Why Self-Storage Success Starts With Better Systems

$0 a month, 0% occupied. That's where one of my guests' ground-up development started. 9 months later, $60,000, almost $70,000 a month in revenue, 57% occupied. I gotta tell you, I wanna know what month 1 of that actually felt like, because I guarantee you it was not the highlight reel of the story. I'm Joe Downs. Welcome to the Storage Moguls Podcast. My company's acquired over 20 storage facilities and over $70 million in assets across multiple storage niches, and I've seen this business from every angle, educated hundreds of students, and learned firsthand who succeeds and why. And that's what drove us to build StorageMoguls.ai, an AI-powered community with the tools, the structure, and the guardrails to to teach people how to buy their very first storage facility. And that is exactly why we launched this podcast, to bring you the lenders, the brokers, and other industry pros like today's guest, as well as the real people who have successfully, successfully purchased their first self-storage facility so you can hear their stories and learn this business from the folks living it every day. And I am fired up about today's conversation. So let me introduce my guest, Megan Smith. Is a CPA and the CEO and co-founder of Atomic Storage Group. We got to get into that name. It's not on my list of questions to ask you, but I just thought of— I want to know where Atomic came from.

It's a great story.

Atomic is a third-party management company that now runs 180+ storage facilities in over 30 states. And Megan has started— Megan started as an onsite storage manager I think you might have to correct the record there.

No, that's correct.

Then became a CPA advising storage owners, ran her own development company, and then built Atomic into a top 15 operator nationally. Meghan, welcome to the Storage Muggles podcast.

Thank you. I'm super excited to be here.

All right. Before we get into anything, because I know I'm going to forget to ask it later because I have squirrel brain, especially when I'm talking to somebody like you, because I have a million questions and only so much time. Tell me about Atomic, just the name.

Just the name, where the name came from.

And the evolution, I just wanna know the name.

Yeah, so we used to actually hand out the book Atomic Habits, and the story that I was told to tell was that it's Atomic Habits, but that is totally false. That's not where it came from. So I wanted to name it something with an A, 'cause back in the, when we started it, it was 2019, you were listed in order alphabetically on the software websites, right? So it was that or Anaconda, 'cause I'm an '80s child, and Those were the options. So I picked Atomic. It's not a good story, but that's where it came from. And it has lived up to his name.

It is such— was Atomic Habits, was that James Clear?

Yeah, James. Yeah, that's a better story. But I like my— I like the truth.

1% better every day, right?

Yeah, yeah. But nope, it was Atomic or Anaconda and I liked Atomic better. And it sounded catchy to me and it's It's been an explosive company so far, so.

What year was that?

2019, founded it.

Who knew in 2019 you were still applying phone book rules to naming your company?

I know.

And by the way, was Aardvark Management taken?

I didn't look that deeply. I only had 2 options in my brain.

There's always the A accounting, AA accounting, AAA accounting.

That's like atomic. That sounds good, let's go. I didn't spend too much time on branding.

Hilarious. All right, before we get into it, um, as you have been briefed, we, uh, are gonna ask some true or false questions along the way. Okay. Um, so here's your first one. True or false? It typically takes 24 to 36 months for a brand new self-storage facility to reach stabilized occupancy.

Uh, historically true.

That is correct, folks. Lease-up on a ground-up self-storage development commonly runs 2, 3 years to hit stabilized occupancy. Stabilized is gonna be defined, uh, 85 to 90%.

Yeah.

Um, and of course that makes it all much more, all much, all that much more impressive, tripping over my words here, that you did it in 9 months on a deal we'll get into in a little bit. All right. So let's start with the number that still doesn't feel real to me. You co-founded Atomic. What was the other option?

Anaconda. Anaconda.

You did right by Atomic.

Thank you.

You co-founded Atomic in 2019. That's the same year we bought our first self-storage facility.

That's awesome.

I very unimpressively announced in the opening here that we bought 20, I don't know what it is now, 22, 23.

That's very impressive.

Facilities.

That's very impressive.

Not compared to the 180 locations that you manage in the same amount of time. You are ranked 12th. I said top 15, but I think the number's 12 nationally on the Inside Self Storage top operators list. 180, like I said, plus locations. 180 plus locations, 35,000 to 40,000 units, somewhere in there. Over 30 states. I want people to understand this isn't theory for you. You've built this from the ground up, literally. So let's start. That blows me away in the same amount of time. Now I get that you can, and you probably did take over, maybe were there mergers and acquisitions in there? I don't even know. Was this one facility at a time?

Because you did that too. No, that would be too easy and I don't do anything easy. So it was not. It was the first year, 2, 3 years was one and twos, right? It was We opened right when COVID hit. One of the— so I, my background, I started as a manager, as you said, and then—

Oh, we'll get into that. Let's not jump ahead.

Well, so go ahead. Sorry.

Go ahead. So it was onesie-twosie?

Yeah, it was onesie-twosie.

Was there a point where you hit momentum?

It was, it was mine. Just our ones. Like, we started Atomic because I owned— I developed a property in New Orleans and converted. So it was mine. And then we picked up Like one of my partners had a store, right? We picked that one up and then we picked up another one. And then it was, it was early COVID days and people were building and needed, needed a good management company to lease up. So it was 1s and 2s those first few years. And as soon as we'd get 'em, we, they'd sell 'cause COVID was just paying crazy rates, right? And then once we hit about 2022, so a couple years into it, we started getting portfolios. So then we started getting 10s and 15s and then we picked up—

Okay.

30 and 40 kind of at a time, and that just doubled our company. And it was a scary time because growth can break, but we held pretty well. And then we kept just getting some portfolios, some 1 and 2s. I have a heart for like the guy who builds the property and can't or doesn't want to compete with what you have to do to run a successful property right now. It's not build it and they will come anymore. You have to be an expert in a lot of areas. So I like I like the people who put in their blood, sweat, and tears to get their one property and they really want to make sure it's cared for. In addition to, you know, the groups that raise money and go out and buy 20, 30, 40 properties as well and just want a really good partner in the operational side. So try to always balance our books so that not any one person is more than 10, 12, 15% of our business so that we're not all eggs in one basket, but we're still serving, you know, the people who just have one that want you to care.

Yeah, no, that's great. That's smart too, because yeah, you certainly have some risk there if you have a concentration in 1 or 2 or 3 even clients. Looking back, it's midway through 2026. This is your 7 years into explosive growth. It's explosive.

Mm-hmm.

What's the one number that still surprises you when you, when you sit here today and you look back?

All of it. So I'm like, I think of myself as an accountant far too often. And then I'll go to shows and people like, I don't know, it's just funny. Like, it's just, it's always interesting to me, the perception of the industry. But I still think of myself as an accountant. I forget how big we've grown the company. I forget how much we have. I don't know. I just wake up and do the best I can every day. And it's, it's cool to see it. It's been good growth. It's been good leads. Our lead flow is really good. We grow well. We're, you know, have a good reputation in the industry. We get a lot of referrals. We've hardly ever done any marketing at all. It's almost all been word of mouth, which is really a cool testament to like—

It's the best marketing you can have because it's a testament to you're actually effectively doing the job, right?

Yep. Even people that, you know, transition to a different, like a REIT company for their exit or whatever, will still recommend us to other people, which is, I think, like It's such a, it's such a great testament.

Yeah, that, that's, that is impressive.

