In this episode, Stacy Rossetti shares her incredible journey from knowing nothing about self-storage facilities to owning 15—all without using her own money. She opens up about her early days in real estate, flipping houses during the downturn, and learning the art of raising capital and structuring creative deals.

Stacy reveals how a life-changing moment led her to seek passive income, ultimately discovering the potential of self-storage investing. From buying her first facility to building a thriving portfolio, she walks us through the highs, lows, and lessons learned along the way.

Tune in to hear how she found hidden opportunities, navigated industry challenges, and mastered her three-step process: FIND THEM, FUND THEM, and RUN THEM. Whether you’re a beginner looking to get started or an investor wanting to scale your portfolio, Stacy’s story will inspire you to take action and build wealth through self-storage.

—

Watch the episode here

 

Listen to the podcast here

 

How Stacy Went From Owning 0 To 15 Self-Storage Facilities Without Using Her Own Money

My Self-Storage Investing Story

I teach people how to get started in self-storage investing. I have been teaching self-storage investing for about five years, which is not a long time. I’ve been teaching and helping students buy storage facilities for the last couple of years. I’ve been in the industry for about ten years. I’m going to go over my story here in a bit. I wanted to give you some background.

I own 115 storage facilities and have helped around between 50 and 60 people buy storage facilities as well. Also, I’m partnering with about maybe twenty storage facilities. I have been involved in this industry for a while. I got involved in this industry before people were even thinking about self-storage. Self-storage has been around since the 1960s. There are storage facilities built in Texas in the 1960s. I’ve been able to go and look at some of those. Ultimately, for the 21st century, storage didn’t get popular until the last couple of years. I started in the industry in 2015.

I want to go over some of the questions that I get on a regular basis from people that I talk to who are interested in StorageNerds. StorageNerds is a brand, but it’s my education platform. It’s where I teach people how to get started in self-storage. That’s why I’m here. I want to go over the step-by-step process of how you can get started with or without StorageNerds. Ultimately, you can do this on your own. I teach how to get started in all the main steps. If you’ve been following me, I  do teach. I’m going to do that here. It’s not going to be super high-level. It’s going to be concrete steps.

What I’m going to do in this episode is go over my story and how I got started so you can see how I progressed from not knowing anything about storage to owning fifteen, starting my coaching program, and then ending up with StorageNerds and how I got there as well too. I am going to go over my story so you can see how everything flowed for me.

Of the fifteen storage facilities that I own, I didn’t pay a dime for any of those. I raised money and used other people’s money to buy those. I’m going to get to that as well, too. I’m going to go over what I call my three-step process, which is Find Them, Fund Them, Run Them. I’m going to go over what you need to do in order to find storage facilities, run a deal analysis on them so that you can know whether or not it’s a good deal, and then also how you fund them in all the different ways that you can fund deals.

Also, I’m going to go over management. The Run Them part is the management part. That’s the most important part. Most of the time, you are not thinking about the management part. You’re thinking, “How do I get started? How do I pay for these things?” The truth of the matter is that if you do not manage your properties properly, then you are not going to make money. This is something that I’ve learned over the last couple of years that I’ve been doing this. I’m going to get into that a little bit.

If you want to spend the next hour with me, then what I would do is hang out with me for a little while, read, and be present. Also, there’s going to be a form that pops up. It’s going to be your name and then your email address. Once you put that in, then you will get access to the rest of the session where I will go through everything that I talked about.

I wanted to point out too that typically, I’m teaching people who are buying storage facilities that are less than $2 million. My students are buying facilities from $500,000 to $1.5 million on average. I do have quite a few students who have bought $2 million-plus storage facilities, but I’m typically $3 million or less. That is what I am. Between $1 million to $2 million or $500,000 to $1.5 million is where the students buy their first deal.

If you’re reading and you’re like, “You have to buy 40,000 square feet or 50,000 square feet in order to get your foot in the door,” I’m probably not going to be the right person to tune in to because that is a whole different type of facility. There’s nothing wrong with buying those at all. You have to raise money. You have to syndicate. You have to crowdfund. You have to learn how to buy facilities like that.

Ultimately, the people that I work with want to get started. They want to buy a small facility, figure out if it’s something that they want to do or not, and then they’re going to move on to the bigger facilities. That is what I’m here to do. That is what my purpose is. That is how I serve others. If you’re interested, put your name into the form and your email address and let’s get started.

What I’m going to do is I’m going to go over my story and how I progressed from owning 0 storage facilities to 15 facilities. I want to let everybody know that I did not start in self-storage investing. I started in rehabbing. What happened was that the company I was working for was closing down the department I was working for. They let us know. They gave us about six months’ notice and said, “We decided to shut everything down. You have six months’ notice right now to start looking for a job, and then we are going to give you a six-month severance pay.” It was a good deal. It was almost a year of pay when they were shutting the company down.

My husband owned a home inspection company and it was doing well. He started right in the middle of the downturn. This was when all of the houses were going into foreclosure, and there wasn’t a lot of buying going on. That’s when he started his home inspection company. He went through building that out, and I saw him building that out. I was proud of the type of person that he was becoming.

Remember, during the downturn, everybody’s life was hard. Everybody was losing their houses. What happened was that my husband had convinced me to get started in real estate investing. The reason why is because he saw all these houses. He was doing these home inspections for these houses. These people were walking away from these houses. There were so many different foreclosures. There were a lot of houses that honestly were left in shambles and needed a lot of work. He was thinking, “We should buy some of these, fix them up, and sell them.”

We started learning about real estate investing. I don’t know if you guys remember, but back in 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011, real estate investing got super popular. He took me to one of these seminars and we learned about how real estate investing was. I was like, “I don’t know if I want to do this or not.” He was like, “You have to do this because I see so many houses out there. There are a lot of opportunities.” I was like, “Okay.”

I started learning about how to flip homes. In 2010, we decided to pay a lot of money to get into a coaching program, and then, ultimately, I started learning about real estate investing. In the first couple of years that I was in real estate investing, I flipped a lot of homes. The reason I’m telling you this is because when I got started in real estate investing, there were a lot of houses for sale, but if you remember, there was no money to borrow at all. Ultimately, it was a double-edged sword.

There were a lot of opportunities and a lot of houses. They were also super cheap. I used to buy houses for $50,000. I would put $50,000 into them and then I would sell them for $150,000. I got good at doing that. How did I get all that money? I raised it. During this time, I joined the coaching program. I had a mentor telling me exactly what to do, and then I followed what the mentor said. I started getting confident enough to make offers on houses, and then I also got confident in raising money. The truth is there were no banks out there lending. There wasn’t a lot of money.

During this time, if you remember, this is when hard money lending became popular as well. With hard money lending, let’s say I had to borrow $100,000 to do a rehab. They would charge anywhere from 15% to 20%. It had super high interest rates. Instead of borrowing hard money, which a lot of people do in real estate investing, I decided to learn how to raise money. I got good at talking to people about letting me borrow their money. I also got good at creative deal structures. That’s the seller financing, assuming loans or structure, subject-to structures, or something like that.

