RTO Legend: Larry Carrico of Rent One

Two stores, a fire that melted the backups, and a decision that transformed an operator into a multi-state force: keep the people, codify the playbook, and own the ground you stand on. We sit down with Larry Carrico of Rent One to unpack how acquisitions, training, and real estate leverage shaped four decades of growth without going public.

Larry explains why he buys underperforming locations and keeps local teams, then turns culture into a system. From Zig Ziglar’s “train the trainer” to DISC assessments and data-driven coaching, he shows how to match talent to roles, reward frontline excellence with driver rodeos, and make service the brand. He also reframes the RTO offer—don’t sell appliances and furniture, sell cold milk, clean clothes, and a great night’s sleep. That mindset powers sales, retention, and even legislative advocacy.

We dig into the hardest chapter: a devastating store fire that destroyed data and forced a paper-by-paper rebuild. Out of that crisis came a real estate strategy—secure options to buy, then build equity that funds expansion and remodels across eight states. Larry also shares why he stayed private: fewer compliance constraints, more room to invest in coworker-centric culture, and faster moves on programs that matter.

Looking forward, Larry is chasing the next generation of customers with gaming. Partnering with influencer networks, he’s structuring good-better-best PC offerings that speak to both men and women—because 45% of gamers are women—and positioning RTO’s advantage around service and zero-hiccup coverage that fintech copycats can’t match. He closes with advice for new operators: grow at the speed of your bench, buy property when you can, and lead with outcomes, not objects. And then a reminder worth writing down—work hard, but take time to smell the roses.

If this conversation sparked ideas, follow and share the show, leave a review, and tell us: what’s the next product category RTO should add?

Chapters

• 0:00 Legends Series Setup & Book Giveaway
• 2:14 Introducing Larry Carico And His Book
• 3:50 Why Write A Legacy Book
• 6:40 Early Career And Krista Rentals
• 10:25 Buying Two Stores With 10% Down
• 15:20 Acquisition Strategy And Keeping People
• 21:55 Store Consolidation And Modern RTO Changes
• 24:30 Training Philosophy And Zig Ziglar Influence
• 30:45 Scaling Leaders With Assessments And Data
• 37:10 Advocacy, APRO, And Legislative Wins
• 43:15 Selling Solutions: Cold Milk And Clean Clothes
• 48:05 Staying Private And Coworker-Centric Culture
• 51:30 Entering Wheels And Tires With RNR
• 57:40 Driver Rodeos And Frontline Excellence

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Hi, I'm Pete Chao. You may know me from the Arts Go Show podcast, but today I'm doing something a little bit different. Apro and Wild Brents have launched a special project to bring the story of our industry to life like never before. They've asked me to sit down with some of the true legends of Rent2Own, after their stories, their impact, and their vision for the future. And now I get to share those conversations with you. A new book. The Red to Own Revolution, a definitive history of advocacy of the demographic, written by April CEO Charles Twitter, the WildBrown studio Wildcraft. The book explores the grassroots of RTO, the advocacy that has defined it, and the future that we're building together. Here's where you come. We're giving away free copies once the book is required. Just head over to rtorevolution.com and sign up for a chance to receive a copy in early 2026. Don't miss the chance to be among the first to hold this piece of RTO history. That's rtoorevolution.com. Check it out and become a part of RTO History. Hello and welcome to the RTO show. I'm your host, Pete Shao, and today we're with another legend, probably a legend that has a great story. You want to know why? That story comes in the form of a book right here. Larry Cariko wrote the book on owning your life. And you know what? I can tell you right now, it's a good book. It's a good read. I'm not all the way through it yet, but it explains a whole lot. I'm learning a lot more about Larry that I didn't know on the road. But Mr. Larry Cariko, how are you doing today? How's everything going in your neck of the woods?

SPEAKER_01: 1:42

Well, we like to say it's going great, but it'll get better. So that's what I'm hoping for.

SPEAKER_00: 1:47

Well, if you guys don't know, right now there is a whole lot going on in the world today. But the reason that I wanted to talk to you, Larry, to be real honest, you have a story, so much so that it came out in print. But I wanted to talk to you about your journey. And, you know, let's let's start out with the basics. What made you want to start writing a book and get that out?

SPEAKER_01: 2:08

Well, the book was kind of one of those things, I guess you might say, you know, when you got grandkids, you got family, you want to leave a legacy. So we kind of started out just so they understood what it we were about. So my wife Sharon and I were like, well, you know, you could we could tell them today, uh, we can tell them tomorrow. But if it's put in writing, you know, you you see it, believe it, it may make a difference. And that's kind of how it started out. But at the time we were in the COVID side of things, and if you recall, there was a lot of things going on, and people that came to work for us wanted to know our story, and it became really prevalent at that time. So you could you could tell them all you did and everything else, and they would hear it, they check you out. But when you wrote it down, that's kind of what we decided to do is to write it down, and then we shared that with our coworkers, and that was kind of cool because they got to hear the inside story, what really made it. A lot of them knew a little bit. People had been around 20 or 30 years, they knew our journey, but that was you know not the only reason. And the third reason what we saw was that there's so many great people out there. I was just listening to uh you know Lynn's story today. I I think it came out on April, so today I was listening to him, you know, and I've heard his story, but not quite as much detail. So I appreciate what April's doing and what you're doing, and and as well as the WoW brand as far as bringing those um you know stories to flourish. But everybody has you know, Glenn can write a book. You could go back to the the people, Gary Ferriman's, uh Shannon Strunks, all these guys that are out there in the industry can all write books. There's no doubt about it. So I just happen to have some time on my hands, and my wife and I wanted to make sure the grandkids, before we pass any wealth to you, you gotta pass a book report. So we we have a little book report. When did we start the company? When did, you know, how old is Pawpaw? How old is G-May, you know, stuff like that. So that was kind of the that was kind of the reason when we uh you know started to write it. So that was that was where we're at.

SPEAKER_00: 3:57

Well, it's definitely a book to read. If you guys haven't read it, you can get it online and go to Amazon and get it, pick it up. It is own your life on building a family business and leaving a legacy by the caracos. And your your wife had a lot to do with that as well. I know that you know, as I'm reading the stories, kind of going back and forth from different viewpoints and how she saw things and how she grew up and how you did the same, and then how it kind of comes together with the family and the culmination. I'm looking forward to finishing it. I do appreciate I do appreciate the read. I really, really do. I kind of feel a little bit closer than I probably should see it, but I know a little bit more about you. So at the beginning, you meet your wife, you guys start starting to come back to the rent-owned side of it. At one point, and correct me if I'm wrong, is this Krista Rentz? Was that your first?

SPEAKER_01: 4:39

Yeah, it was called Krista, C-H-R-I-S-T-A. So Krista Rentals, and I happened to be the owner's name at the time. His his daughter's name was Krista. That's kind of how it started. Actually, it was the owner's um partner's daughter, and that's how Krista Rentals, and it was basically started in St. Louis. Um, and we opened stores all over the I mean, I opened stores from Florida all the way to Wisconsin. So I worked for him from 81 to about 85. And uh during that time I learned uh a lot about the industry and what to do and what not to do. And uh, but we we learned a lot and we figured out the financing part of it. We've seen, you know, how you do it, and and that's you know, I learned a lot from him. From Jack, his name was Jack Lawrence and his son Steve were they were actually Curtis Mathis dealers. So he was one of the guys that went around and opened up Curtis Mathis stores. So, you know, the big 25-inch combos with um, you know, that weighed about 200 pounds and stuff like that.

