Integrity & Value: Debbie Brunaforte on Leading the Largest Family-Operated RV Dealership

Anthony Codispoti: Welcome to another edition of the Inspired Stories podcast where leaders share their experiences so we can learn from their successes and be inspired by how they’ve overcome adversity. My name is Anthony Cotispodi and today’s guest is Debbie Brunoforte, Vice President at Campers in RV. They are the largest family-operated RV dealership group in found that in 1966 after its owners experienced a negative encounter at a local dealership. Today they specialize in no-pressure RV sales, service, and parts focused on treating every customer like family.

Now under their leadership Campers in RV has grown significantly and is recognized for its trusted approach and commitment to helping people find the right vehicle for their adventures. Debbie has played a pivotal role in overseeing operations in Arizona since June 2022, drawing on her background from Arizona State University to guide teams and streamline processes. Her achievements include helping the company maintain its strong family values while driving innovation in the recreational vehicle industry. Through her leadership Campers in RV continues to build on its culture of integrity and teamwork, ensuring its customers have the best experience possible. Now before we get into all that good stuff, today’s episode is two by my company, Add Back Benefits Agency, where we offer very specific and unique employee benefits that are both great for your team and fiscally optimized for your bottom line. One recent client was able to add over $900 per employee per year in extra cash flow by implementing one of our innovative programs. Results vary for each company and some organizations may not be eligible.

To find out if your company qualifies, contact us today at addbackbenefitsagency.com. Now back to our guest today, Vice President of Campers in RV, Debbie Bruna Forte. I appreciate you making the time to share your story today.

Deborah Brunoforte: My pleasure. Glad to talk with you today Anthony.

Anthony Codispoti: So Debbie, tell us how did you first get into the RV industry? What drew you in?

Deborah Brunoforte: Well, it’s a family business long before I became part of Campers in. My family was in the RV industry, so I grew up in the business. I wanted seven children and my parents believed in free child labor. So my brothers and sisters and I spent our weekends and so forth at the dealership doing what kids can do, pull weeds, pick up litter, clean trailers, clean RVs. And that was my journey. My brothers and sisters and interestingly enough, the RV industry has so many family operated small individual dealerships. So life story is not unique in this industry.

Anthony Codispoti: And so as you grew older, you just sort of naturally kind of became a bigger and bigger part of it and then eventually took over ownership. Is that kind of how the path went? Yes.

Deborah Brunoforte: Yeah, exactly. I became, even though I have an older brother that was involved in the business and my father that was involved in the business, I became the president of the company. Shortly before I was 30 and continued to work with my brother, my father and other family members, but I just had more of a passion for the industry and more of a drive for it than my older brother did.

My brother is still one of my best friends to this day and he was very, very good at what he did. He just didn’t love it as much as I did.

Anthony Codispoti: And so at some point he stepped out and this became what you did.

Deborah Brunoforte: I guess, yeah.

Anthony Codispoti: And so you became president before the age of 30. And what was the business like when you took it over and then tell us what the growth curve kind of looked like after that?

Deborah Brunoforte: Well, we were fortunate to have quite a bit of growth. We were just a very small dealership. We grew to multiple locations. We became the largest RV dealer in the state of Arizona on the Toball side, not the largest in motorized. In the RV space there’s the motorized side, which represents about 10% of the industry. And then the Toball side, all the different fifth wheels travel traders, toy homes, public traders, they represented that 90% of the industry. So we did open up multiple locations. We closed some and built new ones and became the largest towable dealer in the state.

So we were fortunate to have that level of success. And then in 2022 is when we sold the company to Campers Inn. So that company are good friends of mine. I’ve known we’ve been in a business masterline group for about 20 years. And so they knew me very well. I knew them very well and it’s worked out very good since then.

Anthony Codispoti: So prior to selling the business, you were growing, you’re opening new locations, sometimes you close them, reopen them someplace else. What is it that you think you were doing well that allowed for that kind of growth?

Deborah Brunoforte: Well, you have to have a level of success in your own dealership before you can consider opening other locations, at least in my opinion. We always wanted to go where our customers want to go, Anthony. And in my mind, the customers, the books, they’ve always been the books.

