AJ Osborne – Self-Storage Investor, CEO and Founder of Bitterroot Holdings/Keylock Storage and Host of Holdings, and Host of Cash Flow to Freedom podcast from the Boise, Idaho area talks to Neil Henderson and Brittany Henderson, the hosts of The Road to Family Freedom podcast. AJ Osborne talks about the importance of achieving financial freedom, overcoming being paralyzed, the life-saving ability of passive income, insurance needs, and the self-storage market.

At the end of the day, it's inevitable 100% like death and taxes, you're not gonna be able to work. Now, you may die before that happens, but you're still not gonna work when you die. So it was like I start thinking about it like this. This is something that should just be inherent and ingrained in every single person's process, you should be dealt with developing other streams of income, that are separated from time and effort. And that should be happening from the moment you get out of your parents house.

I'm Neil and I'm Brittany,

we are a family on a journey towards financial and location independence. Each week, we interview successful real estate entrepreneurs about their chosen investment strategy, and rate it based on how much money it took to get started, how long it took to educate themselves, how passive it is, and whether or not they could do it from anywhere in the world.

Welcome to the road to family freedom. If you like our show, the easiest way for you to give back is to leave us a rating and review on iTunes head on over to rode family freedom comm slash review for links and instructions on how to do that we would be so grateful. All right, and that thought of us Let's hit the road to family freedom.

Before we get to this week's show, I'd like to make you an offer. You can video chat with me if you like. It's something people do with me all the time and it's completely free every Wednesday evening. This is a free strategy session done over video chat, anything and everything you want to talk about in regards to real estate investing. There's no sales call here. There's no ulterior motive. I'm not going to pitch you on mentoring program. This is really just a way for you and I to connect. I talked to real estate investors all the time or Ria meetings. But there are only so many meetings I can attend having a family and a full time job. And I prefer the one on one connections anyway, doesn't matter if you're brand new investor just starting out or an experienced investor. I can act as a sounding board on a deal you're looking at or maybe just answer some questions you have about real estate investing, head on over to rode to family freedom comm slash connect and fill out the form there to schedule a call. I look forward to speaking with you. Greetings, friends and families. I'm Neil and I'm Brittany, you're listening to the road to family freedom podcast. Our guest today is a self storage investor from Eagle Idaho. He's the founder of bitterroot holdings and the host of the outstanding podcast cash flow to freedom. Today we're going to talk to him about the importance of achieving financial freedom not just to sit on the beach sipping mai Tai's, but for a much more important reason. AJ Osborn, welcome to the road to family freedom.

Thanks for having me on. I'm excited.

Yeah, I know. It's glad we've been trying to get you on for a while. And it's glad to finally finally meet you face to face.

You too.

So I've often heard you talk about the difference between really being rich and being wealthy. Can you describe for us what you were doing? When you consider yourself to be rich?

Yes, you know, it's interesting talking about real estate and self storage during because when I got started in the world, that's the last thing I ever thought I'd be doing. I was in insurance, and I was an insurance broker. So I worked with companies and placed their, their insurance, and we worked with the managing self funded dollars, all this kind of stuff for all the benefits. And we had clients all over the place 350 in every single state, United States. And that's what I did, I went out and sold insurance to companies and I it's a commission based job, but it can pay very, very well. I was out and I was kind of born into insurance. My father was an insurance broker. And when I was in college, I went to work for an insurance company. And then from there, I left and went to work for an insurance brokerage firm. And then my father thought I was learning the wrong way. So he wanted to teach me so I started went teamed up with him. And then we were selling insurance. And it was a wonderful thing because I could basically choose my income. Now, that didn't mean I got always made it. But if I wanted to make a certain level of income, I knew the work that needed to be put in to get it done. Right. And from a really early age. I I learned that, you know, for me, I didn't get a paycheck. So they taught me the skill of if you want to make a larger income, you need to go out and work for it. And I got paid directly by my work. Which was I mean, that was an amazing thing for me. Right? That was something that I you know, I think was really fundamental in growing our other businesses and growing our real estate portfolio. But it has huge limitations that I didn't realize at the time being young. And that limitation is although that I could go and work For my income, that also meant I had to work for my income. And I didn't quite understand this, but it, it started, I started, you know, I had two kids. And then all of a sudden, I started realizing while I am working all the time, and you lose one big client, and it can set you back years. So as good as it is that it can come, it can also go away. And that was one of the biggest things is it did go away, right? We lost clients. So it became this effective, what I called a treadmill. And when I was on this treadmill, just running, running around running, more income I made, the higher the treadmill turned up. And this, you know, I realized, you know, I'm rich, but I'm not wealthy. And what that fundamentally meant was wealthy people, I learned very quickly, they didn't have to work for money. Me, I just made a lot of money. But I certainly had to work for it. And that that difference became so clear to me, I had a acquisition, I was acquiring another brokerage firm, and, and it went south, who was probably one of my biggest mistakes I've ever made, it was I screwed it up royally, to say the least. And because of that screw up, though, and I lost tons of money, I risked my family's money I it was bad. And I, I realized, wow, this can go away so quickly. These people, I have no control over this revenue at all. I have zero control over the clients and what they do. So how am I supposed to compound out my returns? And there's no exit strategy to this. And that, that started to become frustrating as a now 28 year old sitting here going, where am I going to be in 10 years? And the answer was doing the exact same thing? And where would I be in 10 years after that, and where am I going to be in 60 years. And you know, we could own our little brokerage firm and hopefully sell it right. And that was the goal is that we would sell it for higher mountain, you'd get people underneath you things like that. But it never stopped the running. So I always had to go to keep those clients, right, you have to keep going and running. And in fact, it just it was an It was a hockey stick effect on the work. So I started to work really hard on developing somewhere away that in really two, although I was I was looking for financial freedom, one of the main things I was looking for was a way to systematically compound return. So I wanted to be able to take in the revenues. And I wanted to be able to deploy those revenues at a known rate of return consistently over a period of time, therefore growing the overall revenue, but not growing the work. And to knowing something I could map out something that I can say, listen in 20 years, I can tell you where I'll be because what I was doing, I was not the case, I couldn't tell you if I was going to be broke, or if I was going to be making more money. And that was just not possible at what I was doing. And so we started looking around. And we started trying to really dive in to what our skills were not not just what our skills were, but where we could lend what we had. And take the other side to like I wanted to basically have my cake and eat it too, right. And there's no other way to say it right? I wanted to be able to have a business model in which I could go dive in and I could improve. And so the my efforts would create an increase in equity and revenue. And then I could deploy that revenue that I've now created.