SPEAKER_00: 5:39

Yeah, they did, they did too. I think I think I I pulled a muscle or two uh moving those around. And so how did you how did you get from the position of working with them to then it was like a one or two-store purchase when you first started out?

SPEAKER_01: 5:54

Yeah, so so I had opened up all these stores, and we opened up in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, and we had another store in Florence. Uh, this was a time he was struggling. We had a lot of different we used to, I used to build them, you know, I'd put carpet in, put counters up, and then we would grow the stores to three, four hundred uh AOR, B O R back to time, and then we would a lot of times he would run into debt problems and he would sell, you know, at 10 times, 7 times, 8 times, 12, depending upon who it was, to a uh a different owner. And then we would close the stores and we'd take the cash, pay off the debt, and then we then I'd start all over. So I opened up probably 40 or 50 stores throughout um South Carolina. We were in Asheville, Florida, Tampa, St. Pete, all over the place. And eventually that came kind of to an end where the they were struggling and they asked me. I was the general manager, I was running the stores, and they just asked me, look, uh, we can't afford to pay you anymore. So would you look at buying these two stores down in Alabama? And I just opened the stores up, so I knew what they were, and that's really what happened. They offered me a deal. It was a 10-time deal. We were doing$19,200. I still remember it. Uh so we took the money at 10 times, was you know,$192,000, and that was my first thing. And of course, I didn't have any money. I was listening to Lynn talk about his father. My father wasn't quite as generous. He said, sorry, you need to figure out how to come up with uh the 19, because back then, Board Warner, they would say, Trans-America, they would say, look, if you give us 10%, we'll finance the rest. So anyway, I came up with I hocked my car, sold my house, and I had$19,000, had a little over$20,000, put down the 10%, and they gave me a line of credit and allowed me to buy the stores. And that's how we had started. We had two stores, and um, you know, and many of the young guys that are out there trying to get started, they always ask me, they say, Well, Larry, you know, how did you get from two stores to 100? Well, how did that happen? Well, it was actually a lot more difficult to run two stores than it was one. So what I did, dad always taught you, uh, get rid of your debt. You need to pay cash. So I sold those two, I sold one of the stores, paid back, I don't know, 80 or 90,000, whatever it was, and and I owed$70,000 or$80,000 at the time, and I had one store. And uh at the time, Board Warner thought, that's pretty cool. They paid us back. The other guy wasn't. So, and then they offered me the stores in southern Illinois, and and kind of the same type of deal. I didn't have any money. So if you want me to open the stores or run them, you'll have to give me the line of credit, similar to what Lynn was talking about, too, is well, they just kept giving you money. And uh we kept utilizing it and paying back our debt, and you know, we ended up uh doing that over and over until we, you know, continue to expand with the people part of it. I mean, you can't expand anything unless you have you know great people, but we were able to do that. So that's kind of how it how I got to from St. Louis to Muscle Shoals was because of default.

SPEAKER_00: 8:52

So as you're growing, right? And and they're saying, hey, listen, we have these places here, you're paying us back, we think that you're a good fit, you're we think you're a safe bet, we want to go with you. Did you have the opportunity to kind of like identify these markets and say, you know what, this is a better market for me to go into? I don't want to touch this one because I don't feel right about that market. How did you identify the right markets to move into, especially not just one or two, I mean cross-border markets from Alabama? Because I think that's where it's where you got your starts from. How did you start looking at it on the outside of the of the state and outside markets and go, you know what? I think this is when it's gonna work for us best. This is gonna kind of give us the best bang for our buck.

SPEAKER_01: 9:30

I had a little different philosophy than most. I was one of these guys who said, you know, if they were in it and they were maybe non-successful, because we made I I very I opened very few stores from scratch. Almost all my stores were done through acquisitions, which was kind of unique in itself. So uh we had a lot of Curtis Mathis, color time dealers, a lot of those same people that we dealt with. And plus, I had already opened the stores in Southern Illinois up for this Jack Lawrence. So Crystal Rentals, I had operated those and we had changed the name from Krista to Rent One, and the idea was to compete against ourselves. So there's a lot of guys that did that during these last 30 or 40 years. They would have, you know, rent one over here and Crystal Rental over here, and that's what we did. So I knew from the past because of the success when I opened them, I had stores that had maybe five or six hundred agreements on rent, and they had dwindled to two or three hundred, and that's when they I bought people's um uh mistakes are less opportune. So I knew if he could get to a certain point, I knew that I could build it back up. And that's that's really there was no science in it. It was really about people who had failed or they wanted to get out of the marketplace. You know, they said, hey, I'm 65, 70 years, I want to get out of the place. And they said, Hey, Larry. They'd raised their hand and I'd say, Hey, good, let's do it. And I still do that today. You know, we still make acquisitions quite often. But the reason they were successful and people allowed us to keep doing that was that we always kept, or at least tried to keep their people. That was a big thing for you know, all of us owners is the last thing you want to do is go into a marketplace and you don't know it, and the people are the bit most valuable assets. That's what we did. We kept our people, grew the stores, and you know, kept doing it over and over, and and that's how we worked.

SPEAKER_00: 11:17

So the idea was the acquisition to take over growing the stores by fixing, not necessarily picking the market, but picking the store in the sense that if it's not working, I know I know a way to get it done. I know a way to fix that. I know I have this plan that will make it work.

SPEAKER_01: 11:35

Yep, yeah, that was it. It was just uh and some of them had already been successful when I first started. I knew the stores because I highlighted open most of them. And uh, but but the people part of it, and I came from a background I probably read in the book where I was in the shoe sales side. I used to sell shoes, and I could sell the heck out of shoes and shoe trees. But what I really learned from Floorshine was they were a big organization and they had a corporate structure. So when we were in rent to own, like everybody was saying, you know, we started in the 80s, we didn't know, you know, we didn't know anything, we didn't know how to discipline employees, how to write coaching sessions. I did all that. So what we did was typically take those same people that were not successful, and we allowed to coach them up instead of out. So we offered a hand up instead of a hand out, and that helped out with those people. They didn't they they had to work for their dollars, and we learned a lot when I was with Floorsheim and the formal training of that. So that was the the big advantage. And I had applied it at Krista because I worked for them for about four years, and so I had seen where that had worked, and they allowed us to do training programs, and they had a very formal training program. We did the the Zig Zigglers and the you know, train the trainer and and uh stuff like that. So that's that's really what it was. We had everybody has great people, but can you get the greatness out of those people? And that's what we really worked uh hard on.

SPEAKER_00: 12:57

Real quick, how many stores does Rent One have at the moment?

