From Recession Survival to 500+ Stores: President of National Self Storage Travis Morrow Tells All

STORIES BEHIND THE DOOR — EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Presented on The Self-Storage Report Episode: From Recession Survival to 500+ Stores: President of National Self Storage Travis Morrow Tells All Host: Thaddeus Campbell — Stories Behind the Door Guest: Travis Morrow — President, National Self Storage; CEO, Storelocal; CEO, Modern Storage Media; past president, Self Storage Association Recorded: July 29, 2026 Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ri49xBFWKEw Sponsor: Kiwi II Construction Key topics: Travis Morrow's start as an intern at National Self Storage and rise to president; building a competition-analysis database before Tract IQ and StorTrack existed; running operations, accounting and owner reporting through the 2008–2009 recession; why Public Storage's completed NSA acquisition and the 2023 Extra Space–Life Storage merger put roughly 8,000 stores under two entities, against fewer than 1,200 twenty years ago; self storage's cap rate compression toward multifamily; a 35-year-old, 37,000-square-foot Syracuse facility trading under a 6 cap; $1.8 billion of joint ventures between private equity and the REITs; Storelocal's growth from 112 member companies in 2019 to more than 530; the founding of Tenant Inc; acquiring the Mini Storage Messenger assets from MiniCo in 2023; and the MSM show in Atlanta in November with 60 hours of content and six keynote speakers. Note: Speaker attribution reconstructed from raw captions. Light cleanup of transcription errors only; wording preserved. Timestamps, music cues and YouTube chapter markers removed. Turns marked [attribution inferred] could not be attributed with certainty. ————————————————————————————— Thaddeus Campbell: Over a 20-year career, he's accumulated a bunch of titles, including past president of the SSA, current CEO of Storelocal. Behind it all, though, is the heart of a self storage operator. On this week's edition of Stories Behind the Door podcast, we welcome the president of National Self Storage, Travis Morrow. Two decades helping shape self storage as an operator, tech industry leader, and industry innovator. Today, we're covering the journey that put him at the center of Storelocal, Tenant Inc, and Modern Storage Media. And of course, now the show coming in Atlanta in November. Really excited to welcome to the Stories Behind the Door podcast, Travis Morrow. Thaddeus Campbell: Travis, excited to jump down the rabbit hole with you. Before I do that, I got to give a shout out to our sponsor on the podcast — also a lead sponsor of the show coming up in Atlanta — Kiwi II, Wayne Woolsey and his team. Simply the best crews and steel. When they say it's going to get done, it is going to get done. Over 30 years they've been building steel structures and self storage. Now, heavily involved in small bay industrial flex. If you have a project, reach out to them at kiwiconstruction.com. Thaddeus Campbell: Well, back to the man of the hour today, Travis. I've really been looking forward to this. It's kind of funny. Since we first talked a month and a half, two months ago, we put this on the calendar for the podcast. I cannot believe the number of industry leaders that I just hear about the show over and over again. One person after the other that's going to be speaking. We're going to get to that. We'll talk deeply about it. Before I do that, the show always starts with the same question. Storage — such a unique asset class, such a niche asset class. How did Travis Morrow find himself so immersed in self storage? Travis Morrow: Well, I was lucky, truly. You know, I've said it before and I say it all the time, but it's 100% true that you don't graduate business school and say, "Man, I can't wait to get into self storage. That's definitely the path I'm signing up for." But I was lucky enough to intern with National Self Storage the last semester of my senior year. And Bob Sha, my mentor in the industry, Hall of Famer, been doing it since 1974, really taught me the business. Travis Morrow: And so when I first came in, I did a competition analysis database in some old Microsoft data or database product, because they were on Excel spreadsheets, or the stores were sending in just pieces of paper, and I'm trying to compile all of this information into a database — which, you know, today that database is like a Tract IQ, or the recently acquired StorTrack. That was the dream, to get it to that. I am not a tech person by any means. I'm not a developer. I'm not an engineer for any of that stuff. But I've been lucky enough to at least have the exposure to that kind of tech, to at least have an understanding of how things can work. And so that's really what got me started — that internship at National Self Storage, and then I kind of progressed up through the company all the way to president. Thaddeus Campbell: Now, I love that. And obviously Storelocal, the co-op of smaller individual owners to be able to kind of compete with what's going on in the industry. Tenant Inc as a natural offshoot of that, to help that, you know, conglomeration of folks. Talk to me about how important in your journey, starting out as an operator, was starting out from understanding what it's like to actually run the business side of it. Travis Morrow: Well, I'm first and