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TRANSCRIPTION: #6 BOOK REVIEW.wav DURATION: 00:21:41
Jim: I�m Jim Ross. He�s Matt Vanhorn, and this is the Three Mile Domination Podcast.
Jim: Here we go for another week of Three Mile Domination Podcast. How are we doing,
Matt? Matt: I�m doing great. How about yourself?
Jim: Good. Doing the Podcast and remaining consistent here on these.
Matt: Yep, we don�t often get three day weekends, so it�s real nice to have that
every once in a while. Jim: I�ll take it.
Matt: Absolutely, and I know some of you won�t be listening to it anywhere near this time,
but for all of you veterans out there we appreciate your service and thank you.
Jim: Definitely. Matt: No, this week has been great. I know
one of the things I wanted to talk about this week was a book that I picked up a couple
weeks ago and it�s finally about finished and it�s just really, really excellent.
It�s called So Good They Can�t Ignore You, by Cal Newport.
Jim: Oh, where did you hear about this book? Matt: I actually heard about it on another
Podcast, amazingly enough. We do, we listen to all kinds of stuff. But I had actually
not only on Podcast, but he also runs a blog that I follow called Study Hacks, and he started
the website, the blog, in really just trying to maximize his time management potential
while he was going through graduate school. There are always some very, very interesting
things in there and one of the things they always talk about is really what your passion
versus what people will actually pay you for, which they call craftsmanship. Cal Newport,
he�s actually a Professor of IT at Georgetown University, and he�s basically collected
this and interviewed people and gone through files of people that have been very, very
successful and also people who followed their passion, and that�s really what seems to
be a common theme these days, is, �Oh go and find out what your passion is. Do that,
and you�ll be happy.� Well, the problem is, is that if your passion is sixteenth century
art, and you can�t get a job in a museum, that passion is not going to pay your life.
It�s just not. No one is going to pay you for that. So, basically the premise of the
book, and I�ll go into it in a little more detail, is that the people that are passionate
about their work didn�t necessarily start out that way. They got passionate as they
got better at it. And as time went on, say for example, in self storage, if you�ve
been in the self storage industry long enough, and I�m not talking about a year or two
or three years. Just for example, Jim and I have been in this industry almost fifteen
years each. And basically the premise is, is that as you go through those years, and
you gain skills, and you put in, say, your ten thousand hours like Malcolm Bradwell says
in his books, you become passionate because you become good, and once you become good,
people will pay you for that skill, and that�s when you become passionate because it fulfills
you. It fulfills your needs internally. Versus trying to find your passion� One of the
examples in this book of someone who was following their passion, there was a girl in here and
I think her name in the book was Jill, had a job at a marketing company, and she was
making very, very good money, but again did not like it. It�s like what everybody is
worried about, being caught up in the rat race. Didn�t like it� Wasn�t fulfilled�
She had totally been there a few years, so again, building up that craftsmanship to where
you are the top of what you do, like what they call career capital, and she decided
she liked Yoga and wanted to go do Yoga, and went and took a three hour Yoga certification
class, quit her marketing job, and thought she was going to open up a Yoga Studio. Well,
part of the problem was, was that she went and opened this Yoga Studio but she didn�t
have what they call the career capital or the years and the experience to be able to
run that successfully, and it failed, and end of story she ended up on food stamps because
she couldn�t get her Yoga Studio to work because she did not have the experience or
what they call, again, the career capital in Yoga, to be able to make that work. So
it was just a really, really interesting story to review a couple case studies like that.
So it was just really, really interesting. I highly recommend the book. For those that
are, especially those of us, and Jim and I have been there too, where you�re sitting
down and you�re looking at your occupancy reports and you�d much rather be doing something
on the beach. We all have been there and it�s just one of those things where you have career
capital, especially in storage where I think this is an amazing industry and people may
not look at it that way, but we�re really in an industry that�s becoming mature. It�s
getting there and it�s becoming mature. Wall Street is noticing what we are. There�s
a lot more money going into our industry, and those of us who have put the time in,
and have learned this industry from the ground up and have really worked on building, again,
what we call career capital, can be really successful in this industry because a number
of people want to get into it and they need people who know how to do it, therefore those
of us in this industry that have really put the work in, it can turn out very successful
for us, and we can be very happy. Jim: Definitely. It�s all about� We review
the books and we�re always learning and going and I look back fifteen years ago and
we were newbies and didn�t know anything, but you submerge yourself in the industry
and also learning as you�re going and reading these kinds of books, it�s a great way to
make yourself better and if you can grow in the industry as well, great.
