Jeff Lebakken · President, Lebakkens Rent to Own · U.S. Army Reserve · 1980–2001
In 1990, as American forces poured into Saudi Arabia, Jeff Lebakken was headed there too. He describes it with a soldier’s dry humor: he “was volunteered” for a Fast Reaction Team attached to the XVIII Airborne Corps, the first corps headquarters the Army sent to the Gulf.
He was a military police officer by training, but in the desert his work took a different shape. He served as Officer in Charge of a Civil Military Operations Center under the G5, the staff section responsible for civil affairs, and there he received a battlefield promotion to captain.
A Civil Military Operations Center is where an army meets the people around it. Its officers coordinate with local authorities, relief organizations, and ordinary civilians, so that military operations can go forward without overrunning the lives of the people who live in the area of operations, and so that those people’s needs are known and answered.
Very little of it runs on command. Most of it runs on listening, on coordination, and on building trust with people who do not wear your uniform and owe you nothing. It would be hard to find a better description of what a good rent-to-own store does in its town.
From Enlisted Soldier to Army Reserve Officer
Lebakken came to that assignment from the bottom of the ranks. He enlisted in the Army Reserve straight out of high school and spent a year as a private first class before deciding he wanted to lead. He entered the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps and was commissioned in 1985 as a Military Police officer.
Having served as an enlisted soldier first, he knew what the orders he would later give looked like from the receiving end, and he carried that perspective through the rest of his Reserve career, which ended with his retirement in 2001.
Leading a Family-Owned Rent-to-Own Business
For most of those years, he was also living a second life in the family business. His father, Loren Lebakken, opened a Curtis Mathes showroom in Rochester, Minnesota, in 1975. Lebakken worked at a corporate Curtis Mathes store and at his father’s store while in high school, and kept working at the family store through college as it converted to rent-to-own and became Lebakkens.
After college, he joined his father full time and helped expand the company. In 2001, the year he left the Reserve, his father passed away and his mother, Dorothy, took over the business. Six years later, Lebakken bought the company from her.
Today Lebakkens Inc. of Wisconsin operates ten stores across the state. Dorothy still serves as Senior Vice President, and Lebakken’s daughters, Victoria and Erica, work in the business as a regional manager and a store manager.
Supporting Veterans and Local Communities
The instinct of a civil affairs officer shows in how Lebakken runs it. His company gives veterans a five percent discount on all merchandise, for rent or for sale, and gives veterans preference when they apply for jobs. Lebakken has also donated merchandise to the families of veterans whose service took them to war.
Lebakken is quick to point out that he is not alone in this, and that he has seen and heard of other rent-to-own companies doing the same. In his experience, knowing a community means knowing which of its people have given something to it, and making sure the store answers that.
Asked what ties the generations of his family business together, Lebakken pointed to the joy of helping others and the shared sense of purpose that comes with it.
In Saudi Arabia, his job was to make sure an army served the people around it rather than simply passing through them. The uniform has changed since then, but in its way the assignment has not.
About Lebakkens Rent to Own
Lebakkens Rent-to-Own is a family-owned and operated rent-to-own company serving communities throughout Wisconsin. Founded in 1975, the company offers furniture, appliances, electronics, and other home essentials through flexible rental-purchase options. Lebakkens Rent-to-Own has been an APRO member since 1988.
