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The RTO Show "Let's talk Rent to Own"
Ever wondered how a $8.5 billion industry keeps millions of Americans lounging in style? Step into "The RTO Show Podcast" – where the mysterious world of Rent to Own furniture finally spills its secrets! Your host Pete Shau isn't just any industry veteran – he's spent 20 years in the trenches, collecting the kind of stories that'll make you laugh, gasp, and maybe even rethink everything you knew about that couch you're sitting on.
From wild customer tales to industry shake-ups that'll knock your rented socks off, Pete brings the seemingly mundane world of furniture financing to vibrant life. Warning: This isn't your typical business podcast – expect real talk, unexpected laughs, and "aha!" moments that'll have you looking at every lease agreement in a whole new light.
Whether you're an RTO pro who knows your depreciation schedules by heart, or you're just curious about how that fancy sectional ended up in your living room, Pete's got the inside scoop you never knew you needed. Tune in and discover why the furniture business is anything but boring!
The RTO Show "Let's talk Rent to Own"
Part 2: AI in the world today & Whats Already Working!
Unlock the potential of artificial intelligence in the retail and rent-to-own furniture industries with insights from our special guest, Daniel Hajduk from Vox Populi. Discover how industry leaders like Home Depot and Ikea are transforming customer experiences through AI innovations like weather-based inventory forecasting and room planning tools. Together, we explore how these advancements are not just enhancing efficiency in retail but also paving new paths in the rent-to-own sector, offering tailored solutions for customers based on their preferences and home decor.
Throughout our conversation, we reveal the game-changing role AI plays in simplifying operations and boosting productivity. From predictive sales strategies that anticipate seasonal trends, to cloud-based collaborations that streamline store operations, AI is becoming a cornerstone of modern retail. We delve into practical applications, such as transitioning from paper to digital processes for seamless rental agreements, and discuss how tools like Zoom and VersaRent are revolutionizing daily business practices by reducing repetitive tasks and optimizing workflows.
The future of retail and rent-to-own businesses is here, and it's intertwined with AI. As we navigate these technological advancements, discover how committing to AI integration can lead to more informed decision-making and improved business outcomes. We also touch on the importance of maintaining a strong digital presence and leveraging social media for success. Join us as we explore these transformative technologies, emphasizing the need for leadership to prioritize AI in their strategic vision for staying competitive in an ever-evolving market.
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Hello and welcome to the RTO Show. I'm your host, pete Hsiao. Today we're covering our AI series, part two, about AI in the world today and what's already working. Again, my guest here is Daniel Hajduk from Vox Populi, and the reason that I have them here is because they have a great understanding, from beginning to where we are now, of how it started, what we're doing and how RTO can benefit from it. Now, some of the things that we're going to talk about are not RTO inclusive, in the sense that they are not just from RTO, but we are talking about things that eventually will be in RTO and how it's going to affect our industry, especially in the future.
Speaker 1:Now, daniel, going forward, I mean right now, that's the hot topic. Nothing is more important right now, or nothing is hotter than AI. I think everybody's talking about it. It's coming out everywhere. Nothing that we do doesn't have some type of use of AI stuck in it, at least anything electronic, right? I mean, if I go in my backyard and I start doing exercise, that's probably the only thing that AI is going to pop up, or at least my watch is going to tell me that my heart rate is up. But as far as the furniture industry goes the rental-owned industry. Part of what we wanted to do was educate everybody as to how AI is already starting to become integrated, what's already working in the retail furniture space. So what are some stories from like a retail side, from a retail furniture side that you say you know what. You might not even know this, but it's already started before you even know that it's there.
Speaker 1:It's already been a part of the situation. Not only is it only there, it's getting better.
Speaker 2:There's many different ways out there and again, one you probably don't notice but, like Home Depot, for example, they're using it to predict certain things. So they'll use it to help them organize and use their inventory for when we might have a warmer spring in Atlanta and they're going to start saying all the gardening stuff out quicker than normal. But if it's a colder spring or colder winter, longer winter, you might not see that stuff come up as soon as stuff. But they're able to get out there and be the first ones and all those things that you see out the front of home depot when you walk in yeah and like, oh, I actually need that. Then you know they're on sale or whatever and they're just not really on sale, but it's, it looks like a good price and you need it. I'm gonna grab one. That's how they're using it.
Speaker 2:Another really cool one ikea. Um, they have a whole ai powered like room setter, so they're doing these room plannings and I didn't realize this. But my neighbor, um, they redid their entire kitchen with Ikea. So everything is from Ikea and it's all planned out and the they can take your whole room and laid out with an AI tool.
Speaker 2:Wow so they're planning everything from the cabinets, the furniture that's in there, and they're able to show you exactly what you want to buy before you buy it, which is really cool, because, again, it's not. Well, I think this couch is going to look good and hold up in our house and look right. Well, now you can go put it in there with their tools that they're doing. So, again, there's so many different ways that companies are using it to speed up the process with things, to make their life easier, to gain that extra sale because they're putting the thing out there, no one's able to tell them to get it.
