300. Make More, Do Less: Hiring Your FIRST Self Storage Employee
Self Storage Income
AJ Osborne
4.9 • 591 Ratings
🗓️ 10 June 2025
⏱️ 77 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Whether you’ve got one self storage facility or twenty, you own a self storage business. And, if you’re like most of us, you want to keep growing. But you can’t be the one changing the locks, picking up the phone calls, answering the emails, and repairing the units while building your portfolio. If you’re doing this, you’re on track to have just another job instead of a fully fledged, profitable business. So, you’re tired of doing all the work. Who do you hire first?
Today, we’re talking about teams. These are the people who will take your storage facility business to the next level. You might have zero employees or just a handyman and virtual assistant. Or, you could have full-time staff on the backend. Wherever you’re at, we’re sharing how you can scale faster, smarter, and WITHOUT making the same mistakes we did so you can work less, make more, and build your business faster.
When we started, we were the ones shoveling the snow, repairing the units, changing locks, and answering calls. This quickly became too time-consuming, so we were forced to hire. Now, with $300M+ in self storage, our business has radically changed, but the steps we took have not. Follow these “levels” of leadership, and you’ll be able to make self storage your full-time business, or at least a more passive income stream that takes care of (much of) itself.
What you’ll learn in today’s show:
- Who should be your first hire when running a self storage facility
- The three “levels” of leadership you’ll go through as your business expands
- How to ensure standards don’t start slipping when you leave the day-to-day operations
- Start firing yourself! If you’ve got a full-time job, you need to STOP working on your facility
- The biggest mistakes AJ made when taking on team members and leading employees
- How to STOP working in your business and start working ON your business
Leave a Review for AJ’s New Book: https://www.amazon.com/Growing-Wealth-Self-Storage-2-0-Post-Pandemic/dp/1735258865
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is when we really started to grow. That system allowed us to manage, operate multiple locations. |
| 0:08.7 | Once that happened, the business of storage really became something. That's when we needed to expand |
| 0:14.6 | personnel. This takes you from a handful of investments to a business. That business then can take you very far, right? |
| 0:23.7 | And all you'll be doing is improving the systems, hiring people within them and improving |
| 0:28.6 | them. |
| 0:28.9 | Be intentional about this stuff because then you'll get better at it. |
| 0:33.3 | You get really good at it, even when it's just that part-time employee doing it. |
| 0:36.6 | Then when you hire a full-time employee, you've been intentional, you know what you need to do, |
| 0:40.5 | you know how to do it, you get better and better and better. |
| 0:43.1 | And then you have a rock star team that is unbeatable. |
| 0:52.8 | Welcome everybody to self-storage income. And Connor, today we have a large topic. It is so essential. |
| 1:04.0 | I think, you know, you've brought this up and you talked about this last week as well. |
| 1:08.5 | It can be really hard to conceptualize. And I remember thinking that to it. You know, today our companies, all the organization we have, all the people that we have, right, thinking back to when it was, you know, Sam. And like, we're just doing everything. Like to get from there to there, we didn't really know. |
| 1:28.0 | It's just, it's wild to think about that. |
| 1:29.8 | And I think it can be hard to conceptualize what that end is supposed to even look like. |
| 1:35.0 | Mm-hmm. |
| 1:35.5 | And what is needed to produce it. |
| 1:38.0 | And so you've talked about our, you know, creating that team and you wanted to really hit on this today. And this was |
| 1:45.2 | kind of your idea where you're like, I think this is important, especially because you're |
| 1:48.9 | talking to all the people in our community, you're very hands on there. And you're hearing this |
| 1:52.7 | feedback. And a lot of people first hire anything else. So we're going to hit on this today. |
| 1:57.8 | It's an important, good topic. Before we do, though, I have to say thank you to everybody because I didn't realize this. |
... |
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