And do it again. But then not worry about losing the original source of revenue. And that was really only possible in a few areas. And it was only really effective to get to a level that I wanted to get in real estate. Now you have to remember to I was not just working full time when I started down this avenue, I was running our state's largest brokerage firm. So I was really working for a multibillion dollar company. And it was I was traveling all over and and my father was working too, but we went down the real estate route. And for us Self Storage was it. The reason being was I knew I could identify underperforming businesses. I came up with this theory that self storage, everybody that owns Self Storage has it wrong. And I thought this is a great opportunity because they all think they own real estate, when really they own a business. And so I could go buy from these real estate investors and I could turn around their business and I would just have a massive increase in revenue. And I could create it make it more stable. I'd add it have other other lines of revenues, we could work on inefficiencies and revenue management pricing, there's so much we could do with that asset class that you could not do in other real estate assets. So I don't mind getting my hands dirty, and I don't mind diving in there and working and working a lot, because I never had it, you know, what I would call it typical nine to five, I was used to, if I'm going to make it, no, I'm going to work, you know, 10 times as hard to make that much more. And that's how it starts out. And as all real estate investors know, you know, you start out with that first duplex, and you're putting all this money in all this work. And then you make $200 a month. Right. And that's, that's how it starts. But we front load this work, because we see the Envision, and I know that if I could do all this work and make $200 a month, then I could do it again. And after I do that 15 times the first $200 a month is now $500 a month. And that's across 15 properties. And I now have you know, over a million dollars that I can go do something else with. And I can do that in a 10 year period of time, you can map it out. So that work pays off huge later down the road. Well, Self Storage was that, but it was that on crack, right? I mean, I could go in and we could take these things over at 20 cents a square foot a month in revenue. And within six months, I could have that business making 60 cents a month in revenue, it was immediate, and it was just massive increase. And we could double the gross revenue of that asset and this effect that we could do with our skills in business. And what we had been doing that went really well to the asset class. And I'm one of those guys, I kind of like to go big. So we're like we're doing this, we're going all the way we're going to disrupt this industry, we're going to take everything over, right. And we've been before the recession, and we got into it really big after the recession. And we've been buying and turning around properties ever since. And, you know, we started doing this and it was the scope of which we were doing was really big. And I wanted to do it really big. We needed to turn around an asset we needed to get the increase, we need to take the revenue, we needed to deploy it, we needed to do it again. Then I needed to create a management team and I needed to create the systems that could execute my strategy time and time again, without me this was a key part of it. And so that created another layer. So it took a few years to get there. But then we had a management company we owned operated. We were buying small assets we bought. So our first asset didn't actually make money. It was a teeny small little storage facility. It goes under 10,000 square feet, it was like $600,000 or era $1,000. It was up on the Canadian border in a place called Bonners ferry, there's more grizzly bears there than there are human and this little Idaho town, you know, we lost money. It cashflow positive, which is what we were looking for. But we sold it for 100,000 less than we've put or 20,000 sorry, 20,000 lessons a

great, that's a great strategy.

Exactly. And we just kept with it. And so we sold it, but the reason we sold it and the reason we sold it at a loss was from what we learned from it. And this was really important. We didn't give up. We said we see here, what can make this work and what it can't, our strategy wouldn't work in that market. We sold it, we took our small amounts that we got out of that one, we rolled it into another one in a bigger second tier market, which we purchased for I actually have the notes here I can share exactly how much with you. It was I think 2

million. And then six months later, we sold it for 3.1. And then we took that and went No, no, excuse me, it was one, we bought it for one, five sold it for just over two, five. So we took the million out of that went and bought a $4 million asset, which we've now had that asset and expanded it. And that's about an eight $9 million asset. And this was a simple strategy that we took and we just repeated time and time again. We're still working in the insurance world, right? We're developing the strategy, you know, everything's perfect. I'm still running I'm running this huge brokerage firm now and it's state's largest so I have my great white collar job you know where I'm, you know, get a play around and go meet with all these people make a lot of money. So get the rich, but I was developing wealth on the side. Now. I was working my brains out, obviously. But the things you know, things going good couldn't be happier. And I thought you know, we've made it this is the pinnacle Life is good. We'll keep doing both of these things and we'll just sell off into the sunset and that's when things went bad. And south as they always do when you're on your top of your game, and when you think everything is, you know, wonderful things go south. And they went south very, very quickly. For me, I was actually in California, we were at the PGA Tour with some clients and I started to get sick. And so when we got home, I went to the ER because I was like, just something super wrong with like, we couldn't even I couldn't even pinpoint it to my wife, Tessa was like, you know what's going on? I'm like, I don't even know. I can't even tell you. And so that I was like, whatever it is, it's not normal, and it's not good. So we went to the ER, and sat in there, and they did a million tests. And they're like, dude, you don't even like you don't even have a cold, you're perfectly healthy. And I'm like, okay, apparently I'm just a big wuss. And so I turned around, went outside, I'm throwing up in their parking lot, and me and my wife went home and she took me home, she put the kids to bed, I got the title late, but this time, and I was exhausted everything else like that. And I went to get up. After being in there for a long time and my legs didn't work. I just literally didn't work. And she she got me out, we went to the ER, she drugged mamsa car. Long story short, within two days, they couldn't figure out what's wrong, I started to get worse, they put me on a ventilator, because I started to lose my ability to breathe. And then I went into a coma. And when I woke up out of the coma, I was paralyzed from head to toe, all the way up from literally my eyes down to my feet, I couldn't move at all. So I was hooked up to machines that were keeping me alive. So it was on life support. And that was my new reality. And so I went from being on top of the world and top of the game to be on the bottom very, very quickly. And I was on life support for months, I couldn't communicate at all for over 10 weeks. And so I blink to talk. And then after that, after about four months, I went to a rehab facility that could take care of me. Then after that, I went home, still paralyzed. And yeah, I'm still partially paralyzed in my feet and legs. And that was two and a half years ago, I'm very, very fortunate to where I am now. I'm walking, which is something we didn't know that I'd ever do again. So we're very, very happy with where I am. But one of the reasons that we attribute that I was able to recover so well was that my wife, you know, we weren't worried about selling our home, we weren't worried about what are we going to do for money, you know, because my boss came and visited me in the hospital, from the insurance world and said, AJ, good luck, we love you. But you're no longer employed. And so, which, obviously I couldn't work, if you fail, it's not a bad thing. It's what it was. And that, but I went, you know, in two days from Dylan tons to losing it all. And if I hadn't diversified invest in self storage, that would have been a very, very, very different reality for my family. So it, you know, I say that, you know, investing in real estate saved our family's buying financial lives. And it really did and allowed me to to get better. I wasn't worried about what I had to do, I wasn't worried I could just do real around in my wheelchair, go to rehab, and, you know, do what I needed to do. And that was huge. Obviously, there was you know, I, I, we had just had a baby, when I went to the hospital.

