Progressive Rentals July-August 2005

What Happens in Las Vegas Doesn't Always Stay There by Neil Ferguson and Bill Keese
Why People Don't Rent, Part I: Pricing and Rates by Ed Winn III
The Tipping Point by Ed Winn III
A Little Bit Country, a Little Bit Rent-to-Own: An APROfile of Larry Goad by Kristen Card

What Happens in Las Vegas Doesn't Always Stay There
by Neil Ferguson and Bill Keese

APRO’s 2005 Convention and Buying Show, held at Las Vegas’ Mandalay Bay in August, marked the association’s 25th year of service to the rent-to-own industry. For a silver-anniversary celebration, there were many golden moments: Larry Winget’s keynote, a Joan Rivers impersonator helping APRO members take trips down memory lane, a buying show that reaped an APRO record $14 million in product sales, seminars that delved into a variety of topics—including one that sparked this issue of Progressive Rentals’ cover article—and the list goes on.

The parties were spectacular and the networking opportunities—a component of APRO membership that is vital and sometimes overlooked—were unparalleled. Perhaps the best summation of the value of this year’s celebration came from one first-time attendee who was scheduled to leave Las Vegas midway through the convention, but extended his stay until the end of the event because he was having so much fun. Jeff Lebakken, who left the convention midway through in order to testify on important RTO-related legislation, but felt it worthy enough after his testimony before Wisconsin’s Assembly to catch a flight back to Las Vegas and resume his participation in the APRO@25 festivities.Nobody would ever suggest that APRO members aren’t a dedicated group! 

The morning after a welcome reception that had attendees dazzled by a pick-pocket’s slight of hand, keynoter Winget kicked things off with an “anti-motivational” address that was nonetheless motivating, advising the audience to “shut up, stop whining and get a life,” among other bon mots. The buying show then opened for business—and great business at that. In addition to the record sales on the show floor, vendors were pleased with the number of new attendees and companies, which was up considerably from the previous few years. 

Throughout the three-day event, members were treated to reminders of APRO’s past via video presentations, which featured hundreds of snapshots of members through the years and reminiscences by many of the industry’s leaders. The APRO museum exhibited more photographs, plus awards the association has received and more video highlights. d The Tom Kitchens/Joe Eason Golf Tournament, held August 8 at the beautiful Las Vegas Paiute Resort’s Sun Mountain course, was a sell-out, as is typical. This year’s winning team was David Belt, James Belt,Michael Belt and John Broyles. APRO members got to see a little rain while in the desert—or more accurately, Rain, one of Las Vegas’ hottest night clubs. Convention attendees were the “beautiful people” they’ve previously seen on the E! channel’s Party at the Palms, in which Rain is located.

Dancing and dining were the order of the night. A “Tonight Show”-themed awards banquet capped the week’s celebration, beginning with a red-carpet walk past the flock of paparazzi on the way into the ballroom. During the banquet, a Joan Rivers impersonator— filling in at the last minute for an ailing “Jay Leno”— brought members to the stage to offer key memories, all with levity, informality and even a little dancing. Next year’s APRO Convention and Buying Show will be held in Orlando and we hope to see you there as we kick off the next 25 years with more networking, learning, buying—and, of course, fun.

Why People Don't Rent, Part I: Pricing and Rates
by Ed Winn III

The 2004 Trenholm RTO Image Survey revealed that rental dealers have only scratched the surface of their potential base, serving less than 10 percent of the consumers who fit the RTO demographic. This is not news. The industry has wrestled with this reality for the past 15 years. All of those millions of consumers who could—or should or would—rent, but don’t, remain a tantalizing target for the industry. This was a popular topic at a seminar held during APRO’s recent convention in Las Vegas. At the seminar, APRO board member and Michigan rental dealer Sidney Burton offered some novel insights into why people don’t rent in spite of sophisticated efforts by bright professionals in a robust business to broaden the customer base.