Um, what's—

you're a CPA by training, by background. We'll get into that. What's— is there a correlation you see between your background, who you are? I mean, you know, CPAs, engineers, pilots, you guys all, all have similar traits. I have none of them, so I don't know what they are, but I know you have similar traits. Um, what, what is it about that that makes you a good manager? Where's the correlation?

Yeah, so I, I'm a little weird. I did not go to accounting because I liked accounting. I liked that it was right or wrong, but I also double majored in marketing, so I went for both, which is like really— most people do not do that, right? I like business. I always have. Like, I grew up selling rocks to my— in my grandmother's hair salon. And I would like— I was always hustling something, right? I was always trying to make—

You say rocks?

Rocks. I'd paint rocks because they were free and I was a cute kid and I would go sell them to the ladies getting their hair done and I'd make like a quarter a rock, right? And I had zero cost in that and I'd make a quarter and I'd make money enough to go get ice cream on the weekends.

How did you market the rock?

I'd go—

Was it just your smile?

Yeah, just go and I'm like, do you like this? Blue? Like, oh, I love that blue. Like, oh, I like your nails, they're red. Do you want a Red Rock to match your nails? Like, don't you love this? And I'd go, I did that growing up. I'd make necklaces in high school. Like, I was always trying to make money, right?

You were an entrepreneur already.

Yeah, I was always an entrepreneur. So, when I started, when I went to college, I thought if I could learn the number side and the marketing side, I could probably do anything, right? I could understand both of it. So, that's why I went for accounting. I got my CPA because you might as well. Once you go through all the classes, you might as well take that step. I did tax for about 5 years, and that was, that was boring. I did not like it. It was not fun. You couldn't help anyone. You couldn't talk to people. And then I knew storage because I managed it, and niching as an accountant was big then. I had kids. I wanted to be home with them. And I was going to niche in photographers because I thought it was more fun. And a friend of mine said, storage is an incredibly lucrative industry. You know the operations. You really need to focus. And I was like, But storage is boring. I don't want to do that. And he was like, no, it's— you need to focus on that. And thank goodness he told me that because that launched— I started— I called myself the self-storage CPA. I started doing accounting. I'd do operational audits. I'd go travel around and help people just make more money, right? Because I could understand like the levers to pull to, to get the results that they wanted. And then took all the CCIM classes, started developing, learned the underwriting piece of it. The analysis, did conversions in 2017 through 2019, and then needed management because that was an important piece to get the returns to our investor. Because if we're not managing it well, we're not making the asset work right. And it was, it was the worst job I ever had. It was terrible. I hated management. I hated the grind of it. It was hard. It was never-ending. The managers would quit. I'm like, this is the worst. Why am I doing this? And I interviewed a bunch of management companies and I was like, we have to hit these returns and we have to hit them by pro forma. And I can't trust that somebody else is going to drive as hard as I will. What do I do? And I was not sure what to do. And there was 2 other people I had in my life at that time. They said, we'll help you, we'll do the operations, you do the accounting. So we partnered together. We've since, you know, ownership changes. So changes have happened. But that's what led to Atomic was needing really good management for the ones that I owned. and not really being able to give up that control to somebody else. So instead, I built what I wanted a management company to be. So everything we build is from that owner side first. It's super transparent. It's very open. It's very collaborative. It's very respectful that they own it. It doesn't need to be our way. You know, we're the management company, but we're still— we're running your asset, your investment, your reputation of you telling your friends and family, invest in me, I'll give you the returns. And that's our job to make sure that that happens. So That's kind of how we built Atomic. And I think that's a big part of, of why we've grown, how we've grown, because we've really approached it from that owner side and been very transparent.

I think I'm going to throw my show notes out the window here because everything you're saying, I have so many more questions. I want to ask you how you went from 0 to 70,000 in 9 months. But now I find myself more curious about how you went from, I hate this, to I should build a company around this.

Yeah, I still kind of hate it, but it won't let me go.

Okay, well, maybe we'll unpack that as we go here. So, um, so you took over a development, it sounds like, or was this your development?

Yeah, no, we took over. It was a third-party project and they picked us to manage it. And, um, and it—

So they got the CO, they opened the doors. Were you the first manager?

Yes, we were the first third-party management. Um, it was sold— oh gosh, I think at 10 months they sold it for what they expected at year 4, right? It just took off. That was the fastest lease-up I've ever seen.

What do you attribute to this? When was this? What stage was your company at? Were you operating on all cylinders? How much did you have to do with this? Was it the timing? Was it the location? I mean, sure, all of it mattered.

I think all of it. I think a lot of timing. It was in Florida, in South Florida. There wasn't much around it. It was a really good location. They fought They had to put in like a turn lane. They fought hard, they picked well, they built quality. So the asset looked really nice. It was in a really good location. There wasn't a lot of competition around it. And it was right when COVID was spiking. So rates were just soaring up, demand was soaring up. They had some really big units. So they had a lot of options for people. The way that they built it had a lot of options and it just took off that thing. I've never seen that property lease up so quickly. And I think some of it was like we did a lot of pre-market We had our, you know, everything set up. We had all of our marketing set up, our social, our signage, our systems, our, you know, hired a really good manager who was like aggressive and loved to close, loved to sell. So I think there was, it was, it was just one of those perfect timing stories that a lot of things went in the right direction. And the owners were so kind, like they paid us out the full contract, they gave us a bonus, they sold it within 10 months, and we're able to turn around and flip that money. And it was good. It was a really good success story to be a part of.

That's really neat. I just wanted to hear about it because when I read that, I was like, what?

I know.

That's unheard of.

We'd look every day and I'm like, how many units did we rent today? What is happening?

Yeah, uh, that's fantastic.

Yeah.

Um, before we move on, what, what did you believe about this business in like, say, the first year that turned out to be wrong?

Oh, I thought it was boring, uh, but I've not been bored a day. Not yet. And I've been in it This is my 20th year in storage, so it's a long time now and it's not been boring. I think it's something I saw somebody post on LinkedIn yesterday that they just raised rates from their couch, right? And like, people make it seem like it's really easy. I just press a button, it's storage. I do it from my couch, I do it from my phone. Sure. And also not at all. Not at all. Right. So like, we have—

You hit the button from the couch, but that's— there's a lot more that goes into it.

Kind of. Yes, there's a lot more that goes into it. Right. Like, Are all the ships moving in the right direction and are all the little inches correct? So are you pricing correct? Is your discount right? Is your social correct? Are you closing the deal? Is your script right? Like, there's always something more you can do. It's not complicated in that there's a lot of moving parts, but there's a lot of things you can do to make it a little bit better. And storage can always be a little bit better. And that's why it's beautiful, because you have 30-day recurring contracts that you can adjust rates and levers and timing and price in new people. price out old people, adjust them within 30 days, to some extent cut expenses depending on traditional or manned. With AI coming, there's more resources and availability for cutting expenses, improving just a ton of things, right? Like just being more lean. And then what we have to do, which is provide a lot of data and reports, we now have like all of our information feeds into a data warehouse that we have Claude sitting on top of so we can just pull from That, whereas we used to have to download 1,000 spreadsheets and slice and dice, now we can just sort of pull out the data and then look at it. We had an issue the other day. We couldn't figure out a problem with a phone line, and we used Claude to figure it out, and it helped us solve it, right? So something that would've bottlenecked us for weeks, it was like, so it's a cool business. It's—

You're speaking my love language with Claude there. Yeah.

Um, yeah.