I had a baby three months, three, four months before I got sick with hospital. And so it's not like we were, you know, the fourth kid, I was the fourth child. So she had a lot to do. And I can't even imagine what it would have been like having to deal with a paralyzed husband and then to saying now I have to go get a job. So I couldn't sustain my kids. Why my husband's you know, hook to tubes in the hospital. So, yeah, it literally creating passive income saved much more than our family's financial life. Yeah,

well, that's like the, the, like scary, you know, like the boogeyman. For for any American family, it's like, you know, where you're one accident one crazy thing away from complete devastation if you don't have some kind of, you know, huge amount of savings or, or, you know, real estate investment. I mean, that's definitely something that Neil and I have, you know, kind of talked about because if he were to lose his job, you know, that would be the ability to add the ability, ability to work at all, either one of those things, both of those things would be a huge problem. For our family, you know, and that's, that's why we're on this journey really is partially, I mean, obviously, there's lots of other great reasons. But it's, it's a really important reason to have that backup and not be beholden to one thing for your, your income. Well, and you're right. You know, I

think people need to realize, first of all that, you know, we always say nothing like that will ever happen to us, right? I, when this happened, I was 33. I'm an, you know, I used to compete skiing, I'm an avid skier backpacker, there's nobody that is more outdoorsy than, you know, go, go go the me, I worked two jobs running around, probably the most outgoing person you've ever met, young, healthy. And I'd never even heard and what had happened was something called gamma ray, which meant my white blood cells turn in, or Yeah, my white blood cells turned and attacked my nervous system, and shut it down. It happens randomly to one out of every million or 2 million, something like that, people. It's not something you can catch or do or anything like that. So there was no way to even predict it, there was no way to even know. And when they told me in the hospital, I didn't even know what there was, I'd never heard of that in my life. I might remember what, right I like it, this is something that really hadn't even been discovered till the 80s. And so it's, it's true. And it's like, you know, we all say this leader never happened. I mean, I just, I'm still blown away. It happened to me, like, crazy. Like, this is something that happens to other people. Not me. Right? And that's how I still feel. Yeah,

no, I, I can completely understand where you're coming from I because I had the same I two different things that I got diagnosed with this year. I'm a nutritionist, and very healthy and played softball all the way through college, you know, all the things and, you know, I came, I have a, basically a digestive issue. And I'm like, but I eat better than, you know, 80% of the population, like, you know, except for maybe like, elite athletes, or, you know, like, I really well, why is this happening to me, but it just is a weird combination of, you know, genes and luck and, you know, being exposed to whatever. And then, you know, I also have seizures, but I have no reason to, you know, there's no explainable reason. And it's just, it's, and luckily for me, it didn't, neither one has affected my life, to the point where it's made us why can't do things, but it could have had we not really, you know, caught some of it, like, you know, for a long time, I had trouble swallowing food. And if you let that the, if you let you ego to like its extreme peace, you can have a feeding tube in your stomach, and that's the only way you can eat, you know, like, or I could have had a seizure and really hurt myself more than a couple times I did hurt myself and then incapacitated in some way. So, you know, it's, I'm, like, right there with you, there's, you, it's naive to think that it can't happen to you, like, obviously, you don't want to and you can put all of the things in place not to have those things happen to you. But sometimes you just get well crap. And and you know, it doesn't have to be healthy, you just be driving down the road and the safest driver in the world, you could do all the things right, and you still might get hit by, you know, some buddy else that is not a good driver, or even just some crazy, you know, it's just

anything can happen. You know, you're you're so right into going through this process, I started to think about this. So I was in the hospital. And I started up a blog, it's kind of writing about some of the stuff on my blog, trying to try to work through like, you know, some of this different stuff, mostly with finance, because I just really interested in finance. But then I started thinking about it, unlike How naive was I because not being able to work is actually 100% guaranteed, we will all not be able to work at some point. So this isn't a question. Every single one of us, I would just happen to be surprised at the timing. Right? Now, this is what happened in 40 years, right? But at the end of the day, it's inevitable. 100% like death and taxes, you're not gonna be able to work. Now, you may die before that happens, but you're still not gonna work when you die. So it was like I started thinking about like this. This is something that should just be inherent and ingrained in every single persons process, you should be dealt with developing other streams of income, that are separated from time and effort. And that should be happening from the moment you get out of your parents house. Right? It should be just like us, you go, you get a job, you earn money, you also create passive income. And because you're going to need it, you're going to need to start early. So by the time you do need to retire It can sustain yourself, or it should happen early. And it's just it was just so interesting this thinking process like, this is not even a it's not like this was a surprise, it's just the only surprise was timing. Other than that every one of us and to and most of us halfway before just our burnout and spending the time and working, everything is ruining our lives. So we want to stop anyways. So

yeah,

I can't remember where I read it. But statistically, you know, most people out there probably if they are financially savvy at all, they have life insurance, you know, because eventually you're going to die, you want to be able to take care of your family. But statistically, you are more likely to need Long Term Disability Insurance than your life insurance. And most people don't have any kind of long term disability insurance Did you have you are very well paid very well compensated, you have long term disability insurance.

