In 1998, Joseph Margolis received a call about a business he did not particularly want to see. He was in Los Angeles, looking for real estate investments for Prudential. An acquaintance wanted him to meet Ken Woolley, an entrepreneur with 12 self-storage properties. Margolis had objections. Storage seemed too small, too awkward for institutional capital, too difficult to exit. An hour, he was told. Just give him an hour.
He stayed for roughly four. He also visited a storage property for the first time. The conversation helped lead to a $150 million Prudential investment in Extra Space. The investor who had doubted the category would eventually become the company’s chief executive. It is an inconvenient origin story for anyone who likes to believe a career begins with a perfectly drawn plan.
Today, as he prepares to retire at the end of 2026, that meeting looks like the opening of a long apprenticeship. He encountered Extra Space as a capital partner, served on its board, joined its management and then took the chief executive’s chair. Each position gave him a different view of the same company. The view kept getting larger.
Four hours later, a new possibility.
A lawyer learns to read the room
Margolis’s professional life began with documents rather than storage doors. A graduate of Harvard College and Columbia University School of Law, he worked as a real estate associate at Nutter, McClennen & Fish from 1986 to 1988. Prudential’s in-house real estate legal team followed. From 1992, his responsibilities at Prudential Real Estate Investors included general counsel, capital markets and portfolio management.
The sequence matters. A lawyer studies obligations; a portfolio manager studies the consequences of putting money behind them. Margolis’s career crossed both desks. By the time Woolley appeared on his calendar, he had experience considering real estate through several kinds of risk. His first reaction to storage was a professional judgment. Taking the meeting left room for a second judgment.
He later co-founded Arsenal Real Estate Funds, where he was a partner from 2004 through 2011, and became senior managing director and partner at Penzance Properties. Meanwhile, his relationship with Extra Space continued through its board. His route to running a storage operator passed through law, investment management and property ownership. There was no requirement that the route be straight.
The numbers could wait until morning
When Margolis joined Extra Space as chief investment officer in 2015, he brought East Coast expectations to a Utah office. During his first week, he asked an analyst to run some numbers late in the day. The analyst accepted the work, got into the elevator and went home to dinner with his family. Margolis had expected the assignment to trigger an evening at the desk.
The analyst had understood something else: unless the request was urgent, dinner remained on the calendar. Margolis’s eventual verdict was admirably economical. “He was right and I was wrong.” For a senior executive, that is a useful sentence to have available. It saves everyone the trouble of pretending the elevator was the problem.
The episode gives a practical meaning to a phrase such as company culture. An employee made a reasonable assumption about his time. His new boss revised his own assumption. A principle survived contact with a live assignment. The numbers still needed doing; the question was whether they needed doing before somebody ate. Margolis learned to distinguish the two.
“He was right and I was wrong.”
Joseph Margolis, on the analyst who went home for dinner
An incoming CEO with a light touch
He became chief executive on January 1, 2017. His account of the transition contains surprisingly little appetite for a ceremonial overhaul. He believed he was taking over a well-run business, staffed by experienced colleagues who wanted it to succeed. Ken Woolley and former chief executive Spencer Kirk were available to help. The new arrival could ask questions without having to announce a revolution.
Margolis described moving slowly, building agreement and resisting the temptation to put his fingerprints on everything immediately. An executive can spend a remarkable amount of energy proving that an office has changed occupants. He chose to spend some of that energy understanding what already worked.
His investment thinking did expand the business’s options. Bridge lending, structured finance, partnerships and triple-net leases supplied additional ways to work with real estate owners. Alongside those changes sat his argument for keeping people involved in customer service, even as technology made more automation possible. For him, operating efficiency still had to account for the person at the counter.
Four digits, individual conversations
Extra Space had 1,427 stores when Margolis became CEO. By May 2025, the company described a network exceeding 4,000. That kind of multiplication changes the practical demands of leadership. A conversation that once travelled down a corridor must now survive departments, districts and distance. Familiarity becomes something a company has to arrange.
Margolis’s arrangements included roundtables with small groups of employees and meeting each newly hired corporate employee. The distinction between those two practices is worth keeping: a roundtable gives existing staff a chance to speak; an introduction gives a newcomer permission to belong. Neither requires a particularly novel management theory. Both require time in the calendar.