And I think that's the thing people maybe miss or don't understand. I mean, you didn't start with a 180-facility company. You all, all of everything you just said in the last 30 seconds was developed and learned through trial and error and process and ups and downs over the last 6, 7 years, I'm sure.

Yeah. I started with 2.

Um, right. Um, and that's where most people are right now.

Yeah.

Right. They're either looking for their first one or they have 1 or 2 and they've, Got some doubts about management and, yeah, and where they're headed. And we'll get into that in a second. But before we do, I wanna switch gears here. Um, it's long overdue for a true/false question. So true or false, the 5 largest publicly traded self-storage REITs combined own less than 25% of all self-storage facilities in the United States.

Fair.

True or false? That is true, folks. Self-storage remains one of the most fragmented commercial real estate asset classes. The large public REITs are a small slice of the total facility count nationally. All right.

I want to say there's only like, what, 12% that have third-party management or something? I don't remember the number. It's pretty low. I'm sure somebody knows it, but it's not very—

Is that right? That's not a stat.

It's a pretty small number that uses third-party management. Yeah, surprisingly so.

That's interesting. So the REITs manage themselves. So in addition to that third party, that's fascinating.

Yeah, it's starting to consolidate a lot too. Like state associations are starting to fill it, but it's still a pretty small number compared to how many properties are out there.

Yeah, that's really interesting. And by the way, this has been gnawing at me because you said it's boring a few times and then you said it's not boring. And I just want to Give everyone the permission to be okay with it. It is boring. They're metal boxes, but boring is sometimes sexy.

It should be really boring. I think it should be boring.

Right, it should be, but at the same time, it should be sexy.

But it's kind of fun. Yeah. The business stuff should be boring, predictable.

Exactly. Yeah, exactly. All right, I wanna go back to before any of this existed, before Atomic, before you had your CPA license. You said you started as an onsite self-storage manager, and that's actually the seat a lot of people listening are afraid to even approach right now. So let's talk about how you actually got here because the path wasn't CEO of Atomic Storage on day one. So what did that first onsite manager job teach you that, let's say, a spreadsheet never could? About this business?

So it was a new build. These guys, there were 3 investors that built it, and they just wanted to build it and knew nothing and did not want to deal with it. So they hired me.

So they hired someone with no experience who knew nothing?

Yes, fresh out of college, and said, figure this out. And that's how I learned storage. So nobody taught me, nobody was there. I got on Inside Self Storage, I got on the Self Storage Talk forums. I read, I learned.

What year was this?

2006. Yeah.

Okay.

2006. And just kind of figured it out and talked to people and figured out how to price it and discount it and got a website at some point and just read online and learned, learned that way. And that's, that's kind of how I started it and then got my CPA license and then Just, you know, over time picking up. I'd go to shows. I remember, so I went to a trade show one time and I sat in on a presentation of how to do phone skills training. And then I sold a consulting job teaching them how to do phone skills training like the next week, 'cause I learned it in Vegas, right, at the show. And then I—

You were quite the entrepreneur.

Yeah.

And you're also answering all the questions I was about to ask you. So yeah, so you, so you became— that's why I wanted to dive in it. So you, you, you're out of, fresh out of college, ambitious. You're figuring out how to run a self-storage facility for 3 guys who don't know how to run a self-storage facility, but obviously could build it. They were developers, I'm guessing?

No, they just hired a contractor who built it who had never built one before.

So nobody involved in this facility— that's incredible. Uh, then you become a CPA because you graduated with an accounting degree.

Yeah, and an accountant walked into the storage property one day and said, why are you working here? Why don't you go work in an accounting firm? And I was like, that's a good idea. So I went to do that.

Who said this to you?

Just an accountant who rented a storage unit. We were talking and I told him I had a degree and he said, go work in an accounting firm. And I was like, that's a good idea. I think I'll do that.

And you did that.

And I did that.

But then you You brought your— now your CPA back to the self-storage space. Were you working? Were you still working in self-storage when you were getting the CPA?

So I was working at a tax firm when I got my CPA license and I was doing consulting. So the person who built— the contractor who built the property that I managed, he owned a self-storage property and him and I kept in touch over the years. I would do consulting for him, so I'd go audit his property, right? Walk around, check the units, and I'd trace the money from the system to the bank. Make sure nobody was, was pocketing cash. So I would do that once a quarter for him. And then I worked in tax for 4 or 5 years, and then I had kids and I wanted to be home with my kids. I didn't want to work tax season. So I started my own CPA firm, which was just bookkeeping for self-storage. I think I did tax returns for a year and I was like, this is horrible. And then I started just doing accounting and consulting for only self-storage properties. After that.

Okay. And then, so now that you, you've, you're, you're, you've, you're gaining experience, you've got your sea legs in self-storage, now you're a CPA, you're getting your sea legs there. Now you're becoming pretty dangerous. Not that you weren't before. What, what's the first thing that you— I meant that as a compliment.

I got it. I took it that way.

All right, good. What's the first thing you noticed About as a CPA who has now been doing audits, as you started to consult, because I think you said you started to do that first for other self-storage owners. What's the— what did you see operators continually get wrong? Like, what just jumps out at you?

Oh my gosh. That was the time that we were preaching raise your rates and sell tenant insurance because I don't even think tenant protection was a thing then. And like, get a website and answer the phone appropriately. Like, People, most people were running it very, very loose, right? They would hire some person to do something. They would have their way of doing it. They didn't adapt to anything that was kind of a little more of a better way of running things then. And I feel very old. It was still like, get websites, raise your rates. So many inappropriate leases that weren't compliant with state law. Late fees, not in compliance with state laws. Like, it just was, it was ridiculous. There was a lot, a lot of people built one, they weren't really paying attention, they had other jobs. So the person running it just sort of was chilling, like taking naps and not really doing anything. It just, there was just so much more room to make things improve the business that they already had, so much room. So I did that for Maybe 5 years, traveled around. I did like an audit in Los Angeles. The city acquired a right of way to build a railroad or something that owned a property that a third party managed. So then I had to audit the third party for the city government. It was cool. Set up auditing programs for different people. Like, I got to do all sorts of things. It was just— it was a lot of fun to be able to sit and help and show, like, look at their whole— I'd look at their whole business and I would just sit and talk to the manager and say, So what do you do? And then what do you do? And then what do you do? And then what do you do? And we'd look at all of it from like how they marketed, how they did their accounting, how they sold, how they looked at the property, did maintenance repairs. Like we would find units that were there that nobody— they weren't in the system. I'm like, how does nobody see the— it's right there, you guys. Like, how'd you miss that? So it was just a lot of fun to travel around and see all the different ways people would run their business. And I'd take little lessons from here or there, you know, and improvements and bring them to another property.

That's, that's so interesting. Um, not sure any of it had to do with a CPA background. Well, the audit.

The audit.

But, 'cause the rest of it was like marketing, legal, business development, but the audit. Um, so you really learned this business from the inside out. You learned it by looking at what everyone else, the mistakes everyone else was making just by seeing how they operate, different operators. That, that's, am I wrong in that? That's my takeaway as I'm listening to you.

Yeah. That's how I learned it. Yep. I'd go just poke around in other people's businesses and see what they were doing.

That is so fascinating. And then you ran a development company, Safe Space Development, from 2016 to 2022, before Atomic, before co-founding Atomic, or at least you started it. What was, how did you, obviously you had Leased-up developments, but where did— how did you get your— find yourself involved in actually developing?

