RecNation teaming up with Goldman Sachs for $500M raise.

THE SELF STORAGE REPORT — EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Episode: RecNation Teaming Up with Goldman Sachs for a $500M Raise Guest: Gary Wojtaszek ("Wojo") — Founder & CEO, RecNation RV & Boat Storage (Dallas, TX); former CEO, CyrusOne Host: Chris Berg — Abernathey Development Published: February 18, 2025 (live) Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woTIPTdd1BQ Key topics: The $500M raise with Goldman Sachs, Gary's path from Cincinnati Bell CFO to spinning out and building CyrusOne into a REIT and a ~$15B KKR exit, why RV and boat storage is "the first part of the inning," Starlink and remote work as demand drivers, Millennials as the fastest-growing RV buyers and the Class B Sprinter van trend, the origin story of not being able to park his own Airstream in Highland Park, partnering with Centerbridge Partners, building a ~70-location platform and the path to 300–400 locations and a $7B business, "what's my right to win" as the investment framework, capital allocation and the right side of the balance sheet, alternative-use floor value as downside protection (~$6–7M average deals vs. $500M single-asset data centers), site criteria (population, income, growth rates, registered boats and RVs, competitive supply, a dozen facilities per market), lights-out operations with a US call center augmented in South Africa plus app-based access control, ancillary revenue (third-party management, an Airbnb-style RV rental pool, Turo, Camping World mobile repair in Florida), trying to partner with Lennar on land, Hamid Moghadam at Prologis as the capital-stack model, and all four of his kids joining the company. Note: Speaker attribution reconstructed from YouTube captions. Light cleanup of transcription errors only; wording preserved. ————————————————————————————— Chris Berg: Welcome to the Self Storage Report. I'm your host, Chris Berg. Very special guest today — Gary Wojtaszek. He is the CEO. Did I get that right, by the way, Gary? Gary Wojtaszek: Everyone calls me Wojo, Chris. Chris Berg: Okay — Gary Wojo, CEO and founder of RecNation. Exciting news: he's looking to raise $500 million with Goldman Sachs. Just last October, Goldman Sachs announced him as one of the premier entrepreneurs of the year. He's got a great background — he took Cincinnati Bell, acquired CyrusOne, flipped it into a REIT, and eventually in 2021–2022 there was a $15 billion all-cash offer for CyrusOne. I'm presuming — and we'll get into this today, Gary — but that's exactly what you're looking to do as far as taking RecNation into a public REIT as well. So welcome to the show, congratulations on all your success, and I really appreciate you being here. Gary Wojtaszek: Sure, yeah. Good to be here, Chris. Thanks a lot. Chris Berg: So let's just jump in — because again, these are some of my assumptions based on the research I've done. Any of it: "Hey, I learned these systems with CyrusOne, I feel like I can apply those now to RecNation." So let's start — let's talk about how you take Cincinnati Bell, acquire CyrusOne, and flip that into a REIT. Gary Wojtaszek: Sure. So look, I was the CFO of Cincinnati Bell, and I was hired to figure out what to do strategically with all the cash flow. It was a classic telco — it was generating buckets of cash, but the cash cow was dead, it just takes a while for it to keel over. So I knew I had some time to figure out what to do with that. And as I was looking at the different lines of business, we had a wireline business, a wireless business, a tower business, a managed services business. As I was digging into the managed services business, I realized that there were data centers in there. And then when I pulled apart the pieces of that business — separating the IT systems business from the underlying infrastructure — I thought it was a more interesting play in data centers. We just started spending more and more time understanding that, developed a strategy around it. I thought it was something that you could do on a standalone basis, and that's what we did. We separated it out, we started running it solely as an infrastructure play, and then spoke to the board of directors about developing a bigger strategy around it. They agreed, and we started doing just that. Then that took us down a path of acquiring CyrusOne, which was a Houston-based data center operator at the time — pretty small. We basically acquired that, moved it to Cincinnati, renamed our data center business CyrusOne, and then just started expanding it. And then ultimately turned it into a REIT, IPO'd it, and then took what was a really small $500 million business and built it into a global powerhouse that was acquired by KKR for about $15 billion. So about a 30x multiple from when we first started the business. It was a tremendous business, a lot of success, a lot of great fun, a fantastic team. We got to do everything there — I mean, you basically kind of climbed to the top of the mountain and you did it all, and you did it along with just a tremendous group of individuals that really enjoyed building the company together and with one another. So it was a great run. Chris Berg: So it was a great run. You end up being, you know, quasi-retired, if