From Storage Units to Operations Manager! Introducing Joe Becker! | Freedom Vlog | EP. 90

Hey, everybody. Welcome to vlog. Episode number 90. It is. I'm Tina. I'm CEO of Freedom Real Estate Group. And it is my pleasure to introduce to you today our operations manager of Freedom Capital Investments, a company in our Freedom family of companies, Mr. Jo Becker. Hi. Hey, Joe.

Hello, Tina. How are you today?

Great. So if you notice, we have these. These. We chose matching backgrounds because we're both in virtual locations. We're not in the Dayton office. I'm in Georgia. And Joe, tell everybody where you're at.

I'm just outside of beautiful Charleston, South Carolina. It's a lovely day here. We avoided hurricane Ian, so I've been losing a few trees. It's been pretty nice here. Lived here for about four years, and I've been in commercial real estate for almost 30 years. My background is mainly in the self storage world, where I've held just about every job in the industry. Working properties, training manager, operations manager. I've worked for both large and small companies, and over the last 15 or so years, I've found a little bit of a niche going into smaller self storage organizations and helping them become scalable. So it's afforded me the opportunity to see a lot of the United States, including California, Massachusetts, and now here in Charleston, South Carolina. And I look forward to working in Ohio, I think at some point. It's been a challenge working virtually, but I'm getting used to it.

Yeah, I've been doing it for a while now. There are definitely times when I wish I was in Dayton in person with everybody. But, you know, we'll travel, we'll go up there. I'll be going up there for quarterly, and you'll be going back up for the end of the year. So it'll be good. All right. Thanks for that brief introduction about your background and where you're at. What do you do specifically? I said operations manager. But what does that entail for Freedom.

Capital Investments at the Freedom family of companies? We have a lot of different activity that's going on. And over the last two months since I've been here at Freedom, I found myself delving into a whole a lot of different aspects of the organization. So I almost consider myself the octopus of the organization. I've been working to free up Danny's time acquisitions. We're working on our 2023 budgets now, which has been a challenge. We are working on some other forecasting, reporting. You name it, I'm involved in it.

Yeah, that is true. And thank goodness you couldn't have come at a better time. We have a Lot of moving parts and a lot of things going on.

I never thought I would be doing a podcast.

ARM number nine.

ARM number nine. You know, the most challenging part of the job has really been some of the vendor management and tenant issues. When we talk about our multi unit buildings, one of the things we really like to do is we really like to take on the renovations ourselves through another one of our, our companies and overseeing that and working with the tenants and our management companies to try and satisfy their needs has been very, very challenging but enjoyable. I've got to know the properties and a lot of the different employees in the company and they've been very helpful and supportive and hopefully we'll be able to expand our holdings and have even more fun in the future.

Yeah, for sure. Lots of fun to be had. The experience with one of the, the multifamily in Hamilton for example, the residents there have been really have been pretty amenable to moving to the rehabbed unit. So that process has gone a lot smoother than I thought. I mean some bumps in the road of course, but they're people are usually understandable and they're getting an upgrade. So I think they, they like that. Do you have you always wanted to be in the real estate industry?

When I saw you were going to ask this question, I actually had to chuckle because I never wanted to be in the real estate industry. Oh, I fell into it by, by accident. I actually was brought up sitting on my father's law lap reading Barron's stock guide and my mother was a financial planner. So I had always planned to go into that industry. And I spent the first year of my working life actually wholesaling mutual funds to brokers over in Asia. So my day ran from, you know, 9 o' clock at night to 7 o' clock in the morning in a cubicle outside of Boston. I fell into real estate, into the self storage industry, part of real estate. Entirely by accident. I thought I was going to be taking a vacation. Little did I know it was going to be a vocation. I found myself, you know, with the years that passed, loving the business more and more. And as I became more entrenched in the first company I worked for, Storage USA, they expanded my responsibilities so that after almost 10 years there, I was the one responsible for onboarding almost all the new properties. So I would be responsible for operationally doing computer conversions and training and kind of lit a fire under me to kind of expand my horizons in property management. And also I think excited me about travel because I was always on A plane, seeing somewhere new. And where else can you work in an industry that pays for you to see the United States? It was just a wonderful marriage that I didn't anticipate when I was younger.

That's true. Like, there's so many different avenues in real estate that you can get into. Self storage. Sounds. I'm. I'm. It was one of the things that we liked about you right away when we first met you is that your background in that area. Just. We're all interested in learning the ins and outs of that and how it works. So happy to have you aboard. Final question for this vlog episode. How do you like to. Or what do you like to do and how do you like to spend your free time?

Well, as I said, you know, being in property management afforded me some time to travel, and I've really taken that to heart as I've gotten older. And I've taken to mountain climbing as, you know, climbed Kilimanjaro last year. I just came back in June from Mont Blanc in France and Italy and Switzerland. And my son and I are actually planning our next adventure. We are going to summit the highest peak in South America, which I believe is called Aconcagua.

Wow. Where in South America?

It's in Argentina.

Oh, okay. Fun.

I certainly wish that I had started earlier because the recovery time when you take on these excursions is a bit lengthy.

Yeah, that's a lot.

I enjoy traveling, of course, spending time with my family. And as anybody who's seen me on Facebook knows, I do enjoy my cats, your cats, and everybody's cats. I'm a bit of a homebody. Just, I enjoy working. So I kind of spend a lot of my downtime staring at the computer.

You have. What's your cat's name that you have now? The rescue you've had for a number of years.

Right, right. One of my rescues is Peanut, and she's sort of a Maine coon cat. And it's an interesting story. I was working in Philadelphia and my alarm system in my stor storage, one of my storage facilities out there kept sounding and I couldn't figure out whether it was a rat or a spider or whatnot. I put out all sorts of traps trying to catch this creature. I couldn't figure out what it was for weeks. And one day I was in this self contained storage building and I saw this scrawny little thing running around. I chased it down and I grabbed it with my hands. And it was this bag of bones that I. That I brought home. And she's part of my family. She's 13 years old and I'm looking over to my left. She's, she's sleeping as a 13 year old cat does.

That's sweet. Cat. One of our team members, she's got a, a dog. His name is Peanut, too. You both have your peanuts? Yeah. All right, cool. Thank you so much, Joe. Thank you for the introduction and letting everybody know a little bit about you. And we are certainly very happy to have you aboard. And you made a big splash right away as soon as you joined the team and made such a big difference. And I know that you're knee deep in asset management and underwriting another deal in the pipeline right now. So we will end this episode and thank you everybody again for watching vlog number 90 with Joe's intro. And we will end this with what we always end with is invest smart, Live happy. Live ecstatically happy. Thanks, everybody.

Bye.

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