Join us for an insightful episode with Parker Samelson, a successful entrepreneur in the real estate industry, particularly in storage facilities. Parker shares his journey from working in a family office to becoming a self-storage expert. Learn about his strategic pivots, the importance of partnerships, and his passion for giving. Discover how Parker integrates business with a meaningful life, emphasizing the value of creativity and adaptability in entrepreneurship. 

Tune in for inspiration and practical advice!

People who are young, hungry, ambitious, don't really have anything to lose, they have the energy and the drive to try crazy things, and they're creative, and they haven't really been put into a box yet. So, And the other thing too, is they'll say, you know what? well, Warren Buffett makes the same analogy. Warren Buffett says, it was so much easier for me to make money early on because if I was a jet ski compared to a cruise ship, where if I want to turn the boat around or turn right or turn left, it's so easy on a jet ski, but when, when you're a massive cruise ship and you want to turn around, I mean, that is just so hard.

He's here to guide you through the complex world of business transactions and growth. Each week we dive deep with actionable insights, expert interviews, and real world strategies to activate and equip you to live exceptionally and build exceptional businesses. Now, let's dive into today's episode.

Here's your host, Chris Segers.

Chris Seegers: I'm joined by an incredible guest today, Parker Samelson. Parker is just a tremendous human being. So, he got into the storage facility side of things in the real estate industry. He's had a ton of success there.

Cause there were some young folks, and to 85 year old, cause there were some older folks in the room. So, Parker, welcome to the show, brother. Super excited to have you here.

Parker Samelson: Thanks, man. Honored to be here. And uh, yeah, I love talking about business, entrepreneurship, investing, life, faith, all of these things. So, I'm excited to talk more.

Chris Seegers: That's awesome, man. We always start with the story. So, tell us your story, however far back you want to go, however near you want to go, how you got into the business. Tell us about your family and maybe some of your travel, cause you've had some incredible journeys and wisdom that came out of that.

Parker Samelson: Yeah, for sure. I grew up in Colorado Springs, went to Wheaton College. I studied business and Bible, which have been two main threads of my life where I feel like those are big parts of who I am kind of on the business, investing, entrepreneurship side, but also just grappling with the spiritual aspect of life, and trying to live a meaningful life, and kind of figure out how those two things fit together.

So, I feel like I learned a lot from him, but we stopped working together a few years ago. And then, I tried to just start on my own as a real estate investor, and feel like I had learned some things from my dad. I met with a guy that I knew in town who owned a bunch of storage facilities, and he had developed them all himself. And of all the different types of real estate, I had seen up to that point.

So, I found land, put it under contract, put the whole business plan together, put a whole model together, and just started pitching it. I just started smiling and dialing people and seeing if they wanted to partner with me. And everybody said no, except I found one group from Chicago that was a investment group that did alternative assets for families. And they kind of do out of the box niche stuff, and they'll also work with brand new fund managers or deal sponsors, emerging managers essentially is what they'll call them.

And, I found a couple of groups actually, that focus primarily on emerging managers. Which is cool, cause I've had a lot of friends say, Hey, I couldn't get into this cause I don't have family money. I don't have any connections. I don't know anybody. And I said, look, like, my family or any of my family, friends haven't invested in any of my deals.

People who are young, hungry, ambitious, don't really have anything to lose, they have the energy and the drive to try crazy things, and they're creative, and they haven't really been put into a box yet. So, And the other thing too, is they'll say, you know what? well, Warren Buffett makes the same analogy. Warren Buffett says, it was so much easier for me to make money early on because if I was a jet ski compared to a cruise ship, where if I want to turn the boat around or turn right or turn left, it's so easy on a jet ski, but when, when you're a massive cruise ship and you want to turn around, I mean, that is just so hard.

So, he'll say, anything below that, there's probably tons of good opportunities down there, but it's just too small to be worth my time. So, I kind of think, I have this theory that, there's this perfect sweet spot underneath where all the institutional investors are playing. Cause they'll say, we don't do anything below that.

