Rent-to-Own

Capitalizing on Your Strengths by Brian Tracy

A Foolish Inconsistency: If You’re in RTO, Don’t Tell the Tax Man You’re in Retail by Ed Winn III

The Silent Treatment: Bridging the Communication Gap with Your Employees by Linda Keefe

APROfile: Rent-A-Center’s Mark Speese by Katie Garza

 

 

 

Strengths

Highly successful people are extremely selfreliant. They accept complete responsibility for themselves and everything that happens to them. They look to themselves as the source of their successes and as the main cause of their problems and difficulties. When things aren’t moving along as fast as they want, they ask themselves, “What is it in me that is causing this problem?” They refuse to make excuses or to blame people. Instead, they look for ways to overcome obstacles and to make progress.

Totally self-responsible people look upon themselves as self-employed. They see themselves as the president of their own personal services corporation. They realize that no matter who signs their paycheck, in the final analysis, they work for themselves. Because they have this attitude of self-employment, they take a strategic approach to their work.

The essential element in strategic planning for a corporation or a business entity is the concept of “return on equity.” All business planning is aimed at organizing and reorganizing the business resources in such a way as to increase the financial returns to the business owners. It is to increase the quantity of output relative to the quantity of input. It is to focus on areas of high profitability and return and, simultaneously, to withdraw resources from areas of low profitability and return. Companies that do this effectively in a rapidly changing environment are the ones that survive and prosper. Companies that fail to do this form of strategic analysis are those that fall behind and often disappear.

Increase your return on energy

To achieve everything you are capable of achieving as a person, you also must become a skilled strategic planner with regard to your life and work. But instead of aiming to increase your return on equity, your goal is to increase your return on energy.

Most people in America start off with little more than their ability to work. More than 80 percent of the millionaires in America started with nothing. Most people have been broke, or nearly broke, several times during their young-adult years. But the ones who eventually get ahead are those who do certain things in certain ways, and those actions set them apart from the masses. Perhaps the most important thing they do, consciously or unconsciously, is to look at themselves strategically, thinking about how they can better use themselves in the marketplace, how they can best capitalize on their strengths and abilities to increase their returns to themselves and their families.

Your most valuable financial asset is your ability to earn money. Properly applied to the marketplace, it’s like a pump. By exploiting your earning ability, you can pump tens of thousands of dollars a year into your pocket. All your knowledge, education, skills and experience contribute toward your earning ability—your ability to get results for which someone will pay good money.

what s your marketing skill?

One of the greatest responsibilities in life is to identify, develop and maintain an important marketable skill. It is to become very good at doing something for which there is a strong market demand. In corporate strategy, we call this the development of a “competitive advantage.” For a company, a competitive advantage is defined as an area of excellence in producing a product or service that gives the company a distinct edge over its competition.

In capitalizing on your strengths, as the president of your own personal services corporation, you also must have a clear competitive advantage. You must do something that makes you different from and better than your competitors. Your ability to identify and develop this competitive advantage is the most important thing you do in the world of work. It’s the key to maintaining your earning ability and the foundation of your financial success. Without it, you’re simply a pawn in a rapidly changing environment. But with a distinct competitive advantage, based on your strengths and abilities, you can write your own ticket. You can take charge of your own life. You can always get a job. And the more distinct your competitive advantage, the more money you can earn and the more places in which you can earn it.

There are four keys to the strategic marketing of yourself and your services. These are applicable to huge companies such as General Motors, to candidates running for election and to individuals who want to accomplish the very most in the very shortest time.

one: specialization

No one can be all things to all people. A “jack-of-alltrades” also is a “master of none.” Specialization is the key. Men and women who are successful have a series of general skills, but they also have one or two areas where they have developed the ability to perform in an outstanding manner.

As you determine your area of specialization, put your current job aside for the moment and take the time to look deeply into yourself. Analyze yourself from every point of view. Rise above yourself and look at your lifetime of activities and accomplishments in determining what your area of specialization could be or should be.

You might find that you are already capitalizing on your strengths and your current work might be ideally suited to your likes and dislikes, to your temperament and your personality. Nevertheless, you owe it to yourself to be continually expanding the scope of your vision and looking toward the future to see where you might want to be going in the months and years ahead. Remember, the best way to predict the future is to create it. Therefore, your main job is to decide which of your talents you’re going to exploit and develop to their highest and best possible use right now.

