Avery: Storage into the Google machine, so without further ado, I’ve got AJ Osborne here. AJ, how’s it going?

AJ: It’s going good.

Avery: Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it. Yeah, thanks for coming on. We really appreciate it. Um, so for those who might not be familiar, can you introduce yourself and kind of just give us a little background on how you got into self-storage?

AJ: Absolutely. So, um, you know, it’s interesting because I think a lot of real estate investors, no matter what asset class you’re in, everything we do kind of follows a similar path. It is an investment vehicle that we’re using to try and change our circumstances, right? That was obviously no different for me. Um, I was in sales.

AJ: So, I did insurance sales, which I actually uh, enjoyed. I loved it. I followed in my father’s footsteps, who sold insurance, and that took him out of poverty. So, my father grew up in, um, extreme poverty. Not like, I think, people call poverty today, right? It’s—it was, he, um, he poached for food and didn’t have running water. So, you know, it was… it was outhouses, the works. And my dad is not a hundred years old, so he’s, uh, not that old at all, actually.

AJ: So, it was—you know, he grew up in that circumstance, and that’s what took him out of it. We grew up, I—I live in and grew up in a rural city in Idaho. Uh, I don’t live in a rural city anymore, but that’s where I was born. That’s where he was from, and he took us out of that. And he sold insurance and moved us to what was considered the big city at the time—boy, Idaho, uh—which, at the time, nobody knew where that was. But, um, he worked really hard, and that kind of led my example, right? Of what to do, and what I could do, uh, growing up. Now that, to me…