was single-minded and impatient, a young bull who muscled his way into an account when he had to. “He was averse to controversy,” Jones said of his father. “I wasn’t.” Angry that they had no share of the collections business at the local hospital where he had been born, Jones, still in his early twenties, demanded a meeting with the hospital’s board of directors. He wanted his father to join him to lend his support and the weight of his name, but the old man wouldn’t do it, Jones said. “Dad was so nervous, he went home.” Jones drove by the family house on his way to the hospital. His father was sitting out front in a lawn chair reading the paper. Jones was twenty-four when he bought out his father for $100,000 and named himself the chairman, president, and chief executive officer of Credit Bureau Services, Inc., a company that in time he would sell for more than $10 million.
Success prompted Jones to start dreaming big. At the start of 1993, shortly before visiting James Eaton in Johnson City, he began accumulating land in the hills just north of Cleveland. After work, he would drive to his property, light a cigar, sip a Scotch slushie, and dream about the grand home he would someday build on his hill. “I was always fascinated with the Beverly Hillbillies’ house,” he told me. He wanted to build an equally impressive home so that people would remember him long after he had passed.
“Most homes were designed to last a hundred years, maybe,” he said. “Mine I wanted to design to last a thousand.”
Driving me around Cleveland, Jones was grousing about some of the more ludicrous things people say about him. At the Home Depot he overheard two men talking about him. “I’m telling you,” one man said to the other in a voice of utter certainty, “the fixtures are made of solid gold. Solid gold!” Jones shook his head. He has pewter, stainless steel, and perhaps porcelain faucets in his new house on the hill, but none, he assured me, are made from gold.
“There’s a price that I never realized I’d pay for fame,” Jones said. “People think the worst of me.”
His son attends public school. His home number is listed in the phone book. Jones told me both these things the first time we spoke and then repeated them not ten minutes into the start of our two days together. He mentioned this pair of facts a third time during our driving tour. He pointed out that he was driving a Ford pickup. He could afford something much more expensive, he said, but that’s not him. He pointed out that his jeans are frayed and his boots scuffed. He buys his suits from a local clothes store. He was intent on convincing me that he’s still a regular Joe, despite all his riches.
That is no easy task. His home is still reachable through directory assistance but it also sits behind a locked gate on a hill high above town and includes two working elevators. His youngest child does attend Cleveland High School but while I was there he was driving a $300,000 Maybach, a loaner from his father while his car was in the shop. Jones, a self-described “car nut,” had an air-conditioned garage built on his property to house a collection that includes both a vintage Rolls and a vintage Bentley. And then there are the planes and yachts he owns and the $12.3 million he spent in 2002 buying a dude ranch in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, because, he explained, “We really enjoy being out in nature in my household.”
People talk about his jets as if they are proof that he’s just another nouveau riche entrepreneur who indulges every whim despite the cost. But that’s only because “the common person,” Jones said, “just doesn’t understand business.” The three big jets he’s bought over the years have been purchased through an airplane leasing company he calls Jones Airways. His payday company leases the jets from Jones Airways (in 1999, Jones was charging himself $360,000 a month for the jets plus extra for flying time), which has allowed him to claim the jets as a business expense. Jones Airways was briefly a three-jet airline but he tells me, “I sold the big one. Had it eight months but sold it for a $10 million profit.”
Jones only wishes he could say the same about the 157-foot yacht he bought a few years back after the previous one, a 136-footer originally owned by Spain’s King Juan Carlos, was destroyed in a fire. “In the last two years I owned it, I was on it maybe fourteen days,” he said. It was a gem, he said—a vessel with “an abundance of exquisite and highly detailed woodwork,” marble tiling, and ten big-screen TVs, according to
Jones didn’t waste any time once he had decided to jump into the cash advance business. He leased an empty storefront on a busy corner and spent two days fixing it up before he opened its doors. Let MBAs with their fancy degrees waste months writing business plans and modeling alternative scenarios. Three weeks after visiting James Eaton in Johnson City, on the first day of summer 1993, Jones opened a store he called Check Into Cash. His first customer, he said, was a military man who needed $100 to buy a bicycle for his daughter’s birthday.
