WHEN TED WILSON WAS ELECTED APRO PRESIDENT 25 years ago, he was accepting not so much an honor as a challenge. On the outside, the RTO industry was under continual attack-at the time, an attempt to redefine the transaction as an installment sale. But on the inside, the situation was worse: the association had just appointed a new, green executive director and completed a less-than-stellar national convention, was at an all-time low for membership, struggling financially and experiencing widespread speculation about the organization’s true value and survival. And while Wilson had won the election, he was only the second non-owner ever to hold the position, a fact that wasn’t exactly popular with some member-company owners.
“The industry was young, and the owners were mostly a bunch of former TV salesmen and repair guys,” Wilson recalls. “Many weren’t really knowledgeable about the business world. I was the vice president of finance [at Alrenco], which was a title almost unheard of nationally in rent-to-own at the time. RTO was getting to be a real business at that point and everyone knew they needed a businessman in that position. Plus, I had a personality, which helped.”
As Wilson began his presidential tenure, he realized it wasn’t going to be a baptism by fire; it was going to be a baptism under fire. But this Hoosier accountant had a vision for APRO and for the industry: strength in numbers. His objectives were clear: build up APRO’s membership; square up the budget; shake up the status quo; and fire up his colleagues to fight for their right to do rent-to-own business.
You might think a man prepared to undertake this sort of herculean agenda (spoiler alert: and succeed!) would be an all-business-all-the-time kind of guy. But Ted Wilson definitely is not. As he recounts his 20-plus years in rent-to-own, Wilson’s “war” stories are laced with laughter and tales of cocktails and golf games. “We worked hard and we played hard,” he chortles.
Wilson grew up in the town he still calls home – New Albany, Indiana, a small city just across the Ohio River from Louisville, Kentucky. By his own skimming account of his youth, Wilson “did all the wrong things kids do,” went to Indiana University to earn his accounting degree and joined the U.S. Army for a brief stint (“I hated that, of course,” he quips). He went on to work several different unremarkable accounting jobs before being recruited by his flamboyant brother-in-law, Mike Walts, in the mid-197os to join him in an emerging industry known as rent-to-own.
“Mike was a successful TV and appliance dealer, and he was also a mercantile salesman – linens and other home goods,” Wilson remembers. “He had read a magazine about this thing called rent-to-own and he decided that it was a great deal. He went to one of the first conventions and when he came home, he said, ‘We gotta do this.’ So I began by helping another guy literally build our office. It was an old warehouse and we turned it into an office building. Mike was blowin’ and goin’ all the time, so we just kind of kicked our way through the first year. It was kinda fun and we got it going pretty good, so Mike wanted to open up some more stores. We just grew and grew and grew.”
The company, which began as Kentuckiana TV & Stereo, underwent a name change to Alrenco as its expansion spread to other states. Eventually, Alrenco would grow to well over 100 stores reaching from Phoenix to Miami, with its main concentration in the Midwest and Southeastern states.
In addition to his fiscal responsibilities at Alrenco, Wilson became involved in APRO because he understood the importance and potential strength of having a unified front for rent-to-own.
“[Our industry was] getting assaulted from all sides,” Wilson affirms. “People thought we were taking advantage of poor people, that we were too expensive. But too expensive by what standard? If you’re sitting there watching the wall all afternoon and you could get a TV from us for a fair amount of money every week and not beat yourself to death to pay it, then that’s not too expensive. And thousands and thousands and thousands of people from sea to shining sea don’t believe it’s too much money. If someone rents a TV and they’re paying 12 bucks a week for it, some people might say, ‘That’s too much.’ Maybe it is if you have a TV, but if you don’t have one, then that’s not too bad. It just depends on how bad you want to watch TV.
“Yes, it’s more than if you went down to Big Bob’s Appliance and bought it,” he continues. “But with ours, if you get into trouble and can’t pay for it, we’re not going to take you to court. We’ll just come pick it up and you never have to pay another nickel on it. Or you could say, ‘I’ll be back for it when I’m working again,’ or whatever and we would say, ‘OK, you be sure to do that!’ And they’d do it, time after time after time. That TV just had to be sitting in our living room rather than his while he’s not paying for it. It’s pretty simple. But the industry has been attacked so many times by people who either didn’t understand the transaction or didn’t understand the people who use the transaction.”
