The Inside Self Storage Expo 2025 is coming up next week in Las Vegas, and I’ll be there.
I make it a point to attend at least one self-storage convention a year to stay sharp—tracking trends, seeing new products, and deepening relationships in the industry. Events like these are essential if you’re in or entering the self-storage business.
But today, I want to talk about something most people overlook:
Breakthroughs in business often come from outside your industry.
The Assertion
As some of you know, I am writing a book now that applies to self-storage business growth but is specifically designed for this industry. It is a unique perspective on how to use one’s mind in a creative way to create wealth.
In the early part of the book, I assert that most “breakthroughs” in an industry usually come from outside that industry.
Let me share a section from Chapter 1:
But I’ll assert here: breakthroughs in any field often come from outside that field.
The Wright brothers weren’t engineers—they ran a bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio. Meanwhile, Dr. Langley, an actual engineer, publicly declared that human flight was impossible after crashing his flying machine into the Potomac River in October 1903. Two months later, in December, those “non-engineers” flew. Sixty-five years after that, man was on the moon.
Einstein wasn’t a trained physicist when he wrote the Theory of Special Relativity in 1905. He worked in a patent office in Switzerland.
Wallace Wattles, author of The Science of Getting Rich in 1910 … was a New Thought minister.
Dr. Maxwell Maltz, a plastic surgeon, wrote Psycho-Cybernetics after realizing that external transformations didn’t change his patients’ internal self-image. Maltz showed that success in life and what someone created for themselves as possible was intimately tied to self-image.
I could go on.
These people changed the world—not because of their industry credentials, but because they saw something differently.
So, what does this have to do with your self-storage business?
Perhaps a lot. If you’re serious about growth—personally or professionally—stop limiting your education to what’s already within your lane.
Learn Outside The Lines
Wherever you may be a week, as a businessperson, owner-operator, or someone in the business of “getting in the self-storage business,” there could be more power in going outside the self-storage world to learn.
For example:
- FI terms like “cap rates” and “IRR” still make your eyes glaze over; go take a commercial real estate course.
- From 2017 to 2019, I was frustrated with self-storage online marketing results from industry vendors. So, I hired an online advertising coach who worked with digital agencies. I learned Facebook and Google ad strategies not from storage people—but from broader industries. Then, I translated those strategies to storage.
In the early days of my fundraising, I not only joined fundraising groups and organizations but also studied psychology and brain Neuroscience to see what insights I could get for working with investors.
I took classes and joined education organizations that worked in these two fields.
This helped me immensely as I talked with people about putting money in my self-storage deals and with investors after they were in the deals. For example, in the brain, when someone thinks they are losing money in an investment or someone has taken advantage of them and stolen their money, the same part of the brain fires that would fire if a saber tooth tiger was crouching, looking at them and getting ready to pounce.
Yes, a person may intellectually know losing money in a self-storage deal is not life-threatening, but on a physical level, it occurs like a life-and-death situation because of how the body feels after adrenaline and cortisol are released in the body from the brain, triggering the biological fight or flight response that part of the brain activates. This automatic brain function was necessary and required to save our lives over hundreds of thousands of years of evolution.
Do you think that would be helpful information prior to a call with investors telling them a quarter’s performance is below exaptation due to…whatever?
Almost every leap I have made as a businessperson and self-storage owner has happened as I studied outside our industry.
Expand Yourself First
If you want to grow as a businessperson and take on a bigger game in life, my training was to expand myself first.
I suggest this involves two steps:
- Expand what is possible for yourself and your life, then
- Put a new structure in place to support that larger vision of yourself.
In 2013, I created a game called “$60 million Self Storage Portfolio.”
There is nothing magic about that number; it was just a made-up game I created and talked about in the book Creating Wealth Through Self Storage.
So, the first place I was weak was actually seeing myself as someone who could play and win that game. I was nowhere near having the money or the net worth needed to win the game. I had never trained or educated myself to be able to play or win at anything like this before.
In other words, I did not have the self-image of myself as someone who could win the game, a “$60 million Self Storage Portfolio.”
So, the first thing I did was work on creating a breakthrough on who I needed to be to play that game effectively. I attended courses like Tony Robbins’s Business Mastery training. I saw and learned what people who are playing big games in the business world actually have their attention on and, just as importantly, what they do not have their attention on.
I learned how to nurture a created version of myself that was exponentially larger than anyone I had ever been before.
I learned how to be with people who would have intimidated me in the past.
Next, I learned how to attract the right people to me to fill in the gaps I needed to play and win the game I had created.
I took high-powered time management courses to be the person who can organize my 24 hours in such a way that I can play effectively the game I have created.
None of this training was “self-storage” related, but it all was absolutely necessary for me.
I got coaches.
Now, I’m not saying this to say, “Look at me.” I hope this inspires you to create a game for yourself and your self-storage business that will stretch you to become someone you are not now, then expand yourself and your structures to be that person.
In my life experience, that is where the fulfillment really is. Not in getting somewhere or “winning” the games you make up, but in who you expand yourself to be to play the games effectively.
So go to the storage conventions. But don’t stop there. Never stop expanding and growing as a person or a business owner.
If you are going to the ISS Expo 2025 and you see me, stop me and say hello and tell me about your successes and challenges in this great business of self-storage. I look forward to connecting with you.
