A tile guy pays us $780/mo for a garage. He could lease a warehouse for $4,000. But he picks our Mega MAK Storage condo every time. Most of our storage tenants aren't storing couches. They're running businesses. Plumbers, electricians, landscapers, and contractors run their operations out of our units, often with $50,000 of tools inside. A traditional industrial lease wants a 3 to 5 year commitment and four grand a month. Our unit gives him: → Climate control and real security → A 12x14 door he can pull a trailer through → A 30-day lease instead of a 5-year handcuff For a growing business, that flexibility is worth more than the extra square footage. About 75% of our tenants are business owners. That's not an accident. We built the product for them. When you build for a specific customer, you stop competing on price. Who is your product actually built for? -- DM me "storage" to learn how we develop luxury storage at MAK Capital.
The last question is the one every business builder needs to answer before they do anything else. Most people build something general and hope everyone shows up. The ones who build for a specific person, with a specific problem, and a specific reason why every alternative falls short, stop competing entirely because there's nothing to compete with. The tile guy isn't choosing you because you're cheaper. He's choosing you because a 5-year lease on a warehouse he might outgrow in 18 months is a liability disguised as a solution. You solved the actual problem, which was flexibility and function, not just storage. I think about this constantly as I build around swing traders specifically: not all traders, not all investors, not everyone who has ever looked at a chart. The more precisely you define who you're actually for, the more everything you build starts to resonate with exactly the right person instead of barely resonating with everyone. Know your customer better than they know themselves. Everything else follows from there.
Dusty this looks like something you know about or should know about.
75% business tenants is the stat that matters here, Marc. That's not storage anymore - it's flex industrial with monthly optionality, and it prices accordingly. We see the same dynamic in small-bay product across Texas: the tenant isn't paying for square footage, they're paying to not be locked in. Build for the actual customer and the comp set stops mattering.
Flexibility is very important. Sometimes there's better solutions like this one.
Knowing your ideal client is everything in Business
The product stops competing through what it offers. It begins competing through how completely it inherits the operating reality of the people using it. Everything that appears as convenience, flexibility, or value is simply where that alignment becomes visible.
The 30, day lease is the real product here. Most contractors can't predict five years out, so they're not choosing your unit over a warehouse, they're choosing flexibility over commitment.
The point about stopping the competition on price really stands out. A product designed for a specific audience naturally becomes more valuable because it solves problems that generic options often miss, Marc Kuhn.
Yep people running their own show will pay for freedom to move fast and skip long contracts and freedom keeps money working and doors open 24/7.
Brilliant layout of product-market fit, Marc. Moving from a traditional 5-year handcuff to flexible 30-day flex agreements completely captures the small business market, but scaling that strategy introduces a massive operational data bottleneck. Managing a high-volume pipeline of short-term industrial tenant sheets and monthly rent rolls burns massive analyst hours in manual data entry. To help active developers scale flexible portfolios smoothly, our engineering firm built private single-tenant pipelines that instantly map these complex operational metrics, from lease type parameters right down to Tier 4 maintenance split obligations, in 5 seconds from raw PDFs with zero hallucination. We are opening up two temporary testing nodes for active CRE developers to pass a messy asset package through this week.