And it’s our job to provide that to them. One of our core values, our name is little dealer little prices was the name of the business. And so we still in Arizona, we still operate under that name, even though we’re owned by Campers Inn RV. And in the view of the customer as the boss, our goal was always to give them the most value for the money. And those are the products that we would seek out in a business as long as we have. And during the volume of business that we do, we’re fortunate enough throughout the years to be able to get pretty much whatever product or brand that we want it. And we could represent those. And the goal in doing that is what is the best one for our customer?

What are these provide the most quality at the best price? And I think that that’s worked. And then we always discounted everything. We never sold anything at MSRP. We always had a very low price. Our goal was to be the lowest price hence the name little dealer little prices.

This is my father’s philosophy when we when he started out, he would use the saying I’d rather make, you know, a quick nipple than a slow core. And that and that just grew, it grew momentum, even during COVID, interestingly enough, because there was a severe shortage of RDS. The demand was far greater than what the supply was. And I’m the only dealer in the country to my knowledge that did not raise prices.

Wow. A lot of winners were straight MSRP. Some leaders were over MSRP. And we never changed our prices. We still gave the same discount that we always gave. We had the same pricing model. We struggled with that a little bit, probably cost us a lot of money that it just felt like the right thing to do.

Anthony Codispoti: And that is surprising, right? Because I know both in the RV space as well as with automobiles, right, the demand during COVID was a lot higher than what the supply could meet. And so prices just went up and through the roof. And so to hear that you just kept your maintain your already low prices through a period where everybody would have expected that you would increase prices is surprising.

Deborah Brunoforte: Yeah, that’s exactly true. You know, the margins naturally went up a little bit because in a normal business cycle, you might have some age delinatory that you mark down even further. We didn’t have any of that type of thing. But yes, we kept to the exact same discounts as what we had for 10 or 20 years before COVID and after COVID.

Anthony Codispoti: Do you feel like that may have in any way furked you as you were coming out of COVID and things slowed down? Like your competitors, maybe they were charging higher, higher, higher rates that they had a little bit of extra cushion?

Deborah Brunoforte: Well, you know, it’s one of those things that I’ll never know. Could we charge more money? Absolutely, we could have. I mean, there’s no question about that. We could have charged more money. We probably would have sold the same number of RVs. Do you have residual value with your reputation in the community? Hopefully, when people would come and trade in on something else, if they bought it from us, they weren’t completely varied as if they had bought it from somebody else that helped just a little bit. So it’s one of those things that we’ll never know if it was if it was better for the company or worse for the company.

Anthony Codispoti: But for you, it just felt like the right thing to do. Like at your core, like how would I want to be treated? This is how I would want to be treated. Like keep the prices the same or margins stay the same or improve a little bit. It’s like you said, you don’t have that aged inventory. But you were more concerned about doing the right thing and what your reputation was in the community.

Deborah Brunoforte: Right. Now, the margins, but like I said, NAPS really went up a little bit because you didn’t have all those other business constraints. But the pricing that we priced our RVs at remained exactly the same. And it didn’t go through my mind often as if, you know, am I doing the right thing? Should we raise the prices? But we never did and things worked out well. So it’s not it’s not a decision that I regret. I’m glad we did that.

Anthony Codispoti: So tell me what went into the decision to sell to your friends at campers in RV? Well, because you had Matt in the master line.

Deborah Brunoforte: Yeah, you know, the biggest part of it and they know the great reason but the biggest part of it is because I just didn’t have a succession plan. I have three sons. They all graduated college and were in careers that were in alignment with their degrees.

They were very happy all three of them with what they were doing. So I just didn’t feel like I had a succession plan. And therefore I found at some point in time I need to sell the business. I don’t need to get out of the industry. I love the industry.

I love what I do. I intended to stop the industry. But I thought at some point in time I needed to sell the business.

The time was right to sell the business number one. Number two, my very close friend who is the owner of campers in, he had 3035 locations, but they’re all in the East Coast. He wanted to expand out West, not on the East Coast, but on the East side, half of the US. He wanted to expand out West, but he just didn’t feel like he could do it. Officially from the other side of the country, he needed a platform store.