you will. You get an RV, all of a sudden you don't have a place to park it — thus sort of the inspiration behind RecNation. Quick question, because I know you took CyrusOne globally: do you see RecNation as a global entity as well? Gary Wojtaszek: Yeah. Almost my entire career has been international. I worked overseas, worked for General Motors, I've lived in France and lived in Belgium, and almost my entire career I've always managed teams of people internationally. It was only until I went to Cincinnati that that was the first domestic company I worked at — and then quickly started expanding CyrusOne globally. Because look, if you're playing on a world scale, it depends on your ambitions. If you want to do something big, a global stage is the way to play. I have been spending time looking at that opportunity here, but there's so much wood to chop in this country — because we are in the first part of the inning. We are the largest player in the space now, and we're really nothing industry-wide in this country. So before we want to expand outside, there's a lot of work to do here. There really is. Chris Berg: And you and I touched on this in our first conversation — and again, these are some things that I've been thinking about for this interview — but I can see RecNation, just to really give you that ARR that you're looking for, kind of become a membership-type club, like a Costco kind of situation. And then with Starlink now, you could easily be a global entity where you've got these RVs and boats all over the world, and they're part of the RecNation membership. Is that kind of where you see this going to hit that $7 billion number you put out in some articles? Gary Wojtaszek: Yeah. No, look, I think we can easily get this to 300–400 locations nationwide. I think Starlink is just another fantastic product — that Elon, that guy is just incredible what he comes up with. I was using that this summer, and it's good and bad, right? I was out in a remote camping location on top of a mountain in the middle of nowhere in Colorado, which was really cool — but at the same time I was on a bunch of board calls, to the chagrin of my wife, who was pretty annoyed that I just couldn't get away. But I think what Starlink does for the broader community is it's going to enable people to work and take advantage of all the opportunities this country has. You can spend your 8, 10, 12 hours a day working on that Colorado mountaintop, and then the rest of the time you can go hike around and do that. And it's available — the speeds that I was able to get on Starlink were just impressive to me. So I think that's just going to really continue the trend of people working remotely. When I first started this business, you're right — I have a place in Florida, we were on a beach during the middle of COVID trying to figure out what to do, and our trip to Italy kind of got skewered because of COVID. So I convinced my wife to go buy the Airstream camper we ended up camping with. And I still do a lot of board work — I'm on the boards of several companies now, so it's a decent amount of work — but every time I knew I had a board call, I knew I had to camp and get to somewhere where I had Wi-Fi access. And Starlink is a game changer. Now you can go anywhere and it's perfect. I think more and more people are going to do that, particularly when you're in a hybrid work environment. You could just load up the RV and go shoot to Big Bend National Park and go spend a couple days on a long weekend there and still get your work done. So it's pretty efficient. Chris Berg: Well, and you probably know the demographic numbers better than I do — and I know that RV buyers are getting younger, and yet with all the Baby Boomers retiring, but they want to look at their portfolios. The opportunity to have them in RVs and checking their portfolios and using Starlink and being one of your customers is, I would guess, pretty robust. I want to get into some of the nitty-gritty. So here you are, you've got this Gulfstream — excuse me, that's not a jet. You've got — maybe you have a Gulfstream. And so you're looking for a place to park it. It's hard to land those in the national park. But I do want to get into sort of the nitty-gritty, because you've got such a great business. You can't find a place to park yours — what happened when you started looking into the numbers? Because if I remember correctly, I think you guys have already raised $800 million, right? Gary Wojtaszek: Yeah, yeah. So that's exactly it. Because I wasn't sure what I was going to do — I had such a fun time building CyrusOne and kind of doing everything you could possibly do, taking a small company, growing it and IPO'ing it and taking it international. It kind of basically achieved all the things I had set out to do, so I wasn't really quite sure what I wanted to do. But when we started this adventure, this camping trip — I realized that when I was bringing back my RV from Florida, moving it to Dallas, my main house — I live in Highland Park — you can't park, you know, no Cousin Eddie allowed, right? So you can't park the RV here, and they're pretty particular about not wanting folks to do that. So I started stressing out about where I was going to park this. And