SPEAKER_01: 13:01

Well, with our R ⁇ Rs, we have about 113, 112 uh stores, and and so we've um the rent ones now are two below a hundred. We have ninety-eight. We've done some consolidation, and that's kind of an industry thing that's been going on. We were in a lot, we made an acquisition with uh Dan Cole with the National Rent to Own. And we had a lot of stores in the city, so we were on every street corner. But the system, the programs now have changed so much with auto pay and the ability to, you know, do online payments and do online deliveries. You don't need to have a store in everybody's backyard. So our revenue continues to grow, but we have less stores, so average revenue per store is higher, and it makes it a little more profitable from the end of it. But uh that's that's where we're at right now. I think we have 98 on the Rent One side, and then we have a hundred and or we have 13 on the RR. So we have 111 stores right now.

SPEAKER_00: 13:55

So, you know, one thing that I heard, and I've heard this from the guys at APRO, and I've heard it from some others, is that one of the ways that Rent One has been able to sustain the success that it has is because of the training. There has been a big focus on training. So you had mentioned earlier that, you know, you had been able to come in and put a hand out uh to help them up, so to speak, and get them trained. What were some of the things that you focused on when you're talking about training these people and getting them going? What was some of the training like? How did how did your training teach them differently from the training that they had received beforehand? And how did that come into Rent One success overall?

SPEAKER_01: 14:34

Well, you know, um back then it was Zig Ziggler. So I'd learned some things along the way with uh Krista. So I'd went to a couple of these, you know, where they fill the auditoriums or the stadiums or whatever with people. And Zig was a uh mentor of mine. I actually uh 87, I believe, when we first moved to Mount Vernon in 87, we didn't have a pot to pee in. And so we used our dollars to uh to go to Dallas and and we did this thing called train the trainer. And so he'd give you this big, you know, he had this big book and you had your cassette tapes and you had to plug them in and and do that. So we worked on the people side of it. We worked on the uh, you know, attitude determines your altitude. You know, you probably heard that one before. And you know, everything that he did was based upon motivation, and even motivation is only good for so long. You know, you can take a shower, but you got to take another one tomorrow to keep it going. So the problem with motivation is how do you instill that into other people and help them continue to be successful and do it. And that's what we found the key to when you have a great mentor, and you know, we've all been around and heard all the people that um you know that continue to read books and do things that are are right, but you have to constantly be doing that's that's really where it started. And what we did was we were able to put that in a rent-to-owned format. And if I if I recall back at the time we had a we had a a program uh program called Company Cake, so you can have your knowledge and eat it too. That was kind of the and and apply it to, I think is what my my wife had kind of started out with, you know, that's you can have your knowledge and and actually uh you know do well with it. And so we put that platform where all the rent-to-one dealers, and you could actually plug and play it. And that was back hell when you know websites weren't even around. So we we were able to be able to do that, and uh, you know, they could find out. We used to have the CYA courses cover your butts, you know, when we talked with Edwin, and and one of the problems that you had, even though Rent One did it this way, Ernie Llewellyn didn't do it that way, or Shannon didn't do that. So we all had to do things in a different way. And so we provided the platform that was generic enough to get us to from point A to point B, but it had the ability, you know, to critique it so that it was customized for the you know the uh UHRs of the world and people like that. So that was that was kind of cool how we were able to do that. And we would actually plug and play it. So if somebody said, here, give me your manual, I can rewrite your manual to go into the program. So we were always worried about raising our hand wrong, knocking on the wrong door, saying the wrong things. At least we had a course that said you took it on Tuesday, December of 2020, or back then it was 1988 or 1999. So that that's kind of how it worked is that uh we would use other people's expertise, and a lot of times it would change. You know, people know a lot more than I did at the time, and together we were able to create a platform uh that was very successful at the time. I think we had, I don't know, four or five hundred, three or four hundred stores that were on the platform that would log in and we would we would learn, we would teach our people. And April picked that up too. I think Charles is is doing some things right now with the training programs. Well, we did that before back 30 something years ago.

SPEAKER_00: 17:44

So you know, you had made a statement earlier that it was it was a lot harder to run one or two stores than it was a lot of stores. You know, it it and I'm sure that's because you gotta be a lot more in-depth, you gotta let that go in. But what were some of the disadvantages, and I wouldn't say disadvantage, but what's some of the hardships of getting into this multi-store? You start out with two and now you have five, and now you have ten, and then you have fifteen, and then you have twenty. What were some of the trepidations that you had to go, you know, to get past, or some of the things that you had to figure out along the way that kind of kind of pretty heavy speed bumps that you're like, I've got to figure this out in order to make this work?

SPEAKER_01: 18:21

I think we all have the same struggles is that we find a good manager as a store manager, he can run four walls, but when you stick 20 walls on him, five stores, and he has to do it, we all want to be a supervisor. Oh, we want to all want to be better. What we were successful with a lot of times was able to find that. We were able to use, and we do a lot of tools now. We use disk assessments, we use uh a lot of training programs that'll say, look, you know, you're you're a hard charger, but you don't have enough compliance. You're gonna allow this thing to fail. So we've looked at the dynamics of training people based upon what they really do. And we can see that our most successful people have these three common traits. We're able to get that out. We communicate with people differently than what with every regional manager. You got one regional manager who's high compliance, he's a high D, you know, he's a dominant guy, man. He's he's a hard salesman and everything else, but he's not compliant. Well, what happens then? Well, you put it out on rent, but we forget to collect it. So, you know, there's some some avenues there that we learned along the way that allowed us to we use a company called ITN that allows us to compare. So we use data people that says, look, based upon this, um, he he did things like with uh Hyatt Regencies and find out how these guys that sell those uh timeshares and stuff. How come they can sell so much? Well, as long as they don't have to collect it, they're okay. And so he used a lot of dynamics. He went to people like um some of the um uh surf pro people, and they know exactly how close those people live to their homes. And you want to have someone that's gonna clean. Well, we follow that with the Ds, with the drivers. We're trying to find somebody that works well with a serve pro for our delivery techs. And then, of course, you want to have people who are wheel techs or you know that do the calling on the phones. They have a different dynamic and personality. So putting the right person in the right seat of the bus is really important. And I think going back to your original question, how'd you get from how'd you find people that did that? We realized that right away because we had some really great, successful people. And we just tried to make sure that we found people similar to that. And we asked them the questions. And you know, they told us what they wanted to do, and they didn't always succeed. You got to remember the breakup is a lot harder. You put somebody in that position, they fail what happens. But you got to make sure that they understand that yes, you can come back, you know, and we did a lot of that at first. We it was kind of hard, you know. It's first off, they're going backwards, they thought, but you didn't. You know, you remained in compliance with what you want to do. You're good at this. You're not good at 20 walls, you're great at four. And you can have 20 people in one store, or 11 people, or 12 people. You don't need to have, you know, 20 people spread out over five stores. You're not as good. So that's that's really how we did it, one step at a time when we had people. The big problems was if you tried to buy three or four stores. We usually only bought one or two stores at a time. That's why it took that long to do it over 40 years, but we stayed around. We didn't leave. And then, you know, probably some of the other challenges, I think like a lot of them were probably gonna say is financing. How do you find money? How do you keep borrowing money? Well, my dad always told me, as long as you pay it back, everybody's gonna give you money. We're gonna give you money as long as you pay it back. And we always made sure that we paid our vendors and our banks first, and sometimes you didn't get a paycheck. Um, you know, when we first started, hell, wife was over there doing stuff at the craft store next door and stuff, and she had a she had her degree and all that, but you know, you you had to do what you had to do to get to the next step. So but we all had that, I'm pretty sure.