He needed a store from which to grow in the West. And that’s why he’d been talking to me, you know, for some time this wasn’t new. We’ve had a few conversations.

And that’s, and the convergence of all those things coming at the same time is why I decided to go ahead and pull the trigger. And as you know, I stayed on with them without any employment contract. There has been quite a bit of consolidation in the RV space, but normally either the owner is out entirely or they have an employment contract where they have to stay on for a couple of years. There’s non-compete agreement.

You can’t either open up another store and compete against or you can’t go to work for another competitor. I didn’t have any of that. None of that was even the topic of conversation because, you know, I just know them so well. They know me. It was never something that we’ve been taught to talk about.

Anthony Codispoti: Didn’t even come up. It wasn’t like, hey, should we think about this? It just, it wasn’t even part of the dialogue.

Deborah Brunoforte: No, it wasn’t even part of the dialogue. I would never go and compete against them. They didn’t know that. So it was not even part of the dialogue.

Anthony Codispoti: So what is your role now in part of the larger group? I’m assuming you’re still running kind of the Arizona operations. Are you involved in a higher level in what’s going on out east as well?

Deborah Brunoforte: Well, we’re, we view ourselves as one company with 37 locations. So yes, we communicate almost daily. We have lots of meetings to communicate with one another for different processes and so forth. Basically, though, I’m doing the same thing that I always did because of COVID, we haven’t expanded out west as we had intended to.

We still will. It’s just that I shouldn’t say COVID, post COVID. So the RV industry has been very slow the last couple of years. We feel that 2025 will be a year where it picks up more. But for the past since COVID, it’s been challenged.

It’s been a challenged industry. So therefore, the appetite for acquisition is just less, unless something was the absolute perfect deal. Now we’re getting to the point where, all right, it’s this year, it could be the year where it’s good for us to go in and start expanding again.

Anthony Codispoti: And why do you think things have been slow the last two years? Was it because everybody who wanted some kind of an RV got it sort of during those COVID years? And so now there’s just sort

Deborah Brunoforte: of so when there’s uncertainty in the economic environment that impels some lower sales in the RV industry, number one, number two, you’re right, I think we did pull forward some of the business because people that were thinking about an RV were quick to pull the trigger during COVID. There were no options. There’s no other vacation options.

The whole world is kind of locked down, but you can go out with an RV and you can go out in the forest in place and have a great time, be by yourself, not have to worry about the pandemic at all. And then the other thing that we watch in our business is consumer confidence. That’s the number one business metric that I have always paid attention to. And as you know, it’s been quite low the last few years. It’s starting to tick up now. We’re higher than a week then and I believe a year and a half. The RV industry is expecting to 2025 this our turnaround year. It’ll turn positive. Fingers crossed, huh? Fingers crossed.

Anthony Codispoti: Yeah. So obviously you weren’t one of the founders of the larger campers and family, but I understand there’s kind of an interesting origin story where the founders had a negative RV buying experience of their own. Can you relay that story for us?

Deborah Brunoforte: Yes, that’s one of the reasons they got into business. I never knew the original founders of the company before I became, you know, in a business sort of mass mining group that I can mention with the owner of the company, his parents had already passed away.

So I didn’t know them. Yes, what happened is they had a pop-up trader and they went in for some service, had a very early bags theory, and so they kind of motivated them to make it, we should get in this business ourselves. And they did and that’s how they started. They bought, they started with pop-up traders. They bought a few pop-up traders and then their yard and was selling them that became successful and then they just expanded and it became a real business for them.

Anthony Codispoti: Tell me about the core values of the company and why they’re so important to you.

Deborah Brunoforte: Yeah, the core values on our company are integrity, teamwork, continuous improvement, and sustainability is interesting because when we sold the company, the core values, and I never knew what their core values were, that’s not part of the conversations that we have in our mass mining group, but it turned out that their core values were almost identical to ours, our mission statements.