every place was sold out, and I'm like, "Oh my God, now what am I going to do? I got this nice toy I can't use it — where am I going to put it?" And then to the point where I was calling up the team at CyrusOne saying, "Hey, I've got to park this at the data center," because data centers are great — there's no people there and plenty of spots, and it's highly secure, so it's kind of what you're looking for. So it was really out of necessity that I thought it was way too difficult to park my RV. And then once I started digging into this, I was like, wow, this is just like an untapped market. I ultimately ended up buying the facility that I originally stored my RV at, and then I bought a couple more, and just kind of bought up a half a dozen of these around Dallas. And I'm like, this is a really cool business. It was cool because from a business perspective it was untapped, new — no one really knew much about it. But I saw it as just easy pickings, right? How do you apply some basic business practices in terms of institutional focus on revenue management, pricing, customer service — the things that were really kind of lacking in the industry, because it's basically mom-and-pop. But then the return profile was very much like when I first got into data centers. In data centers you're making a lot of money in your early days — you were in high cotton right out of the gate. And then as the industry matured and there's a lot of capital going in, the returns kind of got traded away, which is what you'd expect. Here we're still in early stages, and so I was really attracted to this. And I'm like, hey, let me go see if there's other people that can see the same thing I do. And then when I reached out to a bunch of different private equity firms, everyone was interested and spending more time with me on this and partnering. Ultimately I decided to partner with Centerbridge on this, which was great. It was a firm I never really knew before — they're more of a middle-market type firm, about a $40 billion company. Most of my experience in data centers were the big guys that could put data center capital out, the KKRs, the Blackstones, the Carlyles of the world. But the Centerbridge team was fantastic. They had made various investments in and around the space, so they had a lot of institutional knowledge about manufactured homes, marinas, self-storage. And probably more importantly, the team that I got to work with was fantastic — Billy and Matt there, they've been great partners. You hear all these horror stories of people working with private equity firms and it doesn't work out that way, and I can't say anything but positive things about the experience. So it was a good one for me, I can't complain. And so we've raised a lot of money. We built the largest platform now in the country, with almost 70 locations. And I really think I could build this to a national platform of 300–400 locations, and you could take it public, you could sell it to a strategic — there's lots of different optionality on the exit here. But in the meantime, it's a really fun business. Customers really enjoy what they're doing — they talk to you about their camping trips or fishing trips. That customer relationship aspect was something that I did not anticipate, because typically customers only call you in the data center when it's bad news — like your electricity is going down, the heat is out of control. Those aren't pleasant conversations. And so here, these are really pleasant conversations — unless the gate isn't working and there's a guy at your door at four o'clock in the morning trying to go get his bass boat. He can get pretty ornery. But for the most part, these are really good conversations to have with customers. Chris Berg: Man, I've got so many questions for you. I want to get a better idea of just sort of how your entrepreneurial mind works. So you see that there's a need, you go buy some of these. Do you know Rick Caruso, by chance? Big builder out here in LA, ran for mayor of LA. You know that name? Gary Wojtaszek: Yeah, yeah, I know. I saw him on the news a lot recently. I mean, he saved all his malls there — really, really impressive guy. Chris Berg: So my question for you is, I'm curious: as you were looking at this industry and then started to go get some private equity — I know you need to show them some performance, I'm not completely naive — but my point is, Rick Caruso had a really fascinating interview one time where he goes, "I've never looked at an IRR. Never cared about it, never looked at it." So I want to kind of understand: as you're going into this business and exploring and starting, going, "Hey, wait a second, I'm going to go raise some money" — what were the metrics that you were looking at? Financially, or demography, or maybe it was TAM? What were those metrics you were looking at going, "Okay, yeah, I need to go raise some money and do this"? Gary Wojtaszek: Yeah, it's all of those. And maybe Rick is blessed with all that money, you know, that he doesn't care. But if you're going to raise other people's money, you really have to have the metrics down. Well, you have to know what you're going to do — because you have a big sense of responsibility. Probably the biggest: if you take someone's