foremost, even today, a self storage operator. I mean, that's my X handle, @storageoperator. Because everything else that I have done in the industry, or been in the orbit of in the industry, ultimately selfishly comes back to how can it help my stores perform better. Travis Morrow: And so, you know, I was fortunate to be able to be exposed to kind of all phases of our store operations throughout my career. When the great recession hit in 2008, 2009, National Self Storage, we really shrunk our home office and actually went remote at that point. But my job, in addition to running operations, became also paying the bills, doing the check runs, doing the accounting, doing the end of month reporting and getting all of that out to our owners myself. So that gave me a really deep understanding of the accounting side of self storage — which has proven then to be valuable when we're off building software and saying, "Oh no, that's not going to work. That's not how that really works in practice, and we need to do it X, Y, or Z to make it actually work for our customers," or for self storage operators in general. And so being an operator — you know, my wife calls it my operator brain. People pick that from time to time to figure out, you know, what is the actual in-the-field use case for different features or products. Thaddeus Campbell: So many questions that came out of that. There's three of them that I'm going to go down the road. I'm going to start off — I want to stay in this early part and ask you about what jumped out at you when you first got into storage. I'm going to come back to the questions because I want to mention the other two, or I'll forget them. One of them is the changes. You talked about how you were doing all that stuff yourself early on. What's that look like in 2026 versus when you first started? And then the last one is about technology, and I'll get into that a little bit too. Thaddeus Campbell: Let's go back to where I started, which is when you first got this opportunity as a senior at the University of Arizona. We talked off camera — go Rob Gronkowski. Still one of my favorite football players of all time. Die hard Patriots fan. So love that that's over your shoulder. But you get this opportunity. What was it about storage that you're 20 plus years later still involved in the industry? Travis Morrow: Well, there's some great layers to our industry. And one, self storage, when you boil it all the way down, is not a super complex operation. And I am not a super complex business person, if you will. You know, it's very straightforward. We have space, we rent space, and we want you to stay in that space as long as possible. And then you get into, you know, the finer deals of attracting and converting customers, and revenue management, and we get into the more complex stuff. But self storage itself is a very simple business and easy for me to wrap my head around. And that's the business piece. Travis Morrow: The real piece of our industry that I have found to be very unique is the people. And I was fortunate with Bob as my mentor to get to tag along with him, because one of the values that he instilled at National Self Storage was how independent operators like us could guide and help the industry. And so he was very involved in the Arizona Association and he was very involved in the National Association. And so I got to tag along and meet a lot of the people very early in my career that gave me exposure to how much people care about this industry, how willing people can be to work together in this industry for the benefit of the industry. And so that was one of the things that I think I would attribute most to why I've stuck around in this industry for so long. It's just been such a great industry to be a part of, just because of the people. Thaddeus Campbell: It's incredible to me how much this topic comes up on the podcast with various — I've been lucky to have Mike Burnham on the podcast. I've been lucky enough to have Ken Woolley on the podcast. Maurice Pogoda, who got his start in the 80s, National Storage up in Michigan. What those early folks in the industry did to establish a culture in this industry, to this day it blows my mind. I didn't get into storage until 2021. I'm a little jealous of some folks who've been in it longer, but that's still here — that feeling that we have of camaraderie. And yeah, there's competition, no doubt about it, and consolidation is happening, we'll talk about that a little bit. But the fact is, when we go to, you know, events, and you talked about SSAs, both local and national, there's still a sense of people that are fighting to keep this industry as a place where folks like each other and work together in a positive way. It's such an amazing thing to me. Travis Morrow: Well, and it's because it's a great business. I mean, this has all been really good for all of us that are in this industry. And you know, we need to protect ourselves not only from outside influence, whether it be legislation or other legal action, but we also need to protect it from ourselves sometimes. You know, there are stories out there of, whether it be tenant insurance or tenant protection, or pricing models, or things that start to bump up against the guard rail, that the industry as a whole can step in and say, "Hey, you're kind of screwing it up for everybody else. Can we work together to improve this so that it's good for our customers but still remains awesome for us?" And people have been generally willing to do that. Thaddeus Campbell: You open up a fascinating road that I'm going to go down. We've talked about this before. Obviously Extra Space acquired or merged with Life Storage back in 2023. The news came out this morning — I just saw it on LinkedIn. Public Storage releases that the NSA acquisition is now finalized. 