Is This the Future of Storage? A Look at Chris Long's Innovative Approach

Chris Long is a Canadian carpenter who got tired of trying to find a place to park his work trucks and store his materials. There was no good answer in the market. Industrial outside storage was being sold in one-to-three acre triple-net leases on raw dirt with no fencing and no security. Anything smaller than that simply did not exist. So he built one. Then another. Now Long Yards is a contractor-storage platform with 15 partner locations in the United States ranging from LOI to fully open, plus the original 10-acre flagship in Canada that is literally 200 feet by 2,000 feet, road down the middle, 67 fenced yards on either side. Chris immigrated to the US to scale it up. The model is the same as self-storage in concept but built entirely for contractors. Each yard is enclosed by panels concreted in place, with cameras, power, and on-demand portable offices and shipping containers. The panels move. If a tenant needs to expand from 1,500 square feet to double that, the panel between two yards moves over and the lease scales with the business. Long Yards builds out at $130 to $200 per square foot on tier-one land. Sites can launch in three months when no civil engineering or site plan approval is required. What landed in this conversation: Why licensing beat franchising. Long Yards is SBA-approved (search the SBA directory for "Long Yards" just under Longhorn Steakhouse), but Chris cannot personally use SBA because he is Canadian and does not have a green card. The workaround built the model: he partners with American operators who qualify for SBA on the property, puts his own money into the deal, runs the construction himself (he was a general contractor for 10 years), and takes equity rather than franchise fees. The new entry point is the "Go Long or Go Home" $5,000 territory fee, fully refundable inside 14 days if the candidate does not like what they see. The intent is more partners and longer relationships, not a fast franchise license churn. The buy box and the IP behind it. Five acres is the sweet spot, but the real number is net usable square footage. A 10-acre property can be a five-acre Long Yards if half of it is wetlands. Chris built an internal feasibility tool that grades any parcel in 30 seconds against a gross rent multiplier and spits out a tier classification. Tier one is ready to park on. Tier four needs full site plan approval. Long Yards is steering hard into tier one to ship in 90 days instead of two years. They also do not have to buy the land. SBA allows land arbitrage where Long Yards leases the dirt on a profit-share with the landowner and finances only the build. The candidate profile is operator with skin in the game. SBA qualification (good credit, liquidity, net worth), real estate or business experience, and willingness to take some bruises. Chris is explicit that perfection is not the bar because he was not perfect either. His first location took door knocking and grinding to lease up. What disqualifies a candidate is more about culture fit and drive than resume polish, and because Long Yards puts its own equity in every deal, the screening is happening from both sides. The 12-to-1-to-better mistake. Chris scaled his earlier general contracting business to 12 employees by saying yes to too much, mixing residential and commercial work he had no business mixing, and chasing growth instead of focus. The company shrank back to one. Him. Tool belt back on. Two years later, he was making more money than the 12-employee version with a fraction of the people because every system had been rebuilt from scratch around the highest-value work. The lesson he calls the most painful and most valuable of his career: systematize the business, be methodical about who you bring in, and be selective with the partners you take on. Easy to say, hard to do. The advice line that stuck: say no quickly. Chris credits it to his early business coach Bruce Firestone, the founder of the Ottawa Senators. Time is the most valuable thing the operator has, and clarity on purpose makes the no-quick easy. On the reading side, Chris is currently in Atomic Habits by James Clear and Slicing Pie by Mike Moyer for the partnership-equity work, and he tracks Alex Hormozi and Sam Ovens for operator content. The Long Yards leadership team runs on EOS rocks. His success definition is operator-honest: no alarm clock, slow mornings, and freedom to choose who he does business with. With a wife at home and two daughters, he says he already won, he just has to remember to be grateful. Find Chris at longyards.com or email [email protected]. Real Estate Underground with Ed Mathews. 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