Pete sits down with Mike Tissott — president of Countryside Rent-to-Own (40 stores across Ohio and Kentucky) and newly elected president of the Trib Group — for a wide-ranging conversation on family business, buying groups, and where the industry is headed.
Mike's origin story is straightforward: his dad started the business in 1985, built it to 10 stores, and eventually gave Mike an ultimatum over dinner in Charleston — come back or I'm selling. Mike came back in 1997 and has been running it ever since. The first person he met at his first rent-to-own convention was Chris Kale Sr., just as Kale was leaving Buddy's to start Rent King.
On Trib, Mike is clear about what makes it different from other buying groups: it's laser-focused on independent rent-to-own dealers, not retail broadly. When Trib was previously aligned with Brand Source, members were being sent to retail showrooms where vendors didn't want to sell to rent-to-own operators. Breaking from that allowed Trib to serve its actual constituency — small and mid-size independent dealers — without being a retail afterthought. Over 50% of Trib's membership is one-to-four-store operators.
The product conversation centers on the challenge of replacing the PS5 revenue cycle now that pricing and rates have softened. Mike frames it through the Moneyball lens: you can't replace one big product with one other product, you replace it with three. His answer right now is mattresses, bedroom furniture, and high-end gaming laptops and desktops. More broadly, he says the opportunity in the industry isn't necessarily finding the next hot item — it's doing existing categories better and slowing the churn. Every store open more than a couple years has served a thousand customers, just not all at the same time. Getting paid-out or lapsed customers back is where growth actually happens.
On marketing, Mike credits Facebook Live as one of their most powerful tools, citing a store manager in London, Ohio with 4,000 followers who can go live and sell product like an infomercial. He traces the marketing evolution from TV commercials to flyers to direct mail to social, and says the next step is getting better at all three simultaneously — social, direct mail, and old-school guerrilla marketing like visiting lost customers in the field.
On leadership, Mike's mentors are his parents and Gary Fairman of Showplace. His operating philosophy is simple: make Countryside a great place to work and a great place to shop. He runs new employee orientations every six weeks and has for 25 years, always telling new hires that if they don't come to genuinely believe they're doing something amazing for customers, they should go do something else.
The episode wraps with the credit-or-sales question — Mike goes sales, without hesitation, noting that the best medicine in rent-to-own is more rentals, and that everything in collections depends on a sale happening first. His parting thought: the stores that really thrive are the ones where sales and collections work together with no walls between them.
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