Just like that, a trash can sealed the deal—and the direction the Minsleys’ lives would take. Brad secured the internship and Cliff joined them years later as an intern when he was in college. The trio moved from Raleigh, N.C., to Tampa, Fla., where the market was booming. Now, the two brothers were making a name for themselves in the real estate business together.

The Minsleys had learned a lot from their unexpected mentor, but everything was about to change. In 2008, the Great Financial Crisis (GFC) threw the economy into turmoil. “That was a turning point,” says Minsley. “Our previous employer was a successful guy, and we’d helped him get through the GFC, but Brad and I were ready to do our own thing, in our own backyard, in North Carolina, and we wanted to do it with a different lens toward risk.”

In 2010, now back in their hometown, the brothers started 10 Federal. “We didn’t have much,” says Minsley, “but starting at zero after the GFC was a much better position to be in than the people trying to dig themselves out of a hole.”

The brothers were concerned that the $1.5 trillion TARP stimulus designed to right-size the economy following the GFC would lead to runaway inflation, so they began looking at hard assets. “That’s where you go during times of inflation, so our first business plan was apartment-centric,” says Minsley, who relays how he and his brother became fascinated by Housing and Urban Development (HUD) financing. “It was government insured, and had a really long-term, fixed interest rate loan, so getting into necessity-based housing was a really safe play because rental rates and inflation will grow and outstrip your debt.”

Their plan attracted a lot of limited partner interest from those they’d worked with during the GFC. “They would say, ‘You were upfront with us during the crisis. You didn’t lie about how bad things were and you always had a solution. And this sounds good—steady Eddie sounds good.’” That’s how the brothers were able to found the business.

Apartments had a great run in that period of time. While cap rates were declining, their cost of capital wasn’t. The brothers felt they were being squeezed out of the space, so in 2015 they decided to diversify and pivot to self-storage. “We’d been a small fish in a very large pond,” says Minsley, “and with storage, which was similar to apartments, we thought perhaps we could be a small fish in a smaller pond.”

Once they entered the self-storage industry, the disparity between the size of the market and the level of sophistication was surprising. “For one, it seemed counterintuitive to us that properties had on-site managers … that just seemed odd,” says Minsley. “So right there, we saw an opportunity there to inject some innovation and forward-thinking into the industry.”

After cutting his teeth at Public Storage for nearly eight years, Andrew Capranos was brought onboard to lead the way as president of 10 Federal. He and the Minsleys saw eye to eye when it came to turning self-storage into a high-tech space.

“Cliff and Brad were always ahead of the curve on technology,” says Capranos. “Right off the bat, they installed a cloud-based camera system, which was pretty novel 10 years ago.”

At the first 10 Federal facility, where there was a manager on site, the cameras revealed that he was watching Netflix and playing Candy Crush for six hours a day. “That’s when they went unmanned,” Capranos says matter-of-factly.

One of his first moves upon joining 10 Federal was to have the company’s in-house developers build a call dispositioning tool that would track why customers were contacting the call center. Most customers were calling for the same reasons: to make a payment, get the gate code, rent a unit, report a problem, and so on. “We then knew that 80 percent of those inquiries could be automated,” says Capranos. “So that’s what we did through our online portal. It greatly reduced the number of calls coming in and the expense of the call center.”

Building out the AI camera, sensor, and access control system across all 10 Federal locations was another priority for Capranos. Their camera systems run in-camera AI and can recognize the motion of a human or car vs. the movement of generic items. They can also perform facial and license-plate recognition, among many other features. “With facial recognition, off-site managers can easily identify tenants, vendors, maintenance workers, and others who may come and go throughout the day or night,” says Capranos. “The system will also capture video if someone shouldn’t be there or is acting suspiciously, which further notifies off-site staff to look into the issue.”

He’s also helped introduce drones to their facilities. Manufactured by Sunflower Labs, the drones integrate with their camera system to provide an eye in the sky. “They go on predetermined flight paths and record what they see, using AI technology to then summarize it all in a report,” says Capranos.

Watch one of 10 Federal’s drones perform a property sweep on the company’s Vimeo channel.

Capranos’ latest endeavor, at a time when many facilities are installing kiosks, is to rip them all out. “People don’t want to use them,” he says. “They have a kiosk in their pocket, and it’s called a smartphone.”