I decided that instead of paying 20% to borrow somebody’s money, I was going to learn how to raise capital. This time, my coming into the real estate investing niche was a good time. I didn’t know it at the time because I was always sitting there and begging people for money. Ultimately, I learned the skills that I have where I’m syndicating, I’ve got funds, I’m crowdfunding, and all that kind of stuff for deals. I’m able to get deals done with creative deal structures and also with syndications. This is why it’s a very important time to talk about it.

The truth is, if you want to succeed in commercial real estate—whether it's storage, warehouses, flex space, multifamily, or anything else—you need to be good at raising money. Share on X

The reason I’m bringing this up is because commercial real estate investing is expensive. Our students are buying properties for $1 million-plus, sometimes $2 million and $3 million. A lot of people can’t wrap their heads around, “How could I possibly ever buy a $1 million property? I can barely even afford to buy my own house right now.”

The truth of the matter is if you want to get good at commercial real estate, it doesn’t matter if it’s storage, warehouses, flex space, multifamily, or whatever it is. You have to be good at raising money. You have to be good at doing this. You also have to be good at creative deal structures and understanding the concept of creating a win-win situation with an owner so that you guys can both work out how you’ll be able to buy the property from that owner. This time period from 2010 to 2014 is when I learned how to do that.

I got good at creative deal structures. I got good at talking to owners and making offers with owners. I also got good at having the confidence to ask people for money and raising the money that I would need in order to do all the deals that I did. From 2010 to 2016, I was rehabbing. I rehabbed a lot of houses. I was one of those crazy people who was doing fifteen rehabs at the same time all the time.

I was running around a crazy person. I was super stressed out. My husband had his home inspection company, which was doing very well, and then I had the rehabs. That’s how we worked it. His income was active income. His income was the income that was paying all the bills. He would do a home inspection and would get that money right then and there, whereas with rehabs, we never got paid until we sold a house. We never knew when we were going to sell houses. I was more about wealth-building and he was taking care of the family and building that up.

Something amazing happened in 2015. I got pregnant. It was in the summer of 2015 that I found out that I was pregnant. We were so excited. We were so happy. We got married in 2014. It took us six years to get married, but we’ve been together for a while. We finally got married and then I got pregnant. I don’t know what happens with women when you get pregnant, but all of a sudden, your mindset shifts.

Ultimately, at the time that I got pregnant, I was rehabbing fifteen houses, coaching, helping the coaching program that had helped me, and running around like a crazy person. I was stressed out. When I got pregnant, I thought to myself, “How am I ever going to manage all these houses and at the same time stay home, be a mother, and take care of this baby that I’m about to have?” Ultimately, I decided to stop rehabbing homes.

When I decided to stop rehabbing homes, I was rehabbing fifteen homes at that time. It takes a while to get houses done. I also had at least 5 to 10 houses that were in the pipeline. I couldn’t stop rehabbing homes. It took a long time. It took until 2017 for me to be completely out of rehabbing and do the final house.

I got pregnant in 2015. I told my entire team that I was no longer going to be rehabbing homes and everybody was freaking out. I had a realtor that I was working with. I told the realtor, “I’m not going to rehab any homes.” He said, “What is happening?” We had sold almost 100 homes together. I said, “I want to focus solely on passive income. I want to find something where I can stay at home with my daughter and at the same time, be involved in real estate investing. I want to find something that is passive for me.”

Honestly, up to that point, I had not thought about being passive. Although I’d been learning about it, I haven’t done anything. I was focusing on rehabbing. I was focusing on raising money. That was the sole thing that I was doing. I was raising money so I could do all the rehabs that I wanted to do. I was pushing, learning, and trying to figure out this creative deal structure stuff.

I did buy a whole bunch of houses. I bought houses for 0% interest. I bought some creative deal structures along the way and tried to figure those out as well, too. Ultimately, I was not focusing on rental properties at all. I wasn’t focusing on passive income. My realtor got to work and he started looking for properties for me that could be passive.

During this time, if you were back in the day remembering this, about 2015 and on is when multifamily started to get more popular. Before 2015, nobody was talking about multifamily. My realtor started bringing me multifamily properties. I would look at them and be like, “Maybe I could do multifamily and I could manage them. That could be passive income,” but every time that I went to go look at the multifamily property, they all needed so much work, honestly. I did not want to be stressed out about the work of doing more rehabs in order to be able to get to the property. I wanted something that was turnkey, easy, and nothing that could stress me out, so we ruled out multifamily.

He then started bringing me these portfolios of rental properties. I have raised almost $5 million in the past couple of years. I was like, “Maybe I can convince all of these people who are working with me to pull their money together and I could buy a big portfolio of rental houses.” We started looking at that, but honestly, I was hormonal. I was pregnant and having this baby. I was like, “I don’t want to do anything with houses anymore. I want to  get out of houses.”

Buying My First Self-Storage Facility

Luckily, what happened was that my realtor found a storage facility that was twenty minutes away from my house. It had been on the market for five years and nobody bought this thing. Think about that. This would never happen nowadays. You can’t have properties sitting for five years. It was 2016 and that property had been sitting since 2010 or 2011 and nobody had bought it.

I’m going to go over the story of buying my very first storage facility in a few minutes. Ultimately, I drove over and looked at the facility, and then within the next month or two, I closed on that storage facility. I had no idea about what I was getting into with storage. I knew that it was considered passive income and on top of that, it was only twenty minutes away from my house. For me, that sounded perfect. I’m going to get into that here in a minute.

After I bought that first facility, it took me about a year and a half to figure out how to manage that thing, run it, and understand the concept of storage investing. You have to remember that back in that day, 2016, there were 2 other people who had been teaching about self-storage investing, 1 of them kind of, and then the other 1, that was his thing. I ended up going, doing a boot camp and stuff, and trying to figure it out. Ultimately, there was nobody out there talking about storage. Nobody was teaching about it, honestly. Nobody was teaching how you could run a storage facility.

Something that’s super important to me is the management part of the storage facilities. A lot of people think about finding and funding, but you’re not thinking about the running part. I’ve mentioned this. The running part is the most important part. There’s still hardly anybody out there teaching concrete ways to manage your properties so that you can be better at increasing your income and decreasing your expenses. There wasn’t anything out there.

In StorageNerds, we have a facility owner mastermind. It’s for only owners. We’re getting together on a regular basis and talking about what everybody is doing to make sure that they are managing these properties properly. Go out and look. There’s nobody out there teaching this. Everybody’s teaching about how they made $1 million on their storage facility. The truth of the matter is that if you are not managing your property properly, then you will not be successful in this industry. You’ve got to focus more on running a business rather than thinking, “How do I find and fund the thing?” StorageNerds is the complete circle of what you need involved in the industry.