Speaker 1:Could you imagine in the rent-to-own space somebody walking in and going. You know what I like, that I'm not sure if my wife or my husband or whoever likes that.
Speaker 1:I don't know if it's really going to fit. I don't know if it's going to fit the decor and you're like, hold on a minute, let me show up that model number, let me you know. What are your colors that you're dealing with. I, you know, I got a mauve, I got a blue, I got a gray. Yeah, don't worry about that. You contemporary, not contemporary, and be able to throw that together and you're saying this room builder is already active. This is something that I can go and do today.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I believe that there you can sit down with their consultants at Ikea. I don't know what you can do on your own, what they use to do it, but I think you want to go in and you want to remodel your whole family room and you want to get new furniture because you're going to buy a new house, you're going to paint it and everything. They literally go in there with you and can build it out for you. Now I don't know what the technology or what what's required to get that into into a rental company. I don't know what the investment is. I would be happy to hear what different people pull up, if there's certain vendors already in this space that are looking to do that. But again, it kind of does.
Speaker 2:One thing we run into in our business with apparel is we're selling a lot of it online from box and shipping it to you. Biggest thing with people hate is stuff doesn't fit because you can't try it on. It's kind of that same scenario. How can we use it so that we don't have to worry about someone wanting to return something or not like something because it's not how they thought it would be?
Speaker 1:Well, my thought process is, every time that I think of rent to own, I always think, okay, rent to own is a little bit different in some of the other spaces. Right, because even though we're talking about furniture industry, specific furniture industry has a lot of people involved in it, not just one, right? So, Ikea is a big big company.
Speaker 1:So they're around the world and they have the ability to say, hey, we're going to do our own situation where we're going to be able to put rooms together under our programs, under our power, and say the idea that I always thought that Rent to Own would do is say, okay, in a service that I put out let's say, daniel has its own service and Vox has this idea where you know what, I'm going to make a room builder myself and instead of using it just for myself, I'm going to lease out this technology to whomever decides wants to use it. And the way I always thought is rent to own would be like it would be great to have a room builder, but we probably wouldn't do it ourselves, right, because there's a lot of stores that are. There are a lot of owners that have like three stores, two stores one store.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, there's no way that they're going to be able to put that technology together, and if they did, they would spend the entire store's budget on it for three years and it just wouldn't work.
Speaker 2:It's not something to plan right now.
Speaker 1:Right. But as we go into the future and If there is a situation where you can get a chat GPT or a cloud or something that's already starting to be built, right, I'm getting into it. I know how to use it now and, like you said, one of the versions of this AI could be a room builder. Now I can possibly start getting into that, and the idea to me in Rent2Own is we might all be using a version of a room builder, not necessarily one or the other, but more like I think that's the evolution of it. Right, that's something that nobody in rent to own has right now, where somebody can walk into the front door and say, hey, I want this, but I'm not really sure. Well, why don't you get somebody at home to take a couple of pictures or a baseline picture?
Speaker 1:far enough away where we can eliminate the sofa you have now. Add this in and take a look at it. Or you know what? Just give me the dimensions of your room. We'll build it, because you just moved in and you can have a whole selection. And before you know it, I packaged you out with coffin end tables and lamps and a rug and a picture and probably a pretty good package that's going to be beneficial for both of us and I really see that as a way to enhance rent-to-own that it's never had before and you know, I look forward to stuff like that. When you were telling me that IKEA could definitely God, isn't that where it belongs? Like, how do you use AI in our everyday? Well, that's it. I mean, how is the washroom jar going to look? You know, do I have? Will it fit?
Speaker 2:Will it fit to the door Right?
Speaker 1:Will it fit? You know, and I have this huge uh you know side by side fridge and it's 26 cubic feet, and then I take it to the front door and I'm like, okay, this isn't gonna work no but being able to use an ai in that sense, I didn't know, I would have never guessed pete a couple of years ago, like there's look dude, no way like I could do it myself.
Speaker 1:But you know, requires me to get in a truck, it requires me to go to. But it requires me to get in a truck, it requires me to go to the home, it requires me to take a look at everything you have and get some measurements, and this way it's so much easier to kind of relay message over computer and say here it goes, here it works. I mean, what are some of the other uses that you're seeing that you think can really work in our situation? I mean, right now you mentioned predictive sales, which is killer to me because I don't think, you know, as Rent to Own Works. We always say we have the winter season, we have the summer season, we have tax season. I don't even think there's a spring, it's always tax, right. So we have winter, you know, and basically it's fourth quarter with the Black, you know Black Friday and everything and then you've got.
Speaker 1:You know, you got tax season, you got summer season. It's slow and then we start coming into the wrapping back up. But to really say there's a predictability as to what sells more, what might be catchier to the eye, what I mean, that's something that can really game change how rent-to-own is efficient In your mindset.
Speaker 2:How beneficial do you think that would be to any company, especially a rental-owned company? I think it can be a benefit to anyone. How much of a benefit varies, but I think it's a starting point. If you want to look at that data stuff, you want to analyze what can I do better to enhance sales for next quarter? Well, if you have data which I'm assuming most stores do put in your previous year's data, your previous quarter's data, and tell, tell me what's sold the best.