So I did, I had short term and long term, but there's a case to be insured. Now, but this that catch, there's a catch, and this is there's always catches to these things. Now, first of all, you're exactly right. That's why disability insurance premiums are higher than life insurance, you can literally buy life insurance for pennies. Why? Because they actually know you're going to get rid of your life insurance before you ever die. And statistically speaking, it's almost guaranteed. So they're just basically making free money. That doesn't mean you shouldn't have it. And that's the beautiful thing about life insurance. It's cheap, we all need it right? Now, I say cheap. When you're my age, when you're young, it's cheap, as you get older it is. So that's why you need to buy life insurance cheap, and you need to lock it in for the long run. And that's important, but no disability was provided to me through my employer. Now disability, though, is one that isn't nearly as black and white, like life insurance. And they have all these weird clauses in it. And one of the weird clauses is that you can make if you make any income from outside sources, we don't pay you. And so I was making income from my rental properties. And so after they had a one year period, where they basically it kicks in one year, they couldn't look at it after that immediately end and stopped paying me. So which I couldn't, I was here, I was still paralyzed, I couldn't go back and work at my job, that wasn't gonna happen. And I couldn't do my job duties. But that didn't matter, because I was making money from my rental income. So when you guys are looking at disability insurance, it's really important to understand how it works. I suggest if you have private or if you have disability insurance through your employer, you should get private disability insurance on the side, which you can use. Because to a lot of people don't realize like pregnancy. Right? it you know, and like things like this, it actually puts you out of work and bro, these are very common short term disability is extremely common. Every single employer has employees that go on short term disability, it's this is probably your more common benefit that you will use. Once again, very few ever use life insurance, but short term, it's all the time. And then there's a certain percentage of them that go into long term they get fallen off the ladder are they on and on and on, right, everyone knows someone that's been in an accident so that that disability, disability insurance is probably one of the most important and it's probably the least that is purchased. Most people that have medical insurance do not have disability insurance. And you are way more likely to ever as we said before need it and until I racked up it was something like $1.2 million $1.3 million in claims. Because I was on machines. I was sent to an L tak which is a long term care facility. Because the hospitals weren't set up to house me. And so they moved me over and there is where I was going to stay and hopefully not indefinitely. And yeah, I mean, it is one of those things that's like, you know, insurance is just, we we you would never ever get a property and not have insurance on the property. It's funny to me that people will invest in a property, and they'll make revenue from it. But then they don't have health insurance and unlikely you make 150 bucks on that property. But you make $50,000 a year. And you don't insure that, like, you know, come on, you know, it's it that's so important. And if you if you took your and so it's one of the things that we teach, listen, before you can start investing in passive income, you need to get yourself financially stable. And that also includes protecting your greatest asset, which is yourself. If you're making $50,000 a year, and you're 30 and you're unable to work for the next 30 years. This is millions, right? And so you you need to protect that income and then you move on to building other incomes because if you're out investing You have all these properties, and you're doing great. And then you get in a car accident, and you can't pay your medical dollars, you just lost everything you built, there's no reason to even go down that road.

Well, we did not intend for this to turn into an insurance.

It's important though.

We haven't really.

I mean, we haven't really gotten into like the financial nitty gritty piece, we've really mostly talked to specifically real estate people. And I think our next interview is an actual financial guy. But I think it's, it's important because you do need to, I mean, there's lots of, we've talked to lots of real estate, people who just kind of like, winged it for a while, and they made it through, but those are probably more the exception than the rule. Because, you know, the the, a lot of people have made real estate look scary and bad. And those are probably people that don't have that foundation, where if things go wrong, they have something to kind of help them. And that's, I think that's part of the process. You know, if we're going to talk to people about family freedom, it's not just about buying real estate, it has to be about all of those things, insurance, and then save, you know, savings and, and diversification, even maybe outside of real estate, depending on who the person is.

Finance is finance, right. And this is what I tell people, I'm like, Listen, if you don't have your own finances in place, you're investing in. So if you do the numbers, how much real estate Do you need to make up for your $50,000 a year in income is not small. So it's a lot. And in most cases, it's millions in real estate that you need to have to really do that efficiently. So if you can't take care of yourself, people, you can't get to that level, right? It just doesn't happen, you need to do that. And most people that end up doing it, they have to fix those things along the way, which causes more problems. This you're talking about, you know, jeka talking about real estate investing is simply a few things, you're talking about revenue management, and risk management, nothing else, nothing else. That's what you're doing with yourself. So start on yourself, figure out revenue management, risk management, then you move on to real estate, I'm looking at how much I can get out of investing and what I can do to improve the revenues of that property. Right? And how I can limit my risk with loans, downpayments investors and all these things. That's all it is. And you are trying to figure out a system in which you can scale those processes. So if I'm buying for plexes, okay, and those four plexes make me 500 a month. Okay, how do I get to 10 of those, without first of all, eroding away that income? And how do I you know, all these different things. So you're building a business. And that's all businesses is risk management and revenue management. And once you figure out these basic principles, and you start implementing, most of the time, people that I've found, that really get to a level that is can sustain their life in a way that they want. Because I view financial freedom is very different than most people do. Financial Freedom to me, there's three sets. First, you have financial independence, which basically means that this covers your expenses, so you don't go bankrupt, right? So that doesn't mean you're living your life as it is. That doesn't mean you've replaced your income, you're just not going bankrupt, right? You're sitting at home on a couch, worried that you can't spend any money. The second thing is financial independence. This is where you replace your income, which includes all external benefits, right? So people that make $50,000 a year, don't realize that your employer actually spent 65 to 75 or 70 $75,000 a year on you. And so many people that I've seen, they leave the workforce, and they go, Oh, shoot, I just took a 25% pay cut. And I didn't even know I was doing it. Because what came to my bank account match to what my rental property made. And this is, you know, this is a big, big problem, because what ends up happening is they can either no longer invest or they have to go back to work. It's a mess. So you have financial independence, which means you cover your actual salary, right? But then you cover everything else that comes with being employed in America. Then you have third, which is financial freedom. financial freedom means you're free means you can do what you want, right? financial freedom, is it Oh, I cover my expenses. But let's I can't take a trip because I don't have the money to do that. Freedom. That's sitting at home watching Netflix, right? So yeah, financial freedom is what how you want to live your life and what that looks like. And you can do it on your terms and you're in control. That's financial freedom to almost everyone that I've ever found. That reaches financial freedom, but true financial freedom, they usually never stop. Because they realize what it took me to get here, I can exponentially do. So why am I just keep doing this when I can just go buy a 24 unit apartment complex, double my income. And it's the exact same thing as I was doing here. Like the effort doesn't change, it's the same thing. That's what happened with storage. All of a sudden, we're buying 160,000 square foot bankrupt super Kmart, and turning them into storage facilities. Why? Because it's the exact same thing as we did last fall, and the changes, right? And that's what you're going for, you're going to create a system of success, right? You cannot build these things on broken foundations, they crumble. And if you set the right foundation, you do it right, what you're really doing is you're creating systems and processes of success. And those systems and processes can be implemented time and time again, to not just create success for you but others and achieve things that you never thought was possible. And I really, truly do believe this. And I'm not saying that it's easy. I'm not saying any of those things, right? It's never that way. But once it occurs, and once it happens, there's no none of those people ever really stop. I've just never seen it. Because there's no reason to it most of the time, it actually is way, way easier. Right now, what it takes for me to buy another storage facility, turn it around and walk away, I just did one. It was two weeks ago, I closed on it. And 60,000 square feet. I got a call from our guy, it was an off market deal. All our stuff is off market deals. I got a call. He told me about the facility. And I said shoot me over the paperwork. I'll sign it because I'm buying it. And I it was so easy. For me. It wasn't even risky. I knew immediately what it was worth, I knew immediately what it was doing. And I didn't even need to do anything. And our first property. No way. Right? I was so scared to sign those docs. It was like, Really? Are we doing this? This is terrifying. Today, I don't even think twice like I don't even know go see the property. right afterwards, we went and saw it walked around and just confirmed it all was what it was. But left went back my people when they're handling it, I'm on to the next one, the amount of effort that I take now to buy a property 1/10 of what it was before. So it's why not?

