Get ready to be inspired as Stacy Rossetti, a self-storage investor, reveals her remarkable journey from owning 0 to 16 facilities in just 7 years. Stacy shares her secrets to success, including the challenges she overcame and the strategies she employed. Gain invaluable insights on finding and financing self-storage deals, mastering property management, and building a thriving self-storage business. Don’t miss this opportunity to learn from Stacy’s expertise and pave your own path to success in the self-storage industry!
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Fast Track Self-Storage Investing: How Stacy Rossetti Went From Owning 0 To 16 Storage Facilities In 7 Years
The office is what we’ll do. Stacy’s office, starting from day one of buying her first facility or getting out there and starting to look for facilities all the way until now. How did it work? In 2015, I got pregnant. During that time, I was doing renovations. From 2011 to 2015, we were doing rehabbing or renovations. You have to remember from 2011 to 2015, that was when we were coming out of the bubble. During this time, there were a ridiculous amount of houses for sale, but then there was no money.
All the banks were like, “We’re not lending. We can’t lend. We’re all in crisis.” If you remember that time period, I got in right when that happened. The reason I got into real estate was because my husband started a home inspection company in 2009. He was building up his life. He would go around and do home inspections. Remember, 2009 was too bad. In 2010, it started growing. In 2011, he got big. Over the course of those two years, he was like, “There is a ridiculous amount of houses out there that are all in foreclosure and they all need work. There’s a good opportunity out there.”
I was doing another job. I was in the wind turbine business. I built wind turbines for almost ten years. I was like, “I traveled the world and I get to build turbines. No way, Jose.” He was like, “We should start looking at this.” We started driving around looking at all these houses. There’s like a ridiculous amount of houses for sale. If you remember, every house on the street was for sale. I was like, “Maybe we should try this.”
We did. We started getting into renovations and then, it like took off because it was the perfect period to do it. Remember during that time, there was no money. I had to get good at raising money. You could not go to a bank and get a loan during this time. You had to get good at creative deal structuring. I got good at raising money and doing creative deal structures. All of what I do now stems from those couple of first years where I had to think outside the box in order to get money to do all these renovations. We ended up doing 100 renovations during that time. It was a ridiculous amount.
Stacy’s First Forays Into Self-Storage
I would never wish that on anybody. Do not do this because it was horrible. I was running around like a crazy person stressing out. I ended up leaving the job and doing all these renovations. I was doing ten renovations. In my mind when I got pregnant, I was thinking to myself, “How am I going to do like ten renovations at one time and have this like a little tiny baby to take care of?” There’s no way because I was already running around like a crazy person. My thought process during that time was, “I need to do passive income. I want to stay in real estate. I love real estate and everything about it, but I can’t do active income. I have to do passive income.” That’s how I started getting into storage.
I told my realtor and my team, “I’m not doing renovations anymore. We’re going to finish all the renovations that we have.” In the meantime, during that five-year period, I got good at raising money because you need a lot of money in order to do renovations, either go to hard money or you raise money. I got good at raising money. When I say I got good at raising money, this is what it means. I asked everybody for money. Anybody I knew and came across, I said, “Do you have any money? $25,000, $50,000, or $100,000, anything that you have, you could give to me. I’ll use it and I’ll make you money. I’ll do a renovation and make some money as well too.”
That’s how it is with raising money. I ask people for money and then I would cut them into the deal, pay them back, or whatever. I get a lot of questions about funding, which I saw. Personally, funding is raising money. Until this day, all I do all day long is sit and talk to investors and ask them for money. Now I have a fund I can put everything into this fund, but before I had the fund, I was talking to regular people, borrowing money from regular people, and buying all my facilities that way. That’s raising money. In the meantime, in 2015, I got pregnant, and then in 2016 is when I had Lillian.
In 2016, we bought our very first facility and we named it Ms. Lillian’s Self-Storage. I named it after her. That’s the first one. I borrowed this money from a private lender. It was $250,000, my first facility. I started out like little tiny facilities. This $250,000 facility, we still own it. It’s worth well over $1 million. It took me one year. I was managing and doing everything myself in this facility. At this first facility, it was just me. I answered the phones. I put everybody into the software. In 2016, it is right when ESS and storEDGE had got started.