Burton’s analysis will be presented in a multi-part series of articles detailing the findings he culled from his careful study of what people—RTO customers and non-customers alike—said in the focus groups that were a part of the Trenholm study. This first article will focus on pricing and rental rates. Future articles will look at social stigma, product quality, consumer (mis)understanding of the RTO concept and where people get the ideas they have about RTO. The prevailing rental wisdom has always supposed that the answer to the question of why people don’t rent was—and still is—that RTO costs too much. If that is really the reason, rental dealers could lower prices and attract more business. That same wisdom supposes that rental companies can never get prices as low as the big box retailers and so maybe it is better to keep good margins and make do with the customer base that does exist for RTO. It is undeniably true that rental companies have higher costs of doing business than retail.

Payroll in a rental store can run three to four times payroll in a comparable retail store. It is also true that some rental business models have attempted to address this issue by focusing on monthly customers instead of weekly. A monthly business costs less to run that a weekly business. That model has arguably attracted new and different customers, and in addition to Aaron Rents, there are notable independents out there with stores that gross hundreds of thousands of dollars per month with a primarily monthly business base. These stores have higher than average keep rates, generally lower rental rates and lower earnings percentages than more traditional RTO stores. But is price the only reason that people don’t rent? Not according to the people who talked about RTO in the focus groups. And the pricing issue is more complicated than first meets the eye. When people who don’t rent—and consumer advocates, for that matter—complain that RTO costs too much, they are talking about the Total Cost (the total amount a customer will pay if he or she rents long enough to obtain ownership). The comparison is being made between the Total RTO Cost and the cost of the same product at retail. This is the comparison that gets trotted out in every criticism of RTO. There is often a chart with a TV or some other electronic item and the retail selling price from Best Buy or Sam’s or some other discount retailer is held up against the Total Cost in a nearby rental store—and the difference is often dramatic. The industry has responded in a couple of ways. One is to deny the validity of the comparison and to point to the features that exist in an RTO transaction that do not exist in an outright sale. The industry hasn’t done this enough and probably cannot do this enough.

And, finally, no matter what the industry does, the comparison is not likely to go away in consumers’ minds. Another approach the industry has taken is to side step this comparison and insist that customers are not concerned with the Total Cost. Instead dealers maintain that customers want to know how much its costs to get possession of the item per week or per month. Indeed, the weekly rental rate and less often the monthly rate is the primary focus of a lot of RTO advertising. If the Total Cost is disclosed, it is because the law requires it, not because it is a selling point. It may be that the universe of potential RTO customers is bifurcated here. Some people ignore the Total Cost, see a manageable weekly rental rate and come into the store and rent. Other people, by a factor, seemingly, of 10 to 1, see the Total Cost, decide that it is too high and go somewhere else. That may be the end of the story, what with the costs of running an RTO business being what they are, as dealers can only lower the Total Cost so much before they start losing money and go out of business.

But the issue is important enough to merit a little deeper digging. Let’s focus in on rental rates. Rental dealers have long been willing to reduce the rental term on used merchandise, but generally have been loathe to reduce the rental rate because of cash flow issues.What does this look like, exactly? What do customers think of this practice? Is it good for the image of the industry? Assume a dealer has a product with a $25 per week rental rate and a 24-month (104 week) term when brand new. The company will reduce the term over time, but never the rate, and so a chart for this product will look like this: CONDITION RENTAL RATE TERM TOTAL COST NEW $25/WEEK 24 MONTHS $2,400 USED $25/WEEK 18 MONTHS $1,800 USED $25/WEEK 12 MONTHS $1,200 USED $25/WEEK 6 MONTHS $600 Think first about the people who are focused on how much it costs per week and who ignore the Total Cost, which may be all or nearly all people who come into the store and actually rent something.

The fact that the Total Cost is being lowered with each rental, and may actually be a bargain as the unit depreciates, is lost on them. If they are looking only at the rental rate, then three out of four customers, all of the customers who are renting a used item are going to feel like they are getting a bad deal, since someone else is renting a brand new product for exactly the same price and they are stuck with a used product. Such a pricing policy—how much per week—makes the rental company look sneaky at worst and uncaring at best and the practice makes the customers mistrustful. That is what they said in the focus groups. If dealers accept the premise that some to many of their customers are only looking at the rental rate, then this pricing policy, a mainstay of the industry for more than 30 years, is foolishly and fatally flawed.

