ELKHART, Ind. – Wednesday’s (9/11) release of the 2024 RVBusiness Top 50 Dealer Awards winners again helped shed a positive light on the industry in general and some of the specific bar-raising business aspects that manufacturers and dealers are currently focusing on within today’s RV marketplace.
As a matter of fact, this year’s Top 50 selection process frankly impressed those overseeing the selection process in terms of the volume and quality of the applications they reviewed this time around from a wide array of North American RV retailers initially nominated for the awards by U.S. and Canadian RV builders.
Same goes for the judges who were anonymously interviewed by RV Business last week following a day-and-a-half selection process managed by BJ Thompson & Associates (BJTA) at the RV/MH Hall of Fame in Elkhart, Ind., in which the Top 50-winning dealers plus five “Blue Ribbon” dealers and three special honorees were congratulated for their charitable, humanitarian and innovative business practices.
But the main talking point behind the scenes this time around among those handling the selection process clearly had to do with service – a consistent theme, of course, for those involved in the 14-year-old program sponsored this year by Airxcel, Brown & Brown Dealer Services, Cummins Inc., GE Appliances, Genesis Products, NTP/STAG, Northpoint Commercial Finance, Protective Asset Protection, RV Trader and Wells Fargo DF.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen this many high quality applications in one year,” said veteran Top 50 Coordinator Barb Riley of South Bend, Ind.-based BJTA. “It was just astounding. We had a record number of special status candidates. They (OEM’s) were nominating people for Blue Ribbon awards left and right and it was very hard to narrow the roster of (Blue Ribbon) nominees even down to five.”
But at the end of the day, they agreed, the profusion of positive entries and the ways in which it all challenged those administering and judging the program was a good problem to have.
“Yes, we’re very pleased that the program continues to grow and evolve and be as effective as it is,” added BJ Thompson, administrator of the unique Top 50 program facilitated by RVBusiness magazine and its Elkhart-based parent company, G&G Media Group LLC. “We’ve been doing this now for 14 years. It took a couple years off because of Covid, but the program seems to continue to be of interest and desirability among different factions of the industry and we feel good about that.
“I think that we’re doing a good job and everybody that’s involved, especially the dealers, should feel proud of how they continue to evolve in handling their operations and are becoming even more creative and sophisticated in customer satisfaction and in the total operations of their dealerships,” said Thompson, adding that the total number of manufacturer nominations this year was up about 20%.
Looking back, the 12 participating judges – none of whom are OEM’s or dealers – anonymously mentioned their chief takeaways from this year’s selection process:
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“I look at the service techs, of course, because that’s my background and how many are certified and what percent they represent in terms of their dealership’s total employment numbers. And, overall, I was impressed with how many people are absolutely getting involved with all that. But I was also frankly disappointed in a couple of cases where somebody might have 28 technicians while ten of them are just technicians who aren’t certified. But many of those submitting applications seems to be moving towards training because they’re proud of that and that gives them a leg up on their competitors.”
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“So, I think the best dealers that we saw — and most of what’s represented in the Top 50 — had a strong focus on service. But they also had multiple revenue streams. They just weren’t reliant on unit sales. It might be rental, might be storage, might be a combination of both, or all of the above.”
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“There was a lot of discussion in previous years about the need to implement training processes whereas this year I feel that a lot of the dealers have taken those steps to implement more training throughout their dealerships, which was good.
In addition, we saw that rentals are becoming a more important factor among a certain small percentage of the dealers, the reason being that they’re tapping into that younger generation – the Millennials who often don’t have the ability to store trailers. But they’ve now been opened up to the experience of RVing. So that rental business may become a little bit more popular just based on that younger generation not having the ability or maybe budget to be able to store RV’s.”
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“I didn’t know what to expect when I came in here. For some reason I thought maybe the quality or the number of applications would go down commensurate with sales. But it’s been the complete opposite. I thought the quality of applications was just as strong if not stronger than any year we’ve had.
“Having said that, certainly sales declined in some cases, although in some of the applications I looked at, there was a bump in sales, not huge, but there was a sales increase, which tells me they’re managing their dealerships very well. But I was really impressed by the number of applications and getting down to the blue ribbons was probably more difficult this year than I think I can remember.”
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“The thing that really stuck out at me this year was the employees: You can tell that it’s harder to find and keep good employees because I really noticed a lot of stuff this year that I hadn’t seen a whole lot in the past — employee assistance programs, work-life balance, increased vacation time.
“One dealer had unlimited vacation and they cross-trained their people, which is another good idea so that if somebody wanted to take three weeks off, they could. Another dealer added four additional days for whatever. So, if you had a family emergency or something, you got additional time off. As for training, one dealership is paying technicians to do training three hours a week while they’re at work.
“And there were tuition reimbursement programs, so if you want to go to college, they offer to supplement that. Again, there were things that I hadn’t seen in the past in applications as prominently as I did this year, which tells me that dealers are really thinking about doing what they can to keep employees.”
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“So one of the things that I noticed is that when they talk about training, it’s not just training certified techs or sales people or F&I. The top dealers that we were battling over (as judges deciding whom to pick), it’s outside training, constant training, in-store training and accountability. And what I noticed in all these is that it’s not just training as such, t’s a culture of the whole dealership and it’s a buy-in from the ownership all the way down to a lot boy or girl.
“When you start reading on there where the owner’s involved in everything that’s going on and that all the employees see it, everybody’s buying into whatever their plan is and you see it from the top down. That’s where you see them succeeding and overcoming those obstacles. And that’s something that I saw mainly in all the top ones (nominees) we were battling on. They all did it. It’s a culture throughout the dealership.”
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“What I noticed in a lot in applications this year compared to other years is the after-support dealers are offering people purchasing RVs. So, a lot of people have come out with YouTube channels or online education of some sort or more ways to get these customers educated and keep them from freaking out and wanting to just ditch their RVs because they might have had some issues with their units.
“But the point is the extent to which some dealers are really just supporting their customers so that they want to keep camping. I think it’s really important to just make sure that they know that there are resources out there, whether they’re their own resources or they’re partnering up with OEMs or suppliers or whomever to get these resources in front of the owner’s faces, so that they know what steps to take and how to get support for their unit, which I think is really important for customers.”
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