Meet Paula Steppe, Sales Manager of Rent-to-Own with APRO associate member GE Appliances, a Haier Company. Steppe, a minister’s daughter, has always had a formidable work ethic, winding her way from law to laundry to RTO sales and service.
RTOHQ: The Magazine caught up with Steppe at her farm close to Louisville, Kentucky, as she was preparing for a summer jampacked with tradeshow travel.
APRO: Where did you grow up, and what was your growing-up experience like?
PS: I was born in Enterprise, Alabama, which is seriously misnamed; it’s got maybe three traffic lights. I was an only child until my sister came along when I was 10, so I was around adults almost all the time and super self-entertaining; I love books and have always been a huge reader. My dad was a Christian preacher, and we moved to Charleston, South Carolina, then to Jacksonville, Florida, where I went to high school. The only extracurricular activities I was allowed to do were church-related, but I did begin working at the age of 15 – at a check-cashing business. My senior year of high school, I participated in a business program, where I took business- skills classes in the morning and worked as a sort of intern in the afternoons at Crowley Maritime shipping company. I began college at the University of North Florida with the intention of becoming a nurse, but changed my mind, transferred to Jacksonville’s Jones College, and graduated as a paralegal with a business degree.
APRO: How did you get from paralegal to rent-to-own?
PS: During university and following, I worked three jobs – as an assistant to a personal-injury attorney, as a paralegal for real-estate closings, and at a bank. When I married my husband in 1996, we moved to Dayton, Ohio, for his work, and again in 2002 to Louisville, Kentucky, where we live now. When we moved to Louisville, I had to regroup professionally, and was working as a temp for a corporate accounting firm when a friend let me know about a position open in GE’s legal department. It was 2007, and I worked there for about five years before becoming an Executive Assistant in laundry and technology, for the product manager and the manager of the engineers who worked on our washers and dryers.
Seeing everything that went into the manufacturing of our products was very interesting, but once I got to know it backwards and forwards, I was ready for a new challenge. So, in 2016, I became the Executive Assistant to the Senior Vice President of Sales. We began the transition from GE Corporate to GE Appliances under Haier, and the sales department got restructured. In 2020, while we were all working from home, my VP alerted me to a position opening as Sales Manager of Rent-to-Own – Paula Allison was retiring, and he thought I’d be great at it. I got the job and have been here ever since!
APRO: So what are your main responsibilities, how do you spend your time?
PS: I am troubleshooting 24/7. I’ve got more than 300 RTO customers on paper, and about 50 of them contact me regularly. I’m their lifeline to GE products. My day-to-day is calls and emails – typically stuff like, ‘My shipment was wrong,’ or ‘My product got delivered damaged,’ or ‘My order is missing a piece,’ or ‘I got charged the wrong rate,’ or ‘Do you know when my order is going to ship?’ I help them manage all of their orders, and I make whatever is wrong, right. It doesn’t matter if they’re an $8-million company or if they’re a $25,000 business, I give every one of my customers equal attention.
I also oversee our presence at tradeshows – I decide what sponsorships we’re going to do, how big our booth is going to be, I order all the product and go to the shows. As we get close to shows, I also help customers plan their buying budgets and meet their customer needs for the following few months.
APRO: What’s your favorite thing about working with the rent-to-own industry?
PS: I love the people I work with and what I do. RTO people are honestly the bread-and-butter of America, really down-to-earth, great people. And they truly love what they do. The managers love their employees, and the employees love their jobs, which says a lot. The vast majority of people I deal with, once they understand that you’re here for them and you’re going to do all you can to back up everything you promise, they love you.
APRO: What do you think makes you exceptional at your job?
PS: Not to toot my own horn, but I’m honest with my customers. I don’t just say whatever to get a sale, because it’s not going to keep them as my customers. They can often find someone to sell them something similar for less somewhere else, but my customers know that if they buy from me, they get me. I believe in service after the sale, so they know they can pick up the phone and I’m going to answer, I’m going to reply to their email, and I’m going to get a resolution for them. It makes a difference for customers longevity-wise – they want someone who’s going to actually care about taking care of them.
APRO: Tell me a little about your life apart from GE and RTO.
PS: My husband, J.R., and I have been married for 29 years. We met because our dads were pastors together at the same church. Since all of my activities were confined to the church, I wasn’t allowed to go to parties or even over to anyone’s house unless my mom personally knew them. So I was 19 and hadn’t dated anyone when J.R. and his family moved to Jacksonville from Ohio. He was in his early 20s, so I thought he was probably some kind of nerd, moving across the country with his parents. But he had actually been through a bad breakup and needed a change of scenery, and his parents were moving, so he tagged along.
His third day in Jacksonville happened to be a Sunday, and as soon as I walked into church, we locked eyes. It really was a love-at-first-sight situation. The next night at the men’s softball game, he asked me out on a date. We went, saw the movie The Firm, and have been together ever since. We truly are best friends.
We have two children: our daughter, Madison, is 26 and a registered nurse engaged to a firefighter in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina; our son, Jake, is 24 and works in medical-device sales in Lexington, Kentucky.
APRO: And how do you spend your non-work time?
PS: Well, four years ago, we bought a farm. We have barn animals that cost a lot, don’t make us anything, and are essentially just eye candy. We’ve got three horses we call our ‘yard art.’ Big Dan is in his late 20s, and he’s my buddy – he runs over whenever he sees me and puts his nose on me. Newt is a rescue horse we were told would never run again because his feet were so messed up, but we got him fixed up, and we’ve seen him running! He’s going to live out his days here on our dime, healthy and happy. And we’ve got a yearling we’re boarding for a friend of ours for a year. We also have two donkeys – a full-sized named Dolly Parton, and a miniature, Willie Nelson, who’s quite elderly. They’re madly in love and won’t leave one another’s side. It’s so sweet.
So my hobbies are mostly working on the farm and caring for the animals. It’s very peaceful. I feel like I’ve found out the important things in life, and they’re the very simple things.