So what is your area of excellence? What are you especially good at right now? If things continue as they are, what are you likely to be good at in one or two or even five years from now? Is this a marketable skill with a growing demand or is your field changing in such a way that you are going to have to change as well if you want to keep up with it? Looking into the future, what could be your area of excellence if you were to go to work on yourself and your abilities? What should be your area of excellence if you want to rise to the top of your field, make an excellent living and take complete control of your financial future?

When looking at your current and past experiences for an area of specialization, one of the most important questions to ask yourself is, “What activities have been most responsible for my success in life to date?” How did you get from where you were to where you are today? What talents and abilities seemed to come easily to you? What things do you do well that seem to be difficult for most other people? What things do you most enjoy doing? What things do you find most intrinsically motivating? What things make you happy when you are doing them?

As you capitalize on your strengths, your level of interest, excitement and enthusiasm about the particular job or activity is a key factor. You’ll always do best and make the most money in a field that you really enjoy. It will be an area that you like to think about and talk about and read about and learn about. Successful people love what they do and can hardly wait to get to it each day. Doing their work makes them happy, and the happier they are, the more enthusiastically they do it, and the better they do it as well.

two: differentiation

You must decide what you’re going to do to be not only different, but also better than your competitors in the field. Remember, you have to be good in only one specific area to move ahead of the pack. And you must decide what that area should be.

three: segmentation

You have to look at the marketplace and determine where you can best apply yourself with your unique talents and abilities, to give yourself the highest possible return on energy expended. What customers, companies or markets can best utilize your special talents and offer you the most in terms of financial rewards and future opportunities?

four: concentration

 Once you have decided the area in which you are going to specialize, how you are going to differentiate yourself and where in the marketplace you can best apply your strengths, your final job is to concentrate all of your energy on becoming excellent there. The marketplace pays extraordinary rewards only for extraordinary performance. In the final analysis, everything that you have done up to now is simply the groundwork for becoming outstanding in your chosen field.When you become very good at doing what people need, you begin moving rapidly into the top ranks of working people everywhere.

Brian Tracy addresses more than 250,000 men and women each year on the subjects of management, leadership and sales effectiveness. He has produced more than 300 audio/video programs and has written 26 books, including his just-released books Create Your Own Future and Victory. Contact Tracy at 858/ 481-2977 or visit www.briantracy.com/.

 

 

A FOOLISH INCONSISTENCY

Rental dealers are in business to make money and they have selected the rental-purchase industry as the best means toward that end. They have chosen to offer a unique transaction to a niche market instead of, say, opening a furniture or electronics retail store aimed at the general population. It may not be the case any more that the rental-purchase business is less competitive than retail, but it is still true that the large service component associated with rental-purchase makes the transaction less price sensitive than the retail buying and selling of what have nearly become commodities, e.g. certain categories of electronics, where the market is driven entirely by price.

IF YOU ASK RENTAL DEALERS WHAT BUSINESS THEY ARE IN, most will tell you that they are in the “rental” business, the “rent-to-own” business or the “rental-purchase” business. If you ask them whether they are in the retail sales business, most will say “no”—unless, of course, they are also in that business as an adjunct to the rental business.

If you ask them whether they want to be in the retail sales business, most will answer “no” and really mean it. They do not want to compete with Wal-Mart and have to sell DVD players for $88. Retail selling of electronics and, to a lesser extent, furniture has become a high volume, low-margin business and is the business model that most rental dealers have considered and rejected in favor of the rental business.

Most rental dealers are pretty consistent in their preference for the rental business over retail sales and, even if they did not live through the more harrowing days when the line between rental and retail was more blurred legally than it is today, most know the history of the industry’s struggle for recognition and clear separation of the rental business from retail sales.

There is, not surprisingly, a price to be paid for this choice as there is a price for most choices in life. One price for being in the rental business is the assessment of personal property tax on rental merchandise in a number of states. In these states, inventory held for resale is most often exempted from this tax, but merchandise held for rental is not. Thus, Hertz, Avis and Blockbuster must pay the tax on their cars and tapes and DVDs; car dealers and Sears and Wal-Mart do not have to pay the tax on the items they carry.

From time to time, rental dealers— ever alert for the chance to increase profits—seek to slip the bonds of rental-purchase consistency and argue with the tax man that they are not really in the rental business after all and, instead, are selling their merchandise and should not have to pay this personal property tax. This is not a position these dealers would want to take with customers, legal aid lawyers, legislators, the press—or anyone, really— but the tax man. And they would not want to make the argument with all tax men, really—just the county or other local personal property tax assessor. If they made this argument with the Internal Revenue Service, they would pay more tax, not less.