Matt: Well yeah, I mean, one of the things I was thinking about while I was reading this
book was I would love to be the GM, the General Manager of the New York Mets. I would love
that. That would be what you would call my passion, but I don�t know anything about
running a baseball team. I really don�t. I watch it on television. I can play couch
manager, but I don�t know anything about it. I don�t know what it takes to run a
baseball team. I don�t know the economics behind it except what contracts and things
have been put in the news. But I don�t know how to run it. I don�t know about setting
up team travel or anything. What the rules are� So me at my age right now going to
go and say, �I�m going to be the GM of the New York Mets,� it may be my passion
but I have no career capital in baseball other than I played Little League when I was little,
and that�s not enough. I have no career capital to be able to go and do that but when
we talk about self storage, when we talk about management, when we talk about operations,
when we talk about feasibility studies, development, things in our industry, Jim and I do have
career capital on that because we�ve been doing it for so long. And therefore once you
have that career capital, it makes you feel good because you�re moving forward in your
own industry, and therefore then it becomes your passion, rather than trying to figure
out what you�re passion is, because most people don�t know what it is, and if I were
to say, �Okay Jim, what�s your passion that you want to go do tomorrow,� it might
be three or four different things and it may not be something that you really want to do.
One of the blog posts that Cal Newport put on his blog, this is probably a few weeks
ago, they were interviewing, for those of you who love stand up comedy, Louis CK, and
during the interview what it said was, �Oh how do you feel? You have all these great
things. How do you feel now that you�ve made it,� and he goes, �You know, there
was a lot of work that went into this.� Louis CK has been doing stand up in New York
for two decades. And one of the things he said was, �This didn�t come over night.
It was an absolutely horrible process.� And what that means is, yes, he�s successful
now, but starting in probably I would guess his late teens or early twenties, going around
the comedy circuit in New York is not easy. It�s not like he was wealthy, probably slept
in his car, or probably slept on the subway there in the back, probably had a really crappy
apartment, not in Manhattan, and basically the premise of it was that the process which
we�re all going through on a daily basis is to become good at what we do, was just
horrendous for him. He said it was a horrible process, he hated it, just like everybody
else, you�re going through the toughest times learning, you want to quit, you don�t
want to go forward, but if you stick with it and you become really good, then you�ve
got something, and that�s really the premise of what this book is and I highly recommend
it to everybody. I�m actually going to be buying some copies for some other people that
I know. Jim: As you�ve been talking I went to my
Amazon Prime account. I�ve already got one ordered, so� Got one coming to me�
Matt: Yeah, I highly recommend it and there was a couple case studies in there where it
shows how people who did build up what they call, again, career capital or what they would
call experience is really what that is, and over time and how they were able to parlay
that into different things and there�s this idea of consistent study that�s out there
as well. There was a book by Jeff Colvin called Town is Overrated and it�s one of the things
it focused on as well, and they mentioned in this book where it�s just consistent
study where you�re always learning new things and working on it and not just messing around.
This consistent study which makes you better, where you�re really pushing your limits,
so if you�re really good at sales, well now I need to push my limits and learn marketing
and I need to push my limits and learn finance and how self storage facilities are financed
and how they operate financially and how to market these things in different ways, how
to do sales programming because our sales programs in this industry are recycled. You
know this telephone game that�s been spread from somebody who worked at a read now what
I learned at the read I�m going to bring into a smaller amount of pop up, or a [inaudible]
telephone down even further and further where it gets polluted and we have this half crazy
sales program that was once from one of the reefs but it�s now morphed into this ugly
mess and it�s really just about getting better and they say as you get better you
get more passionate, so I really enjoyed the book.
