The Right Way to Build Your Team

My previous podcast guest James Manes thinks that the biggest thing was through the years that he learned how to build teams and how to market not only a company or an asset but himself as well. When he started to go out on his own, he thought he could raise probably a million dollars, but in the end, he raised a million dollars in about 45 days and he was like, “Okay, wow.” The way he did that really was being out in the storage community, speaking for the prior six years. So, a lot of those people that are invested with him were friends and family as well as different vendors in the storage industry. He was able to line up people ahead of time that said, “man, if you ever buy a property, I’ll do this with you.” When it came time to go raise the money, he literally had a list in a notebook of all the people throughout the years that had told him that and he called them.

They invested and he was like, blown away, he was like, “oh my god, they actually invested!” That started and then they started to build a machine internally through different marketing avenues and he does a lot of speaking like this on the local, state and national levels. You know, now we’ve gotten really sophisticated, we use CRM and all that kind of stuff. Where before, he was on the phone making telephone calls and saying, “Hey, I think you told me you might want to invest.” Now he does a lot of one on one, why storage is a good investment and probably talked to about a thousand people in three years so they go into our database and when it comes time to raise money, he does an email blast and he is rising about a million bucks a month right now.

He has a philosophy that he deals with people he likes, trust and respect and you don’t fall into those three categories and he will not do business with you. He always teases that one of his business partners falls into two out of three of those categories. So really, what it comes down to is you’ve got to build that likeability with people that are honest with you because you have to be really transparent and honest with them so it starts there. Then, like a lot of people through leadership, try to build teams with people like themselves and rebuilt teams were people that complement each other, but it starts with that core value of like, trust and respect and then it builds from there. James is more of the extrovert of the group, he does a lot of public speaking, he is not afraid to make himself look stupid in the public. He does a lot of the front-facing, raising money and running operations. Where his partner is kind of a middle introvert versus extrovert.

He has a degree from the University of Kansas as an English major and he does all the behind the scenes stuff, deals with the banks, the insurance companies do any contract, he does post investor communication of that. He says that his partner is the letters guy, where he is the numbers guy. His third partner, who does all the construction related stuff, prepares maintenance or ENA like enhancements and expansions and things like that and he always likes to say that he’s the bricks and mortar guy. If you look at it and he’s an extreme introvert. Look at us as a team, we’re all totally different but we get along really well and it makes for probably the best partnership that you can have in a place of business because there’s not one dominant player. The underwriting for us as a company, he does all the underwriting and underwriting department reports to him. But James is a big-picture guy, so when he is done, he sends it to his other partner, because he is the detail guy and he goes through with fine-tooth comb and makes sure everything’s just as accurate. So, when it comes to building teams, a lot of people like to just deal with people that are a lot like them, and James does the opposite.

Listen to the full episode: https://lifebridgecapital.com/2019/11/ws378-learning-more-about-self-storage-with-john-manes/