Yeah, so I, I had set some goals for myself and I wanted to own, right? Like most people listening, they're like, I want to own. How do I do this? Like, what do I do? I knew the operations, I knew the accounting. I'm like, how do I get ownership? Like, what's the next thing here? So, um, I knew conversions were good, just going to shows, and I would drive around. I made a list of, of buildings and I went drive around and looked at them, and I had no idea what I was looking at. I was like, There's a building. Like, what am I supposed to be looking for here? And the guy that built the property that I worked for in college, we kept in touch over the years. I did consulting for him. He was a contractor. He had a few partners. They were starting a development syndication company, and he wanted me to manage their asset. So he called me and he said, hey, you can earn your way to equity if you want to help manage this for us. I wasn't managing any properties then. I was just doing consulting, traveling around. I'd do accounting. My life was great. I worked like 4 days a month. It was awesome. Yeah, it was great. I'd travel with my kids, like we were having a fun time. I said, equity's on the table, right? Like, I'm not doing this for the, for the chance in the future. So I got a little bit of equity in a deal. They, they had identified the deal. They, it was already underway whenever I came in the room. So that was the first one I managed. And then I, I liked that piece of it. So I took all the I taught myself, right? Like, I learned from him and the construction piece and then took all the CCIM classes in Florida to learn like commercial real estate underwriting and how to do this. And then we found another deal in Texas with the same group, did that conversion, ended up selling equity in one and selling the asset on the other one in conversion. But that's what kicked off Atomic. Like, while I was doing that piece, I had to manage it. So then I had to build a legitimate management company, and then management just took off. Like, I've always liked the development side better, but it's just never— it wasn't the path I was supposed to take. I think the management was like, that was the path of it, which is really— it's like I say, I don't like it, but it's fun. It's people, it's numbers, it's marketing, it's personalities.

It's—

you get to like talk to owners who are always cool, and that's always fun. You get to like figure out how to make things better, which I really enjoy doing that. And sometimes people even thank you, which is really nice. Like not all the time, but sometimes.

Yeah. Well, so that's such a— so fascinating. And I love how you just found yourself maybe on purpose, maybe by happenstance.

Not on purpose. It was accidental.

Okay, there you go. Infiltrating every kind of piece of this business, every angle, every way to approach it, and you found yourself involved in it. And it's such a fascinating way to learn the business. And so folks, for Meghan, the path was the front counter at a storage facility, then the books, then the buildings, then the whole business. And there's no shortcut in that story, but there's also no gatekeeping. Every layer of it is learnable. And, and that's what I want listeners to understand is that there's so many different ways to get into this business and learn this business. And look at how much you learn by operating your own facility. It's just fascinating. And for others. Megan, true or false? Self-storage has one of the lowest average operating expense ratios of any major commercial real estate asset class.

True. Sure.

It is true. Self-storage typically runs leaner than multifamily, office, or retail on a percentage of revenue basis. All right, um, I want to name something directly because I think it's the single biggest reason people never bring in outside help running their facilities. We didn't, as you know. Uh, full disclosure, uh, my company, Bellrose Group, is a client of Atomic. We've, um, we've had multiple managers in the past, uh, including self-managed. So I just want to put that out there. Um, and, but that also— and I'm introducing that here for a reason, um, because we at Bellrose didn't really trust outside management. Um, We had looked at it. We had lit— we had, we did our research. We talked to people. This is over the years, not, not in the last year. And frankly, for the facilities that we were buying, the size of them, you really couldn't find— now maybe we just didn't find you, but at the time, and I'm talking 2019, '20, '21, '22, '23, '24, all the way up until about a year or two ago. Did we, did we really start to accept the fact that, hey, maybe these third-party managers have, have outpaced us? Maybe they are better even though they're not managing their facility, because no one will ever care like you, the owner. That's the mindset you have. These are my words, by the way. I'm not speaking for everybody. Um, but in the last few years, we did notice that, you know what, not only have— has Third-party management at the smaller facility level, you know, under 40,000 square feet, let's say. Not only have they caught up in management, but they've surpassed in some cases a lot of what even we could do ourselves. And then on top of that, we educate a lot of students, and so we talk to them. We're the first-time buyers. We're constantly in front of them. Then of course, we're networking with others. And I tell you all of this to say there's a lot we hear out there. We know what's going on in the industry, maybe not at the REIT level, but at every level below that. And there's a fear we hear a lot. If I hire a management company, I'll lose control, I'll lose margins. Certainly you lose some margin. I have to pay you, but will I lose margin? In other words, can you increase the margin such that you're paying for yourself? That's the question we ask ourselves, right? And then some, because ideally, we're not just trying to free up our hands. We're trying to hopefully put our business, the operations, the control, the brains of our business where it matters, where the rubber meets the road, in more capable hands. So, what's the actual worst case an owner pictures when they hand off management to you? Is the fear— the fears that I just talked about, are they ever right?

That's a great question. And I couldn't do it right, so I started my own. I don't recommend everyone—

It's a bad way to sell your company.

That's not my recommendation, because guess what? It's real hard. Um, it takes a long time. But I— that was my fear too, so I really, really get it. I understand it. I went through the same journey and process. And I couldn't quite overcome my own fear. So, what I've seen from our clients, because we have this conversation all the time, the ones that want a partnership. So, it is a, you have to pick the right company for you, and everyone has their own flavor, right? So, like, we, we are a really good fit for some people. We're a really bad fit for some people. And that's, that's fine. There's a lot of companies out there. You have to—

Unpack that for me. Yeah. Give me 1, 2 examples of where you're a great fit.

Yeah.

And 1 or 2 where maybe you're not.

So we're big on the relationship. We want to make sure that we're doing the right thing for everyone. We want somewhat of a partnership, right? So we have some give and take. We're going to be creative on fixing things. We had one of our district managers, we needed power lines cleared, so she called the— or we needed trees cleared. She called the power company and said it was impeding on it and got it done for free and saved like $20,000 for the owner. So we will work really hard. What we're not is very buttoned up and corporate. Like, we're professional, but we're not going to be like— I have a hard time when the relationship is just transactional. So if you're looking for a very transactional relationship, that's probably not the best fit for us, right? Like, there's—

What's an example of that?

People who approach the asset as like black or white. At the end of the day, it needs to be the bottom line, and that is all that matters. forsaking any customer relations, any Google reviews, any way of treatment of customers. Sometimes if they got themselves into a situation that they have to have unachievable results, like, and that's what they're demanding, right? So like rates have to be just so high because the asset just wasn't purchased well. I'm not interested. Like, we can't, we can't do the unachievable, right? That's not going to work out well for us. People who approach the relationship as like the beating with a stick and you'll just work harder, that does not work for me. That's not what we're trying to get. We will do our very best. We will be a good partner. We will show up, you know, we will continue to improve. We like a good conversation. We like realistic expectations. We like clarity around what those expectations are for, for our customers.

Sounds like there's a lot of collaboration between you and the owner.

As there should be, right? Like, as there should be.

That's what you prefer.