money, you have to be able to deploy that and return it back to them, plus a nice return on top of it. So there's a big responsibility when you take people's money. But the returns you're looking at are the same as you'd look at on any investment: what is your going-in yield on it, what's your cash-on-cash returns, what's your IRRs over a certain period of time. Those are just your base-level things. But to me — I've looked at a million models in my life, and maybe this is where Rick was going — I think more important than just returns, because a lot of those returns and that investment stuff is really more of a spreadsheet exercise, right? You can make that IRR to be whatever you want it to be. I always looked at: what structurally do you have in the industry that's going to give you that type of confidence that you're going to be able to go do this? So you hit on one of them, right — an addressable market. If you have a big market that you're going after, that's always better than a small market, so that's generally a good position. If it's an unbelievably fragmented space, that gives you a really good ability to think you're going to do well — so long as you have the wherewithal to go build an operating company that can sustain a competitive advantage. So that's what I was really focused on: what's my right to win? And so how do I think about the competitive landscape, and how I can compete against them, and how do I build a business where I can run the table and put everyone to the sides and take a big share of that market? That's the way I think about it. And that's the way we did it at CyrusOne too. When I first started CyrusOne, we were a very small company and there were big established players already, and there were dozens and dozens of companies. What I did then that was somewhat novel and unique was that I was focused on supply chain. I was like, how do you design cost out — with the goal strategically of how do I maintain the low-cost position in the market and speed to market, so I can ensure higher returns, minimize my capital deployment? And if I can marry that up with a sales team that were just killers, you couldn't compete. So you marry up capital allocation with sales velocity, and that's always a good approach to take. And so I look at those industry parameters as being more my right to win, and think about: can I build a better mousetrap and do something here that's uniquely different, where I can just continue to put more and more room between myself and everyone? So at CyrusOne, in the years that I was there we were by far the largest data center developer in the country — domestically in the US. The other two bigger players, Digital Realty and Equinix, are still big companies, really big players, but they weren't developing as much. And we had a real strong competency on development, because I was very comfortable with my build cost being the lowest in the market, and I had a sales team that was second to none where we would never lose. So I felt really good about doing that and growing that business. When I think about our business here, I think same thing. It's like: how do you compete against the crowd that's out here? And I like my odds here, because this is like a really, really beginning-early-stage investment here, and we have developed a really robust operating platform, which is very difficult to do. What I found in real estate is that real estate tends to be a passive investment play. It's kind of like a bond-math type investment — you get some base returns and some inflator on it, and that's kind of it. Which is a great investment. The result is that a lot of people kind of shy away from focusing on the operating-intense type businesses, if they can. And that's kind of where I like to focus, because in data centers it's a very operating-intense business with high capital expenditures. And if you could take that same type of mindset applied to this space, you could really do well. And that's what we had. So it took us about two years to build up a really robust operating platform here. And I was fortunate that I pulled a lot of my execs from my CyrusOne days — kind of got some of the band back together here. There's still band members there, and CyrusOne is doing incredibly well; they're just still killing it, they're probably like a $30 billion company now, I guess. But I got a lot of the team that are doing this here, so we're having a lot of fun kind of recreating this. And probably the biggest lesson is just trying to avoid some of the mistakes that we made at CyrusOne. We grew at a 25% CAGR for the dozen or so years that I was involved with it, and that level of growth sustained is really difficult to do efficiently. I always recognized that my top line was really outgrowing the operating foundation that I had of the company, and so my staff meetings had a lot of tension between salespeople complaining about accountants and operations and legal — everyone complaining about everyone. And I fundamentally knew that it was because we were outgrowing the foundation of the company, and so there were things that we needed to replace. And it's hard to do when you're a big company and you're still running hard, to change out that stuff. So creating change in