Industry Leaders Remember Legacy of David Gorin
David Gorin
David Gorin will always be remembered as the man who helped establish the National Association of RV Parks and Campgrounds (National ARVC) as the voice of the North American campground industry, according to current and former campground and RV industry officials.
“David had an enormous influence on National ARVC and our industry in general,” Paul Bambei, National ARVC’s president and CEO. “He will always be remembered as National ARVC’s first executive director who saved the association in its early, formative years when financial solvency was uncertain.”
National ARVC was known as the National Campground Owners Association (NCOA) in 1987 when Gorin was hired.
“While we spent numerous years together professionally, I think the thing I enjoyed most were those times where we would just sit and visit about our personal lives and our families,” Jeff Sims, National ARVC’s senior director of state relations and program advocacy said. “He will certainly be missed.”
National ARVC’s earliest board members remember Gorin as the man who rescued and rebuilt the organization, which suffered from financial mismanagement under its previous executive team.
“We were bankrupt and we had to come up with a funding source to even hire him,” said Al Daniels, a former NCOA board member who joined fellow board members Erv Banes and Dan O’Connell in mentoring Gorin as he made the transition from leading the Solar Energy Industries Association to leading NCOA.
O’Connell told WOODALLSCM.com that Gorin was an easy pick for the job of leading NCOA. He said the NCOA had sought job applicants from an association of executive directors so as to avoid politics.
“We had five candidates and two backed off. We interviewed three, but David just shined above everybody,” O’Connell said.
As a solar energy executive, Gorin knew nothing about the campground business, but he worked hard to learn the ropes of the campground business and built lasting friendships with park operators and industry officials across the country.
“He had a lot of energy and seemed excited about the opportunity (with NCOA),” explained Daniels.
Daniels said Gorin quickly “came up with great ideas” to strengthen NCOA as an organization, one of which was to broaden the membership base of the association beyond campgrounds to include RV parks and resorts.
“(Gorin) was instrumental in coming up with that idea,” Daniels said, adding that Gorin worked closely with board members and the organization was eventually renamed the National Association of RV Parks and Campgrounds (ARVC), which it retains to this day.
“Some CEOs are caretakers of an organization. Others are key to an organization’s growth and the impact an organization has within its industry. David was just that. He took the reigns of NCOA at a seminal moment in its history and changed the organization and the industry for the better,” said Debbie Sipe, who served as executive director of California’s association before joining Gorin’s consulting business.
Gorin was ARVC’s chief executive from 1987 to 2001, during which time he helped establish industry-wide national building code standards for campgrounds and RV parks. The standards were initially outlined in the American National Standards Institute Code Section 1194 and subsequently added to the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) codes. Gorin’s other major accomplishments included establishing the National School of RV Park and Campground Management in Wheeling, W.V. to provide professional instruction and training for campground and RV park owners and operators and their staffs.
Gorin also led the launching of GoCampingAmerica.com, one of the first websites to promote privately owned and operated campgrounds nationwide.
Karen Redfern, senior vice president and chief marketing officer for the RV Industry Association’s GoRVing campaign, said GoCampingAmerica.com was the leading marketing platform before the GoRVing program was launched.
David Gorin helped establish the National School of RV Park and Campground Management during his time with National ARVC.
“When I joined RVIA in 1988, RVIA and NCOA had partnered to create Go Camping America in an effort to put information about RVing and camping in the hands of consumers,” Redfern recalled. “We had a Refer a Friend program with print ads in RV enthusiast publications and state travel brochures/visitor guides. Soon after we added a toll-free phone number, which was answered at NCOA’s offices down the road from RVIA, and it was staff from both orgnizations that curated and collated paper lists of references by state to get consumers on the road to a fantastic RV camping vacation. Oh, the paper cuts I had in those days! RVDA joined the effort and eventually, the idea for a more robust, national marketing program grew from those early efforts and the Go RVing program was born.”
Redfern said Gorin was passionate about the industry.
“He unabashedly and tirelessly championed the success and growth of the campground industry and his dedication was second to none,” she said.
Linda Profaizer, who became ARVC’s president and CEO in 2002, after Gorin left the organization to launch his consulting business, said Gorin was “a very progressive thinker, always coming up with new ideas on how to better programs or develop something new and interesting. He loved the RV park and campground industry and was an ardent student of campground design and operations. As president of the old Woodall’s Publishing Company, I worked with David for many years and upon retiring, worked for him at ARVC. Conversations with him were fun and always stimulating.”
