Forced from his island home by a ferocious storm, Randy Rivers took a chance in the land of opportunity – and made his own dreams come true.
When Hurricane Hugo hit the U.S. Virgin Island of St. Croix in late September, 1989, it was classified as a Category 4 storm – 1 level below the ultimate violence of a Category 5 – but the destruction it left in its wake felt practically absolute.
Island-wide peak sustained winds estimated at 140 mph, with gusts up to 167 mph, lasted almost 12 hours, destroying 70% of buildings, stripping vegetation bare, and wholly knocking out electricity and water services. Many neighborhoods were reduced to rubble, and about 75% of remaining homes were unroofed. When the skies finally cleared over St. Croix, Hugo had killed 3 people, left 3,500 people homeless, and wrought more than $500 million in property damage. In fact, the hurricane’s ferocity led to the retirement of the name Hugo from Atlantic hurricane names.
Through the aftermath of this devastation, a hero appeared; well, a qualified hero. American Airlines, communicating with St. Croix residents via shortwave radio [because all other communications had been obliterated], offered a free flight for one member of each family to a U.S. mainland destination of their choice. Qualifiers: 1) Takers must have a family member living in that destination city; and 2) They can bring along only the clothes they’ve got on – not even carry-on luggage was permitted.
“My father had a standing globe,” Randy Rivers, Director of Operations for Fairway Leasing LLC, dba Aaron’s Sales & Lease Ownership, recalls. “He said to me, ‘Look at this part of the globe, here. Pick a state you want to go to, and we’ll send you there.’ And I said, ‘I don’t know anything about the states, but North Carolina looks good.’ So I left St. Croix and my family at 20 years old, with no belongings other than what I was wearing, to come to the U.S. mainland and try to create a life for myself.”
“My father had a standing globe… He said to me, ‘Look at this part of the globe, here. Pick a state you want to go to, and we’ll send you there.’ And I said, ‘I don’t know anything about the states, but North Carolina looks good.”
Fortunately, Rivers had an uncle in North Carolina who picked him up at the airport. Unfortunately, the uncle promptly informed Rivers that he had two months to find work and somewhere to live, as finances were already tight.
Twenty years old, just left everything and everyone he had ever known to go to what was culturally, if not technically, a foreign country, and immediately told he had sixty days to get it together or get out. Gulp moment.
If you’re finding this story rather extraordinary already, here’s where it takes exceptional to a whole new level: In the uncle’s car, on the way home from the airport, Rivers spots a Now Hiring sign at a Thrifty Car Rental. He asks his uncle to pull over so he can apply – which he does, and the next day, gets the job.
“I told the owner of the franchise, John, that I wanted a customer-service position,” remembers Rivers. “But I’m from St. Croix, my parents were from Trinidad, and I had a pretty strong accent. So he put me into the fleet department, running cars back and forth, back and forth, for $4.25 an hour.”
Two years later, the location’s fleet manager retired, and Rivers was promoted – and to his delight, given a brand-new car to drive as a company vehicle. It was the beginning of Rivers’ fulfillment of the proverbial American Dream – one catastrophic hurricane, one free plane ride, one tough uncle, one understanding boss, one unsinkable work ethic, and two years later, Randy Rivers was beginning to feel like he had finally arrived.
Randy Rivers stayed at that Thrifty Car Rental in Charlotte, North Carolina, for over a decade. He married, had three children, and eventually grew weary of petty customer gripes and of not spending much time with his young family. In 1999, Rivers accepted an account manager position with an RTO business.
“I wanted to stay in the rental business because I enjoy interacting with customers,” Rivers says. “I knew next to nothing about the furniture and appliances rent-to-own business; I just jumped into it.”
Rivers landed nicely, was promoted to store manager within nine months, and stayed with the company for four years.
“One week, I needed one more customer to pay in order to hit my numbers,” remembers Rivers. “There was one little lady named Frances who normally paid every week, but didn’t this time. My boss was leaning on me hard, and I knew if I knocked, she’d probably open the door, because she knows me, and maybe she’d have the money. It’s 8:30 p.m., I go to her house, she comes to the door, and I tell her I need her payment. And she says, ‘I’m sorry, Randy. I didn’t get my check. But you know I’ll come in Monday to pay you. I just don’t have it right now.’
“So I call my boss from her doorstep and explain the situation, and tell him I don’t want to bring her merchandise back because she’s a good customer, she’s on oxygen, and keeps her tank in the fridge. And he basically says, ‘You’ve gotta hit your numbers, so you need to either get the money or get the merchandise. Make a decision: get paid, bring it back, or lose your job.’ Well, I didn’t bring it back, and I didn’t go back to work Monday. That was 2003, and I still stand by that decision.”
Within a month, Rivers was working at Aaron’s, which proved a much more comfortable philosophical fit. Within two years, he became an entry-level multi-unit manager, and within five years, he was promoted to regional manager within Aaron’s corporate arm.
In 2005, Rivers met new Aaron’s franchisee Todd Wilkins at an annual management meeting in New Orleans, and the pair hit it off. Wilkins left the conversation telling Rivers, ‘If there’s anything I can do for you in the future, call me.’ So, five years later, when Rivers was seeking a change, he did just that. And that, as they say, was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
I hired Randy Rivers in 2011 as a regional manager for Fairway Leasing LLC, and moved him to Lexington [Kentucky],” Wilkins recalls. “He had a ton of multi-unit management experience, he knew the Aaron’s program inside and out, and he came highly recommended. Some things I’ve discovered working with him for the past decade are that he’s extremely talented, his attention to detail is second-to-none, he’s very, very fair, he has great respect and caring for his people – both professionally and personally – but at the same time, is all about accountability. When we grew to the point at which I needed a director of operations, someone to essentially run the company, he was the guy.”