However, from time to time some rental dealers do make this argument, consistency be damned. It was made most recently by a musical instrument rental dealer in Indiana. The argument was ultimately unsuccessful, but not before the rental dealer went to court and got reprimanded by the judge. The tax court judge was fairly scathing in his criticism of the rental dealer for talking out of both sides of his mouth about what business he was running [see W.H. Paige & Co. vs. State Board of Tax Commissioners, 711 N.E.2d 552 (1999)]. In order to appeal the assessment rendered on his merchandise out on rent in the field, the rental dealer had to argue that “notwithstanding the language in the rent-to-own lease stating that Paige is the holder of legal title of the musical instruments…Paige is not the owner of the musical instruments for the purposes of the personal property tax.”

Elsewhere in the opinion, the court notes that, “Paige maintains that the lessee’s ability to terminate the lease prior to the completion of the lease term is irrelevant…[to the treatment of the transaction for tax purposes].” The court noted the vast body of case law holding that rental-purchase transactions are true leases as opposed to conditional sales with a retained security interest by the lessor and even acknowledged the few minority decisions where courts ruled in favor of consumers, usually on unusual facts. But the court went on the say, “However, the tug on the heartstrings (and the attractiveness of those [minority view] cases) is considerably less powerful in situations where a lessor is attempting to disclaim the language of a contract it drafted.”

This Indiana case is not the first such instance of rental dealer double talk. The same issue arose in Kansas a few years ago when several rental companies argued that their transactions were really conditional sales in order to be exempted from the Kansas personal property tax. In brief after brief, in appeal after appeal, all the way to the state Supreme Court, attorneys for the rental companies crafted complex legal arguments for the propositions that the rental-purchase transactions under scrutiny were not what they purported to be by their own terms and were, instead, really conditional sales agreements. It is a wonder that legal aid lawyers did not take these briefs, reverse the names and use them in their several recharacterization lawsuits that were being litigated around the country during the early- to mid- 1990s.

The Kansas case did catch the attention of the late Henry Gonzalez when he chaired the House Banking Committee and in 1993 held hearings on the rent-to-own industry:

“A ‘rent-to-own” company is now arguing in a Kansas appellate court that it is in the ‘sales’ business in order to avoid paying state taxes on rental property. Drawing a distinction between the ‘rent-to-rent’ business and ‘rent-toown,’ this dealer claims that ‘when a customer contracts with a rent-to-own company, both parties anticipate that the customer may-and probably willend up owning the merchandise.”

It was Ralph Waldo Emerson in his essay Self Reliance who wrote that, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.”

It may fairly be said that there are a few immutable truths in the universe— not many, perhaps, depending upon one’s point of view, but a few. One of those truths for rental dealers is that they are really and truly in the rental business. One may wonder whether expecting consistency on an issue fundamental to the continuing viability of one’s life work is foolish. Some things arguably demand consistency. For rental dealers, understanding the true nature of the business that they are in is one of those things, even if it costs them a few dollars to maintain that consistency.

Ed Winn III is APRO’s general counsel. His e-mail address is edwinn@e-bylaw.com.

 

 

The silent treatment

HOW TO BRIDGE A COMMUNICATION GAP BETWEEN YOU AND YOUR EMPLOYEES

IN ANY COMPANY, COMMUNICATION BETWEEN MANAGERS and employees is a big issue. Employees want guidelines from their supervisors and management staff wants input from its team. And while most companies have little trouble filtering information down the layers, they do have challenges when it comes to filtering information up. That’s because too many employees stay quiet about what they need, resulting in missed opportunities, delayed projects and failed initiatives

THE REASONS FOR SUCH A COMMUNICATION GAP ARE NUMEROUS, RANGING FROM THE EMPLOYEES’ THINKING: “I DON’T WANT TO APPEAR INCOMPETENT” TO “WHO AM I TO OFFER IDEAS TO MANAGEMENT?” ADDITIONALLY, BECAUSE THEY KNOW THAT THE MANAGEMENT TEAM IS BUSY WITH LONG-TERM PLANNING AND STRATEGIC INITIATIVES, MANY EMPLOYEES DON’T WANT TO INTERRUPT WITH DETAILS OF THE DAY-TO-DAY ACTIVITIES. HOWEVER, WITHOUT THAT KNOWLEDGE, MANAGERS HAVE A DIFFICULT TIME GAUGING WHETHER THEY’RE LEADING THE COMPANY EFFECTIVELY.