Speaker 2:You look at it that way and all right, let's do that this year instead of just guessing. It eliminates the guessing, so you don't need a whole room builder, but you can. Hey, what is your suggested layout for this space I have, with a couch and a love seat, with a coffee table of this size, it can give you, if it can give you, a simple chatbot can give you that. You don't need whatever. Ikea uses the thousands of dollars it probably costs to have that. To give you an idea to start somewhere instead of, well, we're all just sitting here drawing a blank. Let's start here with the base.
Speaker 1:Give me an idea for a room layout of this size with these pieces of furniture, you can start there so geographically, because, let's say we're in tampa right now, right so, tampa, we have a lot more apartments, you know, I would love to say that apartments are great and large geographically, because let's say we're in Tampa right now, right so, tampa, we have a lot more apartments. I would love to say that apartments are great and large and huge and we're getting taxed to death by small apartments. It's 900 to 1,500 square feet and 1,500 is pretty darn big. On there it's usually about 12 to 1,300 square feet, no-transcript. Say some premier guys who they generally have one, you know, let's say one to four stores. I'm not saying that they all have, I'm just saying I know guys who have one to four stores.
Speaker 2:I'm not saying that they all have, I'm just saying I know guys who have one to four stores and a set location Chad.
Speaker 1:Fosick has one. I know a couple people that have three, and so it probably wouldn't be as beneficial. But when you said in our first, in our first podcast, there's an ability to get kind of a group in there, right, you can, you can have a subscription for everybody, is that something that would be beneficial in that sense, when I have stores in a lot of different areas?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean think about it as hey, you have a regional with an account and then you have all your store managers with their account that you start having them use it for certain things and you can have shared projects. So the cool thing about cloud is we can have private or public projects. So you've got something. You're a sales project everyone's working on. You can have a viewable. Everyone can go in there and put their thing in or see what other people are working on. Um. You can have your own projects too on there. Um, it's kind of cool. So, however you really want to do it, everyone can have their own account. End of the day, that's not a, not a. Your boss isn't paying for an account. It's no reason to not start using it. If you want to enhance what you're doing, start using a free version or even pay out of your pocket. It's not that much.
Speaker 1:Now we're talking about it at a level of a store, but then not only at the store level. I would imagine that vendors can do that as well. Then, right, so we have a predictability and say these are probably going to sell more. I can call you and say this is probably going to be the hotter item right now, based on what we've seen, what we saw, because I know that they're always pushing the latest and greatest, right, just like the cars, right, we want to push the latest and greatest, but there are staples that don't go away. Right, rent home Furniture doesn't go away. Yeah, some of them might, but at the same time, we all sit down. Right, we all sit down.
Speaker 1:We all have, you know, for people who don't have the brand new and they like the contemporary. They went from contemporary, now they're going to more traditional. You know, I'm a little bit older. I don't want to have the USB ports in there. I just want something to recline. I mean the thought that this can all be manufactured in a way to have a calendar that says you know, this probably would be the best time to do what. What do you think the efficiency is based on what we have in AI versus what we don't have. What do you think the gains could be from saying let's switch over to this. Let's figure this out together. Daniel, you got a store in Ohio, I got a store here. We're going to have a joint account in a sense. And then, how much do you think that it could change the role of somebody on their day-to-day? Let me ask you something.
Speaker 1:Are you getting everything out of your rent-to-own business? If you're not an APRO member, then the answer is probably no. Look, advocacy is APRO's bread and butter. This is why they were created and what they do best. But here's the thing APRO membership is about way more than advocacy.
Speaker 1:Apro connects you to the movers and the shakers of the industry. People have been there, done that and they can help you do it even better. Apro's monthly webinars give you expert insights and actionable takeaways. It's like having a masterclass for your business every single month. Got questions about complex regulations or sticky situations? No problem. Apro's legal hotline gives you direct access to experts who have got the answers. That no problem. Apro's legal hotline gives you direct access to experts who have got the answers. That's a peace of mind that you can't put a price on. And let's not forget the resources, news updates and tools that keep you ahead of the curve Scholarships for your team Check.
Speaker 1:Disaster relief when you need it most Double check. Apro is your ultimate support system in the rent-to-own world. So stop settling for less With APRO members. Get more, more own world. So stop settling for less With APRO members. Get more, more support, more connections, more success. Head over to rtohqorg and join the APRO family today, because in this business, more isn't just better, it's essential. See you at the top with APRO however, you want to use it.
Speaker 2:If you want to say, hey, pete, we are going to start using this to help us plan out all of our scheduling, let's start doing that. We can both go back and forward. You can try things out, you can give it scenarios and it'll do that for you. Or, like we'll go into the marketing stuff. Pete, we need to lay out a marketing plan for our individual store on top of the entire company Because, again, like you mentioned, stuff is different wherever you are, whether you have a bunch of apartment customers, or whether you have a bunch of people who live in houses, the weather. It's all going to help putting that into chat and it can give you a different answer and it gives you what you need, not just let's just throw a bandaid on it and give it all the same effect. That's what it's supposed to prevent Just doing the same thing over and over again and doing something that's not effective. It can help because it's pulling that data from where it's getting information.