ESS had just gotten started maybe in 2015. Easy Storage Solutions is a software that had just gotten started storEDGE, which is the software that we use to manage our facilities had just gotten started a few years ago or something like that. If you think about that from 2010 to 2015, nobody was thinking about storage. 2015, 2016, and 2017 are when this software started to come around. The only software that was out there before ESS and storEDGE was SiteLink. SiteLink is an older software. I’ve heard Storage Commander and maybe a couple of others that may have been around for a long time but were super basic software.
I did all the demos. Of all the software I could find, I went in. I remember back in like 2016, there was no anybody teaching me how to invest in self-storage. It was like one other person and that was it. I could not find anything on storage investing at all. I had to figure all this out myself. I went in. I started googling self-storage software. I found the three ones I told you about. I found ESS, storEDGE, and SiteLink, which are the three that are owned by Storable. At that time, the three were not owned by Storable. Storable is not even around. It came around later. I did all the demos and then in the end I liked the interface of storEDGE.
That’s why I chose storEDGE to use it. I’m the one that set everything up. Back in the day when I started working with storEDGE, there were three people working for the company. For our first onboarding experience, it was super hands-on and they were there to answer questions and show you what to do. It was also not like it is nowadays. storEDGE now is like an enterprise solution. Storable is funneling a lot of money into building out storEDGE. storEDGE is going to be the premier software in the storage investing world. We’re beta testers for them. If they have any new things, they always ask us to test them out to see if it works well, which is what we love.
We love how storage adds a lot of new features. You can manage everything with storage, which is good. After we did all these demos, I got it all set up. I answered the phones. I’m the one that was the boots-on-the-ground person. In my very first facility, I didn’t hire a phone and boots-on-the-ground person. Now I always tell them, “You should probably hire that out. If you couldn’t afford it, you should hire it out.” Nobody told me. I had to figure it out for myself. It was me. I was the boots on the ground and the call center. That was me for the first one.
My first facility was maybe 125 doors or something like that, to give you an idea of how big it was. It wasn’t a small facility. It was like a good size facility. In 2017, we bought our next facility. It was 60 units plus 15 parking spaces. Let’s say, 75 doors. The second facility was like 75 spaces. I’m the one that was the boots on the ground and the call center. I did both of these. Together, that’s about 200 doors. In 2 years, I had 200 doors. All the while this very first facility that I bought, I’m telling you it took me one a year to figure out this thing. I had no idea what I was doing. Nobody told me what to do like with the auction.
You could not do online auctions. There was no such thing as online auctions. Online auctions just came out in the last couple of years or so. This was not around. I had to go out, do the auctions, and open up the door to let everybody know this stuff. I was there. That’s what I did. I was the auction person. An auction person falls under boots on the ground if you’re going to do auctions. That’s not true.
If you’re going to go out there, the only thing that our boots-on-the-ground person does for auctions anymore is takes pictures, that’s it because we do everything online now. Before I would go out and you didn’t take pictures of stuff. You put it in the newspaper and then people came out and that was me. I did all this. The call center now is the office person. The office person does all the back office stuff for the auctions, answers the phones, puts the tenants, and calls when they’re late. When we had late payments, that was me. I was calling everybody and saying, “Your payment is late. Can you pay?”
Everybody knew I was the owner. On these first two facilities, they would call me and say, “I can’t pay.” They all knew I was the owner. I tell my students, “Do not do this at all.” You are not the owner. You are nobody. You’re like a maintenance person. If you happen to be out there at your facility, you should be like your maintenance person and nobody should have your personal phone number or nothing. That’s the rule.
Don’t tell anybody you’re the owner. You are nobody. If you happen to be out there at your facility, just be your maintenance person. Nobody should have your personal phone number. Share on XFirst Expansion
In 2018, we bought two facilities. Let’s see, the 3rd and the 4th. I can’t even remember, but let’s say another 120 doors. Now we’re at like 300 to 350 doors. In 2018, at around 300 to 350 doors, I hired Bonnie. All my students know Bonnie because I have Bonnie come in and tell everybody what she does for the company now. She was working for my husband, Pete, for the home inspection company. She was the admin and the office manager.