SPEAKER_00: 21:57

So when when you're doing all this, as you're growing, you're finding people, you're expanding, you're paying back the bills, where'd you find time to join April? Because you you joined April way back in the 80s, correct?

SPEAKER_01: 22:09

Yeah, I think it was about five, I think about 1990 or something like that. So I've been there 35 years with with APRO. Um, well, it really kind of started out kind of as unusual because I was in Illinois, and of course, we had a bunch of people who were attacking, you know, the state of Illinois. It was a pretty, even back then, it was pretty, you know, they they thought, I think Lennon mentioned, you know, they thought we were bad guys, you know, we're ripping people off. So you had to be able to explain it. Once you could do that, you were in great shape. So Edwin and and back then it was Richard May, probably somebody might remember that name. They come knocking at our door and said, Hey, Larry, would you come up to Illinois and represent us? I said, I don't know how the hell to speak to legislators. I I've never had any of that skill before. So it was kind of weird. I ran into a junk, a young man, he was a congressman, you know, he was a state representative at the time. And the guy who was going after us was the head, uh, his name was Voss. I still remember Congressman Voss, a representative Voss. And he was set on the chairman. He was a committee of the um uh retail program or for the the buying portion of things for Illinois for the people who were doing bad things. He was he was the policeman for it. The problem was that he uh couldn't chair, he couldn't sit at the chair's position, he had to step down. And the gentleman that stepped up as the chair heard my side. And we had a guy named Ron Damas back then with Rena Center, they were there. We had Richard May, and I don't think Ed was there at the time at that particular meeting, and we told our story, and he agreed with us, opposed to the representative. So there's five people on the committee, and it took three to two. It was two to two, and then the chairman, you know, he had voted against us, but the new guy, which uh he ended up being he's still a friend of mine to this day, voted the other way. And when he did that, uh we beat him. You know, we were able to keep the rent-to-owned transaction, and from then on it we wrote the laws. April wrote the laws, and you know, we we were trying to go through the state side. Once that happened, I was a member of April. I raised my hand and said, Where do I sign up at?

SPEAKER_00: 24:15

That's it. Let's do it. You know, one of the things that I remember uh this last time that we went to LeggeCon, the legislative conference that we have in DC, you know, that April puts together and we're there, you know, Charles was actually quoting you when he said that, you know, we don't provide a refrigerator, we don't provide just a bed, we provide cold milk and a place to sleep at night. And I think it was, you know, I think it's some of that when you have all those years that you've been able to be a part of April, when you have all those years that you've been able to go and experience the business like you have from one state to the next, the families that we've touched, I think it's those kind of statements that help us get through to our legislative bodies and let them know that this is a this is a business,$11 billion industry that is here to help the community and not take away. But I'd imagine in the course of all the years that you've been doing this, the 40 plus years that you've been doing this, you've come across some people just like that who've really wanted to stop the situation and and hold on to it. And I would imagine that that is what led you to be uh the president of April at one point in time between 2006 and 2008, right?

SPEAKER_01: 25:22

Yes. Yeah, it was um it was always people challenge you, but it but again, as long as you can sit there and talk to them about the program or get him into your store right now. I think we're just as successful than when we hit to the hill in in uh you know Washington, D.C., getting one of your legislators or congressmen into your store to show them. We've had we've had congressmen deliver product for us. We've had them out there on the in the back of the truck. There's a couple guys out there right now that are pretty, pretty voice for us. Well, we got them to come in and and check us out, and we had people interview us and talk to us, and when they talk to our clients, they figured out. But you're exactly right. You know, cold milk, and I I was actually this last time I was in DC, we were starting to talk to, I had a legislative aide. He didn't know what was going on, but he was talking to us, and I kept talking about how we provide cold milk, clean clothes, great night's sleep. And uh, we were talking about cold milk. He says, Well, how do you how do you rent cold milk? I don't understand what you're ice or what? I said, No, man, this guy was sharper than a knife. You know, he was really sharp. I said, No, we provide a refrigerator, the products that actually provide, you know, the things that we need for our house. And it's a lot easier to sell clean clothes than it is a washer and dryer, because that's what people needed. I mean, even when we started, we've always had that type of saying that, hey, this is how you how you do it. We're not selling refrigerators, we're selling cold milk bedding. How do we become such a big betting store? You know, that great night's sleep. I have a whole story when somebody's walking through the store, and I always tell this one is that they're looking around, they don't know, oh, I don't need anything. I said, How would you like to get a raise? And he said, What do you mean a raise? I said, It's real simple. I said, if I get you a great night's sleep, how are you gonna feel? He said, I'm gonna feel great. I said, if you feel great, how's your uh employer gonna feel about you? Well, he's gonna feel really good. So is he gonna give you a raise? Hell yes, he is. If he gives you a dollar an hour, how much do you make?$40 a week. How much is this bed? It's only$39.99. So in 12 months, you're gonna own it. So we have stories like that. You can do the same thing with the linery mat with washers and dryers. So the stories are all relatable so that people can really understand. We're not, uh, and that happens a lot of times. The reason our stores are most successful is they do that. You know, we're selling products, but we're really not. We're selling solutions or providing solutions, not even really selling it. They understand it. That's kind of how we did it.

SPEAKER_00: 27:37

Well, we definitely provide solutions. We provide the ability for our family to be able to get through from their day-to-day processes from beginning to end, whether it be a good night's sleep or clean clothes, go to work, or whatever the case is. And uh, that's really why I fell in love with rent to own. You know, I want to know, you've been able to kind of grow this business in a in a different way. There's no there's no doubt that rent one is a beast. It is a huge company, it is thriving. But you know, when companies get to a certain count, you usually end up like like the uh the publicly traded companies. You got Iraq, you got Aaron's, things like that, but you've stayed independently owned. It's SKC Enterprises Incorporated, correct? Yes. So what is what is that where is that decision, where is that definement between going public and staying private? Because you guys have done that. You've stayed private, you're doing very well. Are there some advantages to being private? And what are those advantages of of having a privately owned company?