In 2016, I had my daughter. My daughter’s name is Lillian. Our storage facilities are called Ms. Lillian’s Self-Storage. That is our brand. We named them after her because, ultimately, she’s the reason why we got into storage. I also take her over to the storage facilities and I’m like, “This is yours.” She’s like, “Whatever, mom. I’m so bored right now.” Ms. Lillian’s Self-Storage was born when Lillian was born as well. She is ultimately the reason why I even have my book. Everything that we have is because of her and for her as well. We are a family-owned business. That’s it. This is us. You will be working with us if you decide to work with us.

 

I bought one facility and it took me about eighteen months to figure that thing out. I bought another facility and it took about a year for me to figure that out. I’m buying facilities that are around 100 units. I am not buying massive, huge storage facilities. The way that you run a 100-unit facility is almost exactly the same way that you run a 600-unit facility. There’s not a lot of difference in the management style. To get to the point where I could buy a 600-unit facility, that, to me, was a long way away. I needed to figure out how to manage these little tiny facilities.

We started buying facilities. From 2016 to 2021, I bought facilities that are about 100 units. We have eleven of those. When we started to buy all these storage facilities, my husband decided that he wanted to sell the home inspection company because, by that time, there were a ridiculous amount of home inspection companies. Everybody wanted to be a home inspector.

We decided to sell the home inspection company. He sold that and moved over into the management side of the storage facilities. Ultimately, that is how we are. We team up. He does not have the home inspection company. I am finding and funding and he’s running. That’s how we do it. That’s the partnership for us. He’s the one that goes out and does a lot of work. He does a lot of CapEx and stuff. We could get into that on the management side.

For a long time, we bought little tiny facilities around 100 units, and then we spent the next couple of years stabilizing them. We buy severely mismanaged facilities. This is not for everybody. There are mismanaged facilities and then there are income-producing properties. We typically bought severely mismanaged facilities. That’s me coming from the rehabbing niche of the industry and seeing horrible, ugly storage facilities and wanting to fix those up. Honestly, the truth is there’s not a lot of mismanaged facilities out there anymore. Typically, most people have bought them and have tried to stabilize them or already stabilized them. If you get into the industry, most likely, you will not find mismanaged facilities.

I used to teach and push mismanaged facilities because that’s what was out there. Ultimately, most of the facilities that you find will have some sort of income. It may not be what it’s supposed to be, but it’s making income. The ones that I bought had been left abandoned. What’s interesting is that one of my virtual assistants found an abandoned storage facility. They are still out there. There are mismanaged facilities out there. This was a completely abandoned storage facility sitting there. Those are still out there as well. For the most part, 20% of the facilities are going to be mismanaged and 80% are going to be managed or income-producing, but most likely, they’re not producing what they should be producing.

In storage, the opportunity is taking a property that has not been managed properly and making it make what it should be making, which is on the management side, which I’m telling you is the opportunity in storage outside of building new and leasing that up. We’re not talking about that. There are a few mismanaged facilities where you have to do a lot of work and get them up and running, and then there are mostly income-producing facilities, but they’re not making what they should be making.

From 2016 to 2021, we are hustling and buying storage facilities. What I’m doing is I’m raising money. I personally am finding the facilities. I got that down. There are plenty of facilities out there that owners will offer. We’re analyzing those deals, making offers, seeing what sticks, and then taking those facilities and getting them from 25%, 50%, or 75% full to 90% full and at the market rate or standard rate that your price should be for that unit size. That’s what we were doing from these times. We were figuring out the industry and buying a lot of facilities and stuff.

I started StorageNerds in 2020 when COVID started. I had to launch StorageNerds in December 2019, and then COVID came out in late 2020. It was crazy that year. I was trying to figure out what was going on. In 2020, I only had six facilities. That’s it when I started StorageNerds. I’m the type of person who, if I figure something out and I figure out that there’s an opportunity, then I’m going to share that with the world. I am not the type of person that keeps secrets to myself. I’m a very open, abundant person. I believe in abundance. I started sharing, “There’s a great opportunity here to get started.” This is when storage was becoming popular. This is right at that time.

From 2016 to 2020, I would talk to owners and say, “Let’s work out a deal,” and they’d say, “Sure.” It was super easy to find storage and buy it. The prime time to be buying storage was when I got into it. I was very blessed and lucky because it was not difficult to find facilities and get them funded. From 2021 and on when everybody started getting into storage and interested in storage, then there was a lot of competition. There are a lot of storage facilities out there. There are a lot of people interested in getting self-storage. Also, remember that the prices went up for everything and we had those low interest rates.

From 2020 and on, everybody was buying at the top of the market for properties, and then at the same time, they were going to a bank and getting super-low interest rates. I did not do this. I raised money. I don’t go to the bank and get funding. All the facilities that I’ve bought either have a creative deal structure or I raised the money to buy them. I personally do not have any loans in any bank accounts ever. It is possible to do that if you learn how to raise money.

In 2020, I was like, “I want to start a fund.” I was talking to one of my coaches, and he was like, “Stacy, you’re right at that time when you could probably do a fund. You should consider doing a fund.” I was like, “I didn’t think about that,” because I had no idea about funds. That is when I decided, “I’m going to start a fund.” I had no idea about how to do it or the process. My very first fund started in 2020. That was when I got the idea of doing it. In 2022, I bought my first 2 facilities inside the fund. It took me two years.

Slow And Steady Wins

You guys are reading and  thinking, “I can’t believe you’ve done all this.” I want you to see it year by year. Slow and steady wins the race. That is me. It looks like I’ve been doing everything so fast, but the truth is that I am not fast at all. Storage fits perfectly into my personality because storage is also very slow. It’s a buy-and-hold. You hold onto it. Sometimes, it takes five to 10 years to make money on a facility. That’s how I am, honestly. I’m that type of personality. My husband is also the same way. It takes a long time for us to do anything. I know it seems like I’m doing everything super fast, but it’s not.

I do a lot of stuff. I always have a lot of things going on. That’s why it always looks like I’m busy, but ultimately, storage is slow and steady, which wins the race. You could see from 2016 to 2020 that I only had 6 facilities. I did not buy a lot of facilities. I started the fund and then we bought four facilities inside this fund.

I then started learning syndication. I learned how to syndicate deals, crowdfund deals, and pool money together. Syndication became popular for multifamily during this time but hardly ever for storage. I was one of the first ones to do this as well, and then everybody started doing funds for storage facilities and stuff. You can put your money into any type of fund out there. Funds became popular during this time.

I feel that I was a trendsetter on a lot of things. I was one of the first ones to be like, “Let’s try it.” That’s where I was, whereas a lot of people are coming in now and trying to figure all that out or they’re coming in a little bit later. Funds started to get popular in 2021. I raised enough money to buy 4 storage facilities inside 1 fund. I crowdfunded four facilities, and they were bigger facilities. They were more like $1.5 million or $2.5 million.