From 2009 to 2019, my husband was doing the home inspection. He grew this huge big home inspection company. We decided to sell the home inspection company and only do storage because we were making way too much money. Home inspections were active income and we wanted to be passive income. In 2018, we sold the home inspection company and then we moved Bonnie over to work for us on the storage facilities. She was closing out the home inspection company and then she was starting to get into the self-storage company.
She worked 20 hours closing out that company and doing the transfer and stuff, then also 20 hours for me. She was admin and she had twenty hours a week with me, and that’s it. All I could afford was twenty hours a week. She was the one that started to answer the phones. She was the phone person. She was the person inside that would do like all the office stuff. She started to help me with the auction. She was for the call center and auctions.
She was not the boots-on-the-ground person. We did not hire our boots-on-the-ground person until later. A boots-on-the-ground person was me and Pete. We went over, over-look people and sweep out units. In 2019, we had Lillian sweeping out units and stuff. Remember this is all Ms. Lillian’s Self-Storage. We’d take Lillian over and then she’d be like a little baby sitting in her carriage and we’d be like sweeping out units and stuff like this. This is how it was.
In 2019, we bought three more facilities. We had seven. How did I pay for these? Private money and lenders. I am 100% privately funded. That’s not true. We have one facility. The very last facility that we bought, we went to a bank and got a loan. That’s number sixteen. It took us up to fifteen facilities to go and get a loan. I am not 100% privately funded anymore, but like mostly privately funded. Let’s say, on average, they were all smaller doors and smaller facilities. They were probably anywhere from 60 to 100 doors. Let’s say, on average, 75 times 3 is 225. We added another 225 doors.
This is us bringing Bonnie on full-time. Bonnie is now 40 hours a week. We couldn’t afford to pay Bonnie 40 hours a week. She was spending $15 an hour or something like this. We couldn’t afford to pay her until we added more doors. Our goal was to make sure she had enough work. She would stay with us and once we could afford her, we bumped her up to 40 hours a week.
All the while, this is about the time when we’re done with the home inspection company. It is the perfect transition. Pete and Stacy are boots-on-the-ground. This is when Pete comes over. Pete starts taking care of the facilities. He’s moved over from home inspection. He manages the management part of the facilities and then I’m managing the finding and the funding. He does running. This year is when all that happened. Bonnie and Pete worked together up until 2022. We hired one boots-on-the-ground person.
2019 is when I started StorageNerds. I started helping people get into it and stuff. I’m the type of person anyways, if I know something works well, I want to share it with the world. I was like, “Let me get out there and start showing some other people how to do this because there is something about this thing.” Remember, COVID hit. There’s one owner and he had three facilities. The day before the closing, he backed out. I was upset. We got it under contract. We were supposed to close in August. It was a March or April.
I had to raise that money. There was a lot of money to be raised for me. It was $800,000 or something in cash because they were mismanaged facilities. I raised all that money and then the day before closing, he was like, “I changed my mind.” I was upset. I was like, “We bought none.” I couldn’t get another one under contract because it was COVID and everybody is freaking out about everything and stuff. I couldn’t find one. Everybody was not selling at this time. We did buy no facilities.
Raising Money
I always have coaches. During this time, I remember there was not anything about learning how to invest in self-storage. I couldn’t have a coach for that. I did have a money coach. He is the one that showed me how to raise money. He was he always gave me tips and stuff. During this time he told me in 2020, “You should consider doing a fund. With all your rehabbing experience and storage facilities, you’re at that point where you should be syndicating or have a fund.”
I never even thought about that honestly until he told me. I was like, “You’re right. I raised millions and millions of dollars. I should be able to go out and get a fund.”I had no idea about anything with funds. This is when I started learning about funds. I did not get the facilities, but in the end, I started researching and I hired a consultant and a company to help me get a fund. 2017, 2018, and 2019, all private lenders. 2016 to 2019, private money, and even in 2020.
