliminating the need for additional administrative hires and enabling strategic hiring.
• Easy-to-Use: Provided an intuitive interface for stakeholders across departments to access and interpret real estate data easily

In Closing

Occupier has been a key component of Gorillas’ growth in the U.S. With the Occupier platform, Gorillas can coordinate key lease information across teams and spend more time on strategic decisions. According to Angeline, the Occupier team is just as important to scaling Gorilla’s real estate footprint as the tool itself. “We feel incredibly supported from day one,” Angeline says. “I don’t want to overlook the tools. Fantastic. But you guys are fantastic, as well.” As Gorillas doubles its warehouse footprint throughout 2022, Occupier and our team will be there to help every step of the way.