Fortunately, there are steps you can take to get your employees to communicate better and to keep the company’s progress on track. The key is to build a quality interaction between the employee group and the management team. When you break through the barriers and get employees and managers working together, you help everyone understand the tremendous effort it takes to advance the company’s strategic vision and attain goals. Without support from every member in the group, your company’s progress suffers and ultimately reduces long-term profits.

To instill confidence in your employees and encourage them to contribute, apply the four elements of SharedKnowledge—a process that can transform your entire organization into one that works with and for each other, not against one another. This unique combination of elements includes organizational communication, skills, motivation and empowerment. Below are ways to use these four vital components to get your employees to communicate their needs so they can help the company grow and prosper.

1. COMMUNICATE NEEDS

Communication is a two-way process and a shared responsibility. Employees have just as much responsibility for speaking up, for setting expectations and requirements and for communicating barriers and opportunities as does the management team.When you encourage your employees to communicate with the senior team, you’re helping each group understand the other’s job duties and what each reasonably can and cannot do given the budget and expectations.

Ask your employees to speak up and proactively tell the management team what they are struggling with and what managers can do to help. Reinforce the company’s vision and state how the current objectives contribute to it. Then explain that you need the employees’ input to make attaining the vision a reality.After all, if your organization wants to produce results that leave your customers and company shareholders wowed, you have to know your responsibilities and what it will take to reach everyone’s objectives.

2. SHARE INDUSTRY SKILLS AND KNOWLEDGE

While most people are knowledgeable about and skilled in their particular job duties, many managers are unaware of their employees’ daily activities. Encourage your employees to educate you about their job specifics. Ask them to explain what goes into each successful project by listing all the actions and costs, including time costs.

Make it a proactive dialog where you and your employees discuss which ideas and actions have worked in the past. Go over survey results, client satisfaction ratings, safety metrics or any other factual data that would begin a discussion. Ask questions to get your employees to offer suggestions about the present situation. For example, you may say, “Last year we increased sales by 35 percent and we had a 15 percent increase in marketing resources.With only a 10 percent increase in marketing resources this year and a 5 percent staff reduction, what kind of results do you anticipate we’ll get and what resources will you need to overcome any hurdles?” As you listen to the feedback, offer trade-offs, such as: “If we allocate more marketing funds, can you increase sales by another 5 percent?” This will enable employees to see the impact on the bottom line and will prompt them to get involved in the decision process.

3. CREATE A MOTIVATION CYCLE

Your input plays a big part in motivating employees to communicate with you and reach goals. Make communicating with management easy. Some suggestions to consider include:

• Arranging a group conference call so employees can share their ideas about a particular project or strategic plan.
• Sending employees a personal thank you note for a job well done, complete with the management team’s signatures.
• Setting a half day aside to conduct round table discussions with employees to address their concerns.
• Offering short, 10-minute one-on-one sessions between managers and employees to discuss employee issues.
• Having senior management sit with the employees during breaks or at lunch to discuss company issues.

When the employees see you and other managers taking an interest in their responsibilities, they’ll be excited to complete their tasks to the best of their ability. Additionally, the senior team’s interest will show that each employee’s contribution is integral to the company’s strategic initiative. Employees will actively seek out new and creative ideas to advance the organization and will share those ideas with you. The result will be a greater increase on the company’s bottom line.

4. ESTABLISH EMPOWERMENT EXPECTATIONS

Empowerment is about setting the expectations. You and your team need to have a common understanding documented. Like Ken Blanchard’s One Minute Manager, write a one-minute goal and the requirements in 400 words or less (half a page). For example, you may say, “We want to increase our sales this year by 50 percent. In order to accomplish this, the team needs a $___ marketing budget, a monthly sales meeting with all employees and managers and an increase in staff by ____ percent.”

Discuss the goals and parameters with everyone involved before you begin delegating tasks so that as a team you can make the needed tradeoffs to ensure a successful outcome. When everyone knows the specifics of what’s required, you are empowered to create the desired results. Always remember that the entire interaction hinges upon communication, and the quality of the communication determines how empowered you and your team are.

RESULTS NOW

If you want to encourage your employees to communicate openly, you need to show why open communication from both sides is so vital to the company’s success. Make it a shared responsibility for everyone to educate each other, express what they need, and show how specific duties affect the bottom line.When you get everyone actively involved in the communication process, the more efficient your team will operate and the greater success you will all attain.