If I would’ve bought something, that would’ve been private money. From 2019 to 2021, Bonnie and Pete are managing the facilities. I’m the one that finds and funds the facilities. Bonnie and Pete are managing these facilities. Pete is the boots-on-the-ground person and Bonnie is the office person. That’s how it was. It’s a total of 600 doors. Bonnie and Pete, that’s it. Nobody else.
In 2021, we bought four facilities privately funded because I did not have my fund. These are private money. We had eleven facilities. All these facilities are going to be less than $1 million. They’re going to be anywhere from $800,000 down or something like that. This is all private money. The fund was not started yet. We were in the process of getting it ready. It takes a long time to put a fund together. It takes months to be able to syndicate a deal.
If you want to do a fund and raise millions of dollars, you have to put the whole thing together. You put the PPM, the subscription, and the financial model. You have to understand everything. I was educating myself and working through putting this fund together. It is what I was doing. The fund was ready to be launched. We decided to push it out until the beginning of 2022 because I have no qualms with asking for money any time of the year. My lawyer and consultant advised me and said, “You should probably ask for money after Christmas.” I was like, “Fine. We’ll start it in the first quarter of the next year.”
2021 is where we buy our next facilities. Let’s say, on average they were bigger facilities, probably about 100 doors each then we added another 400 doors. We are at 1,000 doors. It’s all over Georgia. We had not gotten out. We had not spread out our wings or anything like that outside of Georgia. Pete was like, “I don’t know what we are going to be able to do all this.”
I was like, “Hire somebody.” We hired a boots-on-the-ground person that helped Pete and drove all around Georgia and helped us to be the boots-on-the-ground person. We had one boots-on-the-ground person and then Pete also. they were the two together that were managing the overlocks, auctions, and stuff like this. Right about this time is when we started getting onto online auctions. That guy made everything a little bit easier, but we had like a total now of around 1,0000 doors.
Hiring Boots In The Ground People
This is when we hired a full-time boots-on-the-ground person, plus Pete, Bonnie, and me. I find and fund, and then they are like an office. These two were the boots-on-the-ground people full-time. It was the four of us. We were lean and mean self-storage-invested machines. You have to remember that like for us, personally, we buy severely mismanaged facilities. We don’t buy income-producing properties.
We’ve never bought an income-producing property that’s making what it should be making. We’re always buying properties that you have to get bad tenants out and good tenants in. You have to clean the properties up. It’s not like renovations or rehabbing, but you got to clean, power wash, maybe paint, fix some ballards, doors or springs, stuff like that. It’s not a lot of stuff, but it’s like trying to get it cleaned up.
The main part of what we do is getting all the bad tenants out. Essentially in the storage world, you have physical occupancy and economic occupancy. Physical occupancy is when the owner says, “I’m full,” then you say, “l how many people are paying?” That’s economic occupancy. Every facility I’ve ever bought, they say, “We’re full,” then I say, “What is everybody paying?” It’s like, “Nobody’s paying.” That’s how it is. As asset managers, our job is to get all of the bad tenants out and get good tenants in that have our contracts signed, are paying on time, and understand our rules and follow them.
The hardest part of owning a storage facility, especially if you buy mismanaged facilities, is getting that economic occupancy up so that the tenants that you have are good-paying tenants. For instance, the facility that we’re wholesaling in New York. If you look at this guy’s reports from ESS, he uses ESS to manage facilities. He sent us management summaries, rent rolls, and stuff like that, and everybody’s paying.
He’s at 90% occupancy and 89% economic occupancy. Essentially when you are owning a storage facility, that is your goal. The typical facilities that we buy are maybe 50% to 100% occupied, and the economic occupancy is well below 50%. We are trying to get all these tenants out and they’re all complaining, yelling at us, and putting bad reviews on Google. That’s where we get all the bad reviews because it’s like, “You raised my rates,” and this kind of stuff.