SPEAKER_01: 28:30

Well, the biggest vantage is I don't have uh have all these compliance rules, you know. So if I want to pay somebody, you know,$40 an hour,$20, whatever the night, I can do that. I don't I still have to follow rules, but you know, when I want to take all my people to um, you know, Cancun or we take them on a cruise or whatever it might be, you know, we can feel we're only relied upon us, we're not relied upon shareholders. So we have three cultures we feel. So when you look at the Nikes of the world, they're client-based, they're all about the customer. And then you have the IBMs who are really about the shareholder, you know, they're trying to provide a shareholder. Well, we we feel ourselves as co-work eccentric. So we're trying to provide, and when you think about what we do, if you don't have the great coworker, you don't have the great person working there at the store, you can't provide any of that. So you can't offer great service if you don't. And I think that's the difference between when you're um publicly held, whether it's Rent A Center or you know, buddies and all the rest of them, when they were doing that, the problem that you had is that you had to satisfy somebody else. And they were the ones putting your money, that dollar or two dollars a share that you know they get as a dividend, that goes back into the company. So when you don't have any debt over this time, you can put programs together that make a big difference, that impact people in a way that are uh creating a lot of success for us. And that's that's the reason. The last thing I wanted to do was uh, and we weren't we've never been big enough to go public, you would have to do some crazy things, but it's the compliance sign, I can tell you that. And I've been audited by our IRS and all the rest of them. You don't want those folks in your uh the FTC, you don't want those people in your stores and your and your stuff, but but but but sometimes it happens. Uh that's that's why.

SPEAKER_00: 30:12

So as you're growing, and and you're in traditional rent-to-own at this point in time, right? You're in in traditional rent-to-own, you're growing, you're acquiring, you're assimilating what's going on with them to how you do things, you're training them, you're bringing them up. Where did where did the RR situation come from? And when did that start? And how was that going for you?

SPEAKER_01: 30:31

Well, you know, of course, Larry, he started the program and stuff, and it was Larry Sutton was, you know, a great, great rent-to-own kind of guy. So he understood it. When he told me about the program, he had several of us that were involved. Uh, a lot of the the early adopters of it and stuff were trying to figure out what the hell, what's this thing about renting tires and wheels? And actually, tires weren't really the mainstay, it was about wheels. And so we hung them on the wall, and the idea behind it was the ability to not have a lot of inventory. So I had to look for somebody who was able to understand vehicles and cars and had a passion for it. Still to be successful in the wheel and tire business, I believe you've got to have the passion. So I had a gentleman named Rich Bergman. Rich was running our Rent One stores, he was the general manager at the time. And we were going back and forth about expansion and opening new stores. I had some great talent. I had Trent Agin, had Mark Williams, I had a guy named Murray back, and Laurie does our MIS and just a lot of really good people that were at the core of our business. And I wanted to give them an opportunity to grow too. And Rich said, hey man, I want to start it from groundwork, so from ground one. And so, you know, he had one store. We opened up our first store in St. Louis. Um, we had wheels hanging on the walls, and why I did it have no actually idea. And we we about lost our butts in that because you know it's not like you're providing uh cold milk or clean clothes. I'm providing a vanity item. So people were on our ass and saying, hey, you know, you're selling wheels. What's this thing about wheels? Well, then we switched to the tires. So a guy named David Harrison came up with an ideal, and Dave said, Hey, we need to provide people a way to work safely. So when that happened, you know, many times I was in the store, and I recall one time that that happened where somebody pulled up with a car, and we used to call them Maypops. So the lady pulls up in a in a minivan, she's got four kids in the back seat, and she's got four ball tires, and they're gonna pop anytime. And so we rolled her, yeah, so we rolled her around back, and you know, back then it was you know four tires, you know, a 15-inch tire might have been, you know,$20 a week,$18,$20 a week for four tires. And she was looking for a used tire. Can you put me a used tire? You could see the tire going down. He said, no, roll around, we'll put you four brand new tires on there, and you pay me 20 bucks, and you know, we'll roll you out the front door, and you, the kids will be safe and you can get to work. All you gotta do is miss one day of work. So that's how the tire business uh transacted. And and a lot of guys are doing, you know, Mike Tissle was one of the uh you know pioneers of of doing it in the stores. But the wheel and tire business, the RR side of it is a lot different because you control every aspect of it. I mean, from tighten the tires and the wheels down, I don't depend on a third party. You know, I have cameras all over the place looking at which wrenches they're using to tighten, you know, you got a red, you got a blue, a yellow, whatever. And so all those things are actually being uh looked at so that we get the customer out safely. And uh that's a big difference. And it's like we do in rent to own. It's much, much more a business opposed to kind of like renting jewelry or renting washers and dryers. We're doing the complete experience from you know making sure that the product is aligned properly, you know, they're balanced, they don't jump up and down. So there's a lot of things that help with that. That's how we got in. Rich Rich raised his hand and said, Man, I I like tires. We he didn't like tires, we like cars. And so he he got us to where we're at today, and he's still the president running, you know, running our 13 R and R stores.

SPEAKER_00: 33:56

So as you're as you're adding to the training program, and now you've got to add R and R in there. I could swear I've seen somewhere online a driver rodeo. Is that right? Was it was it a uh and I'm I don't know if I'm saying it was a driver rodeo, but I think it was a driver rodeo. We kind of got all everybody together and they perform like these various tasks or things that they can do to earn a spot and all and essentially win a trophy. Is that is that how it goes?

SPEAKER_01: 34:19

Well, that started with rent one a long time ago. So we had the DT rodeo, so it was a delivery tech. And so it started out very hands-on. So we had to back up a car and you and you had a glass of water sitting on top of a cone, and they had to back up appropriately, not bump the glass, just all kinds of different things, making sure that the uh washer and dryer hookups are done properly. All those things were done live in our warehouse. And we had this big we did all of our um repairs for washers and dryers and TV. We had our own repair service, 40,000 square foot of you know, making sure that we got stuff back in a timely way. Well, that's where the DT rodeo, coming to the RR rodeo, is a little bit different. It kind of works on the same, same premise, but right now uh we made it virtual. So we took this thing completely virtual where that they have to ask questions and make sure they had, because we're in, you know, we're in eight states and you know, trying to bring in it was very costly, but it works out the same way because they love to get. I notice you have a metal back there behind you and stuff, you know. They they like to flip, we we had belts, DT rodeo belts, uh, we've had hats, we've had you name it, we've had it. So that that's we don't take care of the people who are the last contact with our clients, and that's what we looked at in the training program. They are the most impressive. They're the first ones into the home and usually the last ones out. So we made sure that experience was good. And a lot of people have adopted it too along the way, and they've changed it, made it better, or you know, whatever. So that but that's how it started was the DT Rhodia drivers, uh, you know, the the trainers that were there. So it was it was kind of fun. They really enjoyed it.