So, there's this whole space where there's all these small businesses that are moving around. But there's all these mass retirement of baby boomers, who are these super hard working dudes, who run these small businesses that they want to sell them, but it's too small for private equity, and there's this massive amount of deal flow that's taking place. So, all that to say, there's investors who have identified that and say, I would invest in in a rising entrepreneur who can buy small, good opportunities that could outperform these big institutional funds. And So, that's exactly what happened.

Parker Samelson: Right, Yeah, no, that's perfect. Like, even just a week or two ago, I sat down with somebody who wanted to get into self storage facilities, and they said, I've found good deals, but I can't find it. I don't know anybody that would invest. I don't have money. My family doesn't have money. I don't know any investors.

And I told him, I was like, you should just do exactly what I did, which is this, to answer your question. They said, Hey, look, we'll provide all the equity and we'll sign the bank loan and bring all the debt, but you have to give us 51% equity in the general partnership. And so, for me, I thought, who cares, because I'm still going to make 50% of all the money and I'll have a lot less responsibility, actually.

Chris Seegers: And equity in a GP, that's where zero is. we're zero. So, you know, Like, getting that first deal done, and then you know, and then kind of having it as be the launching pad. So, what were some of the things that came out of that first deal? Cause I think back to our first deal, which was 12 years ago, or maybe 13. And Oh my gosh, it was a steep learning curve for us and we made pretty much every mistake you possibly could, but what were some things that came out of that?

Parker Samelson: Oh my gosh, same deal. I feel like we learned so many things. So, at that stage, we are still interested in development and just building, just buying land, and entitling it, and building from scratch, and completely moved away from that after this experience for several reasons. One, the entitlement was just absolutely brutal. Even though we were zoned properly, it took a year to get approved.

Chris Seegers: What year was that, Parker? Was that during COVID or before or after?

We were planning to build the whole project using shipping containers, but then, because of that, and COVID, and the factories, and trying to shut down, and all those things, the cost of shipping containers went up like 6X or whatever. And so, our construction costs went up 6X. So, we got the thing entitled, we got it approved, but then our costs had just fluctuated so much during the whole thing.

That it was because we do all these projections right when we start, but then it's just impossible to predict what's going to happen before we actually break ground on developing it. So, We learned a couple of things. One, we learned, we just switched to not doing development after that. We just switched to doing value out of route by existing businesses and then add value in different ways rather than building from scratch.

And So, what we did is we sold it to an apartment complex developer who rezone it, and built a bunch of apartments on it, and paid us like double for the land where we bought it for. So, I mean, it's just taught us to be creative and be. Another thing that I really feel like I learned too is, I feel like early on I had this attitude where it's like if I back off or give up or on anything, then it's just me losing.

Whereas what's encouraged me is, I'm a huge history nerd and there's this concept in warfare called Tactical Retreat. Where it's like, sometimes it actually makes sense to retreat in certain scenarios, and that's actually the most strategic thing you could do, but people could say, Oh, well, you're just being a sissy.

But instead, we were like, let's just be creative. Let's be open minded. And what that really makes me think of too, is I've talked to a bunch of other family office investors that are really active in the venture capital space. And what they've said over and over and over again is they've said, when somebody is pitching us on some new company, we honestly don't care what the idea is, it all just boils down to the founder.

Because there's these studies that have been done on like, which ideas work and which ones don't? And what they realized was the ideas, the companies that actually survived, we're the ones that pivoted the most amount of times. And so, all that shows is the idea, who cares?

It's all about who's running the thing, and are they willing to change depending on the circumstances and the market and things like that. So, that was a huge eyeopener for me too.

Chris Seegers: I love that, man. And that's actually some counsel I give. So, when people come to us on the buy side. And they're like, what should I buy?

And there's some things that we won't buy, like, we won't get into the marijuana industry. We don't buy liquor stores. There's some things that for us. Not for any big reason, I mean, there's some moral things there that we haven't quite decided and work through, but really, it's just not a business I want to own or I'd be proud of owning, but otherwise, we're always open to anything.