50,000 employees. I think they said 500,000 customers, something like that. I don't know the exact numbers, but is that dangerous for the industry? I guess I'll ask you that question. We have so much power in two entities now in self storage. Somewhere, you know, north of 7,500 stores either owned by or operated by those two people, those two entities combined. In 2006, if we flash back 20 years ago, I think Extra had just done their big acquisition — I can't remember the name of the store that they acquired, but they tripled in size. They were still less than 1,200 stores combined. Right now, we're close to 8,000. Is that good for the industry? Is it bad for the industry? Is it indifferent for the industry? Do we still keep kind of moving along the way we have? Travis Morrow: Well, you know, back in 2005, National Self Storage was the largest privately held portfolio in the industry, and we were at 93 stores. I mean, that's nothing today. And we sold a big chunk of those to what is now CubeSmart. Travis Morrow: But I will say that it's not good or bad. It is natural for our industry, and this is what happens in the lifespan of an industry. So, you know, I always follow the life cycle of the hospitality industry, because I believe that self storage is probably 10 to 15 years younger in the lifespan, or the life cycle, than the hospitality industry. And if you look at the hospitality industry, what's happened with the brands and the consolidation in the hotel space — that is probably going to be a natural destination for a lot of the self storage industry. There used to be a lot of mom and pop hotels, that's where they were. And over time, that consolidation happened. And good or bad, that's just the life cycle of business. Travis Morrow: And I don't know that that's something that you prevent. You know, you mentioned Storelocal, and I work and fight every day for the independent owner operator. At the end of the day, for our independent owner operators — the goal eventually, with the exception of very few that have like 100-year plans that I'm aware of — their goal at some point is an exit that is profitable and life changing for themselves and probably their family. And so the only way to get that kind of exit is somebody's got to be on the other side to buy it from you. And that's where the consolidation happens. And so, good, bad — it's just a natural part of the life cycle of an industry. Thaddeus Campbell: I'm going to ask a question. And you brought up, you know, the kind of independent owner that you've been a champion of and you've done a lot of work for, to try and help them compete in that environment where their competitor has the data and the resources of thousands of stores. It's obviously been a challenging few years, right? My boss Barry Sherman — 1991 he got in the industry. He says every day we go on meetings when we're talking to someone new in storage, this has been the roughest 3 years he's ever seen in his time that he's been here. And yet we still look at cap rates in primary markets, even in secondary markets, assets trading below what interest rates are. Does that surprise you? Are you shocked by that? What is it that's allowing that to happen, in your estimation, and what does it mean for those smaller independent operators and the value of their asset? Travis Morrow: Well, it means good things when they eventually get around to the exit. But for a long time — again, following, I'll switch from hospitality now to multifamily — multifamily cap rates have been historically much lower than self storage, because self storage was the new kid on the block in commercial real estate and didn't quite have the rep or the confidence of Wall Street necessarily to be able to give us those kind of cap rates that multifamily trades for. Travis Morrow: Well, now as the years have gone by, self storage has started to submit itself as one of the top performing asset classes in commercial real estate. And I think we are starting to see, from a cap rate standpoint, that gap narrowing between multifamily and self storage, because we all know that Wall Street now is a real big fan of the industry, and that is going to cause that cap rate compression as our industry stabilizes kind of in their eyes. Travis Morrow: And so from a long-term perspective, you know, is a 3% return on investment cool for me? No. But is it cool for Wall Street? Yes. And so that's where that gap will continue to close in our favor. And so, thinking about it from cap rates versus interest rates, we're now starting to think about it like multifamily, more so than how we always thought about it back when we were 10 caps when I first got into this industry. Hey, good luck finding one of those these days. I don't know where you got to go, but you got to go a long ways from the center of town to find a 10 cap deal in storage. And it probably doesn't have pavement. Thaddeus Campbell: [laughter] Yeah, certainly. Oh, that's hilarious. I