Improving Your Life Through Real Estate with Scott Lewis
Scott Lewis is the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Spartan Investment Group, LLC (SIG). As the CEO, Scott is responsible for the strategic direction of the company and ensuring it aligns with SIG’s mission to Improve Lives Through Real Estate. In addition to Spartan, Scott is also in the US Army Reserves and a combat Vet. Scott graduated from Michigan State University with degrees in Chemistry and Marketing, from Catholic University with an MS in Management, and from Georgetown University with a Certificate in Project Management.
Scott Lewis focuses heavily on self-storage. He does everything from finding their own deals, funding, and then operating them both from asset management, property management, and also construction management.
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Brett:
I'm excited about our next guest. He is on a mission to help you improve your life through real estate investing. In fact, his story starts back in Washington DC, when his partner met his neighbors, and the background in the military created an opportunity to take the fundamentals to the real estate investing world. Please welcome the show with me, Scott Lewis. Scott, how are you doing?
Scott:
I'm doing fantastic, Brett. Thanks for having me.
Brett:
Absolutely. Would you give our listeners a little bit more about your background and your current focus?
Scott:
Yeah, so I'm the CEO of Spartan Investment Group. We focus heavily on self-storage. And we do everything from finding our own deals, funding our own deals, and then operating them both from asset management, property management, and also construction management. And when we have expansion potentials.
Brett:
Excellent. So you've got the vertical integration going on. I love that you're in self-storage. We don't have a lot of self-storage folks on the show, we should have more because it and I definitely want to dive into that to the show here. Most of us are multifamily senior housing and mobile home parks. So we'll dive into that. Before we go there, though, would you give our listeners a little bit more about your background as it pertains to growing up, you know, I want you to go back to maybe the earlier days of university, maybe your early days of high school? You know, I believe we've all been given certain gifts, Scott, and these gifts are given to us to be a blessing for others. So I'm curious, maybe it's one of those one or two gifts that you believe you were given? And how does that help how you help and bless people today?
Scott:
Yeah, so I think kind of like shooting back to high school to kind of talk about my why, like, why I'm in real estate today. You know, my summer job in high school, was framing houses. I've never worked in a restaurant ever, even to this day, I always preferred to be outside kind of working with my hands. And I really enjoyed the built environment. So that's kind of really my interest in real estate started in high school. And then I went to college. And I majored in Chemistry and Marketing and then graduated, went into Biotech Sales. So not a lot of real estate there. I did buy a condo in Chicago in 2005, not a good investment, I still have that sound today probably going to lose 20 grand on it 15 years later. So there is still some devastation from ‘09 and ‘08 being brought over on this side of the house. But failure kind of came in did that sales job for about five years. And then I saw some bad things happen at the top of that organization. And I'm kind of big on integrity and loyalty. And there was some pretty like not good stuff. I'll just kind of leave it at that. And that caused me to kind of start looking around and figuring out like, hey, what am I going to do next? I looked at MBA programs. I got another job for like a month. And I was like, wow, I don't want to do this. So something I'd always wanted to do is serve my country. So okay, well, I guess I'm going to quit my job, take an 80%, pay, cut, sell everything I own, and go to basic training. And that's what I did. And then for about four years, I was on active duty and I came out and then worked for the Federal Government for a little while, and then finally started Spartan and it's kind of gone from there. And you talked about kind of a special skill. I think one of the things that probably other people would say that defines me is my discipline. I'm a pretty disciplined guy. I go to bed about 8:45, 9:00 at night and I get up at 4:30 almost every single day. And I think that's probably the one thing that really kind of defines me and defines my success.
Brett:
Beautiful. Absolutely love that. And by the way, you can find and learn more about Scott Lewis at spartan-investors.com. In fact, to date, some of the numbers are pretty incredible. $42 million in equity raised, 126 million of assets under management, 10 completed projects over 6,000 plus units. And I love that Scott. So let's dive right into your strategy and what brought you to I guess really Self Storage? I want to focus on that one, I think, for the most part, talk to us about the unique advantage of self-storage, and why you and your partner Ryan, find it so attractive.
Scott:
So we like storage, because, well, one, I hate people. I don't want anything to do with multifamily. I don't want anything to do with anything residential, for a couple of reasons. One, it's just you know, when you're dealing with any homesteads, there's a lot of government hands in that cookie jar. And I, for one, don't like the government telling me what to do with my investments. And then to kind of tying into that, I believe in contracts. And if I uphold my end of the bargain, I want my customers or tenants to uphold their end of the bargain. And if they don't, I want the opportunity to sever that contract and recover my asset. In the multifamily space, unfortunately, as a lot of multifamily operators have seen in the last 12 months, that's not going to be the case, because the government will step in and control your operation. And the government really doesn't care if you go bankrupt or not. So they're going to protect the individual for storage, you know, how many individuals got protected? None, zero. They don't really care about grandma's old rocking chair and their stuff. So with storage, a little bit more freedom to kind of operate within the values that we want it to operate within. And quite frankly, we just didn't want to be a part of like, an area that was growing very rapidly. Multifamily has great returns. And it's a really solid asset and such. It's been in vogue recently, and everybody has been jumping into it. And when we go to the conference, everybody was talking about multifamily. So we kind of decided to carve out our own little niche and go with self-storage. We had some experience with it with my cousin building it kind of as I was growing up and just seems like a pretty easy thing like a concrete box that people put their stuff in. It's pretty simple from the concept. Not so much from an operational standpoint, it's definitely probably a little bit more operationally intensive than multifamily. Because it's an active business. It's not it does have a real estate component to it. But there's also a very active business to it as well.
Brett:
Yeah, very well said. And we'll dive into the operational part of here in a minute and you guys efficiency and how efficiencies that you've created with your systems. But I can't help but comment on the fact that Yeah, it sounds like you found the freedom to invest in commercial real estate without all the government headaches or the big, you know, big, big hand jumping in and telling you what you can and can't do. Is that a fair summary?
Scott:
It is? Yeah, we know. I mean, there are some of the states that New York, California are kind of taken eyes at it, but we specifically stay away from both of those states.
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