Linda Keefe is CEO and co-founder of Shared Results International, a consulting and training firm. She conducts workshops and seminars on the SharedKnowledge concept, communications and using technology effectively for corporations, nonprofit organizations and private institutions. Contact her at 888/689-8077 or www.sharedresults.com.

 

 

Speese

On a chilly January day in 1979, 22-year-old Mark Speese walked into the Rent-A-Center store in Grand Rapids, MI, to start his first day on the job. With three years of business classes at Western Michigan University under his belt, Speese had plans to pursue a career in business law or accounting. A shortage of tuition money, however, forced him to take a detour. Although it wasn’t the accounting job he had envisioned, the steady work managing customer accounts for the neighborhood rent-to-own store seemed like a good solution to his financial woes. At the time, Rent-A-Center was a 12-store operation with big plans for the future. Growth was the buzzword in the company and opportunities for advancement were plenty. Speese, full of classroom knowledge and eager to apply it, didn’t miss a beat. Within his first year, he worked his way from account manager to assistant manager to store manager. As the promotions and challenges continued to present themselves at every turn, the young college student, originally from Kalamazoo, suddenly found himself on the fast track to a new career in the rent-to-own business.

After eight years with Rent-A-Center, Speese decided to break out on his own. In 1987, with business partner Gene Heggestead, he founded Vista Rent to Own, based in New Jersey with additional store locations in California and Puerto Rico.

Two years later, in 1989, industry veteran Ernie Tally, then semi-retired from the rent-to-own business, decided to get back into the swing of things. He bought a majority interest in Vista and kept Speese on board as president and chief operating officer of the company’s 25 stores. In 1993, Vista did its first acquisition, buying DEF Investments (dba Renters’ Choice). Vista adopted the Renters’ Choice name and took over its 80 store locations.

Under Tally and Speese’s leadership, Renters’ Choice went public in 1995 and grew larger with several more acquisitions. In 1998, with 700 stores in operation, Renters’ Choice conducted its biggest acquisition, bringing all 2,000 Thorn Americas (dba Rent-A-Center) stores into the fold and adopting the Rent-A-Center name. It was a full-circle journey for Speese. Nearly a quarter of a decade after venturing into the rent-to-own industry to earn cash for college, Speese once again faced his first employer—this time as the chairman and chief executive officer.

These days Speese spends much of his time at his office in Plano, TX, strategizing and planning for Rent-ACenter’s future. The company, which boasts 2,400 stores, an additional 315 ColorTyme franchise subsidiaries and 13,000 employees, has come a long way in the past two decades. Yet, Speese, now 45 years old and married with three children, insists that Rent-A-Center and the rentto- own industry as a whole are still in their infancy.

“There’s an estimated 8,300 stores in the rent-toown industry today,” he says. “Some studies that we’ve done on market penetration show that there could be 15,000 rent-to-own locations, so there’s plenty of growth for us or anyone else in the industry. Rent-A-Center’s objective, as we’ve done in the past, is to stay at the forefront of it all.

“Our stated goal is to increase our store base 5 percent to 10 percent a year, which essentially means that we’re going to add 100 to 250 stores a year,” Speese says, noting that the new locations will be “a mix of new store openings and acquisitions.”

Yet growth isn’t Speese’s only focus and is quick to point this out. If there’s one truth he has learned as he has climbed the rent-to-own corporate ladder, he says, it’s that successful growth is impossible without the right people in place to sustain it.

“We’re in the people business,” Speese says. “I don’t care how good your location is. I don’t care how good your business model is. If you don’t have the proper people in there with the right training, you won’t be successful.We’re not going to grow any faster than management can handle.

“Frankly, we probably could grow faster because we have the financial resources and the opportunity is there in the marketplace,” he says. “But we’re not going to grow stores just for the sake of growing them if we don’t have the right people to staff them.”

The “right” people, by Speese’s definition, are service-oriented employees who are enthusiastic about what they’re doing and who show integrity in their relationships with customers and coworkers. They also have a genuine interest in growing the company and, in turn, growing as a person.

“Everyone has goals and aspirations. In order to encourage people to stick around and help you grow, you have to help them achieve their goals as well,” Speese says. “Involvement is key. It’s important to keep employees abreast of what’s going on with the company and show them what roles they can play to help grow the company and obtain that same level of success for themselves.”