That’s 2021. In 2022, we launched the fund and started raising a lot of money. When you have a lot of money to raise, then essentially you can buy bigger deals. You could buy a lot more deals. In 2022, we bought two good sizes, big deals. We raised enough money to buy those two. In 2023, we bought three. Sixteen is what we’ve raised. These are all in the fund. My goal is to focus on the fund right now. Everybody’s coming to me saying, “Let’s partner. Let’s do deals and stuff like this.”
It’s the fund and my students. My goals are to help my students be successful, and then the fund. We’re not done with 2023. Who knows what’s going to happen and how many more we’re going to buy? These facilities are 300 doors, huge facilities. When you start buying these facilities, then this is when we started hiring more people to manage all of our facilities. We have one facility that’s in Orlando and another in Clarksville, Tennessee.
That’s a boots-on-the-ground person that goes to that facility twice a week. We have the Leesburg. They go twice a week to that facility to help us get it up and running. That’s two boots-on-the-ground people. We started in the state of Georgia. We bought two facilities in Florida. We have a boots-on-the-ground person that goes out and manages these. The way it works for us is we have Georgia, and then here’s Florida.
We have a facility here and there. We create many portfolios. These four facilities are probably within maybe one hour of each other. We have one boots-on-the-ground person that manages that little mini portfolio. We have a part-time boots-on-the-ground person that manages two up. We have six facilities in Atlanta. We have one person that manages those. Some were smaller and some are bigger. It’s like, “We don’t need that much. Go check it out once a week or something like that.” We have the one up here in Tennessee.
We have one down here in Orlando. This is a boots-on-the-ground. We have five boots-on-the-ground people that we’re managing because we have the facilities all over each other. We pay those boots-on-the-ground people $20 an hour. They go out. We have 2 full-time and 3 part-time. The goal is once a week to go to the facility, do the walkthrough, and upload.
Bonnie manages in-house and everything for the software. That’s what she does on storEDGE. When the boots-on-the-ground people do their walkthroughs and if they need something fixed, repaired, or whatever, they’re telling Bonnie, “I have a door that needs to be fixed. Can you order the screen or whatever?” This is Bonnie and the boots-on-the-ground people.
Pete is high-level managing everything. He still goes out. He trains all the boots-on-the-ground people. It is what he’s doing. His job is training all of them, getting them going, and then going out maybe once a month to go check on them, meet them, see how they’re doing, and stuff. Bonnie is in-house managing all this stuff.
Hiring Call Center People
We have a total of 2,000 doors plus. We have a lot of doors. We have three call center people that are answering the phone. We’re hiring a fourth one in training. We have four. We had Steph whom we hired in 2022. Steph is our call center. Whenever she couldn’t work, we had an after-hours person answering the phones. We had an after-hour service.
We hired another person. Steph now manages all the call center people. She trains and does an awesome job. Thank God for Steph. What we do is we meet Steph on a weekly basis. What we do with Steph is all about how can we have the call center people better on the phones. If you think about it now, we are a true asset management company. We’re only managing our own assets.
The truth is, that person that answers the phone is the person that’s going to make or break your business. That person that answers your phone has to answer your phone at all times. You must answer your phone. We have learned. If you don’t answer the phone, the people are on to the next place. They want a place to put their stuff.
The person who answers the phone is going to make or break your business. Share on XIt doesn’t care about brands or anything like this. They want the price. That’s it, “Can we afford it? Is it close to me?” The person that answers the phone, whoever’s talking, are salespeople. How can we do better about that? We have one person that is just for sales, the best person on the phones. When you call in, it’s like press 1 for sales and 2 for customer support. When they push one, it goes to the best phone person, the person that can give them discounts, price matches, and whatever it takes to get them in. That’s what that salesperson is for.
The other three people are customer support. We have 2,000 tenants. We have a ridiculous amount of tenants. They’re always like they want to pay online, move out, do this, or whatever. It’s a lot of stuff. That’s how it is. Steph was in 2022 and then we have a true call center. We have four people. We have Steph and then underneath her, we have sales and customer support. In total, it’s 4 people to answer the phones 24/7. We always answer the phones. We meet on a weekly basis to look at calls, listen to calls, and discuss occupancy. Essentially every phone call, Steph documents and tells me why they did not move in.