Not long after opening that first store, he opened a second one in a town thirty miles away. As a sort of experiment, he put a childhood chum he was inclined to describe as a “lump on the log” in charge of that operation. It didn’t seem to make a difference. That store made money just as rapidly as the first. He consulted with a big firm in Chattanooga whose lawyers advised him that there was nothing in Tennessee law expressly forbidding him from making these high-rate, short-term loans, and he opened another seven stores around the state in 1994. He collected nearly $1 million in fees that year and yet the stores, including salaries and bad debt, cost him only $486,000. That left him with half a million dollars in profits.
He was preoccupied running a statewide collection agency so he hired Steve Scoggins, a man he had known since they were both kids, to help him oversee the payday portion of his business. He gave Scoggins a budget of $1 million and told him to scout for new locations. After doing some research, Scoggins asked him, do you want twenty good-looking stores or sixty that don’t look so nice? Jones chose the sixty. In 1995, Check Into Cash generated nearly $1 million in pretax profits on $3.7 million in fees, operating stores in Tennessee, Kentucky, and Indiana, where a quirk in the law exempted small loans from the state’s usury provisions. Neither James Eaton or Allan Jones invented the payday loan. Moneytree, a check-cashing firm on the West Coast, had been offering cash advances to its customers since the late 1980s, as had QC Holdings, a check casher that started in Kansas City, Missouri. But Jones was the first to pursue the cash advance as a stand-alone business with blue-sky potential. “It was like we was filling this giant void out there,” Jones said.
Jones wouldn’t have to look far to find his first big competitor. It was a local man named Steve McKenzie, who was a few years ahead of Jones in high school. McKenzie, who everyone called Toby, had grown up poor in a family whose woes were serious enough to draw the attention of the local authorities. He cut a high profile in town even as a teenager, when, to help support his family, he took a job delivering newspapers in a smashed-up Volvo he had bought for $150. A social worker named Joe Kirkpatrick used to look in on the family and especially McKenzie’s younger brother, who had a penchant for getting into scrapes. Kirkpatrick had a theory that people in public housing have no dreams unless they invent a different dream every week. McKenzie was different. “Toby was rough around the edges,” Kirkpatrick said, but likable and also a hard worker. Kirkpatrick made sure to keep an eye out for McKenzie because he struck him as one kid whose dreams seemed attainable.
Jones and McKenzie first met in the late 1970s, when both were still in their twenties and McKenzie was looking to rent space for a new business he had recently gotten into called rent-to-own. “You know how stores rent TVs to people?” McKenzie said in explaining the business to Jones. “I’m going to rent them everything. Living room sets. Bedroom sets. TVs. Everything.”
“Nobody’s going to rent their bed,” a skeptical Jones responded.
“Man, you don’t know. You just don’t know.” But even if Jones doubted the business, he recognized McKenzie as his kind of businessman. Buy a television in a store, Jones remembered him explaining, and you might pay a 20 or 30 percent markup over the proprietor’s price. But rent out that same TV by the week and you make several times what you paid for it.
Competition was inevitable in a business that lucrative, and down the interstate, just south of Cleveland, a rival had seemingly opened directly across the street from one of McKenzie’s stores. The warring between them seemed particularly fierce, with banners that said things like “Don’t be ripped off across the street!” Joe Kirkpatrick remembers expressing his sympathies to McKenzie when they ran into one another in town.
“He looks at me with this big ol’ grin on his face,” Kirkpatrick remembered, “and he says, ‘Joe, I own ’em both. The type of person who goes to a store like mine, they get all pissed off because you repossess, they get back at you by crossing the street. I’m just givin’ ’em a place to go!’”
McKenzie’s rent-to-own empire was up to eighty stores when he hired a CPA named Jerry Robinson to put his
