The question that we always ask is, what keeps you at Extra Space? And it's always the culture. People love the culture here. And what is that culture? It's how we treat one another. It's how we push. It's how we compete. And it's how we act. It's how we use the values, know the values, and live the values. And it's those things that are really important.
On Inside Extra Space Storage, we sit down with the experts building, operating, and scaling Extra Space Storage to not only be the world's largest self storage operator, but one of the most trusted names in the industry. If you care about where Extra Space and the self storage industry is headed, you're in the right place.
Welcome to Inside Extra Space Storage, the podcast where normally I am interviewing one Extra Space leader, but today we have Joe Margolis, our current CEO, and Noah Springer, our incoming CEO, who are sitting down together. We recorded this on the day of the announcement of Joe's retirement and the executive leadership transition. So, we're super excited to have them in conversation and be able to share that conversation with you.
Hello. Welcome. We are here on the day of the executive transition announcement. We started this morning at 4:00 a.m. and I know both of you were involved and we're at the end of the day, but we decided to get together in a room and just have a conversation about how this all is going. So, to start, for both of you, we'll start with Noah. How you feeling today? How are you feeling as this announcement has come out?
You know what? It's exciting. It's exciting. I've been at Extra Space for over 20 years. To get to the spot is exciting. It's humbling. But it is exciting. It's fun to be in a career for 20 years and be in different roles with different people and have an opportunity to have worked with different CEOs and make it to the spot and have this announcement. It's been a fun thing. I'm excited. My mom might be more excited than I am. She was up early this morning calling me telling me, "Hey, I'm checking the news. I don't see anything." My mom, I don't think the news outlets are picking this up, but she has been very excited, too. Shout out, Mom.
Joe, how are you feeling today with this announcement?
Mixed emotions, I'd say. I mean, on the one hand, things are about to get a whole lot easier for me in my life, and that's exciting. But on the other hand, I've really enjoyed this job, and mostly the people I've worked with and both the intellectual and personal interactions we have every day and the challenges we've all attacked and overcome together, and I think I'll miss that. But it's totally the right time for the next stage of life.
Perfect. Noah, Joe's been your boss for the past 12 years. Can you tell us a little bit about what it's been like working together and, you know, how you two work together?
Yeah, so let's go back a little bit. And number one, Joe's been with us since 1998 in some capacity, right? So, one of our first joint venture partners that we had, we had 12 properties when Joe became a partner, essentially with Prudential. He was on our board for a long time. He came in as our chief investment officer and eventually our CEO. To see that progression is impressive. And to look at the things that he accomplished while he was CEO: we got through COVID together, right? Joe had the helm during COVID. He started the bridge loan program as it came through. We did the Life Storage deal and the transition of that. There's a lot of stuff. We went from 1,000 properties to over 4,400 stores. There's a lot of things that Joe accomplished, and it's impressive to see.
And I've been lucky in my career to have worked with three different CEOs inside the same company and really have an education that comes from Ken Woolley to Spencer Kirk to Joe Margolis that not many people have a chance to do. And so to be able to work with Joe in this capacity for the last 12 years has been really a special treat.
Joe, obviously you've worked closely with Noah. Why do you think he's ready to take on this role?
I have worked closely with Noah for a long time and I've seen him do a lot of things and a lot of things really, really well, both existing things and then new challenges that just come up. When things got too hard or too complicated for me, I knew who the right person to call was to throw at the problem. So Noah started our third-party management program, now the largest, fastest-growing, most profitable in the industry. He's worked with joint ventures, asset management, construction and facilities, HR, operations, lots and lots of special projects. So I have absolute, absolute confidence that Noah is well prepared for this job and is going to do a great job.
Okay, for both of you, but we'll start with Noah. How are you looking at the future of Extra Space? When you look at like 10 years from now, you know, how are you thinking of Extra Space's future?
Yeah, it's an exciting time, right? There's a lot of things that are exciting. Number one, we're in a great spot. The company has done really, really well under Joe. It continues to do well. There's no major changes we need to look at. Take our executive team, for example. There aren't going to be major changes with that. The big change that you'll see is third-party management and asset management will roll up to Zach Dickens. He's well prepared. Zach and I worked together for 20 years, and he'll be able to run that no problem.
Overall, the people are very strong. The balance sheet is in good position. We've been able to grow a lot of things. I think the thing that we look at the most going forward is going to be our properties and what can we do at the stores to push same-store NOI and remember that those stores are our biggest lever now. Joe's done a great job by growing our store count and increasing the size of our company. We're a $32 billion company now. And with the number of properties we have, the biggest lever we can use is the store. And same-store NOI is the best thing we can push on to really increase the value of our company. That said, what does that? It's the culture of our company and it's the people in our company. We need to make sure that we continue to focus on the people and protect the culture that we have, and that will continue to propel us well into the future.
Perfect answer. Joe, how are you looking at the future of Extra Space? You'll obviously still be on as an advisor on the board. You'll be connected still. So, how are you looking at it?