I want to know why they didn’t move in. Is it because we were too high? That’s what we do on a weekly basis for all of our facilities now. We’re getting good at this. We have a lot of leads coming in. We do Google Ads. We have an in-house person that does Google Ads for us, but they do all my marketing for StacyRossetti.com. That’s why you all are here then. On top of that, that same person does all of our Google Ads for us as well. We meet with them and go over that. Overall, in these people, how we went is like up to 600 doors. It was just Pete, me, and Bonnie.
After 600 doors, we added a boots-on-the-ground person to help alleviate some of the stress from Pete. He was traveling around taking care of facilities and stuff with Pete. Once we started the fun and started buying these bigger deals, that’s when we truly started adding a call center and hiring the boots-on-the-ground person to manage the facilities that we buy and stuff. That’s how it is. It’s Pete and Bonnie managing everything, the call center people and the boots-on-the-ground people. That’s how it went from 2016 until now.
Are We Going To Manage Other People’s Facilities?
“Do customer surveys have customer experience?” Yes. We have referral emails and surveys that go out. When you have sixteen facilities, there are not a lot of people honestly. There are not a lot of family-owned businesses that have sixteen facilities. There’s a good handful of them, but not a lot. We are trying to internally become like a true property management or asset management team.
Everybody’s always asking, “Are you ever going to manage anybody else’s facilities?” The truth is we got to get good at managing ours. There’s no way for us to go manage somebody else’s. We’re at 80% to 90% occupancy for all of our facilities. That’s how it is. I don’t want to bring on anybody else and then just piss them off because I see it in Facebook groups. Everybody is always complaining about ESS, call centers, and everything. That’s not us. We want to buy a lot of storage facilities and manage our own facilities. It is what we want to do.
Doug is asking, “How much do you profit per door?” There’s no way to answer that. Every facility is different. We shoot for 10% cash on cash return, but we’re typically way higher than that. Our IRR is in the 30s, but we’re shooting for the best we can. You’re going to make way more money doing this than your multifamily for sure.
“How about new construction?” We have never done new construction. In StorageNerds, the coaching program, there are a lot of people that are doing new construction, but we have not done new construction. I did a couple of new construction homes back in the day and I hated it. Honestly, I’m not good at it. I’m not good at managing all that stuff. We’re too busy to be doing that, but we are in the process of expanding. We have one facility in Florida that we’re going to be expanding on then also the one that we’re closing on in Carrollton. There’s a building that we’re converting to climate control. We’re not new construction, but we are doing conversions and expansions.
Incentives For Employees
“Do you have incentives for employees?” Yes. We do all kinds of bonuses and stuff like this. It’s all different all over the place, but we do a lot of bonuses because we want everybody to stay like Bonnie. We cannot have Bonnie leave at all. She knows this. We pay her very well. She’s part of the family. She came and stayed at our house for a week and hung out with us. We’re cutting her into the deal. We do profit share and stuff. We do all kinds of bonuses, whatever it takes for everybody to stay, make them feel like part of the family. We have a lot of people that work for us. We have a total of 30 people that work for us now. We want everybody to feel part of the family for us.
It’s very important. That’s another reason why Pete goes out to the facilities. Everybody’s like, “It’s passive income. You don’t have to go to your facilities.” The truth is, these boots-on-the-ground people are working by themselves at these facilities. That’s lonely after a while. Maybe the first couple of months, you’re like, “I got some freedom. I can do whatever I want. No drama in the companies.” The truth is, people need communication and contact. Pete does daily huddles. Every day, we’re big on daily huddles and weekly meetings. We’re making sure that we meet every employee every single week.
On top of that, Pete is also going out to the facilities on a monthly basis and checking in with every facility. He may not go to all of them that they’re looking at, but he may say, “I’m going to go drive up and go meet William and go see how he’s doing at the facility up North or whatever.” He spent the day with them hanging out, checking, and working with them. That’s how he does it as well.