Jim: Yes, and you�re kind of putting this towards being a self storage Manager. There�s
plenty of down time in storage when you�re renting, and be grateful for maybe twenty
minutes a day, but that�s not realistic. In between renting units and phone calls and
collection calls and that kind of thing of day to day operations, there�s down time
to be reading and growing and reading these books and going through some courses and seeing
how you can spin that to make your facility better with your salesmanship or your marketing
and just overall trust and relations. Matt: Right and some people are on this call,
especially owners or investors or maybe just some Managers that say, �Oh I don�t have
time to read a book while I�m at my store. I have to do this, this, and this.� And
that I completely understand that premise. But we are now what we would consider knowledge
workers. No one is hammering out widgets anymore. That�s what it used to be in the early 1900�s
here, last century, where you�d go to a factory and *** out widgets, and you knew
what your job was, and it was to *** out as many widgets as you could during the day
and then you�d go home and have lunch and the horn would ring and you�d go home and
life was good. Then you�d come back the next day and you�d make more widgets, and
make as many widgets as you could. But now what we�ve become as a society is knowledge
workers. We have to figure out how much time to spend on certain activities, and I�ll
be honest, if my Managers� If there is some downtime and the property�s clean and everything
looks good, and they�re reading a book like this or reading Success Magazine, or listening
to an MP3 or a Podcast of something that relates to what they�re doing to expand their knowledge,
I�m fine with that. I really am� We have to become more diverse in our skill sets.
You cannot just build a facility, stick a Manager behind a desk and assume that it�s
going to hit saturation or you�re going to be able to refinance stabilization in 24
months. That just doesn�t happen anymore. Years ago we�d sit in a three mile radius
and have three competitors. Now you�ve got seven, so we have to learn to sell. We have
to learn the market correctly and a few things that help us convert more customers or we�re
just not going to make it as an industry. Jim: I totally agree. In fact we need a little
section on our website, like a little recommended reading list or training stuff, that kind
of thing. So yeah, express your [inaudible] Managers and let them know these are some
great resources for you to learn and grow. That�s a good idea. I�ll have to put something
like that together. Matt: I think so. I think we have a lot of
stuff that you and I read on a regular basis and we listen to and even blogs that we look
at on a daily and monthly basis or Podcasts that we listen to on a weekly or monthly basis
that, again, this comes down to putting the time in and that�s really all of what anything
is that you become good at, is putting your time in. There are no easy short cuts on this
stuff. The stuff that even Jim and I have gone through, there�s time where it was
painful. And there were times where we put in I don�t know how many hours per week
trying to learn this stuff and we still do it and we still have to get better, and there�s
just no easy way of getting around it. You have to put the time in. No one is naturally
good at anything. Jim: Okay. That would be nice, but not me.
I agree. We�ll do this once in a while when we have a book that really hits a nerve with
us, we�ll do a quick episode on it and do a little book review and we�ll keep a list
like this on our website. Matt: I think so� I think that would be
great. This, books, and whatever else we find to be interesting and valuable to anybody
else that actually wants to sit down and listen to it, and that�s really what it boils down
to. And hey, you know what, if you don�t have time to read, or you don�t have time
to do certain things, get it on tape, or download it on your iPod or your iPhone or your Android
and listen to it in the car when you�re driving. I do that a lot when I�m going
between sites, site visits, where I properties that are an hour, hour and a half, couple
hours away. I�ll put those on. I either bring CD�s and throw them in the car or
I�ll download MP3�s or use a Podcast manager on my phone and just listen to it when I�m
driving. Anything you can do� Whatever extra time you have� Because then we�re not
wasting time on the road. We�re really trying to use that to the best of our advantage.
Jim: I can�t remember the last time I listened to music in my car or at the gym. It�s always
a podcast or some kind of e-book. Matt: I agree. I still listen to music at
the gym. I�ve got to have something to keep me going, but in the car when I�m driving
between site visits or wherever I�m going, I try to have something like this, something
meaningful, uplifting, something I�m trying to learn while I�m driving just to listen
to while I�m on these trips, and again, my trips are an hour and a half, two hours,
three, four hours sometimes in the car. It�s really time that we can spend just trying
to learn new skills. Jim: Perfect. Well good, I think that we nailed
that point home about always learning and growing. There are plenty of resources out
there. I�ve got a quick story to tell here about going back to specifically storage here.
