How did we get here?

People ask me all the time why I left a career at one of the most prestigious consulting firms in the world to buy storage units in Texas. Fair question.

The honest answer is that everything I've done in my career has been building toward this — I just didn't know it yet.

I started at CAZ Investments, where I spent seven years helping scale a private markets platform from the ground up to over $2 billion in assets. That's where I learned how institutional money actually moves — what LPs care about, how funds are built to last versus built to raise. I sat at the intersection of deal sourcing, fund structuring, and investor relations, and I watched what worked and what didn't. Most of what didn't work came down to the same thing: misaligned incentives. Managers optimizing for fees instead of outcomes. Short-term holds forced by fund timelines that had nothing to do with what was best for the asset or the investor. That bothered me. It still does.

From CAZ I moved to Rockwell Automation, and that's where I started getting my hands dirty. I went from the capital side of the table to the operations side — literally. I was in boardrooms with executives building diagnostic plans and operational strategies, then on factory floors with senior management all over the country making sure those strategies were actually being implemented at massive scale. Not in a slide deck. On the ground. Then back to the table to strategize the next phase, measure what worked, and push for continuous improvement. It taught me something that shapes everything I do today: strategy without execution is just a presentation. The value is in the transformation itself.

Then came Boston Consulting Group. The job is essentially this: walk into a room full of executives running a multi-billion-dollar enterprise, figure out what's broken, and build the strategy to fix it. You learn to see businesses as systems. You learn that operational discipline isn't a nice-to-have — it's the entire margin between mediocrity and outsized returns. That lens never leaves you.

Meanwhile, I'm watching the self-storage sector quietly become one of the most resilient asset classes in commercial real estate. Exposed to almost zero obsolescence risk. Recession-tested. Inflation-hedged through month-to-month lease structures. And yet the ownership landscape is staggeringly fragmented — roughly 70% of facilities are still owned by independent operators with no institutional playbook. No revenue management systems. No digital marketing. No data-driven operations. Just a gate, a keypad, and a prayer.

That's when the stars aligned.

I saw a sector where the BCG toolkit — operational transformation, pricing strategy, systems thinking — could be applied directly at the facility level to drive real, measurable value. I saw a fund structure that could be built differently — perpetual hold, LP-aligned fees, capital returned early and compounding for decades instead of locked up and liquidated on someone else's timeline. And I found a partner in Wilson Covington, who has spent 25 years in this industry and operates with the same conviction I do: that you build wealth by owning great assets forever, not by flipping them for a promote.

So I made the leap. I left the safe path and built Blount Capital Management to do one thing exceptionally well — acquire underperforming self-storage facilities in secondary markets and transform them into institutional-quality, long-term cash-flowing assets for families who think in generations, not quarters.

That's how we got here. Not by accident. By alignment — of skill set, market timing, and the stubborn belief that boring businesses deserve better operators and investors deserve a better model.

We're just getting started.