Yeah, it, um, that works well for us because, uh, we like that. We want to make sure we're, we're hitting the mark in the right way. Um, we've had some customers— the only time it really doesn't work with us is like if you really can't let go of control. You want to hire a company, but you want to retain all the control and be in it with them. That's not going to work. Like, you have to be able to let the professional do the thing, be there, but in the seat of the client and understand, like, we get to make our decision. So we have some people that they want to be on meetings with the site manager, right? It's like, no, that's our job. Like, we need to be able to do these things. So that doesn't work well for us when somebody wants to stay too much in the seat and still control it, but have the management company in place. Like, you can't have 2 drivers in the seat, so make sure that you're ready for that. And the ones that work best realize, like, maybe they're not the best at managing, or they don't like it, or they're not ready for it, or it's just not a good use of their time and talents. They're better suited to go do what they do, which is learn, buy deals, improve, raise money, underwrite things, right? Like, that's the better use of their time to grow their portfolio, and they want somebody to take the asset that they've created and get it to the finish line every single day. Because management is an everyday show up and do the job. It is a very different hat than the owner growing the portfolio or the asset manager. So just understanding that difference, like, that's a great client for us. Like, you guys are great clients for us. You show up, you care, you give us feedback. We're on the same team, we're moving forward. But you respect that we're the management company and we respect that you're the client. And it's a really good relationship.

Yeah, well, we respect that we are outclassed by companies like yours. So, um, well, no, and it's important that you said that, and it's important that you know that, because what I heard is, you know, you've built a company that has a unique ability. I'm a big unique ability guy. If you've heard of Strategic Coach, or Dan Sullivan, um, wrote the book Who Not How. It comes down to unique ability and doing what you should be doing and outsourcing and delegating what you should not be doing. But in that delegation, trusting that who you've delegated it to is the expert. That's why you delegated it. So that's where the collaboration comes in and not the micromanagement or the situation you described earlier, which is, you know, you want to hire a management company, but you still want to control everything. That's like, sounds like, you know, management name only, not actually a collaboration of, uh, I'm the asset manager and you're the facility manager, uh, which I think is the, the healthier relationship. Um, switching gears, there's a scenario that I was briefed on that, um, I'd like you to shed some light on if possible. Um, you took over management for an unnamed REIT. Um, so you picked up, I don't know who the owner was, but you picked up management of this facility, of a facility. Um, and the occupancy was 80% when you took over. And you guys, uh, I don't, I don't know over what time frame. I'd love you for you to tell me, but you took it from 80% to 95%, and the revenue jumped 220%, which is incredible. What was the REIT actually missing operationally that you saw, and what were the changes you made there?

Yeah, that was an interesting one. So the owner was a single facility owner. I believe he had an SBA It was coming due. He had a REIT managing it. They also had other assets in that town, and they would not raise his rates. They would not do rate increases. They wouldn't. They had people so far under, and he went to bat with them, and they said, that's outside of the algorithm. We will not do it. From his story, right? This is coming from him. So he was extremely nervous because he had to break contract, rebrand, start website from scratch, start SEO from scratch. On their pro forma of their algorithm, they were not going to hit his marks and he was going to be in trouble in the business. So he had a hard choice. Which company do I choose? How do I do this? Do I do this myself? I have a time clock on me. What do I do? So he chose us, trusted us with it. We went in, we, you know, saved him as much money as he could on rebranding, resigning. We coached the manager who— he was amazing. The manager was like, He had just a really good heart for customers and was able to talk to people. So we coached him on like how to have that rate increase conversation, like make sure all that was good. We pushed up street rate to right under kind of where the market was, but that gave us so much room to raise rates. So we set that anchor high. So if people looked and got, you know, $150 rate increases, which is what they were going to get, they could still look online and see they were saving. You know, 15% under where we were today. So we kind of had to set all those things up. And then we sent those rate increases and held our breath because we couldn't lose occupancy over it. And we, I think, got one negative review online out of, you know, hundreds. And I think maybe had one move out over it. So we were able to just amplify his, his actual cash collected very quickly with 30 days notice. And then poured into SEO, adjusted street rates where they needed to be, got his occupancy up pretty quick, and he was actually able to sell it to his friend and get himself— he worked out his deal. So it was a success story for him, but it needed—

What a great story.

Yeah, it just needed like— it needed the attention of the site, right? It needed micro attention, not an area algorithm.

Yeah, that's an interesting, um, that is a really interesting insight. An area algorithm versus individual attention. I love that. Um, you've said storage is a data business, uh, length of stay, cost sourcing, marketing spend. Is there, is there one KPI you wish every new owner tracked from day one?

I am a fan of cash in your bank. So like, how much money is going in your account at the end of the day? You can get really— there's leading, right? That tells me what's going to happen. There's lagging, which is cash in the bank. It's kind of the last one. You can get really into all the nuances of everything. We have data for days. We were looking yesterday at our number of phone calls and our closing rate and average call time and answer rate. And, you know, how does that compare with our online sales and with the return ROAS on ad And I mean, you can get into the weeds of looking at all the things and not really knowing what's driving it. If you're going to look at one thing, how much money did you actually collect? Like, was it more or less? Was it what you expected? And then just start tracing back from there. So if you're not collecting it, was it in bad debt? Fix auctions. If it wasn't in bad debt, did I not rent enough units? Why not? Fix phones, fix website, fix marketing. If that wasn't it, how's the site look? Is it clean? Are the signs there? Do the doors open? Are my units rentable? Like, I just want to see, did I make more money than I did last month? And then I start going back and tracing it backwards. That's kind of how my brain works. You could look at all the leading. Once you get good at it, then you start getting as far ahead as you can go because then you can predict because you've gone backwards so much. But I think it's better, especially if you're newer, To start with reality and then start tracing it backwards as far as you can and seeing where the breaks are and just fix one thing at a time. Like, you don't have to come in and try to fix it all or understand it all. Just look at, you know, just start looking at one thing at a time. And if you're, if you're occupied and your cash isn't good, are people just not paying? Start calling. Like, like the things are pretty easy. You know, they're— people want these like, these like sexy, exciting fixes, but usually it's pretty. It's pretty simple.

It's blocking and tackling. Yeah. But I love how you lay it out there. That just makes so much sense. There's a logical process to it.

Yeah.

All right. So folks, the fear is real, as you just heard, but the data says the opposite of what people assume. The right operator doesn't cost you control. They hand you the numbers you were never tracking in the first place in a lot of cases. And if you were just listening to everything Megan Megan just said, I promise you, if you're listening and question— I, I would be questioning whether or not you're tracking all that and doing what Megan just laid out. Megan, true or false, a cost segregation study can let a self-storage owner depreciate a large share of their property in 5, 7, or 15 years instead of the standard 39-year commercial schedule. I want you to lean back into your Uh, tax accounting days to answer this one.

I'm gonna say true.

Of course it's true. Yes, cost segregation is a well-established strategy for accelerating depreciation, folks, on qualifying components of a commercial property, and it's a natural one for a CPA guest to speak to directly.

Of course.

Let's get tactical for a second. I want to break down the actual buckets that run a storage facility day to day because most first-timers Have never seen this laid out. So you've got 3 management models at Atomic. We'll call them— maybe this might not be exactly the verbiage you use, but let's, um, the categories would be traditional management, hybrid, and remote. Um, and I want to use that as a framework here. So walk me through those 3 models. Traditional being the full onsite staffing. Hybrid, uh, I guess roughly defined as onsite during peak and then remote off-peak, and then remote fully offsite call center and, you know, automation-driven. How does a first-timer, a first-time buyer, know which one fits their facility?