was talking to Hans Hardesty, a big broker up in the Northeast, about a deal he sold in Syracuse, New York. I happen to graduate from Syracuse, so it was near and dear to my heart. Syracuse is like a lower secondary market. It, you know, it's not a hotbed of activity in any stretch. And it was like a 37,000 square foot facility that was 35 years old, professionally managed, so no real upside growth, under a 6 cap. You know, and so to your point — and we're seeing it, right — I think $1.8 billion of joint venture or other type of agreements between big PE and the REITs, not counting the massive amount of money that Public was able to get funded to do the NSA acquisition. None of which is on their books, which boggles my mind, right? They managed to put a $10.5 billion acquisition together and assume no debt that they have recourse on. Which is, to your point, good news for smaller operators as they look to exit. Thaddeus Campbell: I want to dive in a little bit now. Obviously 2026, AI is so all-encompassing. Everyone talks about technology, technology, technology. When you go to an ISS show or an SSA show — and I'm quite certain at the show in Atlanta — we're going to see the, you mentioned Tract IQ earlier and StorTrack, and companies like Lumio and Proprise, and I mean there's so many of them that are tech centered companies. Is it easy for an operator, especially a smaller independent operator, to kind of get lost in the shuffle of what's available from technology, and kind of forget about the things that have worked for 40 years in operating a storage facility? Travis Morrow: Yeah. I mean, it can be overwhelming if you're new to the industry, or walking into just a national conference for the first time and seeing all of the vendors that we have in this industry, and all of the additional technology vendors that have come into this industry. And I can talk about AI — it's actually top of mind for me. Over the last 5 weeks I've been using it extensively. But it can be confusing. Travis Morrow: And so that was one of the things at Storelocal that we identified, you know, was a challenge for a lot of our independent operators. And so whether it be Storelocal partners that we've selected in different buckets — whether it be property insurance or protection program, financing, you know, stuff that we don't even necessarily do, some of it we do — but trying to help make those selections and recommendations for them, and but still giving them the choice, right? It's like, here's the ones we like, here's the ones that we use. If you want to go do something else, go do something else. That's the joy of being an entrepreneur. Travis Morrow: And that really was the genesis of Tenant Inc. We were a little frustrated with vendors telling us, "No, this is how you're going to run your business." And telling an entrepreneur that — that does not go very far. And so we have been about trying to level the playing field when it comes to competing with the REITs from a technology standpoint. Travis Morrow: What we recognized very early on was that, you know, individually — whether you're the largest privately held portfolio or a single store operator — you don't have the budget to compete individually with the technology and programs and systems that the REITs are able to deploy. But if we work together and combine our resources, while still not enough to compare to what they're doing, it gets us closer and bridges that gap to make us all more competitive. Travis Morrow: And so that's what I've been doing since 2014 with Storelocal. And, you know, National Self Storage along with 13 or 12 other independent operators were the initial group of founding members. When I came on as CEO at Storelocal we had 112 member companies in 2019, and since then we have, as of last quarter, grown that to over 530 member companies. And so it's that group of independent operators that get that "I'm never going to be big enough to do this on my own, but if I can join another group of like-minded individuals that are all rowing in the same path" — that will be good for my store. Which goes back to what I had originally said, why I do all of this stuff: because it's ultimately what's best for my stores and my operation. Thaddeus Campbell: You just answered my next question. I was going to ask where this desire to go out and be so helpful is. It's not completely magnanimous, and you're super upfront with that. Travis Morrow: It can't be. Like, I am all for the good of the industry, and I learned, you know, to be as industry first as possible. But at the end of the day, we are all business people, and that is our first responsibility — is to our stores, and to, in my case, our third party management clients. I have a responsibility to them to make their stores perform, and I need the tech and the tools to be able to do that. And so if we build it for ourselves and other people find it beneficial, then great, let's do that and share that. But yeah, no, I still do my end of month reports every month, and they're due to my owners on the 15th, and I like to give them good news. Thaddeus Campbell: I love it. First of all, thank you. I got a feature story in the Modern Storage Messenger magazine, so I very much appreciate that. Shout out to Brad Hadfield for an incredible job he did making me sound like a half decent person in storage. I appreciate that. Travis Morrow: Well, it