Thaddeus Campbell

By Brad Hadfield

n self-storage, putting up a fight usually means navigating zoning boards, chasing down delinquent tenants, or wrangling general contractors. Thaddeus Campbell entered the industry after many different types of battles—and he came armed with a black belt.

“I was an MMA fighter,” he says with a grin, shifting the conversation almost immediately. “That doesn’t mean I was always a winner. My journey to self-storage was actually all about not succeeding at things.”

It’s a line he returns to often—and one that frames a career built less on straight-line success than on a willingness to keep moving after things didn’t work out.

Campbell went to Tufts University, where he studied English and history because he preferred writing papers to taking tests. But as graduation loomed, he began to wonder what he would do with his degree. “I knew I didn’t want to be a teacher,” he says.

It was his mother who suggested becoming a broadcaster, saying he had a good voice, liked to talk, and didn’t mind the camera. It made sense to Campbell, so he applied and was accepted to Syracuse University in New York, where many famous sportscasters had graduated. “I thought I’d become a sports anchor and be making $100,000 a year by the time I was 26,” says Campbell.

Instead, he landed in Presque Isle, Maine—one of the smallest TV markets in the country—working on the air six days a week for minimum wage. A move to another station in Nebraska followed, along with a realization: He didn’t like the industry. “I liked talking to people and reporting, but I hated the actual newsroom, so I walked away.”

With no plan in place, Campbell moved back home and went to work for his father’s sales company. “I knew it wasn’t right for me, but it was right for the moment,” he says.

Martial arts came into Campbell’s life by accident. “My dad asked me to pick up some beer after work, and there was a Tiger Schulmann’s Martial Arts School next door. The sensei was there, and we got to talking.”

Before he knew it, he was taking classes and earned his black belt within two years. Campbell invested in the school and eventually bought it. For more than a decade, Campbell taught classes, trained fighters, and built a business around discipline and repetition. And eventually, like many who spend enough time around the sport, he stepped into the ring himself.

“I started at 28,” says Campbell. “Many of my opponents had been training since childhood.”

Despite this, Campbell held his own, building a strong amateur record and eventually fighting professionally, including bouts in Chuck Norris’ World Combat League. “Yeah, I met Chuck too,” he says casually. “It was pretty cool seeing him sitting front row watching me fight.”

In 2014, that chapter of Campbell’s life came to an abrupt halt. A severe concussion after sparring left him sidelined with agonizing headaches that lasted years. “I couldn’t work,” he says. “I’d poured my life into that business and I had to give it away.”

That was the toughest round he’d had yet.

Through a combination of medical treatment and his own persistence, Campbell was able to recover from the ongoing pain, but career-wise he’d once again be starting over. A radio advertisement set him on his next path. “It was a house flipping seminar,” he says. “I’m the guy that went to one of those.”

Campbell partnered up with his contractor neighbor and the duo got to work. They had several early successes, and then they made a mistake that would force Campbell to pivot again. “We thought it’d be a great idea to buy a couple of properties to hold. We figured we’d sink our profit into them, rent them out, and make a lot of money.”

What was supposed to be a long-term play turned into a costly lesson. “I realized too late that we didn’t have anywhere near the money that we thought we had.”

After scrambling to raise $150,000 in high-interest capital just to close, the properties barely broke even. Campbell soon exited the partnership, leaving the assets behind.

Although he chalks it up to another failure, he did gain something from the experience: He learned he loved the mechanics of real estate. “It ticks so many boxes for me: meeting people, building relationships, negotiating, and the structure behind the deals. I was into it.”

Now he just had to find a different route within the same arena.

The next move was wholesaling residential homes, partnering with colleagues from his house flipping stint. It wasn’t glamorous. “It’s like the bottom of the barrel of real estate,” he says with a laugh. “You call distressed home buyers, put their house under contract, and sell that contract for a profit to somebody else.”

Campbell was in charge of taking dead lead lists and hammering the phone—and he was good at it. “I closed a few deals very quickly and was making a percentage of the assignment fee.”

In 2021, his partners shuttered the business; they had their eyes set on the booming self-storage industry. They did, however, take Campbell along for the ride. “It was incredible,” says Campbell. “You could pencil a ground-up deal almost anywhere.”

Developers were moving aggressively at the time—locking up land, securing approvals, and flipping parcels for hefty assignment fees. Tasked with sourcing and selling those opportunities, Campbell thrived in the chaos, helping generate millions in deals. “We were finding more parcels than we could build,” he says.

Then the market shifted. Rising interest rates and tighter lending in 2023 brought many of those projects to a halt, with some never breaking ground. What looked like a winning formula quickly unraveled. “You think you’ve got it figured out,” Campbell says, “and then reality hits.”

Campbell thought his tenure in self-storage may be coming to an end when an opportunity with Safe Storage USA arose. “It was in business development, and I got the job after one phone call and one meeting.”

That’s also when his storage podcast started to take off. For Campbell, podcasting is a bit like returning to his television anchor roots, only on his own terms. “I get to speak with big industry players, smaller operators, and others in the industry. Everyone I talk with inspires me in one way or another.”

By 2024, Campbell says it became challenging to find sites that would pencil for self-storage development. Even when he did find them, there would be pushback from municipalities. When the company decided to focus on acquisitions versus ground-up builds, Campbell knew it was time to move on again. “Building, not acquiring, is what excites me more.”

While at Self Storage USA, Campbell had become familiar with small bay industrial flex space—versatile, multi-tenant buildings that combine office, showroom, or light assembly space with warehouse and storage functions. “It’s not just storage under another name,” he says. “It’s a product type with its own logic, tenant base, and long-term potential.”

Believing this was a profitable direction within the industry, Campbell called Barry Sherman, founder of S3 Partners, which specializes in these types of storage solutions.

“He’d mentored me earlier on, and he’d built hundreds of facilities around the country, plus more than 25 small bay flex buildings,” Campbell says. “So, I called him and said, ‘Barry, want to build a $2 billion flex portfolio?’”

Sherman was open to the idea. Campbell joined S3 and June will mark his one-year anniversary with the company. “I’ve never been happier or more fulfilled in my life career-wise,” he says.

Campbell’s work with S3 spans business development, project work, podcasting, and the early stages of a peer-group concept designed to connect people working in the same niche so they can share lessons, compare notes, and sharpen one another.

That’s a lot of hats, but he thrives in each role. And for someone who built a career on starting over, the constant motion suits him. “Self-storage is always evolving and I love that. I also love that everyone supports one another. Even in martial arts, where we were grappling with each other every day, I never saw the level of camaraderie that exists in this industry.”

Campbell’s drive is rooted in more than just business. He sports a tattoo on his arm of the evolutionary chart, but for him it is a map of his family’s progression. His grandfather immigrated to the U.S. in 1900 and built a life on a potato farm. His father grew up doing chores before breakfast and recalls getting a candy bar once a year at Christmas.

Each generation, Campbell says, built a little more than the last. “Now it’s my turn to keep building.”

That perspective sharpened after his injury, when his wife stepped up, working six days a week while raising their young family, including a son with autism. Today, with three children and a granddaughter on the way, Campbell says his motivation is simple: “All I have to do is think about where my family came from.”

He also credits his younger brother, Franny, who has Down syndrome, with shaping his outlook.

“If a 44-year-old kid with Down syndrome can wake up with a smile every day, what excuse do I have to be in a bad mood?” he says. “He’s my North Star.”