Speaker 1:I mean talking about things that are already working. The other day I was driving around, and the reason that it meant so much to me is because I saw the relation to the rental industry as it could be. I drove up to a Checkers.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And I just you know you get used to the first person that talks is usually like just a recording, right? You know, welcome to Checkers and we'll be right with you, okay. And then usually you get somebody else that doesn't sound anything like that back on there and they just ask you know what's going on, and so it was like you know, welcome to checkers, you know speak when you're ready.
Speaker 1:I was like, okay, you know, I want to. I remember what it was some kind of double cheeseburger with bacon that I shouldn't have been eating. I hope my wife's not listening to this, and so you know. But it continued. Yeah, it was this automated system that I wanted number three, and I wanted cheese and bacon and I wanted no pickles. Okay, you want this and this and this. With none of this, can I offer you. Would you like this, a large size? Oh, yeah, sure. What kind of drink did you want? Oh, I want a Coke. Would Pepsi be okay? Okay, yeah, you know. Is there anything else that I can get for you today? No, would you like you know? And it's supersized. It asked me everything, it read it back to me and then, the very end, it was like we have these Apple turnovers or whatever it is. They have these small versions.
Speaker 1:And I was like oh my God, I think I just completed my entire order with something like AI, and so I'm thinking how great would it be to have somebody be able to walk in right and be able to handle that situation, because sometimes we get short-staffed and we have things going on, but somebody would come in and say you know, hi, rto show bot, I need this, this and this and be able to handle halfway through before I even have to talk to the customer.
Speaker 1:And I'm not saying that I would like to get so something that's already in there, it's already set up. You know, there's things that are happening in podcasting right now. Now podcasting is blowing up and I don't know if you notice, but, man, there's podcasters everywhere now.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I know, I see it all over. You see it on social media podcast clips and you're like, oh, this person has a podcast. What in the world are they talking about? Now, some people have great podcasts and it's definitely an oversaturated market right now.
Speaker 2:It's getting there and you can tell the difference between good and not good and the consistency in an impactful podcast. You found a podcast somewhere where a podcast is needed. Now, me doing a podcast on talking about a certain sport probably is probably not going to be needed because, first off, I don't provide anything extra to it and there's a million out there already. That's the difference.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, but I see the reason I say that is because I see it taking over certain aspects of the job that I didn't I wasn't able to understand before. So, as I'm going in and something's taking my order, there's also this feedback that I've noticed that AI is giving. So you give it information and it will extrapolate what it is that you preset to say I want to use. So I want video clips of this one hour long podcast and it will give me 60 second chunks of what it thought was probably the best. And it doesn't mean, like you said before and you've said it in best. And it doesn't mean, like you said before and you've said it in the other, in in part one. It doesn't always mean that it's right, you have to tailor it in or you can dial it in, but it has the ability to take out and say, okay, you want three 60 second bites, let's do that. So you know being able to make a educational video or a training video, and you know what. I might not need everything in that video, but I can tell AI, you know, if you can extrapolate X, y and Z and then put that together in something, in these bite-sized chunks for somebody to learn how, could that not be worthwhile?
Speaker 1:Or if I take a five-minute video and say you know what?
Speaker 1:This five-minute video where I'm unboxing something or I'm doing something different, I'm introducing somebody or today's my boss's birthday, and we're going to do something coming in, that might not work for the algorithms, it might be a little bit too long or I don't know how to do it right, but then I can go back to my AI and go okay, you know what I'm trying to do, an RTO commercial. In this particular light, can you extrapolate this type of information from what I'm giving you? All these things that I see every day, give me this how are we not using it right now at Rent to Own like we should? And why aren't we? And I think that when I see the day-to-day and already what's going on, I'm almost dumbfounded, because the other day you mentioned Zoom and you mentioned something about Zoom that I had no idea about, you know what, and it kind of dumbfounded me because I didn't even know it was a possibility and yet you were telling me you're doing stuff on Zoom that like it was kind of taking care of the whole situation.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:How did that work?
Speaker 2:situation. Yeah, how did that work? So zoom, as everyone's used in some sort of form since covid, whether it's permanent or you just use it back then everyone's used it and everyone thought about it just being a professional facetime or skype kind of thing.
Speaker 2:Right, company oriented skype it's more than that now and it's making your life a lot easier with whatever using it from a. From a sales perspective, it is speeding up the whole sales process of getting on a zoom call and going through a demo or going through something how AI. We use it every on all of our meetings now. So our company zoom account has the paid version, obviously, and has something called an AI companion and it's able to give us full feedback on the entire meeting we just had. So, for example, we have our daily morning meeting at Vox at 845, the whole company.