a mature organization is tough. So when we started this company, the team here went into it eyes wide open to say, okay, let's go build this correctly from the beginning in anticipation of scale, so that we can run hard and avoid some of those problems. You're never going to fully avoid it — you're always going to, I mean, business is just a continuing problem of the most important issue at that time, right? So you're constantly problem-solving. But if you can minimize it, at least you can sleep a little better at night and avoid some of the drama. Chris Berg: Well, again — a lot I want to ask you. But I think one of the things I really like about this asset class as well, and I touched on this in our first conversation: as you're going out to raise this money, every investor is looking for asymmetrical returns, right? And I think there's a really powerful way to mitigate risk in this asset class, because — hey, you know what, we acquired the wrong property, or we developed and, okay, we'll wipe it clean and the guy from multifamily will come in and buy it and we'll get our money back. Is that a fair assessment? Gary Wojtaszek: Absolutely. When I think about the capital allocation here and the risk-return profile, it's really attractive. I tell the team, look, we could really screw up and just miss the boat on some of these deals, but we're never going to lose an appendage here. Our average deals are like six, seven million bucks. So we've never screwed up on it, but if we did, it's not going to be the end of it. If I contrast that with if I'm doing a $500 million single-asset data center development — which is what we did all the time — yes, there is a very, very different risk-reward profile there. And you're not ever going to have an alternative use of a data center other than a data center. And in this business, you called it exactly. All of our properties are not necessarily in infill locations, because that's probably not the best use for that land in downtown Dallas or Miami — but we are in areas that are in big HOA-restricted communities, where it's surrounded by master-planned communities, where you can easily repurpose us to housing or other types of things. And we've spent a lot of time engineering our design and supply chain, similar to what we did at CyrusOne, to get that down to a cost point that's really low, and we can deliver product quickly. But at the end of the day, it's not like we're building at $1,200 a foot data centers — this is $50, $60, $70. So it's not really that expensive. So I've always liked this. There are a bunch of different reasons I like this asset in general, this company, what we were going to do — but one of them was just at the pure asset level, there was always a floor at which you can repurpose these for something else. We get offers all the time from people that want to go do, like, industrial builders — they approach us all the time wanting to do this, but the numbers that they're offering yet don't make sense. But we know over time they probably will. And I think also over time, as more people buy these toys, we're going to get continued demand. You mentioned it early on — what was interesting to me was the biggest growth in this market is younger folks. It's the Millennials who are the biggest buyers of RVs now, so it's kind of skewing down. And the other thing is the Sprinter vans — those Class B ones. These people are dropping over $100,000 on these, but those are ideal for exploring the country, hooking up your Starlink and just hanging out and chilling and enjoying nature. And that, I think, is a broad thematic trend — that people are going to want to spend more and more time on experiences. Chris Berg: Well, especially in this younger demographic — none of them can afford homes, right? Totally might as well go get a cruiser and a Starlink and go explore the country, and worry about the home thing later, right? Gary Wojtaszek: Yeah. No, one of the heroes — so this one woman who worked for me years ago at CyrusOne. When I started this camping trip with my wife, that was really the first time I got on Instagram. I'd never really been a social media guy, and so I started memorializing our camping trip on Instagram. And then all of a sudden I was finding all these people texting me like, "Hey, where you at next?" And it was so funny — it was all these different Instagram handles, it was a bunch of other CEOs of other companies, or bankers or attorneys, people who didn't want to have a social media presence out there, and they were following me. It was kind of odd. But one of the women that did was a woman that worked for me, and she's like, "You know, we're doing this — my last kid is going off to college and we bought an RV, and my husband and I are going to go cruise around the country." And so she and her husband did that for a year. She worked for a tech company and they were perfectly fine with it — she got her job done and did everything, but she traveled around the country doing it. And I'm like, man, I love that. Those stories are fantastic. The other story — this is my coolest story. We bought a couple properties from a guy out in Jacksonville. An older guy getting ready for retirement, which is like most of the people we buy from — older guys or husband-wife couples that have owned these things forever. So he sold this to us, and it's just a great family. Actually, all the people we bought from are just really nice folks in general. It's a nice business from that perspective. But anyway, he took his proceeds from this and he bought a purpose-built boat that is made to do the Great Loop. If you don't know what the Great Loop is: along the east coast of the US there's the Intracoastal Waterway, where you can go from Maine to Florida and don't really have to go on the ocean — you could just do an inland waterway all along, there's like this little river. So he does this. He puts in at Jacksonville, goes along the coast up, and he stops at all these locations — really cool, like Annapolis, New York, all these places. But then he drives into the Hudson River, goes through the locks, gets into the Great Lakes, cruises around there, and then comes down the Mississippi River, and then he goes out to the Gulf, and then he rounds Florida and goes back. Like, he does this. And I'm like, this is awesome — eventually when I retire I want to do that trip. It's an awesome trip to go do. But it's stories like that that are pretty cool. So we keep in touch — I follow him every year when he puts in the boat for his next trip. So it's awesome. Chris Berg: There's so many ways I want to ask you this question, because I love the way your brain works. So when you hear that kind of story, does your brain go to, "Okay, how do we turn that into a revenue stream for RecNation?" Gary Wojtaszek: Yeah, no — oh, that one is more selfish. It's like, how do I do that for myself? [Laughter] Chris Berg: Because I mean, I keep having this membership idea coming — that's what I want to ask you. Maybe you can share where you see the vision. So let's say you raise $500 million. I saw an article last year where you said, "Hey, we're going to be $7 billion in five years." So how do you go from where you are today to $7 billion in five years? Gary Wojtaszek: Yeah. So we have proven out the business model here. We've pushed past the J-curve. And this is your earlier point about the investors and the IRRs and everything else — but at the end of the day, you're really making a leap of faith between both partners to kind of prove that out. Because I didn't know those guys, they didn't know me, and I'm like, "Hey, this is what we could do," and they're like, "Okay, let's go." And so we did it. We built that operating company. It's hard to do — it is really hard to go pull together all the systems, process, team. We have like 75 people. It's hard getting all that going, and then proving out that model. So we're just done with that now — we're on the other side of that. So now we're going to start allocating capital quicker, going faster, and running at this at scale. Because as we start developing this business, our cost of capital is just going to continue to drop and drop. And then all the efficiencies that we gained on the left side of our balance sheet in terms of the property management, asset management — that's kind of like a really positive do-loop, where our scale just gets more scale, and our cost of capital comes down, so we can scale the platform. So that's what we're focused on doing, and that's how we're going to go do it. Because now we are built where we can handle five, six acquisitions a month and integrate them fully into our company in a month. Because you have to do that quickly — you're on your hamster wheel of, if you're going to do five, six acquisitions every month, you need to be able to quickly integrate that and get that up and running. So things are really starting to go quickly now. Chris Berg: Public Storage manages our stuff, and I'm sure Extra Space has got theirs — some people call it a "loan to own" program, their loan program. You're going to have a lot of cash flow in this business, right? And so my question for you is: do you see yourself having a — maybe you do already have a development arm — are you strictly going to stay acquisitions, maybe have some bridge loans to owners and work with them? Or what's the plan? Gary Wojtaszek: Yes. So we do development now, but not ground-up. We will in the new fund. Because when we started this, the team at Centerbridge is like, "Ah, that's risky." Everyone sees it different — I was like, data center development was risky, this is not risky to me. But anyway, we agreed not to do it. What we did agree to do is that we're going to allocate 15–20% of our capital doing value-add improvements on our properties. And we've done a lot of that, actually — we have about 20,000 units, and we've developed about 2,000 of those. So we've done a fair amount of development on our existing properties today. In the new fund, when we launch this, we are going to do some more ground-up here, because there are certain markets that I've been looking at for a long time and no one wants to sell, and it's been frustrating, and I know there are great opportunities. So we're going to go do that. The one thing that I really learned, most of all, as a REIT was the whole capital allocation aspect of that — it's really interesting. Because most of my career I was in technology, so it was a different space. In