So the companies from the beginning were very much aligned, just our thought process and our beliefs were very much aligned with one another. Those core values though, it’s not just something that we printed once and put it up on a wall, it is something that is used on a continuous basis here at the dealership. Yes, it’s even used if we’re having some sort of a challenge with somebody on the team that requires a corrective conversation, we tie that back into core values. Which of those core values are we in conflict with in this particular situation? And the other thing about the core values, you know, when I was selling my company, there are publicly traded RV groups and private equity RV groups, I could have gone that direction, and the people on my team, the CPA that we hired and so forth, they kind of counseled me that their selling price would be higher if I would have gone that direction, but one of the challenges is, are Nord stars do the right thing? If you’re a publicly traded company, the Nord star is return to shareholders, which is good, it shouldn’t be that way.

If I’m going to buy stock in Ford Motor Company, I want to return on my investment. So they’re not doing anything wrong, they’re doing it exactly as they should. It’s where the first thing that we do is we just have to do the right thing with our customers and our business partners. And then I also believe that it’s a longer term vision. We thought about joining a role at one time and going public, and with a longer term vision when you’re privately held, you do have that long term vision, rather than, you know, we’ve got this quarter, for example, and everything is not driven by the quarter, it’s driven by the long term vision.

Anthony Codispoti: Is there maybe an example of a recent initiative that kind of highlights one or more of those core values?

Deborah Brunoforte: Josh, give me a couple of minutes to think about.

Anthony Codispoti: Maybe I’ll even pick like one specific one. Talk to me about how sustainability shows up in a regular basis in your business. What is that core value to you?

Deborah Brunoforte: It is. Now, that is sustainability of the company that we’re talking about. We’re not talking about green initiatives there, although we believe in that as well. The sustainability of the company. So the idea there is what is best for the whole company is what is best for all of us. We’re all in this together. What is a company?

It’s a group of people are getting together for a common purpose. So we have to do what’s best for the company, and that has to take precedence over what’s best for an individual. In most cases, those two things align. It’s win-win, not in every case, though.

Anthony Codispoti: You guys are known for a no pressure sales approach. Explain, first of all, why and then maybe if you’ve got a story or an anecdote you can share about, I don’t know, a moment where that philosophy really resulted in a very positive customer experience.

Deborah Brunoforte: Okay. So with salespeople here at the dealership, what I try to communicate to them is our job is to help people get what they want. I don’t care if you are the greatest salesperson in the world.

If the customer doesn’t want it, they’re not going to buy it. Certainly not an RV. We’re not talking about, you know, some low cost item.

It’s a high cost item that is a discretionary purchase. So our job is to help people get what they want. It’s funny. I had so many years ago, but I had something many years ago, a newly hired salesperson come out of the auto industry and I hear him talking to another person, another person on the team, and he said that he laid them away. I was so shocked with that. I said, which one will lay anybody away?

That’s not what we’re here for. It’s one of the reasons we have to, the Pusted Price was a discount right on that. You don’t have to negotiate. You can pay.

Anthony Codispoti: What does that term even mean? I can tell by the way that you’re speaking about it that it’s not positive, but what does that even mean?

Deborah Brunoforte: Well, he was talking in terms of the company that he had worked at previously, where the point of pride is getting the deal even if it does not serve the customer.

Anthony Codispoti: Clearly did not align with any of your core values.

Deborah Brunoforte: That’s right. That’s right. He did align with our core values. Our job is to help people get what they want, find what they want, and then help find an RV that fits that. It’s not just their wants and needs in the RV, but it’s the budget also. For one of the things that we talk about is that the customer really likes this one and they really like this one, and this one costs $5,000. If you can steer them in one direction or another, steer them to the less expensive one. It’ll be easier for them to buy that one. If they like it equally as much, just the more expensive one, then they’re better served.

Anthony Codispoti: I’m curious. Maybe use that particular story as an example for how when you see your core values not being demonstrated from your team, how do you approach that from a learning opportunity or a teaching opportunity?

Deborah Brunoforte: Well, one of the most challenging things for management in businesses, I’m sure you see it in your own business, Anthony, and we just as managers, we just have to have the courage to have difficult conversations, face them head on.