SPEAKER_00: 35:55

Well, I have to say that I agree with you 100%. This particular uh this particular thing right here, um, that was my float goat trophy. It's a big, you know, big thing that you hang on your neck, and the store would win it for that particular month. At some point in time, you know, I was running the seven stores in the Tampa area, and we were having a float problem. You know, it was just we were just having a problem getting it down. And so I wanted to recognize the guys who were doing it right, give some mentorship from them to some of the other guys uh that we had to say, this is how we're doing it, this is how we see it, this is the what we allow to happen or what we don't allow to happen, or how we come across these situations and how we react to them. And so slowly but surely, regardless of the fact if anybody says that they have buy-in in that or not, and oh, it's a silly thing, they get involved. You want to know why? Because you don't want to be the guy left out. And so you we made it fun, we transitioned it every month. We make sure we take pictures, we we wanted to show off the team that was doing a great job. And if they did it again, you know, you have the two-peat and three-peat, hey, this guy's in the third month in a row, he's he's kicking butt, you know, make sure you take care of your guys or give them lunches or whatever the case is. But I agree one in 100% that you've got to get them involved some way, shape, or form in the solving the problems that they have. And when you do that, they want to learn. Um, because to be honest with you, success is something that you can teach if they want to understand the processes. If you follow the processes and you do this, you will be successful. But the most part, the hardest part about success, I think, is sticking with it. Because sometimes that there are hard times, there are failures that you go through, there are hard points. Just keep at it. And then keeping at it, you end up with 98 stores and and and uh you know, some rent rolls, and before you know, or excuse me, the RRs, I want to say it because I I said it at all Larry had to correct me. Uh Adam had to correct me. But you, I mean, you guys have done an amazing job. So going from the few stores to the many to adding the RR, then you throw a little bit of APRO on her, you're doing the legislative conferences. What made you decide uh, you know, when you became president, what were some of the things that you were able to enact or do in those two years that you feel, you know what, Carico's been here, rent one's been here, I left my mark.

SPEAKER_01: 38:03

Um, I don't know if we really left a mark as much as we um, you know, you had to fill a position, and that's what you're looking for. April said, you know, when you talk about Bill Keese and Ed Wynne back and then, those were great leaders too, as well. And, you know, people like Bill built his bench, just like we build our bench in the stores, and that's what he did is that we were an active and a working ward. I remember so many times you didn't get to be the president or the treasurer or the a board member unless you served on a committee. So we would have committees of three and four people, whether it was communication, so we had a training, you know, we had a training, that's how I got started. I came up with the Zapro thing or with the training program. But it was all started by being on that committee. I was the chairman of the education. And if you were the treasurer, part of your responsibility was being um, you know, was actually training. And then you had a communication, so the people that were doing web stuff, and back then it was just starting. So that's how it really began, is that I continued to see and keep that program going. It changed later as leadership changed and people moved around, harder to find people. But but it was really keeping all these committees together that served you as a good bench. And, you know, just like the stories, like I said, if you got a strong bench, you know, how did LA win? You know, how how did uh what happened with Toronto? Why is that? You know, you got runners, you got hitters, you got pitchers, and we had that going with people like Bill Keys and Shelly. She was a she was she was the training person. So Shelly was our um Martinick was our our great person there that was doing and and Talisha, some of them are still at APRO now, and they've you know served for 40 years like I did. But that that was how it worked. I didn't really leave anything. Um, I just didn't take anything away. I continued to add to it, just like you know, all of us. That's the reason you're successful. It's not because what you do as much as it is what the people do for you, and that's what they want. To do. And everybody always wanted to serve Bill and uh the people that were at April, which was our actual people in the field, you know, all of our rent-to-owned stores. You know, back then we had 8,000 stores. You know, there was a lot of them out there. We weren't doing as much business. Now we have five or six thousand stores, but we all do a little more revenue. That's the only way to make money because it got tighter.

SPEAKER_00: 40:19

Right. Well, you know, I had the opportunity to meet Bill Keys, John Blair, people like that on the podcast and doing this legend series. And just some amazing, amazing people. You know, the situations that they found themselves in, the way that they built this industry and how we've gotten from there to here, it's just amazing stories. Talking about amazing stories, tell me what was one of the hardest, most difficult transitions you had to get through or issues that you had to get through in the last 40 years, coming all the way through with rent one. What were some of the things that probably something that that really kind of put a speed bump in your way and it and it took a little bit to overcome? Something that kind of helped define Larry, so to speak.

SPEAKER_01: 41:02

So I think it was 1996. We were in Malvern, Illinois. So in Malvern, Illinois, you had a downtown area. So it's like the old downtowns. And I had this big, old, huge building. It was called the Mammoth Building. It was like a Fox or a Famous Bar or a Sticks, you know, some of these big stores back then. At the time, we had our computer system was with a company called Cass. And actually, we might have just started with High Touch, but anyway, we had backup tapes. And you might have remembered, a lot of people probably do. You had tapes, that tape drive that you put in. We had this big fire and the store basically burned to the ground. So we didn't have the backup backup tapes were inside there, but we pulled them out every night and we took them over to the bank. So we went to the safety deposit box, and you know, oh, we're gonna be okay, we're gonna be okay. You know, High Touch has it backed up, and it was called RSS back then. They've got all the tapes backed up. We'll be up and running in two days. All that stuff's on a computer, back it up every night. First off, we went next door to the bank, right across the street, pulled the tapes out, put them in the computer for the drive. There was nothing on it. We said, you gotta be kidding me. So they said, Oh, that's not a problem. High Touch has the, or not High Touch, it was RSS. They even have to back up tapes. We're okay there. We called them up, they looked. They said, Well, your tape drives weren't working. We weren't having the proper communication. We don't have anything. So what you talking about, Willis? You gotta be kidding me. They didn't have it. So what was the third thing that happened? I got the computer. It's at the bottom of the, you know, we got it this little box. It's about this big, about this wide, and it's got the tapes in it. So we dug this out. We had a machine that dug this thing out and we found them. There they were. They were in the bottom. But the heat was so intense when we pulled the tapes out, they were run. So I said, what are we gonna do? First off, we don't have tapes of all the stores. We don't have tapes at all of my biggest store. We were doing, at that time back in Mount Verno, we were doing$125,000 a month on rent to own. So that was like a big part of our business. We were able to have RSS go to each store and back up those, but we literally had a uh a room, so we were gonna be, we were really uh trying to be uh go green back then. This was back in 1996. Well, we had this little room in the back of the store, and the wind was blowing out of the southwest. It was blowing out of the southeast going west, and we had this little room that had all this paper. The only thing that didn't burn down was that little room. The fire had started in the middle of the store, and the wind kept blowing over. So they were able to pull out pieces of paper. We literally went to the car dealership. It was a car dealership that it went out of business, and we took tables and we built the business back at least about$85,000 or$90,000 worth of big business out of paper. Terry McLean still works for me. Terry's in our store, and he's actually one of our buyers now and does all of our PO systems and stuff. He was there taking pieces of paper, putting it together, matching it up with the client. We didn't have anything, but piece. So we rebuilt the computer, and the last piece of paper might have been two weeks ago. We had people that didn't. Everybody learned about it. People knew about it. So people were volunteering, they came in. But I was about, you know, potential revenue, schmirr, whatever the people call it, I was about$40,000 light. So um instead of having$125,000 in PR or Schmirr, I had about$85,000. So, but anyway, we we we learned from that one. Uh we got better backups, but we also found out what people did. You know, most of the people were on us, a lot of them came back in. And I think I only had seven payments left. Well, you know, this people's paper says 13, you know, and or uh I think I might have had 22. No, you only had 12. So there was a lot of back and forth, but we rebuilt the store and we actually had to move. We were in a car dealership, and how I got into real estate business was because of that fire. So um I went to an Ace Hardware store and I told my wife, I said, Sharon, what are we gonna do? I said, Ace Hardware's there. I think they're eventually gonna go out of business, they're having problems, so I'm gonna buy the shopping center. And I did, and they didn't go out of business, so I ended up having to build uh a shopping center. So we went from that small, I don't know, it was 12,000, 15,000 square foot to, you know, we have almost a million square foot of uh property that we own now that we lease. So we own a lot of our own buildings. Uh we own you know, Dollar Generals, we lease to Dollar Generals and stuff like that too, as well, all over seven or eight states is where we're at in there. But it all started because of a disadvantage or to a challenge or a setback, as we might call it, to uh and my son Stephen runs all the real estate. You know, he does all the you know collecting the rents and doing the things, and he's you know he's good about that, and and Kelly's involved. She's the COO. I think you know Lynn talked about his son, and then we just got our middle daughter, Nikki. She was in New York. She's uh she was a documentary. She actually just started with us and does all of our marketing too, as well. So her and Mark Williams are all of it. So it all came from that little fire.

