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Self-Storage Business

7 min read

Self-Storage Business

The most counterintuitive thing about self-storage is that Americans pay 100 a month than confront the psychological discomfort of throwing something away. That tension between rational economics and irrational behavior makes storage facilities one of the most reliable real estate investments in the country.

Nick Huber built a 103 million in acquisition costs, and $41 million raised from investors. Almost all of it came through Twitter.

Watch Nick explain the growth at 00:00-01:15

Why Storage Works

Self-storage defies the typical rules of real estate. Apartments require constant maintenance and tenant management. Office buildings depend on economic cycles. Retail needs foot traffic. Storage facilities need almost nothing. A concrete box with a roll-up door generates recurring revenue with minimal labor costs.

The model is simple: buy existing facilities at real estate valuations, improve operations, raise rents, then either refinance or hold for cash flow. Target returns run between 8% and 15% cash-on-cash, with additional upside from property appreciation.

What makes this particularly interesting is the tax treatment. Through a process called cost segregation, investors can depreciate 20-30% of a storage facility in the first year instead of spreading it across the standard 27-year depreciation schedule. Nick started a separate company, RE Cost Seg, specifically to help other investors capture this benefit. Nine months in, it was generating $250,000 per month in revenue.

Hear Nick explain cost segregation at 17:30-21:30

Twitter as a Capital-Raising Machine

Here is where the story gets unusual. Nick raised 96% of his $41 million from Twitter. Not institutional investors. Not family offices. Twitter followers who believed in the thesis.

He built a distribution list of over 2,000 investors with an average check size of $50,000. The mechanism was straightforward: share transparent updates about the business, educate people about real estate investing, and let interested parties reach out. No cold calls. No roadshows.

This approach inverted the traditional power dynamic in capital raising. Instead of pitching skeptical investors, Nick attracted people who already understood and trusted his strategy. When explaining his pitch method, he described deliberately leading with the risks: interest rates might spike, the economy might tank, returns might drop to 2% instead of 8%. Why invest anyway? The counterintuitive effect was that investors trusted him more because he had clearly thought through the downsides.

Hear the fundraising breakdown at 03:15-05:00

The Hidden Leverage

What looks like a straightforward storage business is actually a portfolio of interlocking companies. Nick runs Bolt Storage with only 6 Americans out of 60 employees. His COO works from Johannesburg, South Africa. His head of marketing is in Colombia. This global talent strategy dramatically reduced operating costs while maintaining quality.

Around the storage portfolio, he built a constellation of service businesses:

Each business originated as something Bolt Storage needed. Nick would hire a service provider, learn the economics, then build or buy a company to capture that value chain. The staffing business is the clearest example: he started as a customer of Support Shepherd, became an affiliate, bought 15%, then acquired majority control.

Shaan Puri observed the pattern: “He chose to not chill. He chose to bet his entire network and net worth on this. I don’t want to bet against Nick; he’s a Workhorse. He comes to pickup basketball games with a mouthpiece in.”

Watch Shaan’s assessment at 06:45-10:30

The Risk Nobody Talks About

For all its appeal, storage carries concentrated risk. Interest rates are the silent killer.

When rates moved from 3.5% to 7%, the math changed violently. Debt is the largest expense for most storage operators. Nick put it bluntly: your interest cost effectively quadrupled. This is not theoretical. He personally guarantees over 3.6 million liquid. The gap between those numbers is where fortunes are made or lost.

Hear Nick on interest rate impact at 41:30-46:00

Nick survived by increasing revenue and operational efficiency faster than rates rose. Many operators did not. The 2022-2023 rate cycle caused what he called “total carnage” in real estate, particularly among those who had underwritten deals assuming perpetually low rates.

The HoldCo Trap

Perhaps the most honest thing Nick has said about his business is that running a holding company is overrated. After building multiple businesses, he reflected: “I’ve been labeled a ‘HoldCo guy,’ but you really have to know your stuff to run more than one company. Most wealthy people I know focused on one thing for a long time.”

This contradicts the popular narrative that serial entrepreneurs should build portfolios of businesses. Nick learned the opposite lesson: consistency beats diversification. Focus is the superpower.

Watch Nick’s HoldCo reflection at 32:00-37:30

The Sweaty Startup Philosophy

Sam Parr and Shaan Puri use self-storage as a benchmark for a broader category they call sweaty startups - blue-collar, unsexy businesses that generate reliable cash flow. The thesis is simple: while Stanford graduates compete for the same venture-backed opportunities, enormous value sits unclaimed in boring industries.

Sam has predicted that HVAC roll-ups will become “the new storage business.” Others point to flea markets, car washes, and laundromats. The common thread is fragmented ownership, operational inefficiency, and buyers who undervalue these assets because they lack glamour.

Hear Sam’s HVAC prediction at 25:40-28:45

The tradeoff is real. Sam and Shaan both admit they prefer digital businesses for lower capital requirements and location independence. But they acknowledge that storage and similar ventures can build substantial wealth precisely because fewer people compete for them.

What Storage Teaches About Business

Self-storage reveals something uncomfortable about entrepreneurship: the most reliable paths to wealth are often the most boring. The business requires no proprietary technology, no network effects, no viral growth. Just concrete, steel, and the patience to compound.

Nick productized his operational knowledge into playbooks that can make storage facilities 30% more profitable. That expertise compounds faster than any individual property.

The deeper lesson may be about matching business model to personality. Some people thrive building software companies. Others need something tangible. Nick has said he was never going to be a tech founder - the grind of storage suited his disposition better than the lottery ticket of venture-backed startups.

Storage is not for everyone. But for the right operator, it offers something rare: a business model where doing boring things well generates exceptional returns.

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Last updated: 2026-01-22

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