No customer is going to feel good about paying the same amount each week for a used thing when he knows that somebody else got a new one. It would make far more sense, from the customer’s point of view, to drop the rental rate, certainly between new and used product, even if the term does not get shortened. And the lower the rate for used goods, the more attractive the deal, the more willing a customer will be to rent the used goods, the fresher a store’s inventory will be, and maybe, just maybe, the less mistrustful customers will be of the RTO store, and the more positive will be their word of mouth about the business. Here is what such a pricing policy might look like CONDITION RENTAL RATE TERM TOTAL COST NEW $25/WEEK 24 MONTHS $2,400 USED $20/WEEK 22 MONTHS $1,800 USED $15/WEEK 20 MONTHS $1,200 USED $10/WEEK 15 MONTHS $600 Note that the Total Cost does not change. The dealer can get whatever turn he wants or needs for the unit. It may take a few months longer to collect all of the money and there may be increased service costs as a result. However, there should also be fewer pick-ups—customers will be able to make a $15/week payment when they could not come up with a $25/week payment, and some of the negative feelings that customers harbor against RTO companies will be assuaged.

That might mean more customers. This assumes that there are people out there, once again, who are focused solely on the rental rate and who will be attracted to a $10 or $15 per week payment who were not attracted to a $25 per week payment. The store will have to advertise the lower rates and also that the merchandise is used, but the bet is that there are people who are not renting today who would rent at the lower rate. The rates do not necessarily have to be lowered progressively. What is most important is to differentiate between rental rates for new items and rental rates for used items. Ideally, a dealer will differentiate the rates in a meaningful way that will have an impact on shoppers and customers. So, a dealer might rent the unit for $25 brand new.When it comes back in, he might rent it out used for $20 for the remainder of its life in inventory.

The dealer will be waiting longer for his money, but he will still get it all. He will be deferring $20 per month and, if the average rental term for a customer is four months, the dealer will get his full $2,400 in 29 months instead of 24 months (assuming no early buy out). Instinctively, the lower the rental rate for used product, the higher will be the demand, but the lower rate will have an impact on cash flow, and like the Total Cost, the rental rate can only go so low before it quits making economic sense. Rental dealers are generally under the impression that the rental rate is the most important economic factor influencing a customer’s decision to rent. Rental customers in focus groups, report that, among many other things, they do not like paying the same rental rate for a used product as for a new product. That seems like such an easy complaint to remedy, thereby making the business look just a little bit better in the eyes of the customers we do have.

The Tipping Point
by Ed Winn III

It is as sad a story as can occur in the rental business. A curious toddler left unattended in the kitchen. A tantalizing aroma from the top of the stove and a novel bubbling sound.

The toddler uses the oven door as a step to probe the mysteries of the stovetop. The stove tips over and disaster ensues. Such tragedies do not occur often. Most parents know better than to leave hot food simmering on a stove with unattended toddlers in the house. But such accidents do occur from time to time, and one such accident occurred recently in a house where a rental company had delivered the stove. The rental company and the manufacturer have both been sued and the exposure is considerable. In other cases where children have been severely burned from stepping on an oven door and tipping over a stove, settlements have ranged from the mid-six figures to more than $20 million. There are complicated legal issues in such cases involving contributory negligence, assumption of the risk, statutes of limitation, products liability and calculating damages that are beyond the scope of this article.

It is not necessarily the case that every time a stove tips over and a child gets burned, the stove manufacturer and the retailer, rental company, landlord or other installer are all automatically liable for ruinous damages. But the possibility for such legal exposure definitely exists. Stove manufacturers have been aware of the tipping issue since the 1960s, when they began using lighterweight materials in stove fabrication. Since then, stoves have come with warning labels and anti-tipping devices that are designed to anchor one of the rear legs of the stove to the floor or to the rear wall. A universal anti-tipping bracket designed to fit the rear leg of all stoves has been on the market for a number of years. The device is separate from the stove itself so that the stove can be pulled out to allow for cleaning or repair and then the stove can be pushed back so that the leg fits into the device.