Speaker 2:Whether you're in person, you're working remote, you're traveling, like I did today, you can be on the meeting and we have a Zoom up. We have it on the TV and we have a zoom up. We have it on the tv. So we have a speaker, we have everything. So, again, no matter where you are, you can be on it and meeting ends, it'll take back and it'll send you a full meeting summary the key points, the next steps and everything you need to know about the meeting now.
Speaker 2:Now, like I said, it's not perfect and it only gives you what it can take, but from a sales side of having a meeting where you need to know let's get this meeting in. What were the key points? What can I review? What do I need to send in a follow-up email at the end of the day to the person I had the meeting with. It'll literally give you everything you need. Whether or from a kind of like a boss perspective, I can go back and review what was said. There's another really cool thing that I learned before we started using it at the FLDC conference this year in Atlanta the Franchise Leadership Development Conference.
Speaker 2:And this is one way I got out of my comfort zone with AI is they do a roundtable session where the vendors can host a roundtable on different topics. Obviously my first choice was to host one on print marketing, as that's our business, but since we were getting into ai and more comfortable with it, they had a couple ai topics. I was like, hey, we can get into this talking about ai and franchise sales and so on, and I ended up with that because the other one got taken by another sponsor. So I did that. I said all right, let's figure it out, and I sat at a table. I had no idea what to expect really.
Speaker 2:I walked in, sat at the table and people were coming and it was a table of different people. There was one guy from Whataburger, another guy from a home services brand company, another one that owns multiple brands of the likes of like sinorama and a couple other just different things and another guy I can't remember what he did and it was crazy to see everyone's different opinions. But I learned the zoom thing from the home services company and their ai tool on their zoom when they're selling franchise for their franchise sales guys, as they're able to go in and pull up certain questions that are asked on a call and it'll bring you to that point and you can watch the call so you can literally see what that person's reaction was when Wait wait, wait.
Speaker 1:You're saying that you can dial into a specific question in the video by typing it in.
Speaker 2:So yeah, kind of like I don't know if you you have an iPhone, right? Yes, so you can go in your camera roll. You can go see, you can kind of search your camera roll and it'll pull up a certain photo.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:It's kind of like that on a zoom. So how helpful is that to figure out what's working in your sales and what's not working on your sale demos? Again, it's a Zoom thing. If you're ever doing that, though, it's just showing you. Hey, when sale person Bob asked so what do you think about the numbers, or whatever, you can look back and then if you're looking to see what the customer's expressions were, what they said, you can go right to that. You don't have to sit there and watch the whole thing. It can pull up the different feedback when times are good, when times are bad, and it's helping them analyze everything to a certain level.
Speaker 2:They weren't able to before and, like I said, they have those meetings. It sends the meeting, it sends a full recording, a summary, to your email, literally within minutes. I think today our morning meeting was like four minutes long. I had the Zoom recording by 9.01 and the summary at 8.56. So our meeting today it gave us a quick recap, next steps, a long summary, but then it says AI generated content may be inaccurate or misleading. Always check for accuracy. So it's giving you the disclaimer.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I'm grateful that it does. But so in your opinion, you're using this AI tool directly, right? You sound pretty hyped about it. Do you see a difference when you used it before versus how you're using it now? In other words, ai less versus AI full?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean everything. You're using it now. In other words, ai less versus ai full. Yeah, I mean everything, and it's. It's awesome when I like find a new way to use or try something out, because, again, every day it's a learning experience. Every day it's like learning how to walk. Every day, again, um, and it's like, oh wait, I didn't realize I could use it for this. Yeah, um, one way. That was like this sounds really stupid, but I had a customer send in an order and it was kind of jumbled up in an email with different kinds of items, different colors, different sizes, different counts, different item numbers, and I'm like, oh gosh, that's what we try to avoid with what we do for our normal orders. But first, I'm customer, I'm not going to say no, how can I make this easier on myself? All right, I copied all the information, information I put it into the chat.
Speaker 2:I said can you tell me, break down all the different items for me so I can know what I need to order and get set into this order so we can do it right, so I don't have to waste probably would have taken me 30 minutes to go through of having to. All right, they wanted two of these, but this color, two of these in this side but this color. Just a lot of variances that I didn't want to deal with. I copied and pasted, just asked what I was trying to do. It said what my goal was. Five minutes later, less than five minutes later, it was ready to submit.
Speaker 2:Wow, so it's just things like that. And I was like, oh, this is freaking awesome and that's why I'm like there's just no reason why we can complain about time with tasks that are just there's better ways to do things. Again, it's like someone complaining about cars are going to take all the horses jobs when we invented cars and you don't have to ride a horse to go everywhere. No, no one complained about that, because you realize how fast you can get someone with a car, just like AI.
Speaker 1:Well, you know the way I look at it and the way I'm thinking about it because, as you're speaking, I'm trying to put myself in a situation of what would I do with it?
Speaker 2:In rent to own.
