How Litmos Became Pawn 1’s Entire Training Department

• Customer: Pawn 1 
• Industry: Pawnshops/Consumer Lending 
• Challenge: Pawn 1 needed to establish a new-hire training program for 30 locations 
• Solution: They selected Litmos to build a single learning path for employees and leaders 
• Outcomes: Pawn 1 now offers 8 courses with 52 modules and 38 training videos, with an eight-week Leadership Academy

Inside the Country’s Largest Independent Pawn Chain

Dana Wilson, Director of Human Resources for the last 11 of his 20 years at the company, describes the business like this: “There’s a lot more to the pawn industry because it’s not only retail and e-commerce, but it’s also collateral-based lending as well since we buy things off the street.” A customer might pawn an Xbox for a short-term loan, sell it outright, or trade up to a PlayStation, all under the same roof as jewelry appraisal and federally regulated firearms sales. 

The Challenge: Thirty Stores, No Consistent Training

Wilson had cycled through LMS platforms for years, “one to another to another,” as contracts expired and rates climbed. Two years ago, he landed on Litmos through a third party and used it mainly for compliance training: anti-discrimination, sexual harassment, and fair hiring for his 30 store-level hiring managers. 

Pawn 1 didn’t have a real, standardized new-hire training program, even though the business is more customer-intensive and higher-stakes than standard retail. It also had no formal leadership development for the 50 people who run the company day to day. Building both was a priority for the COO. 

Turnover is an industry-wide reality in retail, and Wilson knows it well. In Boise, for instance, he says, “I had about a one-third retention of new hires… one out of every three new hires I hired wasn’t making it,” the kind of number a stronger onboarding experience could help move. 

The Solution: From Compliance Tool to Long-Term Bet

Wilson had already tried several LMS platforms before Litmos, and he’s blunt about the comparison: “I do find Litmos to be by far the best out of all of them. I cannot say enough about the support that I’ve got from Litmos.” Two years of using it for compliance had already proven the platform could be successful. So when the bigger decision came, new-hire training for all 30 stores, it wasn’t really a decision at all. 

“Because the COO chose to use Litmos for our new hire training, we’re going to be using that for the next 10 years,” Wilson says. 

The Results: Built by a Team of One

Wilson isn’t part of a large L&D team. He’s Pawn 1’s entire training function, with one HR colleague keeping the department’s day-to-day running while he built out courses and the learning program infrastructure. Like a lot of Litmos customers with small or solo teams, he didn’t have the headcount to hand this off, so he built both programs himself. 

For new hires, he built a single learning path with 8 courses and 52 modules, anchored by 38 training videos his in-house media team filmed on location: role-play, narration, and scripted scenarios walking a new hire from day one through their first 30 to 90 days. Each block ends in a knowledge check, each course in a pass/fail test with unlimited retakes, and welcome videos ease new hires into a job that spans firearms compliance, jewelry appraisal, and video game trade-ins. 

For leaders, he built an eight-week Leadership Academy as eight separate learning paths, weaving together three distinct outside speakers, one more humorous, one more authoritative, one more engaging, so the content, in his words, would “bounce off each other” building from fundamentals to advanced leadership. Weekly reflection-prompt surveys, run through Litmos reporting, gave him a real read on how his leaders operate, and he fed those results into Claude to spot patterns, like how many leaders default to building relationships versus how many say they need to delegate more. 

The Retreat, and What He’s Tracking Next 

Both programs are newly launched, the results are still ahead. But the targets are clear: stronger new-hire retention, especially in high-turnover markets; managers who delegate instead of doing everything themselves, so stores run just as well on a Saturday when the manager isn’t there; and they’re looking to double their e-commerce business this year.  

His leaders have already noticed the effort. “The feedback has been incredible, I’m genuinely proud of the work I’ve put into this,” Wilson says, adding that his 50 managers are “just loving it.” That connection is set to peak at the academy’s finale: a three-day leadership retreat, professionally filmed by Pawn 1’s in-house media team, bringing all 50 leaders together in person for breakout sessions and goal-setting. It’s the moment months of separate learning paths and a running Slack channel turn into a shared room, and it marks the start of the next phase: turning benchmarks into tracked, reportable results, with Pawn 1.