That's a great question. If you can staff, and if you can staff by size, revenue, actual office space for somebody to go to. I think that's always better. So a person in the office, 9 times out of 10, it's going to give you the bang for your buck. It's usually better, especially if you're in lease-up. If you're buying a fairly full, stable property, you probably don't need somebody sitting there unless there's heavy maintenance or it's in an area that would attract crime or things like that, right? So you might need the person there for security. I— the industry kind of swung from like live-on-top apartments to like, now we can just be in the office, then to like, why do we need people at all? And then they were like, oh right, we kind of do need people, right? So it's kind of come back a little bit to it's still a people business. I've been at stores and I've seen people walk up, read the sign, pull the door, and walk away. So we did an analysis of our portfolios. It's probably a year ago now, and we had like 11 more rentals a month on average at a staff store than an unmanned store. So there is, there is a benefit to having a person, the right person in the office for sure. If you can afford it, if the property makes sense. Now you can still do very well unmanned and we have all the models. So sometimes we'll staff, like you said, peak hours, we'll staff one location or an annex, you know, that person can run an annex, or we just go truly remote and the call center runs it. We have a remote property manager level built into our company. So they do. Like walkthrough processing. They call people back, they deal with issues like they're the remote property manager. So the call center is not inundated with dealing with that and the district manager doesn't have to. So you're— the industry has kind of split the customer operations of a store, which is rentals, issues, credits, questions, payments, right? And the site issues of the store, which is walkthroughs, units, lawn fencing, those kind of things. So So those are kind of the 2 components of how you run your store. How do you staff both of them? So if you staff it, that one manager will do both. If you split it, you need a call center to do the customer part, and then you still need a site person to do the walkthroughs and things like that. So the smaller properties we've done well, we built remote operations like well before everybody else did, and it's truly remote. So our first property we managed was Louisiana. The second was Maryland. The third was Idaho. The 4th was upstate New York, and then we infilled. So like, we started that we had to get on a plane to go to a property, right?

Right.

So we kind of learned how to do this from afar early and then built it in, and then the whole industry switched to remote, but we were kind of ahead of it. And that's what— that was part of what helped us grow. So as you're looking at what model is better for you, if you can afford a person, Do it. Even if you're in lease-up, you can do that for a couple of years and then phase it out. So it's not like you have to live with one choice or the other choice. We've staffed unmanned, we've unstaffed manned, we've done hybrid. We mix it up depending on what's happening at the store at the time.

I'm going to ask you a question I know you can answer, but I want to see how you respond to it. When is self-management actually the right call instead of hiring a third-party manager?

No, that is a— that's a good question. So if, um, because we have had some people we've talked to that I'm like, you need to just manage it. Like, don't hire anyone because you're never going to be happy.

So, uh, what's an example of that?

Yeah, when—

or what— not the actual facility or the person, but what were the conditions surrounding it?

So if it is, um, if it is so small that it is a stretch for you to hire a third-party company to begin with, and they can't They can't miss the mark, not even one unit, right? Like they have to get every single thing right. That's too much pressure. And if you live close or you have the time, that's probably a good model for you to continue to manage yourself until you grow to the point it makes sense to have a third party manage it. If it is something that you're not getting back more than you're giving, so it's not that hard for you to manage it, but you feel like you might just need a third party just because that's what people say you need, but it's not really— you kind of enjoy it and it's not hard for you, then don't hire a third party, right? Like, you're not going to be happy with it because you're going to feel like you're paying for something you can be doing anyway. The only ones that are hard for us really are like if somebody's been doing it their way for years and they really don't want to change anything, they want it done that way still, but they want you to do it but their exact way. That's not going to work. Like, we're going to do it the way that we do it. And that's why you're hiring us, because we do it our way. So those are the models that I find just aren't ready yet. They're just, you know, and sometimes they get ready over years. They're just not quite ready yet. We've had a few people say, I want to run it myself so I can learn. I'm not, I don't feel like you have to. Like, I think that if your goal in life is to build out your assets that you're owning, your time and learning is much better spent letting the management company teach you why things are going the way they are, asking them questions. Seeing the results of what they're doing. Like, just learn by being the asset manager. You'll learn better, and you can spend your time finding the deals, underwriting, growing your portfolio, which is going to make you way more net worth and money than self-managing one property, right? Or 2 properties or whatever. So like, if the goal is to learn, doing it yourself is not a good way to do that. I don't think. I think you'll have a better result hiring a management company.

That's interesting. So you could learn by the school of hard knocks, but you could also be an asset manager, which is kind of an apprentice to an actual property management company.

Yep.

And, and fast-track it. Yeah.

And find one that likes to educate, right? And you can say, why is that number like this? What did you do last week? How did that work?

Yeah.

How do you know?

So that— so folks, there you go. There's the roadmap. Is it traditional, hybrid, or remote? And And we also got a straight answer on sometimes it just makes sense to run it yourself, but it all comes down to what is your goal? What are you good at? What is your outcome? What is your outlook? Sorry, not outcome, but what is your outlook for this business? Like you said, are you trying to learn? Are you trying to build a portfolio? Are you just trying to buy 1 or 2 and they happen to be around the corner and that's your job from now on?

Yeah. And that's fine.

Yeah, there's no one right model out there, folks. There's just the right model for where you are and what the facility is right now. So, all right, last one before we close it out. True or false, at a traditionally staffed self-storage facility, payroll is usually the single largest operating expense line item, sometimes bigger than property tax, insurance, or utilities combined.

Um, not in Texas.

Kind of gave you the answer there.

Or Florida or Louisiana. I'm going to say neither. I don't think so. Payroll, yes, can be expensive depending on property tax and insurance. Yes, it is the biggest investment you're going to make because everything else is fairly inexpensive. in additional marketing depending on how you market. But if you're building, you know, a 700-unit new build property and you want to save $50 grand in payroll, like, that's silly. Don't do that. Just hire somebody really good to help you run the company and lease it up for you.

Yeah, I was going to say, so it sounds like, folks, if it is, you should be calling Atomic.

Yes.

And we're going to give you the opportunity in a minute.

Yes.

All right, I want to talk tech and tooling for a minute. I saved this for last here because the model only works if the system behind it actually works. So you run— and this is what touches me dearly— you run an AI-enhanced, 100% US-based call center and automated month-end closing— month-end close tooling. At Atomic. I want to know how that stacks up against what most owners are already using, in your opinion. And I say this touches my heart because I host another podcast called Successful— I should say I co-host another podcast called Successful Idiots. And it's a podcast about how to use AI to help entrepreneurs in their lives and in their businesses. Let's call it Successful Idiots because My co-host, who's an AI guru, allows me to use that term plural. He's not the idiot, I am. I'm the one that asks the questions.

I love that name. That's amazing.

But, but it is, it's been my passion. It's been not just in, in for life, but also for just the tools that we have available to us now through AI to help us, all of us, all of us, everyone listening. with our businesses is just incredible. And I absolutely love hearing and seeing how you're using, you know, you said Claude a few times earlier, but any AI tool to inform not just in the moment, but, you know, ongoing how you run businesses. So run, sorry, your management company, not just businesses, although I'm sure you use it other places. Um, so how does Atomic Data stack, you know, the call center, revenue management, accounting, Close, compared to what a typical, let's say, independent owner has in place today?