Yeah, yeah. I think you know, what you've you've said with the systems, you you know, you got that first one, and yeah, you lost money technically on it, but you gained so much knowledge on how to create the correct systems. And you probably have done that time and time again, I I think it's kind of funny, because we were just talking with our one of our friends about the concept of anti fragile, and I think that sort of it goes along with it. So anti fragile is different. It's

Sorry, it's a book by Nicolas Nassim to leave Yeah, great book,

that the concept is essentially that to be anti fragile, you have to be able to also break things like break it, it gets stronger, you know, and that's sort of like muscles that breaks down, it gets stronger. Your immune system typically to be exposed to things and then it gets stronger. Same idea. And I've never really thought about with systems, but I think it's sort of applies like you, you sort of you figure it out, you break it, it gets stronger, and now your systems all good to go. And, you know, it's I mean, systems, that's what we come back to, on a lot of our interviews. That's really the thing.

I love that concept so much, because it's something that I've done time and time, again in my life, like, you know, I wasn't in real estate. But I knew what I was doing wouldn't get it. So what did I do, I had to break my system. And I did and it became much, much stronger. And then when we got to five properties, I realized what got us to five, six properties is not going to get us to 12. So I went got my team together, and I go I'm redoing everything. We're changing audits, we're changing employment structures, we're changing everything. And we broke everything apart, redid it. And then we shot up to over a million square feet. And the last four months, I said, How do we get to half a billion square feet. And in real estate, I go, we're breaking everything. We just went through another round of creation. And you know, it's it's funny, because if you look at large technology, companies, things like that. They actually try to kill themselves. And that's really important, because they come down to a fundamental understanding. We do it or somebody else does it. So they say how can we make ourselves irrelevant. And if we can do that, we can control the disruption. And that's how I look at it my life I need I just want I know change. is inevitable, it's gonna happen. I just want to be in control. And I want to be able to help myself go through it. And so no, you need you. You cannot let pride erode away your success. And that's probably the biggest thing that I see pride being people are like, no, my system is great, right? Well, it's, it's not, right. It's not people do this system. And there's a million people that are doing it 10 times better than you are. Right? I know that for myself. And so I'm always learning, try to figure out all the ways that I'm failing, which are a lot, because that's how I grow. And so you need to be able to be ready to take that on. And people that, you know, put their pride in front of them and say, I've got this down. The moment you hear something like that, you're just like, Oh, honey, I gotta work out well, for you. Yeah,

yeah, yeah. So when did you buy that first facility to what you

knows in 234234? All right.

So you you bought it, you know, a couple of years before the real recession started? Yeah,

we bought two. So we bought, we bought two and rule markets. And then in 2004, we could not find anything that didn't make sense. And so we stopped 2004, we stopped buying or doing anything, because real estate didn't make sense. And it was funny that because I had a bunch of my friends were out and they were buying everything. And, you know, me and my wife were looking there were just like, how are they doing this, I'm like, I don't know, I'm just not smart enough. Like I legitimately just thought I just don't get it. I, I am not smart enough, these guys are getting rich, good for them. And I'm looking at all these properties and nothing's making sense. So we just didn't do anything because the numbers didn't work. And then after everything fell apart, 2010 we went start a billet. Pick it up 10s of 1000s of square feet every year.

Now your business plan your Imagine you're probably you're taking a distressed or a facility that's not operating at its best. And you're able to come in, implement your systems, clean it up, which a increases the cash value, or a cash flow. But then the big multiplier with commercial real estate is that increases the value of the property immensely. It's a massive multiplier, when you multiply the net operating income by the cap rate. And that's that's essentially a business plan. Chris

is saying we will do developments. I've got one of them. I'm looking at now. If you're on the video, we developed that one behind me there. This one we It was 140 50,000 when we turned around, so I prefer to buy in turn around. But I do what makes sense. And I don't do what I want. Right. So there's markets that I I live in, right? Well, I'd love to buy and build in my market, but the market is so overbuilt, I have to go elsewhere. So it we're buying underperforming assets, we're turning around, it's not complicated, right? People look at it and they go, Well, what cap rate Do you buy, and I'm like, I don't believe in cap rates. And I'm like, I don't think cap rates make any sense at all. And so for me, I actually don't even care what the cap rate is. And I've bought, I bought properties in less than second tier markets that were pieces of junk for five camps. And then I'll go into Seattle, and I'll look at a property, they want a four and a half cap, but I'm like, you gotta be crazy, and it was just built is totally full, right? Because that doesn't matter. All you're looking at is revenue management. And you're right, the revenue drives the value of the asset. So if I can buy an asset for a five cap, but I can increase the revenue on that asset by 40%. The cap rates irrelevant. It literally is irrelevant. And so for us, I'm looking at a facility that is owner separated the owners not either but well the owners either in it, running it himself, right and, or they just have nothing to do it and they leave the manager to do it. We base heavily on technology. We work really really hard on dynamic pricings and merch and, and revenue management like the airline's do, right? So every single seat is a different price, right? Every single unit, even all the 10 by 10s are different prices, and they're changing with different tenants and things like that all the time. So we add products, services, insurance, we sell tenant insurance, which we basically self Fund, which gives us the vast majority of all the premiums, we do all these different things. So you take a facility that's doing none of them. We Bought, we took over a facility. And the day we close, we sent out an average of a 65% rate increase, some people got 170% rate increase, and people are like, what you didn't? Like, but See, the problem is you got to understand is not you don't want all tenants. So I got, I buy a facility and I'm like, oh, shoot, they've got all the wrong tenants. So I need to get them out. And I need to get them out. Now I don't I just rip the band aid off, get it done. Sorry, we apologize, you're not the right tenant for us. We are not the right facility for you. We do it, they all leave, we lost 30% occupancy. Within four months, we were at a higher occupancy than the previous owner had it. And we own and we've risen the revenue at that point, whatever it was 45%. And that happened four months. So we bought our facility for 3.84 months later, it was worth seven, five, I think. And it's it's not complicated, right? But and I know some people want to say, Oh, that sounds really complicated, but it's really not. And I think that's the problem. And when you go back to the first part of the recession, that's where people got in trouble. They were doing things that were complicated. I didn't understand it. And I couldn't do it because I'm not that smart. And I'm like, how are you making money on this? I can see the revenue, I can see the expenses and the dead. This doesn't make money. And they go I'm making money on the back end. Mike, I don't understand what that means. So I can't play in this market, right? I don't do that. I don't I'm not playing around with things. I'm not doing fancy Wall Street stuff. No, I'm just buying a business and I'm improving its revenues. Nothing more. And I don't want people to think that that's a level that they can't do that because the numbers are big, because it's not. You do the same thing when you buy a duplex, but you fix it up. And then you get new renters in at a higher revenue.