I was thinking we were going to do this little episode of this week in doh. And I just like
to hit this every once in a while. What like three weeks in a row? And these stories just
keep popping up and it kind of sounds like storage one on one, but if anything else,
it�s just basic stuff that want to remind you, just make sure you have checks and balances
in place so this kind of stuff doesn�t happen. So, without further ado, here we go for this
week in Doh. At all of our facilities here we utilize call centers, and so I got a call
late Saturday night and what happened was this couple rented the unit earlier in the
day and it was from a new relief Manager, so not to give an excuse or anything, it shouldn�t
have happened at all, but it was a new relief Manager. She rented the unit, did all that,
she closed up and these people came in to move their stuff in around 8:00 PM, so of
course the office is closed but they can get in the gate. You can probably guess when they
got to the unit the green lock was still on it. The Manager never took the lock off the
rented unit. And this should never happen if you have in place where you don�t rent
the unit without showing the unit to the people looking for it or the customer. That the storage
101. Every once in a while you�ll have a customer come in, �I need a ten by ten,�
and �Oh we have some available,� �Okay, I�ll take it.� You know you insist that,
�Let�s go and roll the door up and make sure that�s the right unit for it and make
sure it�s the right location for you, this is the unit you�re going to rent,� and
of course take the lock right back off so it doesn�t happen. It�s happened from
time to time and it�s a big inconvenience because again, they came in at eight o�clock
at night, they rented a U-Haul, it was slam full, and they were ready to get in and they
couldn�t get into the unit. It had a lock on it, so they called the customer service
number and of course it ran to the call center and the call center said they couldn�t do
anything about it so they ended up calling me as an emergency contact. I end up starting
to talk to the customer and this is against my rules, this is a two hour drive for me,
and they actually said, �Well we have some bolt cutters on us,� and the fact is we
don�t like our customers having bolt cutters, and I was like, �Cut it off. Get your stuff
in there.� So they did. They got their stuff in there, however it was an hour and a half
ordeal of them trying to locate someone and getting a hold of me and then calling them.
An hour and a half of total aggravation� They probably think we suck now and don�t
want to come back to our facility but they have no choice. There stuff was already there
to move in, so this is totally bad customer service that could have been easily avoided
if you just show the unit when you are moving the customer in and taking the lock off.
Matt: Well, and you know this kind of stuff goes back to what we were talking about in
previous Podcasts where now you have someone� Of course it worked out okay and it sounds
like everybody�s fine, but something that maybe you may not have been aware of and all
of a sudden it shows up on your Google Review, your Yelp review, or something like that,
a web self storage review, U-Haul review, whatever it is, and now all of a sudden you
have an upset customer and now they�re putting this on social media, they�re putting it
on Twitter, they�re putting it on Facebook just to relieve their anger and now we�re
looking back and here it is. And this could have been just a simple procedural fix and
now it could cascade into something much larger and thankfully it didn�t.
Jim: Oh yeah, well I�m doing damage control as soon as I hung up I took care of that.
I wrote them a nice long sorry for the inconvenience letter with a gift card, just trying to make
nice and smooth things over, so we�ll see how that goes.
Matt: Yeah, and I�ll tell you, you know, like I said a hand written thank you note
can go a long way. Jim: Now my favourite thing is sendoutcards.com.
I utilize that service all the time and we�ll probably do our next episode on that. It�s
a great website just to get out these kind of sorry for the inconvenience or thank you
cards or good bye cards, there are all sorts of things you can do with it. I think it would
be ideal to do a Podcast on that at a later time, but I think for this one, we should
wrap it up. Matt: Great.
Jim: Alright, well we will talk next time. Matt: Alright, sounds great. Have a good week
everyone. Bye. Jim: Bye.
Jim: Thanks for listening to the Three Mile Domination Podcast. Please check us out at
our website, www.threemiledomination.com, where you can download our free e-book, connect
with us on all the social media platforms, and to subscribe to this Podcast. Please spread
the word to those you think that would benefit from this show. Just don�t tell your competitors.
Thanks again.