Remember, I’m buying smaller facilities up to 2020 that are $1 million or less. We had all these facilities that we were managing, and then we moved on to bigger deals. I still only have $2.5 million facilities or less. I don’t buy huge, big, massive deals. That’s not our personality, me and my husband. We don’t want to have $100 million or $200 million in assets. For us, that’s mind-blowing.

My husband and I are vertically integrated. As we’re going through each of these years, we do not have a third-party management company managing everything. We do everything ourselves. We’re building up this asset management company where we have people who are answering phones and people who are doing the boots-on-the-ground stuff. My husband does most of the CapEx. He hires people to help do gravel or something like this, but he also manages the CapEx. If you don’t know what CapEx is, CapEx is Capital Expenditures, which is the stuff that you need to do in order to improve the property. Let’s say you want to re-gravel or repaint. Any type of improvement, that would be it.

The boots-on-the-ground people are the ones that overlook when somebody’s late. They’re the ones that clean the trash up when somebody leaves trash. When you auction a unit off and it doesn’t go, they clean those units out and stuff like that. That’s boots on the ground, there’s the CapEx, and then customer support.

Slow and steady wins the race. Storage is a buy-and-hold investment—it's slow but steady, and that's what leads to success. Share on X

As we’re going through these years, we’re building out this asset management team, which has fifteen storage facilities and a team to manage all those storage facilities. We are vertically integrated. This is not the only way to do it. You can do it yourself or you can hire third-party management companies. You can’t afford to hire a third-party management company unless you have a $2 million-plus of inventory because it does cost quite a bit of money to manage facilities as well. Sometimes, you have to look and see, “Can I afford that or not?” In smaller facilities, you can’t afford that, so we do it all ourselves. That’s what we do.

I raised money to buy facilities. I also helped students syndicate deals. I also started partnering with students on deals as well in 2020. This is when I started StorageNerds. I was teaching and I was coaching, and then after a while, there were students who needed help with raising money. Over the course of the last couple of years, I have become good at creative deal structures and raising money. I used those two skills.

I used to be able to find deals, run a deal analysis, come up with creative deal structures, and raise money to help the students in StorageNerds do this as well. That is what I do. That’s my purpose. That’s what I do well, and that’s what I love to do as well. That is how StorageNerds came to be. That is where I’m at.

We have eleven facilities ourselves. We have 4 facilities in our fund and then I’m partnering in another 15 to 20 deals with students. During this time is when StorageNerds Academy got started and then also StorageNerds Acquisitions. Acquisitions are where we do lead generation. That is where my team is finding deals for you and we’re partnering on the deals with you. The academy is an online education platform. That’s where it came from.

I’m the type of person who wants to share something with the world if something works. I do not keep that stuff to myself. I’m an open book. If you follow me, you know this. I have shows about this. There are YouTube pages. I’m all over. Google my name. Google Stacy Rosetti and StorageNerds and you can see everything that I do.

It has been a blessing not only to be able to get into this industry and figure out how this industry works but also to help anybody who’s interested get their foot in the door into this industry. Is it easy? No, it’s not easy at all. Is it passive? No, it’s not passive at all. It doesn’t get too busy until you get around maybe 400, 500, or 600 doors. The first couple, I was like, “This is good. I can handle this,” and then we started hiring out because I got busier. That’s the process for my story.

Next, I want to go into how I bought the first facility and how I  got into this industry. The facility that I bought is a typical facility that a lot of people in StorageNerds buy. Typically $500,000 to maybe $2 million is where everybody’s at. You can buy a facility for less than $500,000 but it’s hard to make money on those types of facilities. We have found a couple. I found the abandoned facility. We found one where the owner wanted $175,000 for his facility. It was a good facility. You do find stuff like that in sub-tertiary markets.

I’m going to get into the first facility and how we bought that, found it, ran deal analysis, funded it, and then managed it. That’s the next story. I want to get into my first facility, learn how I funded it, and learn how I am running it. I found this facility in 2016. I closed on it when Lillian was born. It’s the first facility in Ms. Lillian’s Self-Storage. The way that I found this facility is through a realtor.

Back in the day, I had a realtor that I had been working with on the rehab side. He went out and started looking for all these properties for me for passive income. He’s the one who found this. This facility was listed on the MLS for five years and nobody had bought it. My realtor called me up and he said, “I found a storage facility. What do you think about storage?” I said, “I’ve never thought about storage.” He said, “Why don’t you go drive by and take a look at it and see if it’s something that you’d be interested in?” I said, “Okay.” The good thing is it was only twenty minutes from my house, so I was super excited.

The next day, I drove over to take a look at it. It’s on a busy road but it’s not right on a busy road. If you take a road down, maybe half a mile, in the back, a little bit is how it is. It’s also in a lower-income industrial area. Back in the day, this is how it was. Now, that whole area has been built out. There was no competition when I bought this facility because it wasn’t an industrial area. Now, right up the road, I have Live Storage, CubeSmart, and Extra Space. They came in and built a whole bunch of storage facilities right there because there wasn’t anything there.

This is considered a primary market. I bought it when it was not even secondary. It was a tertiary market. Now, it’s a primary market. This is in the Atlanta area. You know how Atlanta has been booming. I bring that up because it’s something that you have to think about. Are you buying at the edge of a town where everybody is moving in that direction? Is it tertiary now and maybe in five years, this will become a primary market?

The reason I bring this up, too, is because I talk to my students about this a lot. Ultimately, you have to think about who your competition is going to be. When you’re in a secondary or a tertiary market, and when I say tertiary, I mean in the middle of nowhere country with small populations, not built out, or not gentrified, then you start out with certain competition. What’s going to happen in five, ten, fifteen, or twenty years is that you are going to have different types of competition, which has happened to us on this property.

When I bought this property, there was no competition. There was one storage facility up the way that was super rundown, and then there was nothing else. Now, we have Live Storage, CubeSmart, and Extra Space a quarter mile away from us. That is our competition. Having bigger players as your competition is not fun at all. Being in a secondary market is good on the one hand but also can be bad on the other side. You’re going to start thinking about this stuff.

The way that you market nowadays is not the way that you used to market. When I started years ago, people were not online marketing their storage facilities. In fact, when I bought this storage facility, there were only three choices of property management companies. It was the older one that had been around forever. There was one that was a newer one that’d been around for maybe a couple of years. There was a brand new one that had been launched. Those were my choices.

The older one that has been around for a couple of years is SiteLink. When I got started in the industry, they did not have an online application. Now, they’re online. You had to get their software and put it onto the computer. It was how we used to do that in the old days. A lot has happened in the last couple of years that I’ve been doing this. I don’t know how much more changes are going to be in the industry.

We had a facility owner mastermind with all the owners in StorageNerds. One of my students implemented AI into his storage facility, which we talked about for the hour that we met. He went through what he did and I thought it was super interesting. He has an AI virtual agent answering the phone for him. He does not have somebody answering the phone. He has gone through this whole software where he trains that program to answer the questions that come up. It was very interesting. He has an AI agent answering his phone and taking calls for new tenants.

