In this episode, we sit down with Chris Long, the founder of Longyards and one of the rising educators reshaping how investors think about exits, taxes, and long-term wealth strategy. Chris has built a fast-growing community by simplifying complex financial topics—like capital gains tax, deal structuring, and wealth preservation—into clear, actionable frameworks.
Through Longyards, he helps entrepreneurs and real estate investors understand what truly drives freedom: the ability to exit an asset on your own terms, keep more equity working for you, and deploy capital into opportunities aligned with your mission and values. His content blends storytelling with practical tax education, giving investors clarity on how to create liquidity, reduce friction, and build a financial foundation that supports both growth and impact.
Whether you’re preparing for a major sale, navigating tax-heavy investment decisions, or looking for more flexibility in your wealth plan, Chris brings a refreshing, empowering perspective on what’s possible when strategy and education meet.
Episode Highlights Here:
Brett
Before we jump into this episode, I want to invite you to join our community to help you become a bettersteward scale to billions and ultimately give more or all of it away. All I want you to do is to click thesubscribe button right now. I love your support. It’s incredible to see your comments, and we’re just getting started. I can’t wait to go on this journey with you. Thank you so much for subscribing. It means the world to me. Hey, welcome to the built to billions podcast where we got successful entrepreneurs and investors on their journey from millions to billions. We believe the key to scaling your wealth and compounding your impact starts every single day with the mindset and practice of stewardship over ownership. My name is Brett Swarts, and in every episode, we’re joined by some of the best entrepreneurs, millionaires and billionaires, where they share their insights and wisdom with us so we can all level up faster and make a bigger impact to help MVPs, I’m excited about our next guest. He is a founder of long yards.com and it’s about building industrial self-storage. Investor, developer, if you’re an investor, you want to hear this. If you’re in the development business. You’re gonna want to hear this. This, this show. They have a podcast. This, this guest. He’s out of the Tampa, Florida area, and he has a passion for building wealth within the industrial self-storage space. Please welcome the show with me. CHRISTOPHER LONG, Christopher, how we doing?
Chris
Thanks. Brett, excited to be here. Good, doing good.
Brett
And for listeners, get to know for the first time, for the first time, maybe just give you the 32nd version of the story, and then we’ll dive in right into how do we build wealth with industrial self-storage?
Chris
Yeah, cool. So, what’s the problem we solve? We’re solving the problem small, medium sized yards, month to month in the market, don’t really exist. Didn’t exist. I built it myself in Canada. It worked. Had a holy cow moment when it changed my life, from, you know, flipping houses, being a contractor to now being a millionaire, like, I’m gonna do this, immigrated to the US, and now we’re building it out internationally and look for great people to help solve this problem.
Brett
Excellent. And for our listeners that are like, okay, I’m curious, like, what is the number one secret to building wealth within industrial self-storage.
Chris
Number one, Secret to Building Wealth probably a great structured deal in a great location, I would say like you know, obviously there’s a lot of different matrix elements that have to come together at once, but those would be the main ingredients.
Brett
Okay, so let’s just dives right into an example of this. We’ll give it. Give us one that you recently you’ve done and let’s start to break it down.
Chris
Yeah, I always go with the first example, about 470,000 we put $700,000into it, and then it’s worth 3.6 million. Not long after now, it’s worth closer to five, 4.5 million, and that one location allowed me to create financial freedom for my family and I, which allowed me to pursue this on a multinational level.
Brett
Okay, so let’s break that down. You bought an existing site, or you built and you built it from ground up.
Chris
I bought an existing site for 470 then I built it from the ground up.
Brett
Okay, so you bought some land, right? Okay, and then, and then, how much land was it just under 10 acres.
Chris
Okay, so 10 acres, and then how many square feet did you build? Well, it’s just yard. So, it’s pretty much like, we’re close to 70% net rentable square footage. So, yeah, we have, you know, 43,560times, basically seven. So, a lot of acreage.
Brett
Yeah, walk is dead because, yeah, even then I’m just catching it now, yeah, I’m looking at your, like, your photos and videos here, industrial, self-storage yard, yeah. So, this is, like, this is, you know, walk us through, like, some paint the picture, because someone might be watching this on YouTube, but someone might not. So, paint the picture, yeah, yeah.
Chris
So, everyone knows self-storage, right? You go to your unit; you roll up your doors. You got four walls, a roof. This the same thing, except you go into your location and then you open a gate to a yard that’s enclosed. And it’s your yard, whether it’s for your landscaping equipment, your masonry stuff, you’re building a home logistics company, whatever the case is, we build storage yards on industrial land for contractors and small businesses, and we are scaling this mass scale.
Brett
Okay, I’m getting it now, right? Because you don’t have probably any of the zoning or the issue. I mean, maybe some zoning stuff, but, but, but all of this stuff that’s associated with utilities and or electricity and underground, right? I mean, you probably have some stuff with water mitigation, with water coming down to make sure it flows properly. But, I mean, talk us through these numbers. I mean, this sounds pretty exciting now that again, I’m literally learning about this for the first time. By the way, growing up, I would go to the yard with my dad as a contractor. We go to the lumber yard, and you show up and there’s a fence that opens up and there’s like the industrial like spot where they actually have the office, but the rest of it was just the lumber yard. And we drive up and we’d get our lumber, and we pull out of there,
Chris
right? So, walk us through that. Chris, right? So basically, we took that like traditional yard, and we turned it to more of like a Cadillac product. We do that with technology, with automations, with branding, with uniqueness, with the enclosed space, everything that has a self-storage facility, or that you could bring tech to, including AI and lighting and everything else we ‘ve brought that.
Brett
So, if you like this little, short clip of the interview I just did, click over here to watch the full interview, and please don’t forget to subscribe. Thanks so much, everybody.
Watch the episode here:
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About Chris Long
Chris Long is the founder of Longyards, a platform dedicated to helping investors and entrepreneurs master tax-efficient exits, capital gains strategy, and long-term wealth architecture. With a talent for breaking down complicated financial concepts into simple, visually engaging content, Chris has become a trusted voice for those seeking clarity around selling appreciated assets, navigating tax obligations, and structuring smarter reinvestment strategies.
His work centers on empowering people to preserve more of their equity and redeploy capital into opportunities that create freedom, flexibility, and generational impact. Chris’s educational approach blends real estate, tax strategy, and investor psychology, giving his audience the tools they need to make informed decisions throughout the entire lifecycle of an investment.
Through Longyards, he champions a mission-driven approach to wealth building—one where knowledge, strategy, and intentional planning help investors unlock possibilities that traditional tax paths often overlook.
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