What do Self-Storage and Football Have in Common?

For a football team to be successful they have to plan for every team that they play. They have to put together a strategy to beat that team and then finally they have to practice. When a team does this successfully over and over again, they win. If they don’t have good players on their team, they don’t win. If they have a bad strategy or no strategy in place to play against the other team, they are, more than likely, going to get beaten. Finally, if they never practice or learn how to play football in the first place, they are not going to be a very good team.

All of this applies to self-storage. Before you jump into a property, you need to educate yourself. You need to learn about how to invest in self-storage. Once you know the proper steps for investing in self-storage, then you need to learn how to invest in individual properties. Finally, you need to learn how to invest in a particular area. Once you know these skills, you can apply them over and over again. Just like a football team learns to work together so that they can play against any opponent, you need to educate yourself so that you can take on any property.

Next you need to come up with a business plan. This is your winning strategy. If you don’t know what your goals are for the property, how will you know if you have met them? How can you determine if you are successful if you haven’t decided what successful looks like? You need to know what your numbers should be. You need to know how you are going to get the property to produce those numbers and then you need to put a plan in place so that the property can actually make the profits that you want it to. If a football coach has no idea what plays he is going to call during the game, he is less likely to win than a coach that has a bunch of strategies in place for different circumstances during the game.

Finally, you have to try. If you never make an offer on a property, if you never buy a property, you will never know if you can successfully own a self-storage property. You need to find a way to start making offers on properties so that you can practice the strategies that you have learned and put into place.

Once you have a good strategy and a good plan of action, you can use that plan over and over again to take a bad or even mediocre property and make it successful. As always, happy investing.