Say, yeah, it's just that value add exactly how you add value add?

Well, and what you bring up with such a great point about revenue management, versus occupancy management. And they're, you know, when you if you play in the self storage space, or even in the short term rental space, very much you'll hear people talk about, oh, you know, I'm 100% occupied. And I go, Okay, that's good for you

give me a check by people. I'm 100% percent occupied. I'm like, and here's my checkbook. Yeah, whatever you want on it. And I'll take it.

Because, because what you what you want is revenue management. And if you're 100% occupied, it means you're not charging enough. Yep, you need to you need to get down, you know, you want to be down around, you know, I don't know what your target sort of occupancy rate is, if you sort of have a thing that you're

88 to 93%, around there, because you got to have products to sell. And there's different level of customers, and it's choosing and people that are 100% occupied, they're almost always picking a customer that is price centric. So they're only there because it's the cheapest in town, right. And so I love those businesses, because I come in and I implement a strategy that is actually its convenience, and its quality centric. And so those is when you implement that the spread of those two are those three buyers. So you have a you have three, three main buyers, you have a price buyer, a convenience buyer, and then you have a quality buyer, right, the quality buyer will pay a buck plus a square foot a month, where the price buyer will pay 30 cents a square foot a month, you can do as a simple spread on how that looks. And so those those facilities, that's how they're competing, they view the they just don't want any units at all open. And so they keep the price is low, they don't give rate increases, they don't actively manage the revenue. Because when they do, they get that shock where 10% of the people move out, and then they freak out. They're like our business is failing, although they don't even look that their gross income just Rose 20% and they lost 10%. And so they just added 10% onto the net revenue, which is you do the math, if you have a facility that's 300,000. Right, your net revenue is 100,000. Let's just say I'm totally making these numbers up. But 100,000 is some more that's typical, you increase the revenue by 20%. Right? That's $60,000. Okay, you get rid of 10% of it, that's $30,000 on the gross, that means that's $30,000 to go straight to your bottom line, which is the net on $100,000. That's a 30% increase. If you take that on a cap rate, you just added a half a million dollars, you know, to your value. It's so that's You know, it's that's really that's what we're focusing on. Yeah,

I mean, I think that applies to a lot of things, you just don't think about it that way, even with our short term rental, we would rather have more people More Bookings at that higher price point, even if it you know, dropped our occupancy to 8080 90% range, if we've got people who are paying that higher amount, it's probably going to end up being better for us, generally than having a lot of people that are paying the smallest amount that we charge for room and then in between there, we may still get some one offs here in there that grab it for a small amount, just because we have an opening. And it's last minute, but you know, for the most part, I want the people who are booking early and booking at the highest price, because it's a better client better client and those people because the people that we have trouble with are kind of annoying in some way are usually those last minute, you know

that we are delinquencies go down. So you know, I mean, and that's a whole nother side, we're not even talking about. I mean, we will take delinquencies from 10% to 3%. That goes to your net. So what you really do when you shift up that market and add that value, it's not even 30,030% increase, it's higher than that, because of all the problems you get rid of. And to those better tenants, they guess what they do, they buy more products and services. So it's it's huge, it makes a big, big impact. And it doesn't take a ton of work. But what you're talking about is the shift from being what I would call an investor to being a business owner. And people are like, Oh, I don't want to own a business. I want to own real estate. And I look at it, I go if you have a 20 unit apartment, right, let's say a 20 unit apartment building, because $800,000 you're now bigger than 90% of all businesses in America. So how can you say your business? And it's like in so I try to drive that into people's minds, where it's like, you can have a business and have it be passive. Trust me the Ripley family of repeat gun, they're not doing anything, right.

System system system systems. Alright, so

I want to you know, you have I know, we're, we're running out of time, but I had a couple of really big questions I wanted to ask, one is, you know, you have been through, you know, you went through the Great Recession, you know, there's a lot of people who've entered the Self Storage industry. Only recently, it's been a very hot asset class, probably second only to apartment communities, I'd say, in my opinion. What are you doing differently? Now that you weren't doing maybe five years ago?

That is probably the best question I've had on any podcast I've ever been a wolf. Because I listened to all these podcasts. With all these guys, particularly in self storage, they get in, and they've been in self storage for five years. And I'm like, do you understand that you've been in the greatest run up run in the history of this industry. So you hit a five year bull market. And you are now telling people how you go out and how it's just so easy. And how it's a gem everything like that. That's a huge problem. Because what's happening in self storage is so remnants nursing of single family homes in the early 2000s. They're recession proof I hear these guys saying on podcasts, and I'm like, What? recession proof that doesn't exist, what and to not only that, there's bankruptcies going on in self storage right now. And we are in the biggest bull market of the United States, and they're going bankrupt. Think about what's going to happen when we hit a recession. So we have we have markets that are so overbuilt because people say it's recession proof, and it will never lose money.