SPEAKER_00: 46:13

So I gotta I gotta I gotta ask, because now that you brought up Kelly, what happened to the podcast? I haven't seen it in a while. Is it still up and going?

SPEAKER_01: 46:20

Uh I don't know. They haven't been doing as much. She her role has changed a lot because we've had some people move around. So she's been pretty busy out on the streets. Her and Dusty, you know, they still have fun here. We still do a little bit of this. And and uh I I think we'll probably come back with Nikki, that's kind of involved the video portion of what we had used to be there, and so we've got different people in those situations. So I think it'll come back. I'll I'll mention it to her. Uh we'll try to try to get them back on on air. Because it was mainly doing it for ourselves.

SPEAKER_00: 46:51

Well, I'd love to see I'd love to see Kelly on there. I'd love to see Dusty on there. Uh I I would I'd love to show up on the show at some point in time. Maybe we can work something out. But you know, one of the things that always caught me was is that rent one had such a great expansion. Uh, how many states is it in right now? Uh we're in eight. So eight states, almost a hundred locations, actually one time over a hundred locations. And you know, looking at all that, looking at the the ability to to kind of scale to grow, I always thought, you know, and and maybe I I haven't gotten to that part in the book yet, but who are some of the mentors? Who are some of the people besides your wife? Because I know that you and your wife play a very dynamic team, but you know, what were some of the people or what was who was there to really help you get from point A to point B through these years?

SPEAKER_01: 47:41

Um, as you know, the the industry itself is really um inclusive. I mean, you know, you can ask anybody anything. So, you know, a lot of the people that we talked to over the years were maybe my same age because I was pretty young and the industry was so young there wasn't a lot of really older people that were there. But, you know, Dan Cole, so typically you stayed within your own marketplace. So, you know, Tiger John Cleek, you know, Dan Cole, myself, we used to hook up all the time and you know, talk to congressmen and try to get them to, you know, carry our bill. And then you would see people, you know, whether it's Gary Farriman or um, you know, Larry Sutton, you know, of course he was a great man. A lot of these guys were back out there in that particular time, and they were doing stuff that was different. But I probably learned a lot from Bill and Ed on the rent-to-owned side, but I learned just as much from people like uh, you know, Zig Ziggler. I talked about him. Um, we used to go to, I mean, I would go to every one of his luncheons and anything that he always did, and we knew each other uh somewhat from that side of it. So it was a great experience. So in order to get better, I needed to talk to people outside the industry. So whether it's training, internet, web design, and you know, my wife was an integral part of that. But some of the people that we hired, whether it's you know, IT, you know, or MIS people or software people or training program, I actually had a company called ESPonder that we were the first homeland security people. I did a lot of crazy stuff, uh, Radio Shacks that were, you know we always talk about failure being a um you know event, not a person, because man, I had a lot of failures. I had internet business, I had uh we had dial-up service, so you would come in my store for 1995 and I'd I'd hook you up with the telephone number, you would dial in and you'd hook it up. I had point-to-points. Used to, you know, I had a DS6, which was a big, you know, they used to call them DS3. They had internet box. You know, I had a line that ran in, and I shoot that internet to the uh colleges, to the University of Southern Illinois. And uh I would try to get people to do it, and then all of a sudden Verizon says, oh man, you know, we know how to do that, we see it. They were selling it for less than what I could provide it for. So, you know, we learned a lot of things through failure and point of sales. I I wasn't, I talked to a lot of people because I went to April and to Trib and all those things. We learned never do you come out of there without learning something. But we also went outside the industry and we saw things that people were doing, and I think we have a lot of that going on today where people are always looking for educational things, whether it's you know, podcasts like what you do or you know, YouTube videos of how we get to here and you know, gaming. We just started a big gaming process that we hooked up with a company called Xet. And uh they have a lot of influencers. We have people like Clicks. We found that our revenue is substantial in the gaming portion of it, and we also know about our betting. Uh, that's become really so we want to do the same thing in gaming that we're doing in betting, and uh, we have our separate you know, bodies that we come up with a lot of stuff that was new like that too, as well.

SPEAKER_00: 50:35

You know, talking about these new things and how things are are working out and the ventures that you've gone down. In your opinion, where do you think the next evolution of rent own is going? I mean, when you came into it, there was a lot of everything was I wouldn't say everything was new, but there was a lot of new. There was a lot of separation, there was a lot of new. As April comes along, there's a gathering trip comes along, there's that gathering, you know, John Blair does that, Bill Keith does his thing, and so everybody starts coming together, they're they're forming these associations, and now it wasn't like it was then. Now it's a little bit more unified, it's a little bit more uniformity. But now what's the next evolution? As you guys, as the legends start coming to a point where there you are leaving, and there are some that have already retired, you know, the larger than life Ed Wynne has actually decided to take off his hat and decided to step down as you know, legal counsel for April. He's done that. And we talk about Ed Wynn almost every time that I talk to somebody on the Legends podcast because he does such an amazing job or he has done such an amazing job. As these years start to wind down and these generations, like you said, the children you know that that come underneath are being passed on to. What do you think the next evolution for rent to own looks like?