Years ago, Sears—after it had settled a stove tipping case of its own— instructed all of its appliance repair people to offer a free inspection of all stoves on all service calls and if a stove did not have an anti-tipping device, to offer to install one for $3. Installation of an anti-tipping device requires screwing two screws either into the floor or into a stud on the rear wall. Rental dealers who are installing them report that the job takes about 10 minutes. When the stove is returned, the anti-tipping device is typically left attached to the floor or wall for the next stove. Rental dealers might prefer not to be bothered with installing anti-tipping devices, much like some of them prefer not hooking up icemakers in refrigerators, or electrical connections for dryers.

There are legitimate reasons for not wanting to perform these kinds of tasks, although one might fairly ask whether retailers leave ice machines unconnected when they sell and deliver refrigerators. If rental dealers want to get a premium for the rental service they provide, then they must provide it. If they want to help their customers feel like first-class citizens, then they must give them first-class service. That means hooking up the icemaker, at the very least. As for stove anti-tipping devices, the issue goes beyond quality of service to one of public safety.When rental dealers deliver a stove, they may be assuming a non-delegable duty to install it properly,which will mean installing the anti-tipping device. Manufacturers have attempted to pass their duty to make a safe product down the stream of commerce to retailers, rental dealers and to end users by providing the bracket and by posting warnings in several prominent places on the stove to alert everyone to the tipping danger and the necessity of installing the antitipping device.

There are no statutes requiring that stoves be equipped with anti-tipping devices. Underwriter Laboratories requires that stoves have such devices in order to receive that group’s approval. Consumer advocates have lobbied to get the stove industry to make all stoves with fall-away doors that simply disconnect and fall to the floor when too much weight is put on them, but the industry has resisted this design change, arguing that the anti-tipping devices solve the tipping problem.However, the stove manufacturers must rely on retailers, rental dealers and others to install the device and when it is not installed and someone gets hurt, the manufacturers regularly get sued and pay at least a portion of the award.

Some rental dealers have attempted to shift liability away from the rental company onto the customer by giving the customer additional notice of the tipping danger and the need for installing the anti-tipping device and by getting the customer to sign an agreement to install the device or to have it installed before using the stove. These agreements usually add disclaimer and indemnity language. It is an open legal question whether such agreements will work. One of the defenses to enforcement of a contract is that the agreement or some of its provisions is void because it violates public policy. A contract to pay a gambling debt in a state that disallows gambling is an example.Whether a rental dealer’s attempt to shift the duty to install a stove anti-tipping device is enforceable may ultimately depend on the facts.

If the dealer is renting a stove to a handyman, the agreement may work because the device will likely be properly installed and the public safety is therefore adequately protected. If the rental dealer, on the other hand, is renting to a mother with an apartment full of kids under 5, then—as between the burly delivery guy with a screwdriver in his hip pocket and the mom nursing twin infants—the legal question will be who is better able to protect the public safety by installing the device. On such facts, if the stove tips and a baby gets burned, it will not be hard for a court to declare an attempt by the rental company to shift the installation obligation onto the customer to be void as against public policy. The recent accident in the industry has called rental dealers’ attention to stove anti-tipping devices. Some rental dealers have been regularly installing the devices all along.

Others have not paid much attention to how stoves were getting installed in their stores. Now all rental dealers must confront the issue and make careful business judgments about how to proceed. Dealers need to be aware that if a stove they have rented tips over and someone gets hurt, they will certainly get sued.Win or lose, the costs of defending such a suit will be considerable. Some installations will be problematic—what should a dealer do when the stove is being delivered to a basement apartment with a concrete floor and concrete walls, for example? Dealers should review insurance policies to verify that they are covered for such kinds of accidents and in adequate amounts.And, finally, unless there are good business reasons for not doing so, dealers should consider adding a training module to their operations to teach their delivery people about stove anti-tipping devices and how to install them properly.

A Little Bit Country, a Little Bit Rent-to-Own: An APROfile of Larry Goad
by Kristen Card

If there’s one thing you can count on with Larry Goad, it’s that he’s always on-call—almost literally. If his cell phone has a signal, he says, then he’s going to answer it when it rings. And just to prove it, the Tennessee native conducts a lengthy telephone interview while clearing land in the heart of West Virginia. ! “There’s a little church starting up out here in Oak Hill, West Virginia, and they’ve been meeting in a garage,” Goad explains. “They’ve got about ten acres of land they’ve bought and we’re on a youth mission trip to clear it for them, so they can build themselves a church.”