Speaker 1:How would I affect it? And it's crazy because Mondays are a big office day for us. There's a lot of meetings. We're talking about what happened last week, we're talking about what's coming down the pipe and we're talking about what our goals are for this week. So we're talking about what's coming down the pipe. As far as the month, where does the calendar end? How much money are we going to get this month? As far as revenues, what are we projecting? Where are our collections at? What are our sales at? What's coming up? Does this month have any particular dates in it that we want to celebrate Black Friday, christmas, whatever the case is? And then, as we go on, there's a lot that happens in these meetings, right? So I have an RM meeting and then I go down and I have a GM meeting because I want to relay all the information that I had on the first meeting and the second meeting, make sure that it's going down, and then they have that obligation to let everybody know, right.
Speaker 1:So instead of having every single store stop what they're doing so that everybody can hear this. At one time. It's tier level, right. It goes probably from the brass having their conversation with four or five people. Those four or five people have it with another four or five, 10, 20 people, and then, as it goes on, we have meetings every single Monday and every single Friday, so it's a setup meeting. Usually it's a review and setup meeting on Monday, which I don't know if it doesn't happen in all rent-to-own, but every rent-to-own that I've ever worked for, we absolutely have a Monday morning meeting and we have a Friday sales meeting, and it doesn't necessarily have to be a sales meeting but an updated meeting. Okay, this is what happened during the week. We still have two days to change it. This is where we want to go. I could definitely see.
Speaker 2:How are you doing those meetings now.
Speaker 1:Well, the first meeting. Well, actually, they're both on a Zoom type and they're on Teams right now. Okay, but my thought is, if I was to have that, if I was to utilize that and if I was to be able to as a rent-to-own, as somebody in operations and somebody who's looking future down the road, I would love to own my own rent-to-home and somebody who's?
Speaker 1:looking future down the road. I would love to own my own rental home. That is a goal of mine is one day to say I have my own brand out there and I have my own way. This is something as you're discussing it. This is something I would totally use Because, as something's being said, let's say in that RM meeting or a leadership meeting, and it comes on down, you want to remember everything, you want to do everything, you want to be engaged with everything. For me to be able to say my phone never goes off, I never get an email. Nothing distracts me during this. I didn't mean to miss it, but I'd be lying right, it's the truth. We're human, Things happen and then it's almost like a game of telephone right and we had a podcast about that.
Speaker 1:It starts one way and it ends another, and the best thing to do about the flow through a traffic is to do your best to make sure it's as accurate as possible. How accurate would it be if our Monday and Friday sales meetings were listed and detailed out in reference and you can even go back to something that was said or not said and go? You know what? That was a question I forgot about. Somebody asked me this question. I said you know what, I'll get back to you. And now I got somebody lingering out there who said you know what? I don't even know what we're selling. What's the sales this way? I'll get right back to you on that.
Speaker 1:Or what's the difference between the winter and the summer and why are we expected to be stagnant in the summertime versus the wintertime? Now, that might not necessarily happen in all the stores. I know that Florida is that way, especially because the way things go in our economy, it just flows that way. We have really slow summers because everybody's vacationing and nobody's doing it. Kids are at home and in the winter we get more visitors. And to be able to have an AI tool like that that can help me stay organized and help me get every bit of information from the top to the people who are on the front lines and operations would be amazing. And that's technology that's already in the world today. It's already here. I think it's an awesome situation that I love. I love to hear what are some common challenges that come, along with the AI, into what you're doing every day, Because we say it's there but you really have to. No tool is worth it if you don't use it Right. So we were talking in the first part about simple integration.
Speaker 2:How do I?
Speaker 1:train myself to say I need AI more. Let me.
Speaker 2:Use it Commitment from the top. If the person making decisions doesn't make it a priority, it won't be. That's with anything that happens in a business or organization. If the people at the end of the day that are responsible for others don't care about something, it's probably not going to get done or taken care of. But if you walk in and say, hey, we are going to start using this for this, or at least having it on hand and thinking about it, it becomes a thing. Make it a part of your routine.
Speaker 2:So, like you said, you had those meetings. I don't know what Teams has, but I'm sure they have something where it can record. But if you had it on Zoom, for example, you're going to say well, the next steps are these are what we're looking out for this week. That's going to tell you in that meeting. So now you can start knowing what you need to watch out for this week. You can do the same thing within your store at a level of store manager down. It just can start using it. It's just starting to use it and once people start using it, like I said, I only got more excited about it the more I used it, because then I realized you could do certain things, whether it's just fun or relieving, it's better and better because you're like oh wow, I can really use it. Something is only so good until you realize how good it is. You're not going to know, do you?
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Speaker 2:Those people that live in those communities that are cut off from the rest of the world. I forget what they're called, but there's that one in Brazil. Yes, we're like, oh my gosh, how do they live their lives? Well, they don't know about it, and they're not going to complain about it because they don't know about it In our world. We all know about AI, so we're going to want to use it if we start using it.
Speaker 1:And again, it's a balance of using it too much and using it too little. But you have to start somewhere. I mean already in use. You know, when you say stuff like Ikea is already building this, when we're talking about there's already orders being taken by a checkers bot for lack of a better term you have something like Zoom that's already integrated in what you have and how you use that tool. Zoom, to me, stands out the most because that's not only something that I know I would use, it's already really available, right, something that I would actually use on a day-to-day basis. I can't go to Ikea and say, hey guys, let me borrow your computer, while I set up one of my rooms and my people come over.