SPEAKER_01: 51:44

Well, I mean, part of it's the younger generation of people doing it. Well, they stick, you know, as he goes second and third. I think we'll be okay. This next generation that comes in, you know, Gary's got his son working for him, Lynn's got his son, you know, Shannon has his kids, David David has his. We all have, you know, Chris Cale, we all have our people that are working. And I've been asked before, how did you get, you know, how did you get uh Nikki or Kelly and Steven? How'd you get those guys in there? Well, it's because of what we do to make sure that we keep our disclosures together. They understand how hard work is. So I think it's our people, but we've got to change the way we're doing business. You know, I'm going after that younger audience, and we talked about gaming, being a 12 to 24-year-old. Our aging of our clients keep continuing to go older. And you've got to find a new basis. So, what I'm looking for is that, you know, 15-year-old, I'm willing to wait four, five, six years to get that person, you know, when they need a bed, you know, when they need cold milk, when they need clean clothes. So those gaming is a way that I believe that we can get into it. So now we set up our stores to have good, better, best. The consoles are cool, but 45% of gamers are women. When I was in the stores, me and Trent were out running around stores. We would talk to the manager. Oh, I got my console. No, I've got my I've got my desktop, you know, I've got my high-powered machine or and and I'm good. Well, what'd you do with your Xbox or your PlayStation? Well, my wife has that. I said, Well, does she get to play with yours? No, she doesn't touch my machine, you know. So, so we're seeing that XET is the company that we're working with now. They've come up with some ideas that are incredible in order to find these influencers that are working. And they they believe it's about 65% of the ladies are the new business. And so they have influencers that I mean the men have already been gaming, but our our ladies are actually out there, and you can even ask the store managers. It's amazing what they'll tell you. So we we think we've got to change the age dynamic because our clients keep getting older. The revenue that they have, they graduate. Sometimes our clients graduate to retail or 180 days same as cash or they go to the yesemas of the world or the progressives. So we've got to be careful with that, not allow that to happen because we don't want to confuse the issue. We're still, you know, lease to own, rent-to-own. You know, we're providing those services and you can bring them back. They don't do the same thing we do. And I've had clients tell me that. You know, I tried that program, even you know, Flex, um, uh Flex, uh, same way with them. You know, they're doing some rent-to-own, but they're not servicing the product. Our customers can't have hiccups. And that's a big thing with our club programs. You know, we really provide the service completely through so that they don't have to have that experience where they get dropped. I really think it's that we've got to find a new client. You know, the wow, and you know, Mike, he's just great at doing that. And uh, you know, there's a lot of guys out there doing a great job with it, but it's still we got to keep refreshed. We got to find new products, new things, whether it's jewelry or gaming or whatever, those are those are good things for us.

SPEAKER_00: 54:38

So that helps with the longevity of it. What would you say? What would be advice that you would give to somebody who's now coming into the industry and trying to make their way, make their brand kind of push their way through? What is something that you would pass along to them on the podcast and say, if I knew this, if this is something that you can do, if you can get this done ahead of time, this will put you in a better spot to continue growth and prosperity.

SPEAKER_01: 55:02

Number one, we talked about the five P's people, program, pricing, products, and promotion. And you do it in that particular order. If I knew back then, it took a fire for me to understand about the value of property because you can leverage that property. So if I'm a new guy, I just come into business, I'm gonna start out with the lease for three years and making sure that we secure that program, not for three years, but for nine. You can always tell them, you know, when you have the option to purchase that I can't do it. But if you don't have that option to do it, people are getting hung up. Make sure that we're always looking to be able to buy the property that we're in, or at least have an opportunity to, because that's an asset that doesn't go away. And it can actually be started out at 200,000. I picked 200,000 in it, this product's worth a half a million dollars. I can leverage that to buy more RTO products. And a lot of guys don't do that. It's always about just lease it. Take every reserve dollar you got and you spend it on product. There's a balance, you got to do both of them. If I'd have known that, you know, back then I would have started in in uh 1985 buying properties or looking at it. And I think that's a big thing for us to be able to, you know, make our mark, our brand. And that way I can create the brand the way I want to look, whether it's remodels or whatever, opposed to dictating, you know, what the last guy did and stuff. So I I say those two things. Number one is people, of course, and number two is to make sure that we have the programs that can keep us looking good. And we've seen a lot of that. We're no longer in the B centers or the C centers. You know, we're usually on the street corner. RR does a great job. We do a lot of work with that too, as well. So that's kind of where I I think the advice is that you can't build, you can't grow without people. I still do that today. I got a failing store and you want to walk into another market. Get me the people, then I'll consider it. We don't grow until we can go, and you gotta have the right people in the right place.

SPEAKER_00: 56:47

So then with everything that you know, last but not least, we're gonna before before we before we take off, I want to know you got Larry today. Today's Larry is sitting down across from yesterday's Larry. You've got 30-year-old Larry looking back at you. What is something that you would say to him if you would have known, do this, do that, if you could say to this Larry, not just somebody who's starting out and not somebody that you know you're trying to guide the way, but what would be that one bit of you know knowledge, whether it be don't give up, whether it be you know, keep pushing through, what would you say to yourself?

SPEAKER_01: 57:28

Well, I think you gotta take time to smell the roses. You know, I was gone a lot. I think I Lynn, I guarantee everybody we had, we worked our butts off. But you still gotta do that. You gotta make sure that your work ethic is great. But you know, making sure that you still have the kids and enjoy what you have. There's a lot of times I was growing up, you know, I heard Lynn time, you know, you're gone 72 hours a week, and and I remember some of that. So can't do it. It's gotta take time. Take time. So that's what I would do.

SPEAKER_00: 57:56

Well, Larry Carico with the great words of wisdom, take time. Make sure you give people the knowledge and the business to understand that real estate is good. You got to stay on top of it, the knowledge of teaching, growth, acquisition, and making sure that you take care of the ones that you have around you. Larry, I really appreciate you being on the show today. I appreciate you taking out the time to talk to me because listen, I know that you have a lot going on. If anybody doesn't know, it's taking a while to get to get Larry locked down because he's got so much going on. We've been having to go back and forth. But I appreciate you taking out the time to talk to the show. If you guys have anything that you want to ask Larry about, hit me up at the show at Pete at the RTO ShowPodcast.com. You're welcome to go to the website at the rto showpodcast.com. Also, therto show.com period is coming. I'm gonna get on that one too as well. But we also are on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and where you're gonna see this on YouTube. Larry, I appreciate it so much. I appreciate you being able to share this with me. I'm going to finish reading this book this week. So I'm gonna tell you how it goes. I'm halfway through it. For you guys who don't know, you guys can go to Amazon and pick that up. Larry, I wanted to say that your insight and everything that you've done for the business, including all the years that you've gone to LedgeCon, being the president of APRO, being a part of April, and having the business you do has been a light in some tunnels for some of the younger guys of our of what we do. And we look up to that. We appreciate that. We appreciate you, Sharon, and everybody else.

SPEAKER_01: 59:20

Yeah, we appreciate all the people. That's probably the thing that RTO does the best is you know, we're willing to, you know, we we share back and forth. So there's never a secret. I mean, it's every we're all an open book. All you can do is read about it. Or you can watch the podcast. You can watch the podcast. And it's a lot more fun. We'll have you back on the new podcast. You will be our first guest when she reinvigorates it.

SPEAKER_00: 59:42

All right. That sounds great. Well, we appreciate you guys stopping by and watching us, and I will tell you guys as always get your collections low to get your sales high. Have a great day. Hey everyone, it's Pete Chow here from the RTO Show podcast, and I want to tell you about a company that's making a real difference in the rental owned space. WoW Brands. I've seen firsthand how they approach marketing. Let me tell you, it's not just about ads. WoW Brands builds complete digital ecosystems designed specifically for the rent-to-owned industry. Their e-commerce and lead generation strategies are built to bring in qualified leads. And did I mention that they are actively working with the rent-town industry while also being members of APRO and Trib? Listen, these folks are passionate problem solvers. They don't just slap something together, they design, build, and scale the kind of digital retail tools your business needs and your customers actually want. So if you're serious about growing, reach out to WildBrands at WildBrands.com. I trust them, and I think you will too.