This simple, if rather unusual, revelation typifies Goad: He’s a self-proclaimed “country fella,” passionate about the Lord and passionate about helping people. And he always answers his phone, because it could be a call about one of his other two passions: his family or his family business. Goad is president of Zion’s Rental-Purchase, a five-store operation headquartered in Harrogate, TN—just about where the Volunteer State meets the Kentucky/Virginia borders. And no, the name has no religious connotation; it was simply the last name of Goad’s father-in-law, James Zion, who launched the company in 1976. Today, Goad runs the business with the full-time help of his wife, Michelle; his sister-in-law, Jamie Zion; his mother-in-law, Georgia Zion (who now owns the company) and his own mother, Pam, who acts as operations manager. To some, this set-up might seem a little, well, nepotistic. But Goad is unapologetic. “We’re a family-owned, family-run business,” he says, “and that’s what we like about it.” Larry Goad’s introduction to the rentalpurchase industry was through family, but it happened many years before he met Michelle. Goad grew up in the small east Tennessee community of Luttrell—where the claim to fame is being the hometown of country music legend Chet Atkins and Country Music Association 2004 Entertainer of the Year Kenny Chesney. (What do you expect from a place with seven state songs?)

One of three kids, with divorced parents, Goad originally discovered the world of rent-to-own through his mom. “My mother needed a refrigerator just like anybody else,” remembers Goad. “Working as a waitress for two dollars an hour plus tips, a single mom raising three kids, there was no way she could afford to buy one herself. So that’s how I got to know about rent-to-own— my mother became a customer.” Many of the family’s appliances came from their local rental-purchase store. So years later, when Goad could no longer afford to opercontinue his education at Indiana’s St. Joseph’s College and moved back home to complete his business degree at a Knoxville junior college, he remembered how well rentto- own had worked for his family and he went down to Zion’s to rent a stereo. A few years later, Goad met his future wife while they were both working at K-Mart. (“I tell everybody I got her on Blue Light Special,” Goad jokes.) Michelle’s surname, Zion, rang a bell for Goad, and sure enough, Zion’s Rental- Purchase belonged to her dad. “When she found out I used to be a customer, the first thing she wanted to know was, was I a good customer,” chuckles Goad. “She wanted to know whether I was late with payments— she even went to the store and pulled my file to see whether I paid. So I’m glad I paid on-time!” As Goad and Michelle grew closer, he spent more and more time around her family.

As soon as Goad graduated, James Zion offered him a store manager position at the Knoxville store. Goad accepted, trained for about a week at another store and went right to work. “It was sort of tough coming in as a manager,” Goad confesses. “Having to learn that way—being tossed straight into the fire—and being that young, was difficult. I was 21 years old, running the store, and all the employees were older than me and had more experience than I did. It was a difficult situation.”

Today, Goad credits his ultimate success as a manager to the wisdom he gleaned from his father-in-law, day in and day out. “My father-in-law was a great man and a good teacher,” says Goad. “I always say, he taught me the business from the basement up. I started as a manager, but I’ve done every job you can do. It’s good to be able to look at my employees now and tell them, ‘I’ve done what you’re doing, I know how it operates, I understand the frustrations.’ It’s hard to relate to employees if they don’t know you’ve done the exact same thing. It’s hard to gain their respect, because that’s something that’s earned, not given.”

Eleven years later, when James Zion decided to retire, Goad was his natural choice to head the business. Zion died just two years later. “When my father-in-law turned the company over for me to run, it was one of my proudest moments,” Goad says. “The fact that this is something he started from nothing—with very little money he went into business on his own—and under his power built it up… The fact that he trusted me and in my ability enough to turn over the reins to me was a little overwhelming, really.” When Goad talks—in his deeply Tennesseean accent— about Zion Rental-Purchase, two names come up again and again: his father-in-law’s, and God. For example, Zion had five stores when Goad joined the company in 1988; today, following a bump up to six stores for a while, the company once again has five thriving stores—one in Tennessee, one in Virginia and three in Kentucky. Some might interpret this as a lack of ambition, but Goad sees it as a competitive advantage. “My father-in-law taught me that the customer relationship is what gives you the edge,” relates Goad. “By being a smaller company, we have the luxury of having a more intimate relationship with our customers.

