Coachmen Catalina Team’s Making Impressive Things Happen – RVBusiness – Breaking RV Industry News
At a time when many in the travel trailer industry are seeing lower numbers than the past few years, the team at Coachmen Catalina is firing on all cylinders.
Mike Gaeddert, general manager at Coachmen Catalina said, “We’re the fastest growing brand—now we’re in the top 10—last year we were in the top 20.”
He said they’re at a time when they have the opportunity to set themselves apart in multiple aspects of the business. “Our engineering team has been working in overdrive —the purchasing team has been spinning—it’s truly a team effort,” he said.
Gaeddert reported they had a 59% increase in unit growth and 80% increase in market share growth over last year. He said everybody played a part—operations, parts and warranty, engineers and sales—Gaeddert credits them all for the amount of time and effort they’ve put in.
“We’re ecstatic to see it paying off,” he said.
Jordan Short, product manager for Catalina, added from production managers to group leaders and the whole team, “The foot’s on the gas and we continue to keep pushing the needle forward.”
Gaeddert said he’d be remiss if he didn’t also give credit to their awesome dealer partners, some of who’ve been with them for 10-15 years.
“I call them our ‘Legacy Dealers” they’ve grown with us through ups and downs. I give them a ton of credit,” he said.
When asked, Gaeddert said he attributed those increased numbers to a couple of factors.
“We made some good decisions on the product development side,” he said, adding that he felt like a lot of brands raced to the bottom to come out with a cheaper price point and while price matters, so does “the value of what you’re getting for your hard-earned money.”
Gaeddert said they’ve chosen great features to make camping easier for customers, estimating they tweaked 70-80% of the floorplans from last year.
“Huge credit goes to the sales team, they’ve spent a ton of time away from family and friends to be at dealerships,” saying the sales team was gone 180-200 days last year and at the retail level there were a lot who were new to the industry and “hadn’t faced this environment before.”
He praised the entire team’s commitment saying, “We’ve demanded a lot from the overall team, but we’ve created a pretty cool culture here that instead of thinking it’s more work, they want to know what they can do to contribute.”
He also credited their dealer base for giving them some great ideas on product development, features and floor plan tweaks and a few key vendors who are instrumental in bringing ideas for product development, naming General Electric, the Patrick Group, River Park and Ranger Distribution as vendors who he said ,“go above and beyond and are invested in our success.”
“We appreciate all of our suppliers, but these are a few, among others, who we have a unique partnership with,” Gaeddert said.
“There’s been multiple factors to the success we’re currently having—next the challenge becomes sustaining it,” he said.
Short said while their success might create a target, “We’re in a relentless pursuit for continuing growth and always asking, “What can we do for the next model change? It’s been 100 miles per hour.”
Gaeddert said Forest River has a rating system based on volume of sales and they had a goal to be number one in tier groups. He said last year they were mid-level but now they’ve had back-to-back quarters hitting number one in tier groups parts and warranties, while pushing out huge numbers of units.
They’ve also added another production facility. “Opposite of the market, we just opened a fourth production facility—in an environment where everyone’s closing or consolidating, we’re super excited to be able to increase our production facilities.”
Gaeddert said his team deserved recognition. “It sounds cliché to point to a team effort” but said internally he’s observed everyone’s performance and achievements. “When you like what you do and who you do it with, it makes it more of a competitive game as we continue to improve.”
