Woolley Bio
Woolley is a native of Los Angeles with a bachelor’s degree in physics from Brigham Young University and a master’s degree in business administration and a Ph.D. from Stanford University. He got serious about storage again in 1998. His first task, he says, was to recruit Spencer Kirk, whose management skills he admired, as a partner.
Kirk had helped start a computer switch and modem maker called Megahertz Corp. in his 20s and had sold the company to USRobotics Corp. in 1995. A year and a half later, with his stake in the merged company worth $200 million, Kirk retired at the age of 36.
Woolley knew Kirk because he had been on the board of Megahertz. Kirk, who grew up in Salt Lake City, initially resisted Woolley’s entreaties to join him at Extra Space on the grounds that the storage business, as he put it, was “seedy.”
Mormon Roots
Woolley says Kirk saw the potential only after Woolley took him on a tour of an attractive new Extra Space location in Sherman Oaks, California. He agreed to become a 50-50 partner.
Together the pair -- both Mormons who suspended their careers to lead religious missions -- have turned Extra Space into a storage juggernaut. They took the company public in 2004, raising $300 million. In 2005, Extra Space acquired Storage USA in a joint venture with Prudential Real Estate, adding 458 properties to its 140. That made Extra Space the No. 2 self- storage landlord in the country, after Public Storage.
The biggest challenge for storage operators is high turnover. Extra Space has about 600,000 tenants at any given time. Every day, the company is in search of 40,000 new renters to replace the ones who, on average, move out each month, Kirk said.
The CEO has applied his tech expertise to the task. When he joined Extra Space in 1998, self-storage “was incredibly sleepy,” Kirk said, with property owners keeping track of leasing and maintenance with pencil and paper and color-coded pushpins on wall maps. Kirk digitized Extra Space’s financial planning and logistics and invested heavily in online advertising.
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