Operating In Several States
“Do you do all your deals in one state?” No, we have Tennessee, Georgia, and Florida. We are here in Georgia, Florida, and then now, we’re up in Tennessee. We’re open to anywhere in the Southeast. Honestly, we’re getting to the point now where we’ll probably be all over the Southeast. We’re in the process of selling our very first facilities up here from 2016 and 2017. We’ve stabilized those. We’re going to be selling those off. Once we sell those off, we’ll be able to 1031 exchange that money for bigger deals.
We started out with $1 million or less. Now we’re typically $1 million to $3 million. I like this $1 million to $3 million range and we’ll probably stay in that for a while. If you think about it, $1 million to $3 million mismanaged facilities, not income-producing properties. Mismanaged facilities are where you can typically double or triple the value of that property over the course of the next 2 to 3 years. If we buy something for $2 million, it should be worth at least $4 million, $5 million, or $6 million when we sell it. Those are big facilities. It’s just that they’re severely mismanaged. We’re getting them $0.50 on the dollar.
The truth is with a mismanaged facility, it’s a lot of work. It’s not an income-producing property. It takes a year for you to make money on a mismanaged facility or more. I tell that to all people and everybody in my fund as well. When you put money into my fund, you will not get a distribution for eighteen months after I buy this facility.
It takes that long for us to start making money on mismanaged facilities. Everybody always says, “I want to buy mismanaged facilities,” and then I’ll show them a mismanaged facility and see that they have to come out of pocket every month for the next six months and they all freak out. Income-producing properties are cashflowing properties. Mismanaged facilities, you have to come out of pocket every single month. You make more money on the backend. Income-producing properties are a little bit of appreciation on the backend. It’s a risk level. Pete and I are higher risk level people than a lot of people.
Driving For Storage
“Where do you get the leads?” I teach this all the time. I have fifteen different ways to find storage facilities. If you buy my course, you can learn all fifteen different ways, but internally, I have ten virtual assistants that work for me and do nothing but call owners. We are doing cold calling. When I first started from 2016 to 2020, all of these facilities that I found are driving for storage.
Driving for storage is what I teach. Driving for storage equals market research. Getting out there, getting a lay of the land, and looking for storage facilities smaller facilities that are out in like tertiary markets or secondary markets. Not primary markets, not suburbs of primary markets, but out in the middle of nowhere is what I’m talking about because that’s where you’re going to be able to afford a couple of hundred thousand dollars. All the way up until I got to the fund, everything I found was driving for storage. That’s another thing.
Driving for storage equals market research. Share on XHiring Virtual Assistants
From 2020 to 2021, this is where I hired an in-house acquisitions person to go out and find my facilities. He’s the one that found the three facilities that we did not close on. He found these four facilities. After that, he left. 2022 is when I started virtual assistants. Here is where I have my ten VAs cold-calling owners and asking them if they want an offer. If somebody finds a facility outside of where I’m interested, then we give it to the student. We offer the students the deal and then I can partner with the student on the deal.
The acquisitions person worked for me for years. He found 4 to 5 facilities for us and then he moved on. He wasn’t doing anymore. That’s the finding part. I was hiring people underneath me to help me find facilities. Pete was building up the management team. The funding part was me up until 2023, then I hired Anne. If you’ve emailed me about the fund, most likely Anne emailed you back. Anne is my investor relation manager person and she’s the one that handles all my investors and all of the communication because I got hundreds of investors that I work with. She helps me with the communication and stuff for that as well.
That’s how I’ve built it all out over the past many years. You don’t have to do all this. You could own your own storage facilities and manage them. You could be this and these couple of people to manage a 1,000. Six hundred doors get a little crazy. After 600 doors, you’re like, “I need to hire somebody.” After 1,000 doors, it gets a little bit crazier. Once you get 1,500 doors-plus, it’s like, “You’re running around like a crazy person.”
Our virtual assistants are in the Philippines. We pay them $7 an hour, plus lots of bonuses. I appreciate you hanging out. Remember StacyRossetti.com and StorageNerds.com. This training session’s free. Read every episode. You’ll learn something new. The course is available. Make sure you get the course to DIY along with the Deal Analyzer. I appreciate you hanging out and I’ll see you next time. Take care.
