I got recruited for my first acquisition because I type fast:

Early in my storage career, my District Manager asked me a weird question:
“How many words per minute can you type?”

I told him 78 WPM.

He looked at me and said:
“Pack a bag. You’re coming with me and the Regional for an acquisition.”

I was stoked.

I pictured big strategy meetings… clipboards… site walks… “adult” stuff.

We did a quick walk of the property and headed to the office.

Then I realized something.

There was no computer.
Like… no computer at all.

They were running the site with punch cards and a ledger book.
And here’s the crazy part…

It actually worked.

It wasn’t pretty, but the system made sense. The manager knew their tenants. The ledger balanced. The operation had muscle memory.

So what did my 78 WPM get me?

3 days typing the entire file cabinet into SiteLink.
Unit by unit. Tenant by tenant.

Not glamorous.
Not exciting.
But absolutely necessary.

Because this is what nobody talks about in operations:

The “boring cleanup” is what separates clean ops from chaos.

It’s not the big speeches.
It’s not the fancy dashboards.

It’s the simple foundation work that makes everything else possible:
clean tenant data
correct rates
accurate unit attributes
real reporting
fewer downstream fires

Progress doesn’t come from perfection.

It is built through a solid foundation of simple accurate work.

What’s the most unglamorous thing you’ve done that made the business better?