We don’t sell products; we sell customer service. When you go into a bigger store, it’s sometimes hard to satisfy the customer, because the manager doesn’t have the liberty to solve problems as ours do. If a problem comes up that’s above the manager’s head, they know I’m one phone call away. No matter where I am, we can get the problem solved and get the customer taken care of immediately. My father-in-law was a firm believer in the family-business concept, and as a family business, there’s less bureaucracy and a more direct chain of command. Our customers know our employees have direct access to me. I’m the president of the company, chief mechanic, head bottlewasher and groundskeeper.

This company has no executives.” But with or without executives, doesn’t Goad want to grow the business, make more money, gain more power? Not really. “I want to concentrate on same-store growth; I’m not really interested in running a thousand stores—I’ve got five right now, and sometimes wonder whether that’s four too many,” Goad jokes. “We want to grow, but we’ve got no aspirations for being huge.We want to be able to serve our customers and make a decent living. That’s all we need.” Goad speculates about the potential for opening up one or two more Zion’s locations, probably in Tennessee, over the next decade or so. But he claims to have “no great desire to be a rich man, money-wise.

I’m incredibly rich as it is: the Lord has blessed me with a wonderful family, home and business.We’re content with that.” This devout Southern Baptist attests that the greatest contributor to his success to date, in business and in life, is his faith. “I’m a Christian, and we try not to do anything without consulting with ‘The Boss’ first,” explains Goad. “That’s the way we try to live our lives. Everything I’ve got comes from God, all good things come from the Lord, and we try to acknowledge and appreciate that, first and foremost.” While Zion Rental- Purchase isn’t billed as a Christian company per se, Goad says his belief system definitely translates into his day-to-day dealings. “Listen to the Lord,” he immediately answers when asked his best advice for industry colleagues. “We try to operate by the Golden Rule: You treat others like you expect to be treated. When a customer comes in angry about something, they feel like they’ve been wronged. You’ve got to put yourself in their position.Whether the customer is right or wrong is irrelevant; how would you want to be treated? Number one for us is always with respect. “Secondly, listen to your employees,” Goad continues without missing a beat. “They’re on the front lines every day, and if you’ve got to be in an office somewhere running the company, then you’re not on the front lines.

So listen. If you trust them to run the store for you, then trust them to give you worthwhile comments and advice. “And third, [upper management] might run the company, but we’re human, and we screw up just like employees do. So when you do, admit it,” opines Goad. “Don’t be afraid to say in a managers’ meeting, ‘I messed up. I dropped the ball on this one, so let’s back it up and punt, and do it the right way.’ If you mess up, there’s nothing wrong with that; we all do it. The only time you’ve got a problem with it is when you don’t accept and acknowledge that you messed up, and try to learn from it.” Nowadays, Goad is using his rock-solid faith and lessons learned not only to continue to lead his company, but also to resurrect the Tennessee Rental Dealers Association (TRDA). “TRDA has been in existence for years, but has been very, very inactive,” Goad explains. “When I first found out that we even had a association, I inquired about it with the president at the time, and he just flat-out told me,‘Well,we don’t really meet, we don’t really do anything.’ They were so inactive, they weren’t even charging dues. I went to one meeting in Nashville, and agreed to be on the board, thinking we were going to get things rolling again, but it never happened. I didn’t like seeing our association being so inactive, and wasn’t really sure I knew what to do, but I figured anything would be more than what we were doing, so I was willing to try it.”

Since agreeing to serve as president of the association last year, Goad’s immediate focus has been on membership recruitment. Apparently, TRDA has been promising action to the state’s rental dealers for years with no followthrough. So Goad and a team of four volunteers—including his wife, Michelle, who currently serves as the association’s secretary/treasurer, and board members Chris Bolin, Carl Elgin and Eddie Ford—are leading TRDA in the face of a certain cynicism from their colleagues, who feel the group has “cried wolf”much too often. Nevertheless, the newly resuscitated association held its first membership meeting last spring in Nashville, which Goad says had a “promising turnout.”The next step, says Goad, is to begin to establish an industry presence at the state capitol, to help inoculate the industry from potentially damaging public policy. “Right now, we’re fortunate that we don’t have any fires to fight on [Tennessee’s] Capitol Hill, and we want to keep it that way,” he says. “We’ve got to let our legislators know we’re here, who we are and what we do, and that our door is always open. We need to make sure our faces are seen enough that when a situation concerning our industry comes up, [lawmakers] can think to themselves, ‘The TRDA’s been here before, let’s talk to them.