And we've also seen some industries that we love like HVAC get consolidated so fast. And we're like, we don't want to pay the multiples that are being paid there. So, let's go find somewhere else that private equity hasn't gotten too attracted to. So And one of my mentors had a acronym ALA, Act, Learn, Adjust.

So, all right. So, you sell that land and then you're, you're like, all right, we learned some things. Where'd you go next?

Parker Samelson: Okay. So, after that, I said, Hey, do you guys want to do another? That we got like a 20% IRR or something. So, it was fairly good project. So, I asked them, Hey, even though it didn't shake out, like we intended, do you guys want to do another project?

Cause I'm interested in doing another one. And they said, sure, we'll do another one, but this time you get 25% instead of 49%. This probably isn't worth it. Again, try to just do it on my own. And I just was working on it. But I had a friend, one of my closest friends from high school was back, visiting for something, and we all went and play golf together.

The most important thing is, we just work together really well, and we trust each other, and we enjoy working together. Which I feel like, that trifecta is really hard to find. So, we feel super blessed, after all this time and after all the things we've been through, that we still feel that way is really Yeah, that's great. fantastic.

Chris Seegers: Yeah. I'm working on a second book called Buying Main Street, which is a primer for people that are like, Hey, how do I buy a business? And it's real high level. And one of the segments is on partnerships. And I went through an exercise, a couple of years ago, that was really useful. And it was basically like, outline all of the really successful partnerships you've been in. And it could just be like your wife, your siblings, whatever, right?

And for us, it was very similar is like they have to be high, high loyalty. They have to be high trust. They have to have a set of skills that I don't have. And they have to be really fun to work with. Like I always think in 10 year increments, I'm like, if I want to work with this person for 10 years, they got to be a lot of fun to work with.

Parker Samelson: I feel like that is important. I just had a conversation with a friend about he's thinking about proposing to his wife. And I honestly think there's overlap there, where my wife and I, we actually did pre-engagement counseling, which is kind of unorthodox. But I took the position where I feel like a lot of one aspect of American culture is, oftentimes people might not pay as much attention to just the practical elements of marriage.

Chris Seegers: I love that, man, doing all the pre work because my wife and I, the reason we've been so successful is my wife is just incredible. And we met in business school and we started partnering up on every deal we did. And she brought a totally different skill set, but we just love doing it.

So, Initially, when we bought our first business, we didn't have kids. I mean, We were working like, every day, probably 12 hours a day, every single day. And it was fun, cause it was like, Hey, we're working together. You know, Like, we're building these great things. We're doing these great projects.

And then we started slowing it down as we had kids. But that initial alignment just continues to kind of read through our marriage and why it's fun to be married to her.

And so, we would just meet halfway at this golf club. So, we were essentially trying to build our business out of the really fancy locker room of his. We would work all day and then we would go play nine holes and go do the hot tub and stuff.

And I was like, this is so much fun. I mean, Entrepreneurship is hard and scary and stuff. So, it's like, you might as well make it fun.

Chris Seegers: Oh yeah, a hundred percent. Yeah. That was one of the things as we started buying more businesses, I was like, I am not going to be gritting my teeth.

Through the onboarding, through the optimization, like, I'm going to go in there and try to maintain peace and some sort of balance. Now, some of it's a little out of balance for the first bit of it, but the first few we did, it was just like, we got to get through this part to get to the good part. And then I was like, man, if we continue to buy businesses, I would do that my whole life.

Parker Samelson: Okay. So, the next thing that happened, again, this is part of the pivot, pivot, pivot thing. So, we were planning on just doing another traditional self storage deal. But we had a broker who brought us a deal and said, Hey, I know you guys have been struggling to find anything because self storage is super competitive, and there's not a lot of good deals on the market.

So, he brought us this deal that was a RV and boat storage facility for sale in Denver. Which at the time, even more so than it is now, it was just a super niche asset class that nobody really talked about or was involved with. It was like a 7% cap rate, like, pretty much like downtown Denver, 10 acres.

