What’s the Plan?

APRO’s current Strategic Plan is wrapping up & industry leaders are setting up for the next phase of By Charles Smitherman rent-to-own success

Yogi Berra – famed baseball manager and oft-quoted life observer – once noted, “If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll wind up somewhere else.” Truer words could not be said for associations like APRO; hence, the APRO Strategic Plan.

Strategic plans provide clear roadmaps for how organizations move forward, aligning with their mission and values to achieve established goals over time. Such plans provide a framework for making decisions and allocating resources, as well as promoting accountability. With board leadership, association staff, and members aligned and willing to commit, the results can be powerful and create an important trajectory for future objectives and outcomes.

As a mission-focused trade association charged with protecting and promoting the rent-to-own industry, APRO’s strategic planning plays a vital role in the services and benefits we provide to our members. With this mandate, the APRO Board of Directors convened three years ago to develop and adopt the 2021-24 Strategic Plan. Utilizing a SMART goal – Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Timebound – approach, the board established a guiding compass for the association, defining the key objectives and desired outcomes APRO should pursue over the course of the past 36 months. As this plan concludes and a new one is under development, we want to review and report to you, our membership, on its noteworthy results.

APRO’s 2021-24 Strategic Plan identified five overarching SMART goals for us to focus on:

To collaborate with Virtual RTO businesses on shared objectives

To encourage and strengthen our network of state rental dealer associations

To diversify and grow leaders and revenue to carry out APRO’s mission

APRO continued to execute a core function of monitoring proposed bills introduced in the U.S. Congress and various state legislatures on a daily basis and providing APRO members with Legislative Alerts whenever policy issues of material or noteworthy effect arose.

Each goal included a subset of priorities and strategies to advance APRO’s mission. As motivational author Zig Ziglar once said, “Execution is the bridge between goals and accomplishment.” Guided through the pursuit of these goals, along with the priorities and strategies set forth, APRO successfully executed this three-year plan and delivered excellent results in all five areas.

While achieving the general goal of ensuring no adverse state or federal legislation for the rent-to-own industry, APRO’s strategic advocacy efforts over the past 36 months have advanced through specific priorities and objectives. First, APRO continued to execute a core function of monitoring proposed bills introduced in the U.S. Congress and various state legislatures on a daily basis and providing APRO members with Legislative Alerts whenever policy issues of material or noteworthy effect arose.

Proactively, APRO continued advocacy and education efforts for the industry, decision-makers, the media, and the public through hosting and facilitating virtual and in-person state rental dealer association president meetups to discuss legislative and regulatory developments, as well as how state associations can organize and mobilize grassroots-level efforts. We also continued to provide legal and legislative education sessions and tracks at RTO World each of the past three years, including sessions featuring APRO General Counsel Ed Winn, board members Bryan Pechersky and Rachel George, and other attorneys specializing in RTO.

Additionally, furthering the association’s aim to serve as arbiter of rentto- own industry norms, ideals, data, benchmarks, and best practices, APRO reinvigorated the Industry Health Survey, releasing results reports each of the past three years, with more and more members providing their data. Supplementing the survey, we continued to put together State Economic Reports for use at our annual Legislative Conference – which was relaunched post-pandemic last year – and at other advocacy-based events, including state RDA-hosted legislative days.

To support best practices and enhance governance practices, APRO provided board training led by association experts at each fall meeting of the Board of Directors, focusing on fiduciary duties, mission, and strategic plan assessment and execution. And, to advance and maintain the APRO Code of Ethics as top-of-mind and deep-seated tenets for rental dealers, we promoted the code through publication multiple times in RTOHQ: The Magazine, APRO Today newsletter articles, and industry news up on the APRO website, RTOHQ.org. Concentration on the Code of Ethics culminated in the adoption of an updated code by the Board of Directors in late 2023.

Finally, APRO initiated its 2023-24 Legislative Plan. As part of this plan, we introduced the 2024 APRO PAC Plan to reinvigorate and fundraise for the industry’s Political Action Committee, as well as an online, on-demand RTO Advocacy Basics course, outlining the process for meeting with legislators and sharing the rent-to-own story. In cooperation with state RDAs, APRO also launched its inaugural APRO Legislative Conference Fellows program, providing scholarships for 11 first-time conference attendees to learn and experience legislative advocacy firsthand, and contributing to the growth and development of future industry advocates.

In the course of engaging and increasing membership by enhancing value, APRO accomplished several substantial objectives. Foremost, to help provide valuable data to our members for use in benchmarking and improvement, APRO launched a new series of Fast Five Surveys and Dealer Pulse questionnaires on specific issues affecting rent-to-own, with published results showing member responses. These polls, coupled with the revitalization of our annual Industry Health Survey, offer important data-generation opportunities for the RTO industry and APRO members.

APRO provided more member education than ever through webinars, virtual training, and RTO World sessions. APRO offered an increasing number of live webinars, bringing in rent-to-own experts and related contributors to share tips, information, and best practices. Growing from one webinar in 2021, we’re on-track to provide nine webinars this year, including post-webinar on-demand recordings access via APRO’s website, RTOHQ.org. We also increased RTO World conference education offerings, specific dealer tracks, and state RDA president meetups to assess needs for regional education events.

