Off went the starting pistol, and 115 runners sprinted ahead, jockeying for position.

The first 6 miles of the race was straight uphill, and we had 100 miles to go.

I was baffled.

We would be running for over 24 hours straight—and 60 seconds into the race, I was in last place.

I stuck to my guns and ran my race. I walked the first uphill miles, ran when the course turned flat or downhill, and then went back to walking every time the terrain gained elevation.

After 31 hours and 15,500 feet of elevation gain, I finished first in my age group, and 50 people quit before they reached the finish line.

Here’s what those first 60 seconds of my race reinforced in me about what we are building at DXD Capital and what I spent many of those 31 hours thinking about:

When Drew Dolan and I founded DXD in 2020, we had countless conversations with “industry experts” about how we were doing it wrong.

• The experts said 2020 was the worst time to start a storage investment firm.
• The experts said we needed to pay attention to square feet per capita as the dominant underwriting metric.
• The experts said that building 15 storage facilities a year wasn’t possible.

Drew and I believed the experts were wrong.

We believed the pricing data would allow us to find the best opportunities at any point in the cycle.

What we’ve found so far is that we were right. The projects we’ve built and opened have performed ahead of our expectations.

Drew had scaled a development organization before, and we believed we could take the best parts of that process and improve on the others where we could do better.

Today, the team and process we’ve established are the best in the industry, and we remain focused on improving them every day.

As I look back on what we’ve built DXD into over the last four years, I remain steadfast that maintaining conviction in your gut is the prerequisite for success.

Drew and I often disagree on what the right decision is, but through that process of friction, we often find a solution that is better than any individual thought that was brought to the table. This is a beautiful thing.

Drew and I devote much of our time to reinforcing this mentality within the organization. The best question we often ask is, why?

By asking why, we combat the herd mentality that overcame the runners at the beginning of my race; with the ultimate goal to build the best organization in storage.

Cory

Co-Founder ​DXD Capital,​ ​Radius+​, ​ManageSpace​

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