A lot of stuff is happening. Who knows what’s going to happen in the next ten years? Ultimately, my point is that I started years ago and it was a completely different world. Now, you have to think about who your competition is going to be because there’s competition out there, whereas when I was buying storage, you weren’t thinking about competition as much. I wasn’t in primary market facilities, which is probably a whole different mindset back in the day, too. Secondary and tertiary markets were where I was buying, and there wasn’t a lot of competition. Over the course of the last few years, everything has changed.

That is what we talk about in StorageNerds a lot. That’s what I go over in the academy a lot. That’s why I want you to consider getting into the academy because of all the things that you’re thinking about storage, there is so much out there to learn and understand so that you are educated in making good decisions on what kinds of facilities you want to buy and how you want to run those facilities.

 

For my very first facility, I drove up to this facility. When I drove up to this facility, it was a disaster. The way it looks is that it’s one long building, and there are sixty 10×10 units on each side. It’s a three-acre lot. The owner used all the land to do parking. Remember, it’s an industrial area, so parking in this area is industrial. There were tow trucks, dump trucks, big rigs, box trucks, and stuff like that.

When I pulled up to the gate, first of all, I couldn’t see a lot. I couldn’t get in. I didn’t have the code to get in. I drove by and took a look at it to see if this was something I’d be doing. Even in the very first lane or parking space, there was an RV in that spot. It was parked straight, not even parked at an angle, and it was blocking the entrance to the facility. I could not see what was over there at all because of this RV. It looked like the owner was like, “Go find a spot. If you can find something, good luck.” That’s how it was. This is my very first impression of storage.

Honestly, coming from rehabbing and going to this, this, for me, was perfect. It did not scare me at all. In fact, I saw dollar signs. I was very excited because it was something that I could still fix up, but I could do it on my own time. There was no timeline to it. I called the realtor up and said, “I’m interested in this facility. I want to meet the owner.” He said, “Okay.”

He called the realtor who had listed it and said, “We have somebody who’s interested and wants to walk the property and talk to the owner a little bit. Do you think the owner would be interested?” The realtor said, “Yes,” because he’s been selling this thing for five years and nobody bought it. This is how I do things. I always talk to the owners. In all of the facilities I’ve ever bought, I always talk to the owners.

The First Storage Facility Purchase

We met over there. I was pregnant. I was about to have Lillian, so I was this big old pregnant lady. My husband was there, and then I brought my private lender. Remember that I used private lenders and raised money to do all these rehabs. There was one house I was about to finish rehabbing and I knew I was going to make a certain amount of money on that deal that I could roll over into the next deal/

I called the lender up and said, “Would you be interested in doing something more long-term instead of one year or maybe a couple of years? I have a storage facility that I’m looking at. I’m thinking about buying it. Instead of you giving me money for a year to do a rehab, we could extend it out for a couple of years or so until I figured this thing out.” We had done a couple of deals together before so he was like, “Sure. Whatever you want, Stacy.” The very first private lender that I ever had was my neighbor. I happened to be talking to him about what I was thinking about doing and he said, “I’d be interested in doing that as well. I want to learn more about that.”

I brought my neighbor over. It was me, my husband, my realtor, and the private lender. The other realtor and the owner were there also. We walked the whole property. The owner was an older guy. He was 88 years old. He had built this facility in 1980 and he was tired of it. He was not into it. He said that for the first 20 years, from 1980 to 2000, this place was making a lot of money, and he loved it, and then, from 2020 to 2015, he was not into it anymore. Think about that. Ten, twenty, thirty-five years later, you’re not going to be into something.

As we were walking around, I had no idea about storage. I didn’t know how much money this was going to be making. All I knew was that I could calculate it in my mind. I told my husband and the lender, “Walk the property. I want you to see the lane. I want you to count the parking spaces that you think we could be doing. Look at the units and see how many units there are and what we can make per unit.”

This guy had sixty 10x10s. He didn’t have any real parking spaces. There were cars all over the place, like a junkyard. We went around and calculated. He had 40 cars there. We were like, “We could at least put 40 cars in this place.” He had 60 units. When I asked him how much money he was making in a month, he said around $2,000 was what he was making on this property. That’s 100 units and he was only making $2,000. I already knew in my mind that there could be a huge opportunity here if we could clean this place up, fix it up, and make money on it.

We were walking around and my realtor was looking at me. He was like, “This is a very good deal. You have to figure out how to buy this.” He was getting super excited as well. That’s why I bring my lenders with me. It’s so they could see. It’s exciting to buy real estate. I talked to the owner. The owner had it listed for $500,000 but he was only making $2,000 a month. This is what he told me. I asked him, “Are all these units full?” He said, “Yeah, they’re all full.” I was like, “How much money are you making on them?” He said, “$2,000.” I was like, “How is that even possible that you’re making $2,000 on this place? Everything’s full.” He said, “They’re full. It’s full of junk and nobody’s paying.”

A light bulb went off in my mind when he was telling me his story. This is why I always have my students meet their owners. They can tell you their story, what they’re thinking, and what they want. A light bulb went off and I was like, “This is 60 units here. Let’s say we get $50 each. That’s already $3,000 a month.” He was only making $2,000. He only had a handful of tenants in the units that were paying.

With the parking spots, he said he was charging anywhere from $25 a month to $35 a month. I said, “What if I can get $35 a month? For 40 parking spaces, that’s still another couple thousand dollars a month. I should be able to make at least $5,000 a month on this property.” My mind was thinking, “I’m about to make $250,000 on the deal.” My lender was about to get $200,000 back on a rehab that we were rehabbing. I knew that I had to place that $250,000 somewhere.

The owner of this property had it listed for $500,000. I already knew that I couldn’t afford $500,000. I would never pay $500,000 for this. As we were walking around the property, I was thinking, “What am I going to be able to do? What am I going to be able to offer for this property?” I asked the owner, “Can you please share with me your numbers or how much money that you’re making? Do you have anything to show for that?” He said, “Yes.”

He gave me his ledger. It was a book that he had been using since 1980 to keep track of his expenses. It was this massive, huge book. That is what he gave me. It was nuts. I couldn’t even read the ledger. I don’t even know how to read a ledger. I knew that when he handed over the ledger, he was like, “Take my ledger. You can give it back to me if you want to look through all my numbers and stuff.” I was like, “Okay.” I had this big old book that we were carrying around and put it in the car.

I knew that I was going to have to place $250,000. I paid 10% on that interest. Typically, 9% to 10% is what I was paying. I knew I was going to have to pay $2,000-plus a month if I borrowed that money. He only made $2,000. Remember, he was only making that much. I knew that I would have enough money to pay the mortgage if I could convince him to sell the property at $200,000 to $250,000. I didn’t know the expenses at the time on how to manage a facility.