And it made a lot of sense and our investors were excited about it. Yeah, So, we've kind of had a strategy where we only buy in counties that don't require a building permit to build new modular self storage units. So, we can buy these RV and boat storage, and then we can add these modular units and rent them out as self storage.

Parker Samelson: Right, So, it's kind of like a shipping container. but we've, We originally started trying to do shipping containers, but we switched. We use a third party group called Boxwell, they manufacture them in Shenzhen in China, and then they float them all over to LA, and they rail them and truck them to wherever. And then they just arrive on a big pallet, and then a guy comes with a forklift and just sets them up, and just put them in place.

And then, so we only work in counties that there's no permitting required. So, Because if you did require permitting, then it would require a concrete slab, and anchoring to the ground, and a bunch of crazy stuff that would make it not make sense. Like, That would be too expensive and complex. Shipping containers are really weird gray area in the building code.

So, we were like, wait a second, we can just buy this existing one and then just slowly add some of our modular storage strategy onto it. So, we bought the RV storage facility. Before we even did the storage stuff, we realized we're like, wait a second.

This whole business is so antiquated. They didn't have a website. Their rates. Wow. They hadn't raised We we're like, why haven't raised rates since 20 years? And they said, Oh, well, to raise rates, we have to pull out all the paper leases, and find their email address, and individually email all 600 of our tenants. And it's an absolute nightmare. And they said, we didn't even feel like we need to do the rent raise.

Cause we've, this was already paid off like 40 years ago in the family trust or whatever. And then, we already had enough money, We all we wanted was a ranch and a boat.

That's all we wanted.

Chris Seegers: It sounded like oil and gas people. It's like, I need to sell these minerals and royalties to buy a bass boat.

Chris Seegers: My kind of people.

Parker Samelson: Chewing tobacco. Yeah. That's been another learning piece too. Cause I feel like a lot of people approach this saying, Oh, I can't compete against all these massive hedge funds from New York, Blackstone who are going to come in. I mean, The people who are buying these from they would never sell to Blackstone. They would never sell to one of those groups because they're like, I don't want these out of towners coming in.

Yeah. The fact that we are local, like, I would walk in there and say, Hey, I was born in Colorado. And then there's just instantly trust there. And just look him in the eye, shake him in the hand. I mean, That kind of stuff, I feel like they don't really teach you that, but it's like that, we learned that could take us so much further than acting super professional and wearing a suit and all that stuff.

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Chris Seegers: all right, you guys you get some great deals going and then we'll have to fast forward a little bit to make sure we get it all. But you guys had some success, right? But I want to tie into what was so attractive about you when I first met you is, you're so focused on giving.

Parker Samelson: right? Well, kind of full transparency, and I'm still trying to figure out how to integrate this into my life. Purpose and sense of self and things. But I, When people ask me, they're like, are you super passionate about storage? Is it your life mission? I'm like, no, storage is really boring. It's literally just leasing air to people.

Um, I've never heard that before. That's awesome.

For example, what is really important to me? It's my faith. It's my family. Personally, I really value traveling, and experiencing new cultures, and experiences and things. I have a lot of friends who don't. I have a lot of friends who are like, dude, that sounds so boring, and I'd rather just chill in my hometown forever.

that's cool. But for me, I love learning different languages, and trying new foods, and getting involved with different missions organizations and other countries, and going and visiting them, and seeing how it all fits together in this global picture.

But at that point, we had handed all four of our facilities over to property management. And then it got to a point where we were kind of like, didn't have that much going on. So, we were like, what do we do? So, I was like, well, this seems like a unique opportunity in life. We don't have kids yet.

So, my wife and I just traveled around the world for 8 months. And we visited 40 different countries. I climbed like, 3 out of the 7 highest mountains on each continent and stuff like that. And we had the craziest, coolest experiences and it was a really awesome bonding time for my wife and I. Cause we're with each other all day, every day.

Chris Seegers: Yeah, for sure.