The appeal of these routines is their modesty. An acquisition can be announced once, with a price and a closing date. A workplace has to be made again on an ordinary Tuesday. A chief executive who promises accessibility has to keep finding time for people after the promise has stopped being news.
Stores owned and/or operated. The 2023 bar shows the reported lower bound; snapshots are not annual averages.
The deal was signed. Then came the work.
The Life Storage merger closed on July 20, 2023. The combination brought the operation to more than 3,500 locations and roughly 270 million rentable square feet at the time. Such figures make an excellent announcement. They also describe a very large practical assignment. Every additional property arrives with systems, employees and customers who expect the door to keep opening.
Margolis said the transaction began with a call from Life Storage CEO Joe Saffire after Public Storage had pursued the company. The commercial argument rested partly on bringing properties onto Extra Space’s operating platform. He pointed to differences in occupancy and rent per square foot, along with opportunities to lower costs and improve financing.
The human and technical task was substantial: he described hiring 2,700 employees in one day and bringing about 1,200 stores into the operation. Training and data transfers had to accompany the financial logic. A spreadsheet can combine two companies rather quickly. Getting their people to use one operating system is a less elegant, more consequential kind of arithmetic.
Behind the roll-up door, an algorithm
The humble appearance of self-storage can obscure what Margolis has spent years helping to build. A property has rooms, doors and locks. A national operator also has to determine how customers find those rooms, what to charge and how to learn from the results. The simple building sits inside a complicated information business.
In an interview published in January 2026, Margolis discussed a proprietary point-of-sale platform used across the company’s stores, a pricing model recalculating rates for roughly 2.8 million units each night and an advertising algorithm handling hundreds of thousands of Google search terms daily. Those figures describe the systems at that point in time, rather than a permanent inventory.
This is where scale acquires a specific meaning. More transactions can supply more observations, which can inform pricing and customer acquisition. The advantage depends on being able to use those observations. Collecting properties and building the machinery to operate them are related jobs, but each still has to be done. Margolis’s career joined the capital decision to the operating question.
A simplified view of the operating feedback loop.
Keeping the rooftops in the picture
The Life Storage combination also enlarged the physical canvas for environmental work. Extra Space identified opportunities for solar installations, lighting retrofits and equipment upgrades across the added properties. Margolis’s discussion of the merger included the possibilities above the storage units as well as the economics inside them.
His later stakeholder letter connected the company’s durability to employee development and its leadership pipeline. That is a broad definition of stewardship: maintaining properties while preparing people to take responsibility for them. Both involve expenditure today for a benefit that has to survive beyond the current reporting period. A roof and a promotion policy rarely share a conversation. In a business intended to last, they probably should.
An award with employees holding the pen
In August 2026, Margolis placed 25th among the executives recognized in Glassdoor’s Best CEOs awards. The selection drew on voluntary, anonymous reviews from current and former employees during the specified review period, rather than a self-nomination. It offered an outside check on the workplace argument he had been making.
An award cannot capture every working day at thousands of properties. Its significance here is narrower and more interesting: people who had experienced the organization supplied the judgments. For a chief executive who spent time meeting recruits and employees in small groups, the recognition returned the conversation from the other side of the table.
A handoff, with room left in the calendar
On August 24, 2026, Extra Space announced that Noah Springer would succeed Margolis on January 1, 2027. Margolis would remain CEO through December 31 and then advise the board. The change followed a succession process approved unanimously by the directors. The business reported 4,410 stores as of June 30, 2026, across 42 states and Washington, D.C.
In their conversation about the transition, Margolis expressed mixed feelings. He expected to miss colleagues, daily exchanges and shared challenges. He also wanted time with his wife and family, travel and an opportunity to slow down. Charitable work with his family was under discussion. Golf and fishing offered room for improvement. The ambitions were refreshingly free of a five-year operating forecast.
His confidence in Springer came from working together through existing responsibilities and new problems. The successor had built experience across third-party management and other parts of the business. Margolis was preparing to leave the daily decisions with someone whose judgment he had already used.
The executive who once expected an analyst to sacrifice dinner now has plans to spend more time with his own family. Between those moments sit thousands of properties and years of consequential decisions. Yet the smaller adjustment still helps explain the larger story. Take the meeting. Listen longer than expected. Learn when the work can wait. Leave enough room for someone else to carry it on.