Back then, expenses were super low because you managed it yourself. With the expenses, I was like, “I’ll come out of pocket whatever needs to get done to clean this thing up. I’ll come out of pocket to get it up and running. Whatever it costs, we’ll come out of pocket to do that if I can get him to sell this property for $200,000 to $250,000. That way, at least the mortgage is paid for and I can pay for that, and then we’ll come out of pocket for the rest.” That was my mindset on the very first deal. It’s me talking to the owner and thinking through this.

How did I find this thing? I found it through a realtor. How did I run the deal analysis? That was back in the day when I didn’t even know what deal analysis was. I offered $200,000 on the deal. I told him right then and there. When we were talking to the owner, I said, “We can pay $200,000 for this.” He was like, “$200,000?” He was upset.

I was like, “My lender here, Rick, already has the money ready to go. We can close in three weeks if you want, but I need to be able to afford the mortgage for him. I’ll have to pay him $2,000-plus a month and you only make that much money. That is why I’m coming up with that number. I explained it to him and he was like, “I’m not going to do $200,000.” I said, “Okay. If you change your mind, let us know.” We all left and parted ways.

Ultimately, you have to think about who your competition is going to be. Share on X

A couple of days later, his realtor called my realtor and said $250,000. I was like, “For sure.” I called the lender and was like, “He said $250,000.” Rick was like, “You have to take that deal.” I was like, “Give me the money.” This is how it worked with me. He gave me 100% of the purchase price. I came up with no money to purchase the storage facility. The only money that I had to come up with was to do the rehab, fix it up, and clean it up. It’s not a rehab, anyway. It’s more like improving the property to be able to make the most amount of money that you possibly can on your storage facility.

We had to clean all those units out. That’s why I said it took eighteen months to figure this thing out because every unit was full of crap. We had to learn how to do the auction process. This is back when I was looking at software. I was like, “There’s got to be software out there to help me manage all these tenets.” I started doing all these demos with this software.

On the management side, I was doing demos with software. I didn’t even implement the software until three months after I bought the facility. In the first couple of months, we were still taking cash and trying to figure the whole thing out. I implemented storEDGE into it, and then I started having to train the tenants to use the software, which was horrible.

I had to get them to sign the contract online electronically. These people were probably tenants at this facility for ten-plus years and were paying $25 a month. All of a sudden, this lady comes in and she’s like, “Too bad. You got to get online and sign a contract.” It was not fun at all, but it happened. It took me a good year and it happened.

We started cleaning up, trying to figure out whose cars belonged to who. We started learning about the auction process. We learned about how to auction off units the legal way in Georgia to be able to auction off units. Every state has its own rules. We started implementing that and doing that. It took a long time for us to figure that out. There’s nobody to teach you how to do this stuff, so we had to figure it out. Back in the day, this is how it was.

We also had to figure out how to auction off vehicles. Vehicles are considered personal property. By law, what are your state’s rules on auctioning off vehicles? We had to figure all that out. That took forever. You have to remember too that this is an industrial facility. It’s not run down, but we have tow trucks and dump trucks coming in.

We had a dump truck company park over on the backside. There were five dump trucks. It was junk and things like that. We set up the day parking. They come in, park their vehicles, go and pick up their dump trucks or tow trucks, and then drive out. You can either park in your own lane or you can park in the day parking. We were setting up these systems.

This is what I’m talking about. Management is answering the phones, moving people online, figuring out how you’re going to run this portion, and then also your auction process. If you have parking, that’s a whole different ball game. It’s a whole different thing. There was a whole bunch of stuff like that we were trying to figure out. That is what was happening in the first eighteen months of us owning this thing.

It was fun for us, honestly. We would take Lillian over. She spent most of her time at this facility. We would take her over and try to figure out how to clean out units and stuff. All these trucks would come and drive in. You have to go all the way around to exit. There was a gate there, and the gate was always broken. Pete was always trying to fix this thing.

The whole area in the middle started looking rundown because all those heavy trucks were hitting it and stuff. At one point, we even re-graveled that whole thing. I’m talking about CapEx. That’s us re-graveling and then getting all the parking spaces. We now have 60 parking spaces there. We also have sixty 10×10 units. You could take the wall out and then make it into a 10×20 as well, but we don’t have a lot of those.  We have maybe 2 or 3 of those and that’s it. With the concrete split, we had to redo the concrete in those two. Little things like that come up. We’ve had this thing for 5 or 6 years. That stuff is coming up.

Ultimately, he was making around $2,000 a month for 60 and 40 parking spaces. We are at 60 and 60 and making around $10,000 a month on that property. For funding, he wanted $500,000. We got it for $250,000 by meeting the owner, walking the property, building a connection, explaining our side of the story so that the owner understood, and then coming up with a number that we could both be happy with.

We had a private money lender give us $250,000 at 9% interest. You could go to a bank and get a loan. You could get an SBA loan probably for this, or you could have syndicated this money out. Syndicate means raising money and trying to get people to give you the money for it. You could have done a creative deal structure. I could have gotten him to seller-finance the deal and convince him to do that. These are all the things that you’re going to learn about in the StorageNerds Academy.

Ultimately, I teach my three-step process, which is Find Them, Fund Them, and Run Them. You need to learn where to find properties and how to find them. I teach going directly to the owners. We cut out the brokers and wholesalers. I also teach deal analysis. If you join the academy, you will get our Deal Analyzer. My Deal Analyzer shows you how to run numbers in these different ways.

Are you going to have a private lender? Are you going to go to a bank? What kind of bank loan are you going to get? Are you going to do a creative deal structure? You can run the numbers on my Deal Analyzer with all these different types of scenarios. You’re going to learn how to do that because you have to train your brain not only on how to find them and run deal analysis, but the question I get all the time is, “Is this a good deal? How do I know if this is a good deal?”

I tell everybody, “Get the Deal Analyzer and start training your brain to look at these numbers because you have to learn how to understand commercial real estate deal analysis.” That’s what it is. It’s a whole different thing from land, houses, or anything else. You have to learn those kinds of terms. When you look at a deal, is it a good deal? What’s the cap rate? What’s ROI? What’s your net income? What’s your gross income? It has all kinds of stuff like.

Storage is considered a warehouse. It’s price per square foot and total square footage. You don’t talk about doors or things like this in storage. You talk about, “What’s your total square foot? What’s your price per square foot?” You want to have to write a lingo when you’re talking. It’s a storage facility. It’s not a storage unit or a storage door. You got to learn this lingo because a lot of people say a whole bunch of different things.

Also, with funding, I talked about all the different ways that you can fund and then the management part. You are setting it up so that you have a facility under contract, and you onboard that facility so that you are taking payments on day one. It’s not like me trying to figure it all out months after you own the storage facility. That creates even more chaos than you need, honestly.

After you get it up and running, it’s like, “How do I make this as passive as I possibly can? What are the things that I need to do to automate and systematize the facility so that they are as passive as they possibly can be?” That is what I’m trying to show you overall how I went through. It took me years to figure this out. That is what the StorageNerds Academy is going to be teaching you.