Speaker 1:What are some other tools besides Zoom that somebody already has access to that would help them out in that particular way?
Speaker 2:What do you use? What kind of systems are you using for your management?
Speaker 1:OS right now is VersaRent. So I would say that VersaRent has a big chunk of what's going on in the rental space right now. I think it's about 80% or something like that, and don't quote me on that. I know that there's a large use of it. There is other people that use other things, like RTO, rto Pro and versions of high touch and stuff like that.
Speaker 1:But I think VersaRent has been now almost accepted as the universal OS software. The good thing about that is, if you know a version of it, you know most versions of it.
Speaker 2:It's kind of like you said earlier like having an iPhone.
Speaker 1:If you know iPhone version 10, you know iPhone version 14.
Speaker 2:It's just a little bit better, right. So, yeah, that's more like what it is. What have you seen any difference this past year? Have they come out with anything?
Speaker 1:Well, most recently and I know that there are people in different steps as far as how far they've gone right, because you're using Claude 4.5 or 3.5, and I'd probably be using Claude 1.0. So there are different versions out there available. We started using the tablets, and the tablet allows you to be anywhere and do it electronically, so you can fill out your rental agreement electronically, you sign electronically, and it gives you the opportunity to not be stuck on paper, because once you fill it on a tablet, it will transfer the information into your system seamlessly, so that I can't go past certain things that I need to fill out. It just won't let me. And once I get it all filled out, instead of having to take that information again, which is usually the paper way you fill it out. Now you're going to give it to me and now I'm going to input into the system and then I'm going to put it in this file. Well, it does it all electronically. So somebody puts it in and now it's going to store it in a file sense and it's also going to input it into the account. That was something that I thought was great.
Speaker 1:Now I hear that it's either now or it's going to be very soon where they're going to be doing it in a tablet or a type of tablet out into the field. It's going to connect wirelessly, whether it be through cellular or Wi-Fi, and so if somebody signs it out in the field, it will also do the same thing, versus being just unstuck on the Wi-Fi that's dedicated to the store. That alone seems like a game changer. But then I thought why haven't we done that yet? Why isn't it here yet? Then the integration again. Like I said, you know we have a lot of small stores. How do we get them all together? And that's why I wanted to know, like Zoom is something that's already there and accessible to everybody. Yeah, zoom is something that I can. You know, I can go to zoomcom or whatever it is and I can pull it up and, depending on how far I want to spend on the budget, I can create this and use this for the RTO system already.
Speaker 1:And that's kind of what I feel like would be a room builder, like it's something that's already out there that I would end up utilizing and taking in.
Speaker 2:We don't need to invent new things. I don't think there's a single thing that anyone needs to invent to start using successfully or do anything that's real game changing.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:What's a common problem you see, or that you hear, that people have in the RTO space with doing certain tasks or handling certain things Multitasking, okay.
Speaker 1:I think one thing that rent-to-own has always had is it's a relationship business and being a relationship business, we don't have a ton of people there, right? We create relationships with the people we have and the people that come into our locations, because as much as we would love for our locations to have 20 people, some of them have seven or eight, some of them have three and four. It just really depends on where you are, how big your business is and where you've scaled it to, but generally it's about five or six, right? Smaller stores are generally five or six. You might have bigger stores that are eight, nine, but you don't have a lot of people, right? So, depending on the tasks that you have, you're doing a lot.
Speaker 1:You know what I mean. I can be working on a rental agreement and answering the phone and somebody's coming in the back door with some furniture and I have somebody walking in who's looking at something, and so the idea is how well can you keep those relationships going as you're multitasking, because you know everything that you do and the timeframe if I'm reading something and I'm listening, it's 50-50. I've already cut it in half. I already cut my dedication to whatever this is and whatever this is in half If you throw a telephone call into there that's it.
Speaker 2:It's out the window, it's out the window.
Speaker 1:So you really almost happen to start to select. Okay, I'm going to have to do this in order to do this, and then in order to do this, and the way I see AI is like that extra helper.
Speaker 2:That's what exactly it is.
Speaker 1:And I need you to do this.
Speaker 2:So something like that, if you are struggling with multitasking that's why I ask what tasks things people commonly deal with. Go find something I'm going to ask my handy-dandy chatbot what are its suggestions? Not Clot itself multitasking, which it'll do. Let's ask what are some tools? Rto store managers.
Speaker 1:Just so you guys know right now, if you're listening to the audio, he's actually typing it in right now. We need some real-time answers as to what we can use Multitask better he's actually typing it in right now.
Speaker 2:We need some real-time answers as to what we can use Multitask better. I'm curious Because, if I learn something here.
Speaker 1:I'm going to be shocked. I love learning new things.
