Elevation Park Models Marks 500th Unit Memorial Day Weekend – RVBusiness – Breaking RV Industry News
ELKHART, Ind. – Elevation Park Model Company was founded in 2021 by entrepreneurs Brent Kattau and Joel Lederman. The two had 25 years of combined experience in the manufactured housing business and wanted to push the boundaries of the park model industry to a higher standard. In the Fall of 2021 the two managed to build a state-of-the-art, 65,000-foot manufacturing facility and produced its first prototypes in March of 2022. As of Memorial Day weekend 2024, the company is celebrating its 500th unit with a catered lunch for its team members today, the Friday before the long weekend.
“We’re about two and a half years in now,” said Kattau to RVB just days before its 500th unit would come off the production line. “We’re excited. And I think we had people in the shop that knew this was the 500th unit before we did. We’ve got a heck of a crew out in the plant that are definitely as involved as we are. So we thought it would be a good way to tie everything together for a Memorial Day celebration. But obviously the 500th unit is the driving force behind it.”
He said the celebration of number 500, the food and the bonuses are a way to pay it back to employees because warranty work on units has been so good.
“It’s our way of just trying to reiterate how important the jobs they do are to us,” said Kattau. “So this is a nice way to pay them back and send them off for a good holiday. The timing is just perfect for all of it together.”
This talk of team culture isn’t some Deming-method façade. When we called the offices at 8:00 in the morning of these interviews, co-founder Joel Lederman answered the phone.
“We’re hovering right around 50 now,” added Kattau. “ We’re still pretty small in the shop. There’s Joel and myself, our plant manager and our director of manufacturing, our office manager, CFO and one engineer. So there’s just seven of us in the front office. But yeah, so I think we’re right in that 50.
He said when Elevation first produced its prototypes, it planned on running just a few units a week to assure the quality could be engineered in from the start.
“We only ran three units a week,” he reported. “And it was super intentional.
It was to get the quality right. And at that point we had 13 people out in the shop. A lot of them we’d worked with in the past, but they’d moved on to other places. And this was an opportunity to get the band back together under the same roof. To get everybody on the same page and everybody knew the expectations.”
“I think it says a lot that we still have the original 13 employees we started with,” concluded Lederman on the walk across the production floor to find unit 500 parked in the framing department with a chalked 500 on the A-frame.