was a great article. And I will say that that's Poppy. Poppy handles our content and our editorial at MSM. Thaddeus Campbell: I love it. I love it. I love it. Shout out to Poppy, and thank you. Super grateful. Obviously I told you I graduated from Syracuse. I graduated from the School of Public Communications, Newhouse — pretty well known in the broadcast journalism and journalism world. I'm interested in the choice that you made to acquire MSM, right? As we've seen kind of media change and evolve over the last couple decades. I saw my first website actually in the computer studio at Syracuse University in the summer of 1996, which is scary to admit. But the evolution of what's happened — right, at that time the New York Times came on your doorstep, right, in the morning, you read the newspaper, and magazines came every month. You went to the doctor's office, you didn't sit on your phone, right, there was a pile of magazines. Not so much in 2026. But you decide to acquire that, and to run that, and to put effort and resources into it. Why that decision to do that, and what role do you see MSM playing in self storage in 2026? Travis Morrow: Well, Lance and I definitely got some sideways looks from many people when we threw this idea out there to our board. And, you know, being part of the industry for as long as I had, I knew what Mini Storage Messenger was to the industry — not only as a source of education, but a voice for the independent owner operator. You know, we have our annual Facility of the Year awards, which for us developers is an important deal. Travis Morrow: And so that was a long discussion with MiniCo, who had started and run that magazine for over 40 years before we acquired the assets of it in 2023. The thought was, you know, we wanted to acquire those assets so that we could continue that education and have that voice for the independent owner operator and the industry, so that it wouldn't just go away. Travis Morrow: You know, you are correct that the print magazines face — you know, just like I wouldn't graduate business school and go straight into self storage, you also wouldn't go say, "Hey, I'm going to go buy a magazine. [laughter] A print magazine." But the vision was always bigger than print. And so we rebranded the print magazine. It is a beautiful document. I love to receive it every month, and that is the art of the industry that we're in, from a publication standpoint. Travis Morrow: But then we revamped our digital experience and the digital magazine, and use a vendor called Vertical to produce this beautiful online version of the magazine that gives us all the power of a full-blown website — from animations, and just how we display, and we can add audio and we can add video and we can do all of these things that you can't do in a printed book. We can enhance the digital version into more of an experience for our subscribers and readers. Travis Morrow: And so we get to do all the pretty things, but we also get to talk about what's important to the independent owner operator, and we also get to cover the news. And from an industry standpoint, the other main sources of news, whether it be ISS or SSA, they have an angle — just like every publication has an angle. We wanted to ensure that the independent owner operator angle continued to exist kind of in perpetuity, with our acquisition of those assets. And so that's really what brought us to do that. Travis Morrow: And I've learned a lot about the publishing industry since 2023 when we bought it. And it's been very, very interesting, but a lot of fun. Just being able to have our website, and see the news get updated every day, and be able to see, you know, on the back end how many people are reading articles and what's the most interesting stuff to self storage operators. And fun fact — the most popular type of content we produce is fires. Like, whenever we cover a facility for burning, more people read that than anything. [laughter] I don't know what that says about humanity, but — Thaddeus Campbell: Well, I — you probably heard in journalism school — I quit working in television, honestly, 3 years into my TV career. A, because I was making nothing, and I was living in Kearney, Nebraska. God bless, amazing town. But as someone from the East Coast, that's the only place they'd hire me to be on television. I wanted to see my family. Second was because it was either murder or a fire, or else it didn't get a whole lot of people watching. So — and I wasn't the weather guy. The weather guy, everyone watched. The news guy, not so much. Thaddeus Campbell: Look, we're 30 minutes into this conversation. I usually cut the show off here and I'm going to extend a little bit if you have a couple minutes, because I haven't even talked about the show yet and I'm so excited to dig into this with you, because I find it fascinating. You mentioned ISS, you mentioned SSA. SSA obviously has two big national shows every year — one in the East Coast that rotates, and then one in Vegas. ISS is in Vegas every April. What did you see in the industry that made you feel like you needed to go create this incredible event that you have? And I say incredible — I talked to you about this I think off camera, maybe I said it on camera earlier, I can't remember. But the people in the industry that are coming out to support the show — we talked about Wayne Woolsey and Kiwi that are