It's only a recession, recession proof if the, like balance is there. Yeah, there's too many, then, you know, there's

blind demand. And so you know, you're we've changed dramatically what we're doing, we've exit huge markets out that we won't even go into, we're very conservative on our underwriting, we have to have a margin of safety, our margin of safety has to protect us because we're going to hit a recession. And this just absolute new supply is going to decimate the market. And so you know, it's, and I'm not being like a Debbie Downer, I just bought a facility two weeks ago, and I'm going to buy more, and I'm going to develop more. But I've changed the way that I work. And I realize when I buy those, I'm going to go into a recession, and a lot of people are going to fail, which also means I have a huge slug of cash right now because I'm going to buy a lot of people, and we did it before and when people are like, Oh, the assets recession proof. I'm like, that's funny because 60% of my assets were bankrupt, that I bought from people and it's not and what what they're really looking at is in the recession, Self Storage occupancy remained above 90%. And that's where all These numbers come from what they don't tell you, though, is revenue dropped 45%. So if you're building right now, and you need $1 a square foot, and revenue a month to make your mark, while the last recession that went all the way down to 60 cents. So underwrite at 60 cents and see how you perform. And to you're not going to be, you're not going to be, you know, highly occupied. So you've nailed it on the head, we're totally looking at things differently, doesn't mean we stopping. Because I don't time markets. This is very simple. Now, I look at only the asset, but the asset has to be able to survive. That's another reason we do value add, because that internal add, and when I say value added, I don't mean, I'm getting the increases in them all by it now. And in three years, that would be great. I'm simply taking underperforming to market levels.

Yeah, that totally makes sense. I think that's something that I when they when people say recession proof they do they think, you know, well, they're not looking at it as a business. They're looking at it in that way that you're talking about where we'll high occupancy means that you're good, like that's that and that's just not the only matrix to look at. And it's it's something that I don't think Neil or I have actually really thought about when we're talking about self storage, and we're still you know, we're still learning all that. So that's, I think that's a great lesson to think about and really, you know, really just concentrate on So did you have another question that you wanted to ask him? I

do I want you I want to I want you to cover your your Reno KMR really quick because I love this. I have a lot of friends in Reno. And I'm sure and they're business owners, and I'm sure they would love to hear this story because they probably were like, what how did that Kmart but come up with self storage facility?

Water easy answer. You know, it was I'm not gonna lie. It's something I'm very, very proud of. It was an industry changer. We had people from all over the industry that came all the reads, came and toured it. We implemented new technology. So you can buy online rent, get in access your unit and everything all from your phone, you've never even tapped to talk to a human. And we found it my partner read, he found it. He lived in Reno, it was bankrupt. The guys wanted way too much. We worked them down. We sold off the parking to apartment developers. But the reason we bought it wasn't because the bankruptcy or this Kmart was bankrupt. This is really important. Okay. A lot of people are like, Oh, I'm just gonna find a bankrupt Kmart and do it. We bought it because the market was good at the time. This was three, four years ago. So when we bought it, we could we blew out the walls, we Kate created drive lanes that go through and people go into the building, they can park unload, put all their stuff in. So it's all climate controlled. We have special RFP drive throughs we have, you know, it's a huge facility, 130,000 square feet and world and we're expanding the back half of the building. So it'll be 150 plus 1000. But it we came together with three people that were the key partners we had read, we had me was the operator. And then we had Lance, who was the Self Storage, he brought the technology and we got together to such a huge project. And this was a great market. We've figured out the value proposition. We bought it for seven, we've really it's under a year and a half. We already have all our money out and plus we took another million out to do stuff with solar, everything on the bank. It's worth 25 million today at a six cap or whatever. And it's Yeah, it was it was a huge home run. It was in two it's it's a stellar facility. I mean, it's it's amazing. The marketing strategies we have going on that thing. It's It's incredible. It was so fun to do people in Reno go see it. I you know, we get this all the time there. I I never thought Self Storage was cool. But during the building. This is cool, right? Yeah, exactly. And people love it. They get there in there inside all the stuffs protected inside. It's the highest secured facility. Because every time anybody's doing something on the phone, we're tracking them. So if they're coming in out accessing doors, we know exactly who it's coming from, where it's coming from, what time we have sensors in the unit. So if they shut the door and lock it, they're trying to live inside so we could tell there's this person inside why the doors locked. We have Alert System Setup. It's just cool. And so yeah, if you're in Reno, go check it out. It's an amazing, amazing thing. We given all the reads tours. And we I mean we the people come into her probably once a month and fake developers and private equity and stuff looking to try to get into that space. So we're happy happy to reach out to us, but it's known we're happy to give a tour.

what's the what's the facility name of the facility? keylock

storage is our brand across Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Nevada and it's right off the freeway on the main Exit in Reno right before you head up on your way out to Tahoe. Yeah, so right there on the western side of Reno but yeah, it's. It's awesome. That's cool.

We'll have to check it out next time we go up for a pack game.

Yep. I'm in Nevada grad so Oh, great. I got there. Yeah. All right. All right, so we're gonna we're just gonna finish off with our just our main our main four questions when you bought that first facility? How much money did you end up having to come to the table with that first facility that you lost money on?

150,000? I think is what we had to come to the table with?

How did you get educated on self storage? Oh,

we we worked. I, we did everything from we spent a lot of money hiring people to educate us to we went to all the industry conferences, we joined groups. You know, I just created a mastermind, myself for self storage because of that. That's exactly what we went did. And we took everything. And we just found the guys that were doing this said, Tell me what it is because I didn't really care what the price was because I'm trying to buy a million dollar asset. And we took notes down and then we'd take it back and implement it, figure out what worked for us and what works for that asset. And we just repeated I mean, I every conference, every group Self Storage group that I could get that I could be a part of I, you know, I was going after the guys that really knew what they were doing, though. And I think that's really important. I am I wasn't targeting these guys that have been in it for a few years. And they're just, you know, out selling products or whatever it was right, I wanted to find the guy that's doing it. That is has the experience, and we just clung to those people. And it worked out well.

What does a day in the life look like for you now, I mean, how much time obviously, I imagine this is probably a full time job. It's not, you know, you have time freedom. But this is probably something you spend a normal amount of time, I actually own four companies, we own online product companies, I own an insurance company,

I own self storage company, a software company, I own a lot of different things. So I've become very, very good at creating systems that can run without me. And I probably spend about 30% of my time, or 25% of my time on each. Although Self Storage is my favorite. So I spent probably 35% or more on my time. But I spend a lot of it with other people now, because I'm trying to be more creative and finding deal flow, which is the most important thing to get opportunities. So I'm trying to grow our portfolio from just over a million to 500 million in the next three years. So I'm changing things up. And I'm going to put a lot of effort into it. But I want to buy four facilities a year and be developing one a year, which is hard. Now that used to be easy. So I'm creating I'm trying to team up, we talked about team of people, I'm jumping in with other people to try to find deals and get things done. Because that's where it comes from all our deals are off market.