What I always would want to start a conversation is trying to understand their point of view. One of the seven have us a highly affected people. If you know that book, you seek first understand. We want to start there, seek first to understand, and then try to change their thinking as much as necessary.

So we try to change their thinking and then basically you let somebody know what’s required to stay on the team and if they choose to do it or not do it, it’s their choice.

Anthony Codispoti: I’m curious about that one particular salesperson who laid that customer away. Was that somebody that you were able to kind of coach and train or was that somebody that eventually found themselves employment elsewhere?

Deborah Brunoforte: Well, I probably handled that situation wrong because I coached and trained immediately in front of all the other people with my reaction to stay on, but that’s good. You want everybody to know that that’s not acceptable. He was short-term with a company and it’s the only time that I can ever remember that is a very unusual situation. You had asked for some sort of example or demonstration of how the values work in the dealership.

Anthony Codispoti: Yeah, I’m kind of curious to hear. This is a question I like to ask all my guests about, in most industries, I still hear it’s a pretty tight labor market. You’re talking about that particular individual was a rather unusual kind of an outlier of an experience, but in general, finding and then holding on to good people can be really challenging. I’m curious to hear about some things that you’ve tried and found success with both from a recruiting and a retention standpoint.

Deborah Brunoforte: Well, recruiting, you have two kinds of recruiting. One is if there’s somebody in the industry and they’re looking for something and you have the reputation that we’re fortunate enough to have an industry, they might come to us. But aside from that outside of the industry recruiting, when I’m interviewing people, basically, I’m only looking for two things.

I only want to know if they’re blended in a culture fit and if they can deliver the results that we need. We start them, we start before we even go down mentally that path is trying to identify if the person is more optimistic or pessimistic. Because we get found that if we get somebody who’s negative in the organization, it can be a tremendous drain on the other team members. And it can kind of bring everybody down. Because if you look at any particular situation, there’s going to be something negative about that situation. And there’s going to be something positive about that situation. And it’s our individual choice. We all have free will. Which one do we want to pay attention to? So we’re looking for the people that just naturally pay attention to the positive side of whatever the situation may be.

For example, I’ll give you an example. When we first went into COVID, we had to have a lockdown. Everything has to shut down. And again, I’m in Arizona. So for us, that happened about six weeks. We never did shut down because we are an essential business. So our hours didn’t change at all.

We may change just our normal operating hours. But there were no customers. The state’s completely shut down, locked down.

There’s no customers. What there was a tremendous demand for was toilet paper. As we all know, it became kind of a joke, right? This run on toilet paper. Even here in our own parts department, we had to start limiting it. Because one person would come in and buy everything off the shelf. And then the people that really needed it, we didn’t have it for them. So we had to start limiting it. So our little joke at the dealership is, soon our visa will be like toilet paper. Everybody will want it and there won’t be enough to go around.

Anthony Codispoti: Boy, were you right.

Deborah Brunoforte: Yeah, we didn’t know how right we were. It was just kind of a little joke. But even when there’s no customers, we weren’t sitting around saying, oh, what are we going to do? This is still ungrown. This is so bad. We’re making jokes and talking about how this industry is going to be positive.

Anthony Codispoti: Sure. And so that’s a really hard time and place to be finding your optimistic part of your soul. Because things are shut down. There’s no customers Nobody knew when the world in general might get back to normal or for you more specifically, when people might start buying RVs again.

I mean, was there still something sort of nagging in the back of your mind that said, I’m going to put on a happy face of work, but I don’t know where this is going. And at some point, we may need to shut our doors.

Deborah Brunoforte: Yeah, definitely. Absolutely. And as I mentioned, I have several family members working here too. So it’s and all of their families are dependent on this little business. So it is, it is a weight.

It’s a mental weight. And we did not lay off anyone or furlough anyone, which is also very unusual during that time. I was just hoping that it would turn around quick enough or we would have to. And as it turns out, it did. We were very fortunate that we did not lay off anyone and furlough anyone furlough anyone like everybody else was doing because when it came back, it came back fast. And we really needed the people that we had.