So I'm gonna give all the credit to my team, um, because they have done an amazing job at helping build this out, hands down. Like, they, they jumped in early. We, you know, saw this coming. We— they all decided to self-educate and jump in and spend the time. And I was like, this is important. Let's figure out Everyone figure out how you want to use this, right? We all have some time, go play. So they did. They had a really fun time and figured it out. So we have all of our data in a data warehouse that Claude sits within, so we can pull and pull whatever metrics we want. We used to have to do these like end-of-month reports manually, you know, type in each number, and there was always key punching issues and it wasn't filled out and all this thing. So now It's all automated. My VP of Ops automated the whole thing, so it's all just done for us every single month. He does a lot of automation and like end-of-month reports, analytics that we give to our clients. We've just built a new end-of-month report that gives us more of the— it breaks down the marketing, the call center. We can see how many calls we're getting, the closing rate. So we have a lot of it now. Our revenue management Totally AI enhanced, I'm going to say. So we have still the people who look at it, but they'll look at the, the velocity every day of the rentals and then have scrapers for competitor sets. So we've built our own revenue management algorithm basically so that we can look at how we're performing every single day and then adjust on the fly with discounts and velocity, see something's not moving, fix it. So we have all of that built in. We're still like working with it, right? So it's only as good as the The actual data layer. So we have our next projects are going to be like some chart of accounts alignment, some like end results alignment, and then we can bring it all together. But it's something that we use, like the district managers are familiar with it. It's like we're like everyone, like we're all figuring it out, but we embrace it heavily. We're not scared to try it. We like just get started with it, you know? So just stay started and play with it.

You're so on point. We all are figuring it out. I'm figuring it out every week when I co-host this podcast. Yet I'm at the beach last week, or I'm at a party hanging out with people, and AI comes up. It always comes up. And I'm still blown away by how far behind people are.

And everyone feels like they are. Like, I feel like I'm the least adept in the company.

No, you know what's interesting is the, the only ones who feel like they're behind are the ones who are actually leaning in because they know how far up behind they are. Others are, they're, they're just clueless. They're not even trying to see how far behind they, they, they're using it to polish emails. So kudos to your company for it, no matter how far behind you, you feel or how much you're still learning. You are so far ahead. I promise you, the listeners to this podcast, this episode, with everything you just said and how you're using AI, their heads are spinning right now because they're not doing it, right? So kudos to you and Atomic for embracing it and having it. You said guide and advise, and that's true, but it's— I promise it's become— I'm sure without knowing, it's become an integral part of Oh yeah, and we don't take—

it's a— it helps, right? It— we still look at it, we still look at the numbers. It's not replaced anyone, um, in the company.

Well, it can't. Everyone says it's going to replace humans. It's—

it's—

no, it might replace, uh, or it might decrease the need for multiple people to do the same job, but you still have—

It's just amplified. Like, even like calculating our management fees used to take us a long time, right, as multiple porch, put things together. I built a skill, I can drop it in, it gives me what I need. I copy paste, it takes me 5 minutes now. Like something so simple that just sped up that 1-day process to 10 minutes and makes it—

Even hearing you say I built a skill is amazing. Um, most people don't even know what that means.

Yeah. Uh, all right, just ask it, it'll tell you what to do.

That's what people— I say to people all the time, like, well, I don't know how to do Well, just ask it. It's going to tell you better than I can.

Yeah.

Um, you're vocal on LinkedIn about AI in storage. Um, jobs lost to zero, but, but building AI agents to speed up month-end close, for instance, right? What's actually changed in the last year?

Oh my God, everything. Like, I feel like Claude released its thing, what, February, January, when Claude kind of dropped its, its big things. I think I was in Los Angeles, so everyone was like on ChatGPT playing and we were all just talking about our feelings on ChatGPT, it seemed like. And then it seemed like within 2 weeks Claude came out with all the connectors and everything and it was like, now it's, now it, now it can, it can do things for you, right?

It can do it. It became, it became more agentic.

Yeah. And everyone kind of, the head spun, it feels like for like that 2 months. And I, I was having a lot of AI anxiety, like I think a lot of people get. And it was like, what's going to happen? Like, I was at a— I'm part of this Founders Forum club. So I was at an event in Los Angeles with a ton of founders of various companies of various sizes, and they were talking about AI. And there was a guy there from Google and somebody else who had more credentials than I know. And he was saying, he's like, you have 18 months and we're all out of work. And I was like, is this real? Like, is this real? And the guy next to me goes, that's, that's not going to happen. But nobody knew then, right? Is that real or not real?

Clickbait.

Yeah, but it's still, it was scary. And then it was like, okay, how is this going to affect, what are people going to expect me to have figured out by now? How's this going to affect our performance? How's this going to affect our, how do we use this to help our customers? How do we help this to push forward the business? How do we not How do I not have all of my employees freak out that they're losing their jobs because that's all they're seeing online and help them feel comfortable in adapting this and feel like this is going to help them and not harm them? Because nobody's going to work themselves out of a job, but I need them to learn it and build it, right? So that was like the spring of figuring out like, how do we embrace this new thing, figure it out while we're growing the company, while we're also trying to do the daily tasks? How does it help us? How does it not help us? And then, so I took the leap and invested in a data warehouse, which was expensive, but really glad I did it. And that has helped my team. Like, all I did was sign the thing and they really have taken this initiative and run with it and figure it out. And, and we have everything. We have everything from our property management. We have all of our marketing. We have all of our call center stuff. We're working on getting our accounting in. I'm the lagging, of course, the last one to get on the train. But having everything in that warehouse, now we can pull what we want. So then we just have to— now we get to like clean up and align the data so it can read the data so it can be more accurate with things. But that's going to be our next phase of it. Now we've kind of gotten it there and we see what it can do. And then now we have to figure out, do we have the skills ourselves? Do we hire somebody to do this with us? How does that look as we move forward with it? Because I think data is the key, right? If you're not renting the unit, you're not depositing the money.

Why?

And you can only look at so many obvious things. Okay, my phone's working. I rank on Google. My website looks good. Why am I not renting units? Right? Why am I not renting units? And you kind of run out of things to look at. So then it becomes— A lot of information and data of like what is going on with it. And then that tells you like, what is the average length of stay? How many rate increases can I do? They're getting harder for people to take. Demand is soft, rates are soft, rate increases are hard to tolerate. How do I continue to move the levers to get this asset to perform where I need it to be with one hand behind my back, which is the industry right now, and still be able to perform and do it and, and hit the marks that we need to hit? So, and I think the key to that is in the data, but we can't analyze it enough because there's so much of it. So the key to that becomes AI helping us.

Incredible. So well thought out and incredible. I couldn't, couldn't agree more. And I think that's probably in our exhaustive search to, to look for management companies for our portfolio at Bellrose. I think that's one of the reasons we landed with you guys. So how can, if someone is interested in learning more about Atomic, how can they get in touch with you guys? Is there someone they should get in touch with? And do you do, like, if I own a facility or a portfolio of facilities, is there a review? Will you guys look at my facility or portfolio and just tell us You know, whether you think you can help us or not improve operations, etc.? How does that whole process work and how can we get in touch with you?

Yeah, no, you have to just pay me day one. That's it. No, I'm kidding. Yeah, our website is AtomicStorageGroup.com. You know what you're talking about. Our website's AtomicStorageGroup.com. You can email either info@AtomicStorageGroup.com or Megan. It's M-A-G-E-N. Daniel is our business developer, so he's the one that'll get back with everyone and he's awesome. And yeah, we do reviews. We'll look over everything. We take it slow. Hiring management's not a fast decision. So we can look at the property, we do a budget, we can do consultation if you want for some time. It's very few and far between we get a phone call and get a contract signed, right? It's a relationship of like, how does this look? How does this work? What can you do for me? Do I even need management or do I maybe not need it right now? And we're not shy about telling people, we'll say, not yet. We'll say, here's what I would do if I were you, right? Like, we want people to be— it's a relationship. I have been in this industry 20 years and I'm not going anywhere anytime soon. So there's people I've met 15 years ago that it wasn't time then, and they come back around, and that's what it should be. So we're not going to steer anyone in our direction if it's not a good fit for everyone involved and we don't really think we can help.

