I know what to do, I am just not sure how I can do it! 4 MENTOR?

In this blog series, we talked about just picking up the phone and calling self-storage property owners. We established that your first phone call is just to find out if they are interested in selling and when they are, what information you need to gather. We also talked about visiting the property and establishing a relationship. However, there are going to be times when you just want a little extra help and that’s o.k.

If you feel like you know how to proceed with making an offer and the steps to take to get from making an offer to a closed deal, that is fantastic. If you have a great power team in place, then they can help you with that. However, if you feel like you want someone to walk you through the first few purchases, then you should find a local self-storage investor or someone who trains self-storage investors and ask them to mentor you.

There is nothing wrong with having a mentor. We send our children to school for 12 years to be mentored in various topics and then they spend another 4-12 years being mentored at a specific topic before they even begin apprenticing. Investing in self-storage is something that many people not only get training for, but they also get mentors. This is because there are so many moving parts, that nothing is as straight forward as what I have said in prior blogs. Something always comes up and you have to be ready to go with the flow.

By having a mentor, you have someone that has already dealt with similar situations and come out successfully on the other side. I do not want this to sound like a sales pitch. This is simply to show you the advantages of having a mentor or a trainer.

When you have someone who has already negotiated several transactions, they are more familiar with questions and complications that are going to arise. They know the types of concerns that a seller is going to have, and they know how to deal with those objections. All sellers have objections, but they can be managed once you are familiar with the most common objections. By having a mentor, they can walk you through how to do your first few deals so that you gain that valuable experience with an expert by your side.

You can watch them interact with the sellers initially and then when you decide that you are ready to interact with sellers, they will be right there as a safety net in case something comes up that you are not prepared for. They are your “partner” who has a question or your “partner” that would just like to interject a thought here. Most importantly, they are your support team.

A self-storage mentor can show you how to do your due diligence and they can introduce you to the members of your power team who will be with you for the rest of your career, unless you replace them with people who are a better fit for you. Your power team will help you navigate a lot of the new circumstances that will come up down the road. While every deal is the same overall, you find a property, you evaluate the property, you buy the property, the nuances along the way are very different. Your power team is there to help you navigate the changes each transaction brings. This way, once you are ready to venture out on your own without a mentor, you still have people to back you up and help you along the path.