When Rivers came aboard at Fairway, the franchise had fewer than 10 stores, and every store had around 500 customers, except one outstanding location with 1,200. Rivers was promoted to Director of Operations in 2015, and today, Fairway has 19 locations in Kentucky and Georgia, with an average store size of 960 customers. While Rivers is clearly doing an awesome job, he’s quick to credit Wilkins’ proactively approachable leadership style for the company’s success.
“Todd isn’t the kind of owner who walks around with gold-plated shoes on,” asserts Rivers. “Talk to any of the people who work in this franchise, and they will say, ‘Man, this guy is so down-to-earth to be the owner of a multi-million-dollar business.’ So that’s the culture I try to create at Fairway. I want our people to feel comfortable talking to anyone, and yeah, when I walk into a store, I may be the boss, but you can come talk to me, and if you don’t, then I’m going to seek you out and ask you about yourself. How long have you been with us? What do you want your future with us to look like? How can we help you get there from here? How’s your family? That’s the way Todd runs this company, and I love it. I believe that’s what keeps us going, and it’s something I’m proud to be a part of.”
Rivers likewise believes in Wilkins’ embrace of the Entrepreneurial Operating System® [EOS], a comprehensive business system first introduced by author Gino Wickman in the bestseller Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business. The concepts within EOS help company leaders develop and communicate a vision, and get traction across the organization using practical tools and techniques.
“We hold weekly meetings at the leadership level, as well as with regional managers, general managers, and teams,” Rivers explains. “The leadership meetings are Todd, our Director of Finance and Administration Jodi Sullivan, and me. We go over a kind of scorecard of Key Performance Indicators, and if a KPI is off, then we talk about why it’s off, and we brainstorm potential ways to make it right. As a system, EOS works perfectly for us, because every single week, we’re focused in on issues we’ve identified that need resolution. Naturally, there are some to-dos that go into it, but these problems get fixed – and quickly, so we can continue moving forward toward our goals.”
Ultimately, it becomes clear that Randy Rivers believes in every facet of what he’s doing in rent-to-own. And the underpinning of it all is what he and his business do for customers – something that, as a realizer of the American Dream himself, Rivers no doubt relates to on a personal level.
“We’re here to take care of the customers who otherwise couldn’t get these products anywhere else,” attests Rivers. “They just can’t get it. People say ‘If you want something, then you’ve got to save up the money for it.’ Well, try doing that if you’re living paycheck to paycheck, OK? That’s next to impossible. And you can’t borrow money from family, because your family ain’t got no money.
“So here comes the rent-to-own transaction – it’s easy, it’s simple, and now the customer has the ability to get a computer, a sofa, whatever it may be,” he continues. “We’re providing customers with the ability to live their lives just like everyone else. You rent a dinette set to a family, and now they can actually sit down to dinner as a family. They can actually enjoy themselves because they have the things everybody else enjoys. It doesn’t matter that you don’t have much money – or ain’t got no money – because guess what? With rent-to-own, you can still get this stuff. I think that’s incredible!”
Naturally, Rivers and his wife of 29 years, Teresa, love spending time with their three children – Brittany, 33, Randall II, 26, and Destiny, 22 – and two grandchildren [Catherine, 9, and Randall III, almost 1]. Randy, a crazy-curious taker-aparter since childhood, is a household-projects whiz who also collects guns [he doesn’t shoot for sport; he just takes guns apart and puts them together again], and spends weekends joyriding in his Polaris Slingshot – a low-riding, 3-wheel, open-air roadster – as weather permits. He also likes to listen to audio business books; his top picks include The One-Minute Manager series by Drs. Blanchard and Johnson, How to Be a Great Boss by Wickman and Boer, and Never Lose a Customer Again by Coleman.
Of course, it’s Rivers himself whom his colleagues consider incredible [notes Wilkins, “I’ve never, not once, received a complaint about Randy, the way he manages, or the way he talks to people”]. Earnest and enterprising, intrepid and invested, Randy Rivers might have turned in his Caribbean accent for a Southern drawl, but his roots definitely show up in his spectacular work ethic [remember the 20-year-old who wanted to apply for a job in his first hour on the mainland?].
“We’re providing customers with the ability to live their lives just like everyone else. You rent a dinette set to a family, and now they can actually sit down to dinner as a family. They can actually enjoy themselves because they have the things everybody else enjoys.”
“My dad was a mechanic for the government in St. Croix, he was a supervisor, but I gotta tell you, he didn’t make any money,” relates Rivers. “So every week, people brought their cars to our house and he repaired them to make extra money. As a kid, I used to help him, pass him a tool here, a tool there, and he always said to me, ‘If you want something in life, you gotta work for it. It ain’t gonna come for free. It might seem like it’s really difficult to achieve what you want, but guess what? You just gotta work harder. And don’t let anyone tell you you can’t get it, OK? If you want something, go get it.’”
“Randy grew up in St. Croix with a great family and a good church, but when the hurricane hit, an opportunity presented itself,” Wilkins concludes. “There was more opportunity on the mainland than on the island, and he seized it with the attitude, motivation, and tenacity to make the best of it. Randy has always wanted more, has always wanted to succeed, and he has done that both professionally and personally. I’m so, so proud of all he has achieved.”
Kristen Card has been a contributing writer for RTOHQ: The Magazine for more than 15 years.
