ExploreUSA opened its location in Tyler, Texas, in September 2019. A year later, executives of the company and parent company RV Retailer broke ground on a new facility to handle the explosion of growth seen in the first year.
The dealership sold 673 units in its first 12 months, far surpassing expectations, said Famous Rhodes, chief marketing officer and technical officer for RV Retailer, parent company of ExploreUSA.
“What happened in that market exceeded our expectations for sales in such a short span of time,” he said. “With the new facility you’ll see we’re trying to give the RV owner a complete solution, from sales to service. It’s a great investment in Tyler, which is an incredible market, and further cements our dominance in the market and the state.”
Rhodes said that even before the store opened in 2019, there were plans for a new facility. An explosion of growth in the first year changed the timeline for that.
“It always was part of our vision to have a store experience that was more homogenous from market to market, so you’ll see the design we’re using aligns well to stores we already have,” Rhodes said. “It always was our intent to get there, but I think we realized the need to fast-track it, and Jon (Ferrando, president and CEO) greenlighted it to get it done as quickly as possible.”
The Tyler location is headed up by General Manager Joe Lazzarino and a staff of about 18. That staff size is expected to more than double when the new facility is finished and ready to open in the summer of 2021, if not sooner.
Lazzarino, who came from being the general manager at the ExploreUSA store in Dallas, said he knew the market opportunity was strong.
“It’s one of those things where we expected it to be good, but we didn’t expect it to be off the charts,” he said. “We’ve been extremely fortunate to have a world-class staff out here with us, and the best of the best product lines. It’s the perfect storm.”
Lazzarino said many of the current staff were hired locally, but there were some others he recruited from all over the country. The work of that staff has helped the dealer succeed in its first year.
“In the past, we’ve gone in and purchased stores and made them better. But in this case, we had nothing but the best and most cohesive staff from the beginning,” he said. “It’s cool to see when you come out to a place like this and all the employees are friends with each other outside of work. The team, from the beginning, was able to gel almost instantly.”
The process of getting to Tyler started four years ago, Lazzarino said, and when the company found a site that could be renovated and moved into immediately, the general manager said he expected it would be a two- to three-year wait before breaking ground on a new facility.
Instead, the immediate success put the dealer in the position to invest in a $5 million project which would open next year.
“It’s a complete 180-degree change,” Lazzarino said. “The current facility gets the job done, but the opportunity at the new building will give us, really, the service capacity we need.”
Lazzarino said one of the lessons learned in the first year was the lack of service capability in east Texas, including Tyler. The current facility has a five-bay service capacity but the new facility will expand that to 23 bays.
“We felt that was a big opportunity for us,” he said. “That will give us almost double the capacity anyone else has in east Texas, so we can actively go and get more service customers and help a lot more customers.”
On the sales side, he said the larger facility will provide more breathing space for staff.
“Right now, we have eight sales guys doing the work and volume of what 15 to 20 normally do,” Lazzarino said. “This will give us the capacity to let guys take days off, relax a little bit, and give us the ability to have support staff and admin for teams. We’ll do better with the business we already have and we’ll be able to reach out to more people.”
All of which makes for an exciting future, he said.
“For us, the most exciting part about it is the opportunity looking forward,” he said. “As RV retailers go, we could be the best RV retailer in the country, but you can only do that if the stores at the local level are the best in the area – and we want to be not just number one in east Texas, but number one by a large margin.”
