The good: no big check up front
There’s good and bad about renting. The good is that you obviously don’t have to pay a lot up front. Using a vanity number in your advertising delivers an immediate dollars-and-cents benefit to your business, and it gives you instant credibility. You can use the value you gain from having the vanity number to pay for the number.
The bad: it’s someone else’s property
But there are significant downsides to renting too. The biggest problem is that you don’t want to build your business on someone else’s rented property, because that means they can yank the carpet out from under you.
If the company renting it to you is a very small organization, often just one or a couple of people, building your business on a smaller, often less reliable organization is an issue. Even a nice guy can have life issues that are outside of their control, and you don’t want that to affect your business.
In addition to the potential unreliability, if they’re marketing their service based on vanity numbers, not by providing competitive service, then they’re not going to work hard to provide the best service possible. It takes a lot of work to keep up in business today, and vanity number businesses really aren’t trying to compete by providing the best possible service.
Related to that, if you need a more custom solution, not just regular toll free service, you would probably need to transfer your number to a specialized vendor. That’s really only a small percentage of customers, but if that’s you, it’s an issue.
Rent-to-own: the best of both worlds
One way around the downsides of renting is a new combination that one vendor offers, and that I’m suggesting all of the vanity services offering monthly plans adopt. It’s rent-to-own. Instead of paying the monthly fee every month forever, there’s a term to it. That changes the relationship significantly.
Every month, as you pay the monthly fee, you’re paying off an asset, which in the end you OWN. So it’s really not rent. That’s PRINCIPAL, and you own it in the end. It’s like buying the building your business is in. As long as the business is successful, you’re not only getting the value of having the number for that time, you get everything you paid into it back in the end, because you have an asset that’s probably worth more than you paid for it. So you didn’t lose any of the monthly payments you made. You get it all back in the end.
Your ace in the hole
Most importantly, if the owner of a number you’re in a rent-to-own relationship with tries to do something you don’t like, you have a buyout option. That’s your ace in the hole, and it gives you the benefit of owning the number without having to pay for it up front unless you need to.
One other benefit of rent-to-own is that they can’t raise the rate. Most rental companies will automatically raise the rent by some amount every year. But rent-to-own is a set price for a set amount of time, and that gets around it.
And if Google or someone comes out with some new AI technology that you need, and they don’t offer it, you can buy it out and transfer it away. You’re never stuck!
You can walk away at any point
Rent-to-own also lets you test the concept. If it doesn’t work out like you hope, or things just change and you go in a different direction, you can stop paying for the number at any point. The owner is committed to not raising the price, and to releasing the number when you’ve paid it off, but you’re not committed to purchasing it. You can walk away at any point. That’s why I say you get the best of both worlds.
You’ll probably get back much more than you paid
Plus, you’ll probably even sell the number for more than you paid for it, by a factor of ten. I think the popular way to say it is that you’ll get exponentially more than you paid, for two reasons. First, your use of the number made it more valuable. And second, being in the business, you have more credibility, you’ve proven the value of the number, and you know the biggest prospects in it.
It’s also going to increase the value of your biggest asset, your business. That increase is almost certainly dozens of times what you paid for the raw number.
Many numbers on VanityNumbers.com come with a monthly rent-to-own option. Search your word to see what’s available.