Mark Connelly · Senior Vice President, Arona Home Essentials · U.S. Marine Corps · 1986–1989
In 1989, Mark Connelly was a newly discharged Marine Corps officer with a wife, a baby daughter, and no job. He went to a job fair, met a regional manager for a Texas rent-to-own company called Remco, and went home to tell his wife he would try it for a little while, just until something better came along.
Thirty-seven years later, he is still waiting for that better thing to turn up, and in the meantime he has led more than three hundred stores, helped build one of the industry’s fastest-growing independent companies, and served as President of APRO’s Board of Directors.
Lessons in Leadership from the Marine Corps
He is modest about his time in uniform. Mark joined the Marine Corps as an officer two years after finishing college and served from 1986 to 1989. “Nothing big to talk about during this time, very peaceful,” he says. He never left the country. His service took him from Quantico, Virginia, to Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, and then to Camp Pendleton, California.
He married right out of Officer Candidate School, and his first child, a daughter, was born at the Naval Hospital at Camp Pendleton. The Corps was also something of a family inheritance, since his father had been a Marine too, the kind of father who woke his son early every morning and did not accept a second request for five more minutes.
What the Marine Corps gave him was less a set of experiences than a way of weighing things. Officer Candidate School trains young officers for combat, and it makes them understand that an officer’s decisions can determine whether the people under his command live or die.
Mark never faced that test, and he is grateful for it, but he carried the weight of it into civilian life. When he arrived in rent-to-own, the pressures of the business looked manageable by comparison, and one lesson stood above the rest. Nothing, he concluded, is more important than people.
Building a Career in Rent-to-Own
He built a career on that conviction. Starting as a manager trainee in the Dallas–Fort Worth area, he was promoted to store manager within his first year. Two years later, he was a regional manager over the Cincinnati, Louisville, and Indianapolis markets, and two years after that, he was a divisional manager in Chicago.
He left Remco to run a ColorTyme franchise in Austin and other Texas markets, stayed on when Renters Choice acquired the franchise, and rose to Regional Vice President. When Renters Choice bought Rent-A-Center in 1998 and took its name, Mark became a Senior Vice President responsible for more than 320 stores, first in the Midwest and later in the Northeast.
The path was not easy for a family. In those years, the standard week was fifty-four hours, and the Connellys moved roughly every two years. Mark is quick to say that none of it would have been possible without his wife’s support.
Putting People First in Business
He measured his own success by an officer’s measure. Early on it was the awards and the bonuses, but over time it became a question of how many people he could promote to store manager, then to multi-unit leadership, and eventually to the executive level.
He did much of the recruiting himself, even as a young store manager, and he learned what he could and could not teach. Product knowledge, collections, and operations could be coached, but personality and work ethic could not.
He still watches what an employee does when the front door opens, because someone who does not instinctively stop everything to greet the customer is in the wrong business.
Creating Opportunities for Military Veterans
That eye for people is also why Mark has always recruited from the military. “Because of my background in the military, we have always looked for great people coming out of the military,” he says. He has hired former officers and many enlisted men and women over the years, and he once hired a Navy SEAL. “The training these veterans received in the military is a great fit for what we do in RTO!”
For more than two decades, Mark has worked alongside principal owner Tom Bernau and his longtime friend and partner Brent Gregorick, growing a small group of Aaron’s franchise stores into Arona Home Essentials, which now operates nearly fifty locations. He has served the industry as the President of APRO’s Board of Directors and received APRO’s President’s Award for Excellence in 2019.
This August, he and his wife marked forty years of marriage. Ask him about any of it, though, and he will correct the pronoun. It was never what he did, he says, but what the team did together, which is exactly what a good officer would say.
About Arona Home Essentials
Arona Home Essentials is a national rent-to-own dealer with more than 50 locations across the United States. The company offers furniture, electronics, appliances, tires, and other home essentials through flexible weekly, biweekly, and monthly rental-payment options. Arona Home Essentials has been an APRO member since 2004.