Trying to ensure that all 13,000 employees in 2,400 locations across the United States feel “involved” in the company’s growth is no small undertaking; Speese and his management team tackle the challenge by focusing on training, training and more training for all employees. He says that Rent-A-Center is expanding its human resources department to support the initiative.

“We’re looking to expand the number of training personnel we have in house,” he says. “They’ll go out into the marketplace and conduct in-store training as well as hold meetings within markets and regions, where groups can be brought together to work on operational or management items.”

To help facilitate these all-inclusive meetings, management also is exploring the idea of training through live video and a company Intranet.Yet how employees receive their training isn’t the only item up for review, says Speese. The content of training materials is under the microscope, too.

“A lot of training focuses on procedures—how to rent a TV, how to take a payment,” he says. “What we’re looking to add is developmental types of training—how to supervise people, how to communicate and get feedback, how to deal effectively with customers or coworkers in certain situations. Again, it’s about growing personally as well as professionally with the company.”

That’s something Speese understands firsthand.

“Because it was a fairly small industry when I first started, a lot of what I know now had to be self-taught,” he says. “On-the-job training is better than anything you’re going to learn in the classroom or in a school book. Frankly, many of the experiences I’ve had over the past 20 years now, you can’t learn them in a classroom environment.”

His vertical career path within the rent-to-own industry also has helped him understand the business intimately from many perspectives. “At one point or another in my career, I’ve done every job, so I understand the difficulties people face when they make deliveries or try to collect on an account or make a sale,” he says. “I understand what they go through.”

Taking care of the people behind the business is essential to success, according to Speese. “In this business, much is measured by what kind of week you had—how many deliveries did you make, how many units did you gain and where’d your credit close out,” he says. “The fact is, those are all byproducts of more important things— relationships and people. If you don’t take the time to think about those things, manage them and make sure that they’re right, you’re not going to have sustainable, long-term numbers.”

He says he enjoys getting out of the office with the vice presidents and regional and market managers to visit stores and find out whether or not the company’s initiatives are translating well at the local level. Yet it’s not enough to simply tour the stores; Speese says he makes a point to establish good rapport with both the managers and the employees. Building such relationships enables him to learn more about what works and doesn’t work in the day-to-day operations.

“Oftentimes it’s simply a matter of verifying what we think looks good on paper looks good in practice too,” he says.

To elicit open communication with employees and managers, Speese says he often approaches others within their “comfort zones.” “I certainly learned at an early age, and as time has gone on, that there are different personalities, different interests and different drives,” he says. “What works for me may not necessarily work for someone else or vice versa. But it doesn’t mean that their way won’t work.”

Because of the rent-to-own industry’s relative “infancy” in the retail market, Speese says it presents many opportunities for professional advancement. Consequently, he says it attracts people who “like to roll up their sleeves and build something.”

“This business requires a lot of self-initiative—how can I make this better, do it faster and bigger—those types of things. You can’t just be content or complacent with what you’re doing today; you have to be forward thinking and forward looking. Where do I want to be a year from now? Is what I’m doing today going to allow me to achieve those things next year?”

As veterans like Speese have grown up in the industry, so has the industry itself.

“I think the rent-to-own industry has matured significantly in the past 20 years,” Speese says. “When you go back 25 years ago, there were no real dominant players; it was very much a small-business person’s market. Through the formation of the Association of Progressive Rental Organizations and the passage of legislation in 47 states that protects our businesses and our customers, this industry has become a much more accepted and viable business.”

He adds that the companies that have gone public also lend credibility to the rent-to-own market. “It’s obviously brought capital, which has allowed businesses to grow. There are a lot of well-ranked companies out there,” he says. “The industry has really cleaned itself up, for the lack of a better term. I think, as with any new business when it first starts, there’s a learning curve.”

Yet, as much as the rent-to-own industry has evolved, Speese says he strongly believes that there’s room for more growth, and the promising career paths that existed back in 1979 when he first started still exist today.

“There has to be a commitment from the individual in terms of personal development,” he stresses. “Certainly a company can bring things to you, but you have to be willing to bring something to the table for yourself. For those who want to learn the business, who are dedicated to it, and who have ambition and drive, the opportunities to succeed are there.

“I can’t say it with certainty, but had I decided to do something else, I often wonder whether I would have been afforded the same opportunities that this industry has provided me over the past 20 years. It’s unique and rewarding being part of a growing enterprise and watching the company—and the people behind the company— achieve success.”

Katie Garza is a free-lance writer.