But for me, I'm like, I want my business to be self sustainable enough where I do still have margin to kind of do these other things. So, that's really how I mean, the vision for me is, I don't sit here and I say, Oh, I want to own all the storage in the world. I mean, I don't really care.

I kind of just want financial independence so that I can buy back my time and have more margin and flexibility in life to do the things that are really meaningful to me.

Chris Seegers: I love it, man. So, tell me a little bit about your giving. Cause that's really important to us. And one of the strategies that we bring to our sellers is, Hey, if you don't have a really good giving consultant, just like you have a financial advisor, an attorney, a CPA, us as your business advisor, you can save a ton of money on the tax side. Just a lot of great structures. So, talk a little bit about that.

They always try to remind me, they say, Hey, don't forget, if you or anybody that you know, are considering selling a business, talk to us beforehand because if you can set it up to where you donate shares before the sale to a donor advised fund, then in this massive liquidation event, you can kind of still personally put a fairly similar amount of money in your spending pocket, but a ton of money that would've gone to the federal government just goes straight into your donor bias fund, tax deductible that you can give to charity.

So, they'll say, talk to us unless your favorite ministry is the federal government.

Chris Seegers: Not any of us. Yeah. I don't think anybody ever, except employees of the federal government, maybe.

It's like, I know we already have this money in there, and we can be generous, and we can kind of be spirit led with it and say, if something just pops out of nowhere and it's likes, Oh my gosh, this is such a crazy, cool opportunity that could just leverage impact in this really crazy way. We don't have to be like, well, let's look at our budget and see if we can make it work.

It's already in there. And so, then we can just do it. And we try to get really creative with giving too. I mean, I've One thing I haven't done yet, but I want to get more into is even just impact investing, impact oriented business through a donor advised fund. I mean, how cool I think, there's so many innovations in this whole space that I think a lot of people don't know about that are really exciting.

So, But that's really exciting and it's exciting what you can do within your giving sleeve that wasn't around even five years ago. So, I think, that's great, man. And I mean, I think, the federal government's the worst fiduciary ever in the history of anywhere. So, if you can get more of those dollars and put them in play in the marketplace or with folks that are doing good things, like, that's going to help the world for sure.

So, let's transition and we'll, close with a couple of questions. So, if you've got a young entrepreneur and they're thinking about either getting into real estate or starting a business or buying a business. What are some things you would have them think about? And then I want to close with just resources, books, and different things that you would, you're really into. And it could be non, you know, non-business, but just stuff you're excited about.

If it were super easy, it would be way more competitive and it would change the market of the pricing and everything. So, the fact that there's people who don't want to do it, that's all priced into the market. I do have some friends who I'm like, it kind of makes sense for you to not do this.

For example, if I have a friend who's a medical doctor, or an engineer, they have an engineering degree, or government contracting job with unbelievable benefits where they can travel the world, and they have young kids, and they're stressed about finances, but they say wait, I can with this I can pay off all my dad, I can do whatever.

And if it's something that you could do kind of on the side, I think real estate falls in that category. Then it's like, yeah, there's no reason why you couldn't do that. Yeah, I mean, there's been times in my small business career where it is really stressful. There's things that happen to control and there's a couple self storage people that we follow online who, when all the interest rates were hiking up like crazy, they would say stuff publicly. But they would say, yeah, I've got 50 million dollars of personally guaranteed loans at floating interest rates.

Chris Seegers: And a lot of those people got smoked, man.

Parker Samelson: And his next comment after that was, he was like, who still wants to get into real estate?

I'm like, guys, the yes and philosophy. So, yes, I want to buy a business and I want to keep my job, or yes, I want to buy a business and I want to minimize my downside risk. The last business we bought, we put very little cash in and it was 97% owner carried, and there was a very low personal guarantee that we already surpassed the first year.

And those deals are out there. They're not easy to find, right? Like, it takes time and energy, but those deals are out there where it's like, Hey, I'm going to take more time, I'm gonna be more patient. I want to minimize my downside, and have a lot of upside. And I agree, I think people like, have just said, if you're young, just take a ton of risk. And that's like, that's not what the smart people are doing. That's not what Warren Buffett does. That's not what the people that have made money for a long time are doing.