Jayne Cohen, of Campground Consulting Group, worked as an independent consultant before partnering with Gorin and later taking over the consulting business. She said Gorin invested his time not only in learning the intricacies of the private park business but in developing friendships with the people he met.
“There were few campgrounds that we would roll into that he hadn’t been to before,” she said, adding that he knew personal details about many of the park operators he met.
“David really did care about the (National ARVC) members,” Cohen added. “He knew them and he knew them personally. Even people who didn’t like him because of some of the things he wanted to do with National ARVC still had a deep respect for him.”
Cohen said Gorin’s decades of work with National ARVC paved the way for his consulting business. Gorin established David Gorin Associates LLC in 2002 and served as CEO of the Virginia Campground Association from 2002 to 2011, a client of his firm. He also continued to work for National ARVC for many years as a lobbyist and legislative affairs consultant, while also building his consulting work with private park operators, developers and investors nationwide.
Gorin was also a leading proponent of luxury RV resorts and consulted for numerous developers who have built high-end RV resorts in Florida and other Sunbelt states that sell their sites to RV owners. He and a business partner developed Holiday Cove RV Resort in Cortez, Fla., in 2007 and 2008.
“When I first started working with him and we were doing feasibility studies, he was really the granddaddy of doing feasibility studies,” Cohen said, adding that Gorin taught her the intricacies of doing feasibility studies while she brought park management and operations expertise to their consulting business.
But while Gorin is widely lauded for his creative approach and out-of-the-box thinking, Cohen said Gorin could also be very stubborn.
“I told his wife, Susan, that there were times when I really wanted to kill him,” she said with a laugh, “because he was very stubborn if he thought he was right. He always wanted to do the right thing for the client. It was very important for him to spend the client’s money as if we were spending our own.”
Even after Gorin effectively retired from his consulting business in 2018, a year after becoming the first campground industry official to be inducted into the RV and Manufactured Housing Hall of Fame in Elkhart, Ind., Gorin continued to voraciously read about the industry and business trends and contact Cohen with suggestions.
“He would read everything,” Cohen said, “The Wall Street Journal, the trade publications. He was constantly sending me things to read, things to do, right up until his last days.”
Gorin had been managing OK with home hospice care until about 10 days ago, Cohen said, when she noticed a profound change when she spoke to him over the phone.
“I got off the phone in tears,” she said.
Susan Gorin said David died peacefully on Sunday at their Florida home. “Our loving, smart, impassioned, poker-playing, cigar-smoking idea guy peacefully passed away before noon today (Sunday) —just short of four months from his diagnosis,” Susan wrote in a blog post on https://www.caringbridge.org/, a website that has enabled the Gorins to send and receive and share messages with people who contact them through the website.
Gorin told WCM in early May that he and Susan had jointly decided that he should receive hospice care at home after being told by doctors there was nothing more they could do for him. Susan said Gorin met his three final goals: spending their annual Passover seder in New York City, enjoying Memorial Day weekend with their sons and their girlfriends, and having a pain-free departure from home through hospice.
Profaizer, for her part, told WCM that she believed Gorin had succeeded in living his life to the fullest.
“Years ago,” Profaizer said, “after one of (our) conversations, I gave (David) a jar of marbles, each one representing a Saturday in life until he turned 75. Each Saturday a marble was supposed to be tossed away. The marbles (were) meant to show that our life was finite, so make the most of those Saturdays enjoying family and friends and doing what maybe you had always dreamed of doing. David lived past his 75th year. Over the years, I’d ask him how it was going and the jar was always a reminder of making the most of his days. I would say that looking at all his accomplishments, his very loving family and friends, that he had a life very well lived — down to the last marble.”
David Gorin’s funeral service will be held on Longboat Key at Temple Beth Israel on Wednesday, June 14 at 1:30 p.m., followed by a graveside service and reception at Palms Memorial Park, 170 Honore Avenue in Sarasota. More information will follow including his favorite places to donate (no flowers, please).
Temple Beth Israel will be hosting a Zoom webcast of the funeral as well for individuals who can’t make it in person. You can also click here for more updates and to share your thoughts on CaringBridge.org.
Source: https://rvbusiness.com/industry-leaders-remember-legacy-of-david-gorin/