During his two years as APRO president, Wil son grappled with disgruntled members while mentoring then-new Executive Director Bill Keese as the pair traveled around the country, recruiting new members for the association. In 1990, APRO held its 10th-anniversary conference at Orlando’s Peabody Hotel. The event proved to be a turning point.
“Everyone complained that the Peabody was going to be a terrible venue,” Wilson says. “It was terrific. We shook it up, doing things that were different from how APRO shows had been traditionally. Like, for the first time ever, we had to walk outside the hotel and go somewhere else for part of the event. We put down a trail of APRO duck footprints [in reference to the twice-daily red-carpet marches of the world-famous Peabody ducks] for folks to follow across the street to the convention center. Just little things like that, some innovative thinking-and it worked. The high point of the conference was when the APRO membership gave the staff and board of directors a standing ovation for a job well done.”
Even after his presidency, Wilson continued working with APRO as Alrenco continued to grow. Along with the professional and personal camaraderie the organization provided, Wilson found serious satisfaction in welcoming newcomers to an industry still in its relative infancy.
“Wayne Chambers was my mentor in rent-to-own,” Wilson notes. “Wayne was a confident teacher, but he was very kind to people. He wasn’t condescending and gave people time to learn the right way. We became close friends and tried to be people who were approachable, not intimidating or judgmental, and who others felt comfortable coming to and learning from. People were nervous as hell to begin with, going into a new business with people they didn’t know. You had to kind of pat ’em on the butt and lead ’em along.”
In 1996, Alrenco went public, and within two years, merged to become Home Choice, which was then bought by RentWay. “Companies were gobbling up each other and flipping left and right,” Wilson says, “I kept reading The Wall Street Journal and I began thinking, ‘This deal doesn’t look real good to me long-term. I think I want to bail out of this today.’ So I did. I sold my stock and a few weeks later, they caught the CFO of that company with some improprieties and the stock bottomed out. I was pretty pleased.”
Wilson’s gut-instinct retirement didn’t hold, though. He never returned to rent-to-own, but after 20 months of golfing, he spent a few years as the controller for an insurance brokerage firm, then several more as the same for a local home-building materials business. In 2010, as the construction industry slumped and Wilson approached his 65th birthday, the timing seemed right for real retirement.
Today, Wilson and his wife of 35 years, Jane, are “trying to keep it simple.” Jane retired last year from her 47 year career in the insurance industry and now has abundant time to- according to Ted- “get mad as hell at me … and most of the time, it’s deserved.” Two of the couple’s three sons also live in New Albany with their families; the third owns and operates a popular Seattle restaurant, Americana. Four grandchildren-including the latest addition, an at-long-last little girl up in Seattle- consume much of Ted and Jane’s attention. They also love to travel around the country visiting friends.
Travel has been limited the past few years, though, by chemotherapy. Wilson has been diagnosed with a treatable, but incurable, bone-marrow cancer. Happily, the treatments have successfully put the condition into remission for the time being, which Wilson hopes will be the case for the rest of his life. “I’m finally back where I was before any of that happened,” he confirms. “So that’s a good feeling.”
With his health stable, his wife lovely and his time fairly free, Wilson’s life columns seem to be adding up just fine nowadays. As he’s quick to note, he’s got plenty to be thankful for, plenty to look forward to and plenty of good times with his rent-to-own running buddies to look back on.
“It was a run-and-gun business back in those days,” Wilson chuckles. “We had fun. I think we were walking the line when we began renting wedding jewelry. But one night, I remember, we were having a big sale and this couple came in. The man had mud on his work boots and they were shopping for wedding jewelry. It turns out they had been married 10 years and never been able to afford wedding bands. So he brought her in and they finally got a nice set of wedding rings. It was really sweet, very gratifying. She was in tears. It was a fascinating business, especially back then, because we grew up with it.”
Kristen Card is a freelance business writer based in Austin, Texas.
