Joe DownsCEO & Co-Founder, Belrose Storage Group. Founder, Storage Moguls.

Learning the Hard Way: My First Storage Facility

10 Jun 2026 · 1 min

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0:38

A founder describes running his first storage facility, from summer fireworks to winter Christmas trees. He walks through early mistakes and red flags he missed, lessons that shaped his approach to the business later on.

Chapters

Fireworks in the summer, Christmas trees in the winter, maybe? It was literally, it was your place. And if I look back on it now thinking the crap, again, I'll keep saying this, the crap we did there, not in a bad way, the crap, I'm like, just the stuff that happened there and the, again, red flags we avoided that we'll unpack here in a second. It just was almost hilarious. I'm like, why did I do all this? But we were just excited and we wanted our first deal. And I will say I learned— I, most of my storage career, I can relate something back to something happened at that facility.