What’s Included In The Storage Nerds Academy?

I’m going to move on to the StorageNerds Academy, what that is, and how you can take advantage of it. The StorageNerds Academy is only around $100 a month. That’s it. It’s not even that expensive. It’s available for anybody who wants to learn how to get started in self-storage. It’s an online education platform. Please give me a few minutes to go through what is included in that for very little money. You could get started on educating yourself on how to get started in this industry.

 

Let’s move on to StorageNerds Academy, what that is, and how it can help you get started, be educated, and make good decisions on storage facilities being bought. The StorageNerds Academy is an online education platform where I take every course and every training I’ve ever done, all of my students’ case studies, and any industry speakers I’ve had on my show and put them into this online platform. You have everything that you need in order to learn how to find, fund, and run storage facilities.

I teach it to three different types of audiences. One of them is the beginners. For most people, you’re a beginner. You’re trying to figure this out. You’re like, “Do I want to get in? How do I do this?” The second thing is owners. If you are an owner and you own a storage facility and you want to build your portfolio out, the academy has a whole section for owners. That’s management, and then you also need to know how to build out your portfolio. You’ll get access to the Owner Mastermind. There’s a lot of stuff for owners. I told you that the management part is the most important part. Owners typically want to buy more facilities and manage their own facilities that they have better. That’s what the owner part is.

The beginners want to know, “How do I find them? How do I fund them? How do I know if it’s a good deal? How do I run numbers? How do I make offers? How do I put the contract together?” That’s in the beginner’s part. There’s a whole section on wholesaling because we have people who do wholesale self-storage in the StorageNerds Acquisitions department, which I’m not talking about here. You can wholesale self-storage as well on your own. You can do this. I talk about what wholesaling is and how it works.

Some people are reading this and thinking, “How can I afford to buy a storage facility when I don’t have any money?” What I do is I teach my students to wholesale first, make a little money on the wholesales that they do, and then they can buy their facility. That’s the wholesaling section. If you’re tuning in and you don’t have any money, wholesaling is going to be the best roadmap for you.

Inside StorageNerds Academy, there are three different roadmaps, which are beginners, owners, and wholesalers. Once you log into the dashboard, you’ll see that. You also have access to the courses. There’s Find Them, Fund Them, Run Them, which is three hours. It is one hour for each one of those. It is very high level. This is how the industry works. Get started understanding this niche course.

There’s a jumpstart course. The jumpstart is for people who are like, “I want to get started right now in finding them, talking to owners, and making offers.” That’s a 4-hour course where I go through what’s called my 6-step system. That’s looking at your facility from a business owner’s perspective. You’re like, “What do I need to do to start setting up this business?” That’s the jumpstart.

There’s Super Simple Self-Storage, which is my main course. That is hundreds of hours of maybe 15 to 20-minute videos from, “I don’t have any idea what I’m doing,” to management. It’s a whole course. That’s the main course. There’s the Deal Analyzer course, which is, “How do I run numbers?” It’s also me going through my Deal Analyzer.

When you join the academy, you’re going to get access to my Deal Analyzer. It’s a spreadsheet. When you first look at it, you’re like, “I have no idea what’s going on,” but ultimately, if you go through the course and follow how I’m teaching it, then it’ll take you through how to run deal analysis, how to understand deal analysis, and how to make offers.

Inside my Deal Analyzer is the magic offer letter. The magic offer letter is created from the numbers that you run inside the Deal Analyzer. What I teach is how to send out offers. The Deal Analyzer does that for you. It doesn’t send it out, but it creates the offer so you can send it to the owner. When I teach, I teach not making 1 offer, but I teach making 4 different offers at the same time. When you run your analysis on the Deal Analyzer, it runs five different ways at the same time.

I push creative deal structures. I push running numbers to raise capital. That’s how I push it because I want to create a win-win situation for the owners. That is what you’re going to get out of the Deal Analyzer. The Deal Analyzer and its course is super powerful. If there’s anything here that you want to learn, that is what you want to learn and that’s what you want to use as your tool. It’s a very powerful tool to make offers, even to get you started.

Let’s say you get started and you start making all these offers. You buy a facility or two, and then after a while, you’re like, “I want to move on to super duper Excel spreadsheet.” We have a couple of people who are buying their seventh facility, and they run deal analysis a little bit differently. Ultimately, for beginners, the Deal Analyzer course is perfect.

Wholesaling Self-Storage is a course. That’s going to be in your roadmap for those of you who want to get into self-storage but don’t have a lot of money. You can wholesale your first couple. There are plenty of storage facilities out there. You don’t have to worry like, “I’m going to have to pass this one up,” or something. You move on to the next one.

We have one student who wholesaled it and made $25,000 on it. He’s saving that money and is working on wholesaling another one. He’ll have $50,000 and then he’ll use that as a down payment for maybe a small deal somewhere. He works his way up. You have to start somewhere. I have very small facilities as well. I have no shame in telling anybody that I started with small facilities and worked my way up. You can do this as well. Anybody can do this.

There’s also the management course. Owners, especially, once you own a facility, how are you marketing your facility? How is your business listing? How are you building your portfolio? That’s the management for the owners, and then there’s the Development and the Conversions. There are people here reading and they’re like, “I have a piece of land. I want to build on it.” We have a course for you. It’s called Development and Conversions. For people who want to build out or expand, that is the course for you.

Everything that you can think of in the storage industry, there is a course for you in the academy. When you get onto the dashboard, you have the bootcamps. I’ve done the Fund Them and the Run Them boot camp. I’ve separated those out. I’ve done those a couple of times. You get access to those. There are about 30 hours of my teaching on finding them in deal analysis. It gets into the nitty-gritty of everything. There are fifteen different ways to find storage facilities. I get into that and show you exactly how you do all those.

I talk about the funding as well. I spent four days going over how I bought fifteen facilities without any money. That starts with raising money and takes it all the way through partnering, setting up your structures, and all the different ways that you can buy the facilities. That is what the funding is. Most of the people that I talk to do not understand how they can fund storage facilities that are $1 million, $2 million, or $3 million.

We have a student who bought his very first facility. He had no idea about storage at all. He only had $150,000. That’s it. That’s all he had. He syndicated his very first deal. I helped him do that. He raised enough money to syndicate that deal out. He bought a $2.5 million facility with only $150,000. That’s what you’re going to learn in the funding boot camp.

Running them is all management. We’re talking about auctions, boots on the ground, your phone people, and all the little tiny things, like your fees, contract, SEO, website, and everything you can think of. We have gone into the nitty-gritty. We show you how we manage all of our stuff and how we do everything. We show you how we get tenants to move into our fifteen facilities in tertiary markets, which is a whole different way of managing them, from secondary and primary markets. We own fifteen facilities across all different types of markets in all different types of states. We talk about how to manage all those and how to market for those. You can see how we do all that.