Let’s call them and see what they have to say about it.’” Goad is definitely a true believer when it comes to associations like TRDA and the Association of Progressive Rental Organizations, and the work they do to unite the rental-purchase industry. In fact, getting involved with APRO and getting to know many of his professional peers nationwide through the organization’s events is one of Goad’s favorite things about his job. “When we come together, the rent-toown industry is so good about sharing information, it blows my mind,” effuses Goad. “There’s no need to reinvent the wheel—if someone’s already been there and done that, by being part of an association, you can learn from them. They’ve already driven down that road, they know where the potholes are and can tell you where they are and how to avoid them.

We can be competitors across the street from each other, but when it comes to the national scene, we’re all on the same team. Everyone is so willing to help each other out—that’s what I like best about rentto- own.” But socializing and sharing trade secrets is the tip of the industry iceberg for Goad. He recently ran for—and won—a seat on the APRO Board of Directors on a “small company” platform, saying, “I want all small companies to have a voice, as the needs of small companies can be somewhat different than those of larger ones.” Goad says that while rental-purchase has come a long way, he strongly believes that through unity, RTO can go even further. “We have something to offer in rent-to-own,” Goad begins. “Our business is so unlike any other business out there, and the negative attitude about us is still out there, even among some people I consider my dear friends. The culprit is ignorance, and I mean that in the purest form, the actual definition of ignorance: they just don’t know. They don’t know what it’s about and because of that lack of education about it, they have the wrong perception of it. The only way I can see to combat that ignorance about our industry is to be united. There are just so many benefits to being united. At the national level, for example, if one person goes to Washington on his own, well, he’s not going to get anywhere.

But if APRO goes with the backing of the industry behind them, well, that carries some weight. Together, we can just get so much more done.” That gravitation toward togetherness, willingness to extend a helping hand, belief in the family business and devotion to a higher power—these are all clearly connected for Larry Goad, and they touch every part of his life. When he’s not leading Zion Rental-Purchase, revitalizing the Tennessee Rental Dealers Association, intensifying his commitment to APRO, trouble- shooting via telephone, or clearing West Virginia brush, Goad’s top two pastimes are: (1) spending time with Michelle and their two children,Mason, 13, and Abby, 10; and (2) performing mass feeding through Southern Baptist Disaster Relief. “I love to help people, which is why I’m deeply involved in disaster relief,” says Goad. “Our church association has a mass feeding mobile unit—a trailer about eight feet wide and twenty feet long— and we have a written agreement with the American Red Cross; anytime within the continental United States that the Red Cross is serving a hot meal, the Southern Baptists cooked it. Last year, we naturally spent a lot of time in Florida, with all the hurricanes. At one point, we were there just over a week, and we cooked and served about 40,000 meals. “I’m an outdoorsman—I love to camp and hunt,” he continues. “When you’re going [into a disaster-relief situation], you’re roughing it.

Chances are, there won’t be electricity, there may not be clean water. And I love the people involved in disaster relief, because you’ve got to have a passion to do it, to leave the comforts of your home and go suffer through the heat or cold, and work like a borrowed mule… It’s amazingly rewarding.” Larry Goad is definitely following in the footsteps of the two biggest influences in his life—the Lord and James Zion (in order of importance). And though the footprints were made by some of the largest proverbial shoes a man might encounter, Goad seems to be filling them with confidence, conviction, and salt-of-the-earth success. “I’m a lot like my father-in-law,” concludes Goad. “I’m just me. I’m a country boy and I’m proud of it. I don’t put on airs, I just put on my britches one leg at a time. I think my employees see that; they see that I’m, well, the kids call it ‘real.’ Y’know, be real. You can only be what you are, and I think that’s the way I am.”