With their smartphones, customers can use the 10 Federal Curbside Rental & Service Center. Similar in look to other curbside pickups but bolstered by complex tech behind the scene, customers simply drive up and scan a QR code to access the Tenant Connect portal, where they can rent a unit, manage their account, pay a bill, get their access gate and DaVinci Lock codes, report issues, and even move out.

“I see kiosks as horse-and-buggy technology now,” says Capranos. “Our tech lets people do everything from the safety and comfort of their car.”

Although 10 Federal’s facilities are unmanned, Capranos makes it clear that their automated management model does not compromise the core business, which is renting space and providing great customer service. “You can provide a great experience without an on-site manager,” says Capranos. “In fact, in many cases, you can actually improve the tenant experience.”

He knows it’s a unique philosophy and likely divergent from what a lot of people think. However, 10 Federal is able to take the on-site personnel payroll and put it toward endeavors that improve the business. “A lot of that may go toward our property monitoring technologies. From my experience working at Public Storage, for example, I can tell you that unless there was an incident like a break-in that drove me to pull up camera footage, I was not monitoring cameras and my people were not monitoring cameras, so it was all reactionary. On the other hand, 10 Federal is proactively monitoring the properties. We have staff that monitors all 100 of our locations across the country, even overnight.”

They’re not just looking for break-ins either. “They’re looking for anything that can be done to improve the property,” he says. “Are the aisles free of trash and debris? Is the landscaping cut? Does the signage look good? Are there maintenance issues? And we get reports on all of that.”

A common misconception some people have about 10 Federal is that the company culture must be non-existent because of how few people operate its portfolio. “They think because our facilities are unmanned that we just don’t have any employees,” says Capranos. “I can tell you that it’s quite the opposite. We have the best employees in the business.”

Because the properties are running more efficiently, the company is able to go out and hire great people and pay them what they’re worth. “I’ve been very intentional about building my team here,” adds Capranos. “We only recruit the best, and they often come from other facilities, of any size, from independent operators to REITs. And they like that at 10 Federal they’re able to color outside the lines a bit as we innovate in this industry.”

One of the company’s core values is centered around being a master of your craft. “Whatever is your sandbox, and whatever you’re in charge of, we want you to become the best you can at it. We’re focused on relentless improvement and we’re always looking for ways to grow, evolve, push boundaries, and go against the status quo.”

Capranos says another part of the company culture is collaboration. “No one says, ‘that’s not my job,’ and there are no egos here.” He elaborates further, stating that everyone works, wins, and celebrates together and that 90 percent of the corporate staff are in the same building every day.

With remote work rare, Capranos believes the 10 Federal team can pivot in an instant and share ideas in real time. “For us, the next great idea happens at the coffee station, soda machine, or over a team lunch, not necessarily on a Zoom call,” he says.

What’s next for 10 Federal? “We’re targeting the acquisition of fragmented small operator properties near major MSAs in the Southeast and Texas,” says Minsley. “All of our acquisition decisions are data driven. We look for businesses we can fix, automate, and grow.”

Minsley explains that 10 Federal employs 0.5 to 0.6 people per store, whereas the major REITs tend to employ about 1.9 to 2.2 employees per store. “That means it’s pretty easy for us to onboard and grow store count. We know what properties will be a good fit or not when it comes to OpEx, because our OpEx is normally pretty static. For other companies, there might be five or six variable OpEx line items. For us, there’s maybe two. And using statistical regression analysis and machine learning, we’ll know what the upper bands of the rental rates we can achieve are with confidence intervals in our markets from a revenue perspective.”

To make the acquisitions, 10 Federal continues to raise funds, something they’ve been extremely successful at. When the company was buying assets in 2021 to 2022, they deployed cash only. Because of that, they have no legacy issues from being over-levered on debt with high interest rates. “Some of our peers are working through that now, while we’ve been able to accelerate through what’s been a pretty soft year for storage in 2023 to 2024. In fact, we had our best capital raising year ever last year.”

With all their success, why aren’t other self-storage companies taking a page from their book? Capranos thinks it’s because there is anxiety around introducing anything new to an existing business. “People get in the mindset of ‘it’s always worked like this, and we’ve had success in the past, so we’re not going to change.’ Well, you don’t have to look further than Blockbuster and Circuit City to see how that pans out.”

He adds that when other companies do make a change, their mistake is just dipping their toes into new technology, never fully embracing it. Minsley agrees. “We are all in and have been since the beginning,” he says with a smile.