The Stacy Teaches is also on the dashboard. This is all of the training that I’ve done specifically on finding, funding, running, deal analysis, and wholesaling. I taught every week for years on very specific topics. For instance, one of the things that I taught was how to do a competitive analysis. If you own a storage facility, how do you look at your competitors? What do you look for to see what pricing you should be adjusting your pricing to based on what the competitors are doing? How do you market and manage your facilities based on the way that competitors are doing it? Nobody’s talking about that. I’m the only one that’s talking about this type of stuff. It’s specific.

Ultimately, you have to think about who your competition is going to be. Share on X

For the most part, any type of podcast or training that is available to you out in the world is going to be very high-level. This is what I’m doing. You’re like, “I’m making $1 million.” That’s awesome, but I’m the only one that’s teaching how you do the little tiny things. I’m the only one teaching you how you manage your phone support, how you hire the best people, and how you train the phone support to answer the phones properly.

The people who answer your phones are the ones who are going to make or break how successful you are in this industry. It’s finding and then a super specific deal analysis on how you run your numbers, how you look at numbers, what’s the cap rate, what’s the ROI, and all kinds of stuff like this, and then all the different types of funding.

I go over the Deal Analyzer a lot in the funding part. That’s where I’m sitting and going over the Deal Analyzer or the deal analysis. I talk about all the different types of ways you can fund deals, what the difference is, and stuff. The running would be a lot of pricing, competition, boots on the ground, phones, and stuff like that. There’s also wholesaling stuff. There’s a whole bunch of me teaching. You’re going to be tired of me teaching, that’s for sure. I’m going to be doing a lot of teaching.

We have the case studies. What happens in StorageNerds is after a student closes on a facility, within maybe six months, I try to get them to come on to our group coaching session and do a student showcase. I ask them how they found it, funded it, and ran it. We’ve got 40 or 50 students going over their deals. I try to get most students to do this. Some won’t do it, but a lot of students come on and they talk about their deals. It’s good to hear what everybody’s doing and how they’re doing it. It is not just me and how I did it, but how all the students in StorageNerds close on a deal, what it is like, and what their thought process is.

We also have the industry guest speakers. Included in the academy is a live group coaching session, which I haven’t gotten to yet. There’s a live group coaching session every month. I typically have either a guest speaker come in or a vendor demo. We’ll have somebody come on and talk about all the different types of topics.

For instance, we had one person come on and talk about land. If you want to expand or you want to build, what type of land should you be looking for or buying? A lot of people say, “I want to buy a storage facility that I can expand on.” What type of land do you need? There’s a lot of land out there that you can’t even do expansions on. What do you need to know in order to be able to do an expansion? We had a guest speaker about that.

We have vendor demos come on. We’ve had storEDGE, Storable, SpiderDoor, and all kinds of stuff. We have anything that you can imagine. It’s a good way to keep on top of what types of companies are out there, like third-party management companies, gate operators, software, and all kinds of stuff. Those are all available for you. We’ve had every type of software. Pretty much any major player in the industry has come and talked to StorageNerds. Those are there.

You have the dashboard, which is where all the courses and the training are. It’s the same login. It’s not two different logins or anything. In the portal, you’re going to have all the templates, all the checklists, and all the files. Everything that we’ve ever used over the years that we’ve been doing this is put into the portal. Also, students have put some stuff in there too. There are pro formas, checklists, and all kinds of stuff that students even give us as well. Those are all available.

There’s the magic offer letter, which is available. This is where you’re going to be making four offers at the same time. There’s transfer ownership stuff if you’re like, “How do I transfer the ownership over? What do I do in the first month or so that I buy storage facilities?” There are all kinds of stuff like that. There’s also information about how to raise money. There are systems for that as well. Even the contracts are in there. Wholesalers are like, “Do I have a contract?” Yes, there are contracts, addendums, and partnerships. There are contracts for hiring contractors. There are all kinds of contracts in there. Anything that you need is in there.

I talked about this, but the live group coaching calls are every month. You hop on once a month. You can ask me any questions. We go over wins, challenges, and any questions where you’re stuck. On top of that, we have the guest speakers coming in. The students will come in and talk about the deal that they closed. If there’s some sort of vendor demo, we’ll have that as well. There’s lots of stuff happening during the live group coaching call once a month. If you can’t make it, it’s recorded. We’ll put it into the portal. You can also hop on live and ask me anything during that session. I’ll help you with it.

Join Our Community

There is the Facility Owner Mastermind. We had somebody join, and he owned a facility. We added him to our list. He gets to start coming to the Owner Mastermind. That is where we talk about break-ins, cameras, solar lights, gate systems, fees, contracts, marketing, and all kinds of stuff inside that. That is once a month as well.

You have access to the Facebook group. We have a private Facebook group for StorageNerds students and members. You get to ask questions. This is where everybody’s asking questions like, “What type of cameras are you using?” or, “Where do I get latches?” or, “Is this a good deal?” All kinds of stuff are in that group. That’s where you talk to each other and you can ask questions.

Finally, you get to join an amazing community. What I tell students is, “Don’t become an island. There is no reason for you to have to go through this alone.” I had to do this alone. Until I started StorageNerds, there was very little out there on YouTube or anything about storage, especially the nitty-gritty stuff. I vowed that if I could be successful in doing this, I would share what I know with the world, and then I would try to bring in people who wanted to be like me and be a storage nerd. That’s why it’s called StorageNerds.

Join the amazing community and then start meeting other people who have the same mindset as you. We have two ladies in the group who met each other, and they partnered on a deal together. They’re closing on a deal together. One lives in Washington and one lives in Oregon. They’re buying a facility in Arizona together. That happens all the time. That’s the whole purpose of the group.

The price is typically $333 monthly. It’s a month-to-month contract, so you can be in as long as you need to or you can cancel at any time if you want to get in and try it out. Ultimately, if you decide to join, do stuff. That’s the thing that’s frustrating to me. Come to the live group coaching sessions, go through the roadmaps, go through all the courses, start educating yourself, and start trying this. If you’re like, “I tried this for a couple of months. It’s not my thing,” then you could cancel anytime. You log into your account, and there’s a cancellation section where you can cancel.

It’s $111 a month. For $111, you can join StorageNerds Academy and get access to everything that I showed you. Try it out. Give yourself a month or two. Come to the live group coaching sessions and be part of it. Hopefully, I can inspire you enough to get out there and start talking to owners and making offers. That’s where the momentum starts. Ultimately, that’s it. It’s a month-to-month contract. There is no obligation.

You also go to StorageNerds.com/Academy. That’s it. That is where you can sign up. I hope that this gives you a little bit more information about how the academy works. I look forward to seeing you guys in the group coaching sessions. I look forward to seeing you get out there, talk to owners, and make offers. I appreciate you tuning in. I will see you soon.

 

Important Links

• StorageNerds Academy
• StorageNerds Acquisitions
• StorageNerds Academy & Acquisitions w/ Stacy Rossetti on Facebook