They're protecting those dollars and then figuring out ways to make really smart bets. I love that, man. So, what else? Any other advice you'd give to young entrepreneurs? And then what about some resources for folks or, resources that have helped you along your journey?

It's thinking through the little details that are just going to be part of your life every day. So, for me, it's like when I'm buying a business, I try to think through, how hard would it be to hire people to work in this job? Is it going to be impossible to staff this thing? Is this going to be a total headache nightmare?

Cause, again, like, why am I buying these businesses? It's because I want to increase the quality of my life. And so, again, if I'm buying something and I, if I really try to think deeply about, would buying this business make my life better or worse? Would it make my life more or less stressful? feel like I've seen people where they'll essentially, like, they'll leave their job and leverage everything and basically, like, buy a job.

But I try to encourage people. I'm like, dude, think about the subjective side of this. Think about how this is going to affect your marriage, your kids. Is it gonna make your life more or less stressful? And then is it gonna increase your quality of life or decrease your quality of life?

That's another big thing, I try to because I do think there are businesses out there that do increase the quality of your life because of the nature of the stress versus risk versus this versus that. So, yeah, That's a big one for me. And then, as far as resources, one of my favorite books, this is more for a startup person than buying a business person, but they call it the Silicon Valley business Bible. It's called The Lean Startup.

Chris Seegers: Oh yeah, that's great.

Parker Samelson: Yeah. That's a good one. I personally love the podcast, How I Built This.

Chris Seegers: Yeah, that's really good.

For example, like our first episode is this guy who's my age, who his dad started Otterbox. He's an episode on How I Built This, but he grew up in a tiny town, kind of like a dead end town, super rural, middle of nowhere, taught himself all the trades, all of his friends, just like dead end situation.

But he built Otterbox from scratch and it's a multi billion dollar business now. And I'm like, how freaking cool is that?

Parker Samelson: Right, right. Exactly. But yeah, I just think, just those stories are so inspiring.

Chris Seegers: What about a non-business book or just a book that you've really loved reading in the past six months?

Parker Samelson: Yeah. I'm not normal in my reading approaches. People ask like what kind of books do I like to read? My answer to that question is just like the classics. Because people recommend to me like, Oh, you should read this new fiction book that just came out a week ago.

And so, it's like, it all goes back. That's why I love history so much, because it's just like the context for why the world is the way that it is? And I want to understand why the world is the way it is going back to that conversation of, like. life kind of just feels like this big game sometimes.

So, it's like, well, I want to understand it really well. Like, I know, some of the best basketball players are the ones who just know the rules so cold that if it's like, 30 seconds on the clock left, you know, how many timeouts, you know, how many timeouts? It's like, they're able to just function so well within knowing the rules of the game that I'm like, that's what I want to be able to do too. I want to understand the world super well so that I can like function properly within it.

Chris Seegers: Yeah. We call that, on our side, identifying the architecture of life. And once you understand the architecture of life, then it becomes a lot easier. And business has an architecture, and good relationships have an architecture.

Parker Samelson: So, people can find me on LinkedIn. I'm fairly public on LinkedIn. Sometimes I go back and forth with how public I should be on LinkedIn. I don't want to be as a LinkedIn lunatic. But I think I might already be one. Um, So, yeah.

Chris Seegers: What about the podcast? You mentioned a podcast.

Parker Samelson: Yeah. So, we have a podcast called Ascendance, which is similar to How I Built This, but the next generation of young people of family, business, families who are trying to ascend into their own identity and impact.

And it's usually through some form of entrepreneurship or investing and giving. And then we wrote a book, it's a little bit more niche of a topic, just specifically on next gen people who are trying to discern their role in these multi generational family office, family business structures.

Chris Seegers: I love it, man. Well, Thanks so much for coming on the show, and we'll have to have you back again.

Parker Samelson: Awesome, man. Thanks for having me.

Chris Seegers: Appreciate it.

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