technology you always compete on the left side of your balance sheet: how do you do things faster, better? That's how you make all your hay — how do I get a time-to-market advantage, all those things that you focus on in the technology space. You don't really think too much about your balance sheet that much. But when you're in a capital-intensive business, as data centers are and this is, you spend a lot more time on the right side of your balance sheet, because then you could really get alpha also on your right side of your balance sheet as well, as you start scaling that platform. And it's really understanding how to use all those levers to your advantage that really differentiates you in a big way in any capital-intensive space. Chris Berg: So with that being said — I'm so glad you brought this up, because have you seen what Lennar is doing, where they're now starting a land fund and then Lennar is going to buy it from them as land as they get it developed, and try to help their returns? Have you seen that? Gary Wojtaszek: No, I've not seen that. But I have been spending a lot of time — the challenge in the data center space is the capital allocation piece is really, really challenging. And so I've been spending a lot of time just kind of riffing around how to ideally solve that problem, because there are a lot of companies going public, and the challenge in a capital-intensive business that's growing is: how do you grow that well? To me, the company I've always admired — and I think he's done the best job — has been Hamid at Prologis. He's got so many different capital sources. He's really come up with a fantastic mousetrap for his business, where he can take advantage of different cost-of-capital profiles. It just marries it up really well. I don't know specifically what Lennar is doing, but we've reached out to Lennar — we're trying to partner with them. Because they're a big home developer, and we are fundamentally providing an amenity that all of their customers need. So we've been trying to work with them on finding pockets of land that isn't ideal to develop on that would be perfect for us. So we've been working with them. Chris Berg: I'm curious — as you are getting more and more in the business, we've got a pretty good site criteria about what we think's going to build out, certain metrics. Are you finding certain criteria that are acting as your most successful sites? And if so, are you focused on population, is it income? What are the metrics you're focused on? Gary Wojtaszek: Yeah, we focus on population, income, the growth rates in those areas. We track the number of registered boats and RVs in those areas, and competitive supply. And then when we're looking at getting in, we just don't want to go in with one — the goal is, how do we get a dozen or so facilities in a market so we can best leverage all of our operating investments? Because we've invested a lot of time and resources on the operating model that predominantly do two things. All the things are either focused on automation — automate as much as we possibly can — and it's focused on consolidation, where we can control as many things through one location. And so we run all of our facilities on a lights-out basis. We leverage our operational team to cover multiple sites, where they have a statement of work, an SOP, that they're going out hitting multiple times a week. They have to go do certain protocols at each location, but they don't need to be on site. If any customer has a call or question, whatever, they call us — we have a call center that we set up in the US, we augmented it with a team in South Africa to provide more support and service around the clock. But we also have an app that controls access and egress. There's a lot of things that we're all focused on: how do you automate that process so that you don't need to tie up a lot of headcount managing the facilities when it's not really needed? Chris Berg: Let's talk about some of your revenue streams. I know you've got some ancillary opportunities here — here's your website for people that want to go check it out. And then you've got third-party management, now you're doing, looks like, repair service, cleaning. Where do you see some of the most growth as far as some of these ancillary revenue streams? Gary Wojtaszek: Yeah, so these are all ancillary businesses that just make a lot of sense for what we're doing. So you mentioned Public Storage and Extra Space, right? I don't know, maybe 30% of their portfolios are not owned by the corporation, and they're doing it. And I'm like, oh, well, we could do that. So we started that up this year, and we've got a couple properties that we're managing for other owners. And eventually when the time comes for them to sell, we hope that we get the call — and if I build the company well, we should have the lowest cost of capital, we should be the rightful buyer. So that's the underlying strategy there. In addition to that, that's just leveraging investments you made — now how do you scale quicker, and that'll help your deal funnel. Other things on there: we started off an Airbnb-for-RVs rental business last year, where we spent a lot of time trying to get our customers to put their RVs in a rental pool that we rent out to