Ryan Brown: Why I Quit Medicine to Build a $41M Self-Storage Empire

Today, I welcome Ryan Brown to The Investing Secrets Podcast. Ryan's path into real estate was anything but conventional. He grew up in a trailer park, became the first in his family to attend college, and trained as a nurse anesthesiologist at Rush in Chicago before landing a faculty role at USC's Keck School of Medicine. But between long shifts in the operating room and annual surgical mission trips to rural Kenya, Ryan realized he was wired to build something bigger than himself. Today he's the Principal and Co-Founder of Turnbull Equity, a vertically integrated self-storage platform with roughly $41 million in AUM across seven states - combining ownership, capital raising, and a nationwide third-party management arm all under one roof.We kick things off with Ryan's origin story and the single beachfront building (financed at a 1.75% fixed mortgage) that pulled him out of the operating room and into full-time real estate. From there, we get into why self-storage rewards disciplined operators over passive owners, how Ryan runs one of the leanest expense loads in the business, why he treats NOI - not IRR - as his true north, and how his management arm quietly feeds his entire acquisition pipeline. We close on his outlook for self-storage in 2026, how he identifies durable markets in a post-COVID world, and the one investing principle he believes matters more than any return metric. Welcome, Ryan, to The Investing Secrets Podcast…Follow Ryan:Website: turnbullequity.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanbrownla/Follow Me:LinkedIn: https://bit.ly/3L2sTc7Instagram: https://bit.ly/3soYxtW