I love that. So Megan, M-A-G-E-N, We didn't unpack the spelling of Megan either. We'll do that offline.

Yeah, I'll call my mom.

Yeah, we'll get her on the next one. Um, megan@atomicstoragegroup.com. atomicstoragegroup.com. Daniel is going to be the one that reaches back out, right? And can help go over your facility or get the process started evaluating what you have. Going from there. All right, last question. Have you heard of the book Be Your Future Self Now? I have not. Oh, you should add it to the many books on that bookshelf after you read it. It was written by Dr. Benjamin Hardy, and it was about—I'm sure you've heard of. How old are your kids?

Yes, they are fifteen and almost seventeen.

If you have boys in there, they've definitely heard of Mr. Beast.

Maybe girls too. My girls did. Yes, we went through the Mr. Beast series.

Oh, I didn't know. Yeah, I— my boys— my daughter never went through the MrBeast phase, but my boys naturally did. I'm not sure they'll ever be out of it. Um, in either case, the book Be Your Future Self Now is really written, um, because of MrBeast and about MrBeast, the beginning of it anyway. It's not the whole book, um, but the premise of the book is about him and what he did when he was 17 years old. Uh, he was a YouTube gamer and he had a following. I think 8,000 kids followed him, something I'll never understand. They followed him to watch him play video games. And one night he decided to record 4 videos. Um, one was to be released 6 months, one at a year, one at 5 years, one at 10 years. The 10-year video that he released, that he recorded that night, was released Um, in October. So he's only 10+ years from doing this, um, which makes him like 27 or 28 now.

Yeah.

Which is incredible 'cause he's the most followed person on the planet. What he did that night when he recorded these videos and released them was he, like Cortés burned the ships. He said to the world, to YouTube publicly, this is who I'm going to be at these intervals. So I'm not gonna ask you 6 months, 1 year, 5 years, 10 years. I'm gonna ask you 5 years. In 5 years, who is Megan Smith? If you were getting a DeLorean and going to the future, what would you see? Who is Megan Smith? Um, is she still the CEO of Atomic? Is she— does, uh, how many storage facilities is Atomic managing? How many facilities does Megan Smith own? Is she doing something else?

That is a great question.

Who is Megan Smith in 5 years?

So I I found a journal that I wrote. It's been 13 years ago now, and I saw it the other day and I hadn't looked at it since. And everything I wrote from my income, my lifestyle, my, uh, how my kids were doing had come true on that list that I wrote 13 years ago. So it was like, it was a cool moment.

Wow.

And I hadn't even remembered, like, and I remember writing how much money I wanted and I crossed it out and I doubled it. Like, in my mind, that was so much then, right? 13 years ago to write that number. And, um, I saw it a few months ago.

So 13 years ago, which that means you're the— you're before MrBeast. You're MrsBeast.

I'm gonna call him. He doesn't know yet. He missed our anniversary. Oh yeah.

You predated him by 3 years. Did you— so you— everything came true. Did you exceed it or did you just kind of hit it?

Yeah, and the income Income was within, I mean, a very small amount of money, which was amazing. Lifestyle was like all those. I was like, oh, wow, I've been wanting this for a long time. Like, it was cool. And I just actually engaged a strategic coach and he said, in 5 years, where do you want your life to be? And we had a call on Monday. So like, that's been my thought of this week of like, how do I want life to look? So I'm right now—

You should have a pretty good answer ready to go.

You would think. Yeah, we're focusing in Atomic right now very much on systems processes. I asked all of my leadership team, how do you know if you're doing a good job? And they said, well, if everybody's happy. And I was like, nobody's ever happy. That's a terrible metric for you, right? So we're working on KPIs, we're working on metrics, we're working on really systemizing the business. It grew very, very fast, and it's been just kind of What's the best next thing? And you just sort of get in it and do the things for the next day. And so right now we're really focusing on systems, procedures. I want to grow the company for sure. We've been telling everybody for a year, get ready for 300. So if your department can handle 300 properties, what does that look like for you? Not that we're there yet, but what does that look like? What won't work now, then that doesn't work now. What does that look like at 300? So we've been focusing hard and heavy on Getting that ready. What I've seen some companies do is scale up in growth and crash right down, and we don't ever want to do that. I don't ever want to lose our service, our customer touchpoint, our deliverable, like our reputation, because we grew too fast. I think growth can be really, really dangerous, as well as not growing. So you have to hit that right mark. So 5 years from now, I think we'll be at more than 300 given our trajectory. I think we'll exceed that very well. We'll be higher on the list of the management companies. I don't want to grow for growth's sake. I want to be able to offer good service to the people who have found this industry and love it because it's amazing and help more. I really like teaching. I like educating. A friend of mine have a podcast that we talk about what it looks like to lead as women. How do we just— how do we live our lives? There's— I feel like women are coming through kind of a renaissance right now, and there's more of us finally in leadership seats. and positions. And I grew up without a template of what that looks like to lead a company. I thought I knew nobody who ran a business. So like, I'm figuring this out, right? So I get to help my niece and younger generations and sort of be that somebody they can talk to and ask questions from. So those things are important to me. My kids will be older, and that's going to be cool. So they hopefully still like to hang out with me. But I think that's, that's 5 years down the road for me is just enjoying life, helping people, building a really cool company. And And giving people the opportunity to do their best work that they can't even believe they get paid to do it. And that's who we like to hire, and they just do an amazing job for us, and that creates a wonderful culture of taking care of our customers.

Well, it's— you're certainly very impressive. What you build is very impressive, and, um, what you just said, that it doesn't feel like work, um, that clearly comes through.

Yeah, so thank you.

Hats off to you. Um, very, you know, Can't say enough about you guys, uh, and, and you particularly as a person since you, you've started all this and did all this. So, um, thank you so much for, for being a great guest today. I was, I was looking forward to this one.

Yeah, me too. Thank you.

Folks, here's what I want you to take away from this one. Storage is data. It's a data business, whether you're running it yourself or handing it to someone else like Atomic. Megan's proof that the fear of losing control to a manager is, is actually backwards, right? The right operator hands you more visibility, not less. And I can speak directly about this at this point now. So for the person still on the fence about whether to self-manage or hire it out, the question isn't, can I trust someone else? Because there's companies like Atomic out there that yes, the answer to that is yes, you can trust them. It's, am I already tracking the numbers that would tell me if I should? So, step 1, are you tracking the numbers that should tell you if you should? And 2, is it what you want to do? Are you looking to do something else? Is there another part of the business you're better at? Are you in the right seat? And for— I know I can speak for our company. We knew the time had come to outsource management. We used to manage ourselves internally. And we recognized that now companies like Atomic were doing it way better than we were. So it became a no-brainer. Take a look at what you're doing. If you're managing yourself, there's nothing wrong with it. Just take a look at it. And if you're not sure, reach out to Atomic. It sounds like Daniel will get back to you and start that process, and I'm sure Megan will get involved at some point like she did with us. Folks, there's a seller out there. There right now who's ready to sell. So stop watching, start moving. Drive for Dollars. Send the LOI. We'll see you next week. Bye.