Speaker 2:All right, it's got tools because it's confident. That's the one thing you notice with AI versus humans. It's always got something. It's going to tell you it's not going to be well, I don't really know. I shouldn't tell you this it's a straight shooter, honestly, and it's going to tell you again it's either yes or no, it's not opinionated. I mean it's opinionated but it's not going to as far as now. It's not going to try to mess with it.
Speaker 1:You know one thing that I doesn't have feelings, right. So if you get back something that you don't necessarily think is going to work the way you want it to work, or maybe you didn't input the things that you thought would give you the answer, or at least a general answer of what you're looking for, you're like you know what I do like the answer. It is informative, it's giving me something, but that's just not what I want. You can literally go in there and go no, that's not what I want. I want to do this, this and this, Get a response, and you don't have to worry about insulting the computer and saying you know what? I worked, enslaved, over the last 0.5 seconds to give you all these answers and this is what you tell me. I quit, that's it, I'm out. It's a whole different ballgame, right? So what do we have? What is it they're saying that we can use to multitask better.
Speaker 2:All right. So, like I said, it's got tools for it to share with us. Yeah, digital tools. There's task manager apps and I've heard about some of these, uh, like trello or asana. It tracks multiple projects and delegate responsibilities.
Speaker 1:Okay and that's all again, ai powered.
Speaker 2:Uh, there's digital scheduling softwares for employees, shifting time management, inventory management systems that send automatic alerts, restocking communication platforms like slack or microsoft teams or quick team updates. And again, I don't know how many people use slack.
Speaker 2:I know it's a lot of companies use slack and yeah, okay, um, their, their stuff is changed a lot and it's ai powered um. But, like I said, the asana thing is um one company we work with. They use it for everything because they're having three different reps assigned to a company account and they're all working on different things simultaneously. Their notes are all shared together. They're not missing something. Or if you're talking to a high level person there, they can put those notes they had in that conversation. It goes back into it correctly and it's not just sitting in someone's phone or notebook because, oh, I forgot about it.
Speaker 2:No it's not like that and in a different perspective, I'm just going to type in my Google Chrome search bar AI-powered multitasking tools. This is why it's accessible to everyone. You don't have to be a genius. I don't proclaim to be a genius or expert on any of this stuff but we use it. We use it because we go look for it. You have to go look for it. So, again, like that's why I asked what is something people struggle with? Just go look for it. Right now you're going to see the sponsored stuff and everything, but look through it. I mean, the first thing is a sponsored ad from mondaycom. Smart operations management systems all in one solution. There are so many things out there. Here's one the best AI productivity tools in 2025. Chatbots, search engines, content creation, grammar checkers and wording tools, video creation and editing, image generation, social media management. I mean all these things that take people time or take effort. Again, not all these things are gonna be great, but it's out Not all of these things are going to be great, but it's out there.
Speaker 1:You know it's glad you mentioned that social media management is something that we could probably all do better, and I know that you know, as you pull up Facebook, it has its own meta right and you can, you can kind of get in there and resched right. You can have something for TikTok, you can have something for Facebook, you can have something for Instagram, you can have something for LinkedIn coming from one spot. I'm glad you mentioned that because I forgot all about it. But the AI reminded me that there is a tool out there to literally manage all of your content, so I could take, instead of posting it to every single one every single time, hoping that it fits.
Speaker 2:There's no reason to do that now.
Speaker 1:Now that it fits. The program of this one allows 30 seconds, this one allows 60 seconds. This one has to be framed in a 16 by 9. This one's got to be framed in a 4 by 3. And you put all your content on there and it rearranges it or sets it up in a way that it can deliver at times that people are active when they need to be done. So I need it done on Friday, I need it done on Thursday. Well, it's going to tell me Thursday at 7.03 is when I'm usually more active than I'm not, and that's a great recommendation from AI.
Speaker 1:And these tools that are already set here are something that we can use all the time to get rent-to-own set up and kind of utilize this on our day-to-day, from Zoom calls to making sure that our information that we're putting down is being reviewed and taken care of on a regular basis, or social media content management. That is literally something that we need to be doing all the time, and if you're not doing your social media content management, you need to. Let me tell you now. There is where it's going, especially from what's going on in today's world, where everybody is connected to what's on their phone. It doesn't get any better than that. What I want to tell you guys is we appreciate you being here, as always.
Speaker 1:I want you guys to know I am wearing something from Vox Populi. This is the red shirts. The red shirts are here, so we're going to donate to our veterans that are deployed, or I should say veterans or people who are deployed Right now. There's a $1 million goal. Selling these, they would donate $5 to this fund and let me tell you, every bit helps. If you guys have anything that's going on in your place of work and you want to do some apparel, please think about getting the red apparel from Vox Populi. You can go online vox-pop-ulicom. Make sure that you go there and look it up. You can get this set up with Daniel and his group at Vox Populi. No problem, we are set up on Facebook because we make sure that we manage our Facebook, instagram, linkedin and you can always find us on YouTube and Daniel, we're going to go into part three now, soon. We want to see you back very soon, but, as always, I'll tell you get your collections low to get your sales high. Have a great one.