supporting it financially, but the people that are going to Atlanta that you're going to put on stage and have talking and educating, the cream of the crop of the industry. What is it that you saw that made you feel it? Because I'll be honest, as a person looking at it, when I first heard about it, my first thought was why, right? Why are they doing this? Why? What do they think they're going to accomplish? And is it — I was like, is it going to work? It's obviously been very well received. Tell me your thought process and what you were thinking when you decided to go down this road. Travis Morrow: Well, so — you actually nailed it with the two West Coast shows in Vegas, plus the moving target of the SSA spring show, that left an opening in the fall on the East Coast. And the East Coast was kind of underrepresented from a national conference standpoint. And there are, you know, 16,000 facilities in the Southeast, and you know, you go up the Eastern Seaboard there's another 10,000 headed that — okay, it was kind of an underserved market, truly. Travis Morrow: But what really gave me the idea is I had been attending other industry events, whether it be a security or HubSpot Inbound, and I saw how other industries were doing their big conferences. And we've been doing our conferences the same way for a long time as an industry. And just like we did with the magazine, we want to do the same thing to the national conference and trade show for our industry. And I've seen how it can be improved, and we're looking to make those improvements at the show. Travis Morrow: And so you do that by, like you said, you have an all-star lineup of the top tier talent in speaking in the industry. You work with them to come up with new content and new thoughts that they can share with the group. We've got over 60 hours of self storage content scheduled at this event, across our four pillars of content, which are data, development, investment, and operations. And plus, we've got six keynote speakers. We've got two US congressmen, a Major League Baseball Hall of Famer, a CNN commentator who's coming to us days after the end of midterm elections. Super on topic, super interesting content that you haven't seen anywhere else. We've got one of the REIT CEOs that we're going to be interviewing, 50 round table sessions, huge trade show floor. Travis Morrow: It's not that it was being done bad previously. I've been going to those events for 20 years. It's just, whenever I see an area to improve or something that can be improved, I like to go try and do it. And so that's what we're doing with this show. And we hope everybody comes out, because — I keep saying it, and believe me or don't believe me — but it's going to be one you don't want to miss. Thaddeus Campbell: I love it. I'm looking forward — I talked to you about this off camera, this I definitely talked to you about off camera. I have my other podcast, Storage Unlocked, much more news-oriented, but I want to bring you back on as we get later into August, September. That is obviously the first week of November when the show happens, right after midterm elections, as you said. Looking forward to diving into that a little deeper with you and giving people an idea of what that's going to be about. If somebody wants to register for the show, if they want to go and be an attendee, how do they find it? How do they get themselves registered? Travis Morrow: We made it as easy as possible. It's msmtheshow.com will take you to the page, and there's a red button at the top right hand corner that says Register. We are just ramping up. You know, we've been marketing it well. I'm pleased with the buzz that we've got and created so far. It's only going to get more from here over the next 90 days. And so the hope is we should be really easy to find for all of your listeners, but msmtheshow.com is the website. Thaddeus Campbell: I love it. He's Travis Morrow at Storelocal. You're going to hear more from him and more about the show on my other podcast, Storage Unlocked, coming up over the next couple of months. Fascinating conversation. I could have gone another hour. I told you beforehand I had like 40 questions listed. I asked one of them that I had written down, which is the first one: how did you get involved in storage? I didn't have to go back to my questions list at all. Really appreciate you coming and spending over a half hour with me and sharing your incredible story in the industry. Travis Morrow: Hey, I appreciate you having me on, Thaddeus. Really do. And I look forward to doing the next one with you too. Thaddeus Campbell: Love it. Love it. Going to give one more shout out to our — I'm going to say our friends, because they're supporting Travis in the show as well. Kiwi II Steel, Wayne Woolsey and his team have been putting up incredible buildings. I literally look out my window at a brand new three-story facility that his steel crews did an incredible job on. Get them involved in your ground-up development project early. Take advantage of 30 years of lessons that they've learned. Let that help you get an incredible development project out of the ground. Simply the best crews in steel. Thaddeus Campbell: He is Travis Morrow. I am Thaddeus Campbell. That's it for this week's episode of the Stories Behind the Door podcast. We'll see everyone next week. Travis Morrow: Awesome. Thank you. — END OF TRANSCRIPT —