APRO continued to provide access to legal services and information on member hot topics through the APRO Legal Hotline, responding to increasing numbers of inquiries during each year of the plan. Finally, APRO continued to merit and develop its role as “The Voice of the RTO Industry” through storytelling efforts and industry promotion via the biannual publication of RTOHQ: The Magazine, APRO Alerts, and the APRO Today weekly digital newsletter.

Recognizing the growing presence of Virtual RTO businesses in the industry, APRO successfully took several steps toward collaborating with these companies on shared objectives. To help develop and implement a plan for initiating positive interactions between APRO leaders and VRTO companies, APRO members elected a representative of VRTO company Progressive Holdings to the APRO Board of Directors. This brings a clearer VRTO perspective to the association’s leadership, and includes serving on the APRO PAC and Government Relations Committee. The board’s modification and adoption of the new APRO Code of Ethics also included the incorporation of the VRTO business model.

The Strategic Plan’s focus on advocacy and VRTO led to the creation and development of APRO’s inaugural Protecting the Transaction Legal Summit, scheduled for August 5, 2024, just before RTO World, in Orlando, Florida. RTO industry leaders, legal and compliance experts, and representatives from both traditional brick-and-mortar and virtual companies will converge to analyze and discuss common legal and regulatory issues and risks facing the rent-to-own transaction – and therefore, everyone in the industry – today.

In order to encourage and strengthen the nationwide network of state rental dealer associations, APRO continued to promote and provide tiered-level services for these essential organizations, from recordkeeping, bookkeeping, financial reporting, dues invoicing, and accounts payable and receivables management, to meeting-planning assistance and marketing support. Through our daily legislative monitoring, APRO also engaged with several states on proposed bills that could negatively impact the RTO transaction and member businesses. We helped mobilize state associations on grassroots-level advocacy and legislative engagement, to educate state lawmakers and prevent such adverse measures from being approved into law.

Additionally, to work toward the revitalization of inactive and dormant state associations, APRO initiated state RDA mergers into multi-state associations, while facilitating compliance in and updates to corporate records and governance structures with state RDAs and their presidents. Finally, as part of APRO’s stewardship services of helping maintain state RDA bank accounts and funds, we launched a comprehensive project to leverage APRO’s investment banking relationships and provide higher rates of return for state association accounts.

Toward the final SMART goal of diversifying and growing leaders and revenue in order to carry out the association’s mission, APRO successfully implemented several new processes and policies. First, APRO continued to provide exceptional stewardship of the association’s financial resources and core assets. The board adopted a new Investment Policy in 2022, aligning with association best practices and resulting in stabilized and rising financial reserves. APRO also maintained a balanced budget in all three years of the plan, with no need to draw from reserves.

APRO continued to diversify nondues revenue channels through its now seven-year strategic partnership with TRIB Group to put on the annual RTO World conference. We also continued to deepen our relationship with APRO associate members through vendor sponsorship, events, and media opportunities. APRO introduced the APRO Member Engagement Kit, a great resource that outlines all opportunities for advertising, marketing, and promotion for these vital members. Finally, APRO hired a new CEO last summer (yours truly), who loves the rent-to-own industry and could not be more excited to serve APRO’s membership in his new role for years to come.

While the successful conclusion of a three-year strategic plan is definitely worth acknowledging and celebrating, our mission and our work at APRO never ends. Past plans and goals are invaluable to determining what worked and where we came up short, but also must yield to new paths moving forward.

Our mission to protect and promote the success of America’ RTO industry endures, as does our ambition to transform APRO from a great organization to an extraordinary association that effectively achieves its core function while fulfilling our members’ needs – providing a positive return-on-investment through who we are and what we are positioned to be: the best in the world at delivering for our industry and our members.

The 2021-24 Strategic Plan advanced APRO’s mission, but the challenge begins anew for 2025-28 iteration. As linguistics expert Paul Kiparsky once remarked, “The art of planning is essential in bringing strategies to life.” For this new plan and its ultimate goals to be successfully achieved, APRO needs you – your input and your feedback on what you need from your trade association, as well as your involvement in ensuring we meet those needs. I hope you’ll join us as we continue to chart this course from great to extraordinary – all for rent-to-own.

Our mission to protect and promote the success of America’s RTO industry endures, as does our ambition to transform APRO from a great organization to an extraordinary association that effectively achieves its core function while fulfilling our members’ needs.

APRO’S NEW STATEMENTS

This aspirational advice from Simon Sinek’s seminal book Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action underscores APRO’s recent update – approved by the Board of Directors this spring – to the association’s Mission, Vision, and Values Statements.

As APRO stands ready to develop a new strategic plan, assessing and refining our WHY is a critical first step to ensure our actions and efforts are aligned with not only our mission, but also the vision we aspire to. Our vision – our WHY – is to, through our advocacy and education programs and services, enhance and elevate the rent-to-own industry as a whole. We achieve this through our mission, promoting the success of RTO while embodying what we stand for in our four value pillars – being PRO Customers, Pro Advocacy, Pro Members, and Pro Dialogue.

OUR MISSION

To promote the success of the rent-to-own industry.

OUR VISION

We are the rising tide that elevates the rent-to-own industry through advocacy and education to better serve our customers.

OUR VALUES

PRO Customers: We improve the lives of our customers by renting products they want and need.

PRO Advocacy: We advocate for the benefits of rent-toown for our customers and the communities we serve.

PRO Members: We meet the current and future needs of our members.

PRO Dialogue: We facilitate dialogue across the industry to ensure we represent the collective voice.