other folks. So we basically are kind of like an Airbnb for RVs — monetize their RVs for them. They get some money, we get some money, everyone's happy, and it makes our underlying real estate that much more attractive. Chris Berg: Can I interrupt you there — sorry, sir. Was it like a Turo kind of thing? Are you familiar with Turo? Gary Wojtaszek: Well, actually Turo is someone we're talking to now about having them park their cars in our facilities so people can go rent them from there. So yeah, it's more akin to like an Airbnb, really. Well, I guess it's kind of both. But in our case, we do the walkthrough. Because you have to — so there's two things: we're kind of like the Hertz check-in/checkout process folks. When you come to our place, we'll rent you out that RV, we will walk it through, make sure there's no dings or dents, everything works, you know how to work it, that sort of thing. And then when you come back, we just make sure it's in the same condition, and if it's not, then we charge that to the renter or to the insurance company. But we do that, and so that is a way to monetize people's investments, to make some extra cash with it. Chris Berg: I was going to ask — so let's talk about this revenue stream some more. Because the research I did: the average RV person is using their RV what, maybe 30 days out of the year? It's not a lot, right? Gary Wojtaszek: Oh, for sure. Yep. Chris Berg: I've got another 11 months to generate a revenue stream thanks to you. Gary Wojtaszek: That's right, yep. And so what's good about it is: if you have an RV and you want to turn it into a business, it's kind of a pain, right? You've got to go marketing, go talk to customers, and then you've got some sketchy dudes coming to your house and your wife is walking them through the RV — like, it's just so weird, right? And so we made it easy for folks. So we started that up last year. And we do a lot of work with Camping World. We do repair services broadly, but what we just did last week is, now all Florida — we teamed up with them where they're going to do mobile repair work for all of our customers in Florida. And so that helps our customers, helps us. It's just these symbiotic things that, when you look at what we're doing, there's so many different aspects of what we do that could make this much more interesting over time. And to me it's just a question of prioritization of focus, because I can generate ideas all day. My team makes fun of me — like, "Okay, Gary's just going to wave the new business idea wand and let's get it going." And so fortunately I work with a fantastic team, and they actually do take these concepts and deliver them into businesses. So I've been very, very blessed to be able to work with such great people — actually my whole career, I've just had a fantastic team that I've always worked with. Chris Berg: Well, one of the things I love about what you're doing is all four of your kids are working with you now as well, right? I think that's fantastic. Gary Wojtaszek: Yeah, yeah. So I got them out of New York. They were all bankers — my other son was an actuary, which wasn't a tough sell to convince him to give up that gig, right? So we convinced them to join, and you know what it is, they've learned so much. I've been blessed to have a good career and do some cool things, but I'm even more blessed now to be able to teach them how to do this. And it's not just them — this is by far the youngest company. I'm the oldest guy in the company, which was never the case before. But the cool part about it is that I get as much enjoyment from being able to teach all these other folks and give them the opportunities to do things that they just wouldn't be able to do, and rotate them around to different areas so they can learn a lot. So they look back in five years and be like, "Look, you will never get the opportunity to do what you're doing here ever in a career." And ultimately, more than anything, I'm teaching them how to fish, right — where they can all go out. My goal would be, if I was successful as a dad: well, one, empathetic, right? If they're empathetic for others, then I know I made it as a dad. But at a professional level, if they can all go out and start their own businesses and have the confidence and skill and experience to do that, then I really, really succeeded. Chris Berg: I completely agree. Gary, as I hope you can tell, I could talk to you for days. I want to be respectful of your time. Anything else you want to add or share that I haven't asked yet? Gary Wojtaszek: No, no. This was good — good catching up with you. Chris Berg: That was great. And again, let's just share with people — they want to find out more about you, maybe there's people that want to be part of the $500 million raise. How can they reach out and be in communication with you? Gary Wojtaszek: Yeah, just give us a call or email me. It's wojo@recnationstorage.com. And I'm always around. Chris Berg: Gary, thank you so much. Wish you continued success. And check them out — recnationstorage.com. RecNationStorage.com. This is the Self Storage Report. Fantastic conversation. Please share this with family, friends and colleagues, and we'll see you again soon. Gary Wojtaszek: Great, I — — END OF TRANSCRIPT —