So you invest in other markets. So obviously you can do this outside of where you're living for as the properties how, like, if you wanted to take a vacation somewhere, like how long could you be? I mean, yeah, what would that look like for you?

Right? Right now I am one of those people, I will fully admit, we go to Hawaii, you know, for 15 days or whatnot. By the last two days. My wife's like, honey, you need to go back to work. I'm like, yeah, I'm dying. I'm like, I'm missing my babies, right. I plan on going for a month to Africa, and all sorts of all take easily four or five weeks a year. We go to Costa Rica, we deliver wheelchairs to people, we do lots and lots of nonprofits. We try to create lots of memories. I ski a lot. So no, I I play hard. But I work really hard. But I'll take I have no problem taking four or five weeks off a year to do things with other people that are amazing. create memories for me and my children. That's awesome.

That's awesome. Well, listen, AJ, thank you so much for sharing with us today. We really I love your story. And I'm happy that we got a chance to introduce you to our audience. If people want to find out more about you, where where would be the best place for them to go.

So I have two podcasts one is just on self storage. It's called Self Storage income. And then the other one is cashflow freedom where we talked about creating systems and building financial freedom and wealth. So you can go to self storage income.com and go to AJ Osborne on Instagram and cash flow to freedom calm. Any one of those things you email me It goes directly to me. AJ Osborne on Instagram shoot me a message Facebook, AJ Osborne, I'm I talked to everybody happy to reply. happy to help. Okay, fantastic. Fantastic. All right. Well,

thanks again for sharing with us. Hey,

thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it.

Well, that was a Osborne from bitterroot Holdings cashflow to freedom podcast and keylock Self Storage really, I love that.

It was a great interview, I, we were talking to him afterwards. And, you know, we're really saying like, it was, it's always nice to have a fresh perspective, because a lot of things in real estate are just what they are. That's it that they, they just are and you talk about it enough, and it starts to get a little repetitive. So having some different viewpoints and experiences and ways of saying things, it's really important. I think, I think this this interview, that just that was, it was a nice, fresh take on self storage. So I enjoyed it thoroughly.

Was there any other key lesson that you took from? Well, I

mean, there's a lot I think that you could pull out of there, I think part of what we went into this interview wanting to get out of it is that financial freedom, that it's not just about, hey, I want to make money so that I can, you know, not have to work and just travel the world or blah, blah, blah, or whatever I mean, a lot of people just like AJ was talking about is they don't want to stop working necessarily, they just want to be able to not work if they don't want to or you know, take time away. But that's not even that's not that necessarily the really should be about making it so that if something happens, or you know, like that you don't have to work that you can survive, that you can take care of yourself and your family, in unfortunate circumstances, which is a you know, is awful. But he took that and really turned it around and made it work for himself. And now, you know, he, we talked about that in the interview he, he was broken. And that made him stronger.

Yeah, I, you know, for me again, and it's a subject that I harp on a lot is the whole idea of your W two income being a single point of failure for people, and so many people. And I think AJ put it even better than I did for real estate investors, which is you're spending all this money to buy an asset that's producing income of cash flow of like 100 to $200 a month in income and you're paying for insurance on it. But you're actually not, you still have a W two job and you're actually not buying insurance to cover that income. And and that's one of the things that I've only recently, sort of delving into the whole realm of, of short term disability, like short term and long term disability insurance. Because, you know, you you know, we're all just one accident or mishap or business hiccup away from losing that income.

Yeah, yeah. And, and then, you know, other things, I think that strategy systems, all those things that we've probably talked about time and time again, are, you know, it's what it comes down to is having good system, knowing your market, being okay with failure, and working from that, and then going from there. So I think that's all important too. I feel like we answered all the other normal, like, going over the interview questions, right at the end of his interview, is there something else you

want? Well, I do want to just like nail, just hammer on home, you know, knowledge, he sat, he went out and he looked for successful Self Storage operators, and basically just, you know, learn from them. Yeah,

yeah, meetups conferences, he put a lot of money into it, it sounds like he threw a lot of money at it and you have the opportunity and means to do that. I don't think that you have to throw that much money into it, you can find ones that are, you know, inexpensive or free or, you know, find ways to make that work. But He really said I don't care, I'm just gonna throw money at it. And, and he was able to get a lot of knowledge probably very quickly and find the right people to help him. So if you've got the means other people can really help pull you up very fast, rather than you trying to like figure it out on your own because they've already got those systems, they've already made those mistakes. And you know, you'll always still make more but they've done all of those things, and they're going to be able to help you get through those simple ones that they've made. So you can make your own mistakes later. So So yeah,

money he he said that first facility, he had to put about $150,000 into it. So Self Storage is not necessarily there are people who go right into it, but it's it's not a cheap game to jump into now it's more of an investment and I'm I'm gonna guess that he probably because he said he was working with his dad. Do you think he shared that with his dad? Probably so might be something to go in on with another. And lastly, can he do this strategy from anywhere in the world? Yes, he

can. He doesn't always want to like to really work. I mean, I think That really is the like I said, a lot of times the people who are doing these things are very passionate about what they do. And they don't actually not, they don't actually want to not work ever. They want to work in something that's enjoyable for them, and is much more fruitful, emotionally, and financially, etc, etc. And it sounds like that he really gets to do that. And he gets to make memories for his family. And it also sounds like he does a lot of charitable things, which is fantastic. And I didn't know that about him. So that's, that's just another thing to think about is that when you have financial freedom and time freedom, and all these things, is that you can use it not just for yourself, but for others. Because you have the opportunity, it can be very hard when you're living paycheck to paycheck, or you're, you know, you're really not at a place where you want to be and you have to concentrate on your own savings, your own things, it can be really hard to reach out and do things for others. And so, you know, I look forward to the day where we can do more than the small kind of donations and things that we do and really make more of a difference. I mean, this is probably why a lot of famous people have nonprofits because they get to the point where they can and it's fantastic. So anyway. All right.

That was AJ Osborne, again, thank you for your time, AJ. We're doing this all again next week.

Let's hit the road.

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