So that part really did benefit us. But it was a painful, very painful for, you know, two or three months there. And I, and, you know, I didn’t have a solution to that. That was very worrying. And to your point, I never expressed my worry. you know, to the team here, it’s we just have to be the beacon of light and be optimistic and hope that it passes.

Anthony Codispoti: And again, Yeah, for those listening who haven’t been responsible for other people’s paychecks before, there’s a lot of stress just thinking about your own paycheck. Hey, am I going to be able to make ends meet? Can I pay this bill?

Can I pay that bill? You know, how do I manage this? Wait, you can relate. Everybody can relate to that kind of stress. But the stress of having to think about are all these people and their families who rely on this business and me to be able to sign their paychecks every week, every two weeks, whatever it is, you know, are they going to be able to afford to live if I’ve got to shut this tap off? Like if everything has to close down, that is a way that is hard to put into words. So for everybody listening, you know, you haven’t been in that boat, you know, go give your employer, the owner there a high five and thank them because they carry that weight oftentimes as Debbie’s pointing out in silence. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Deborah Brunoforte: And so what were some of the, you know, since you weren’t really talking about it, you weren’t voicing that to your team members, how like what were some coping mechanisms for you during that time?

Deborah Brunoforte: For me, the coping mechanism is always make a plan. And the most stressful times for me is if it feels like something is out of my control. So for example, the economy could be that economy, that’s true. So we have to make a plan. How do we adjust to that? How do we adapt to that? One of my favorite quotes is it’s not the strongest of the species that survive, nor is it the most intelligent of the species.

It’s the most adaptable that survive. So one of the mantras that we have in this business, when things are a little tough is it’s not tough just for us, it’ll be tough for our competitors, it’ll be tough for everything. All we have to do is be better and quicker and adapting to the new reality that our competitors personally win. So the way that I help cope with things like that is make a plan and start implementing the plan. So doesn’t mean trips goes away.

Anthony Codispoti: What was the plan in that first two or three months there? Were you things were really slow? You weren’t sure what was going to happen?

Deborah Brunoforte: Well, in the first two or three months, we really didn’t have a plan other than try to keep the team together, try to get everybody’s experience off because the deposit would just shut off. But we knew that that wasn’t permanent. We knew that business would return. So we didn’t feel like we had to make a plan. Now, if you felt like this could last for, say, a year, then you would have to start making those cuts and adjustments right away. We just didn’t feel it. We felt it was temporary and so we could write it out.

Anthony Codispoti: So you said that one of the first things that you look at when considering hiring somebody is, are you optimistic or you pessimistic? Are there particular questions in your interview process that help to kind of bring that personality trait to the surface?

Deborah Brunoforte: Yes. Is it always effective? No. Yes, there are things. For example, I want to find out why a person would leave previous employers. Because one of the things that I have learned is if their previous employer was a jerk and the one before that was a jerk, we’re going to be a jerk also. So that’s one of the things that we like for our another thing to even get an interview. We really look, I don’t get favorably from job poppers.

If you can’t get a job, we’re going to couple of years, even though it’s your choice, maybe it’s your choice to keep moving on. I really need to question why. If it’s a person recently out of school, okay, I get it. You’re trying to find a way. You’re trying to find something that kind of sticks with you. But other than that, I feel like either you’re a quitter and I don’t want people who are quitters. I want people when things get tough, you dig in, you have some grit, you figure it out and find a way or, or it’s people that are asked to leave on a free-finding basis. So now I got one of those for people that I want on the team.

Anthony Codispoti: Understandable. I’m curious, Debbie, if there are maybe certain things that are specific to different geographical locations as it pertains to the RV industry, like are there certain things that you see in the Arizona market that are different than what, you know, maybe the founders of Campers NRVC and some of their eastern locations that influences how you have to prepare the business or train people to handle customers?

Deborah Brunoforte: There are differences. There’s more similarities than there are differences. One of the things that I learned for years and being in this mastermind group is called a 20 group. You said there’s more than one way of success because she had business owners in there that one business owner would do something this way and another one would do it this way and another one did it the third way and all of those could be successful. It was usually in the implementation as much as the idea or philosophy, none of itself. So there are regional differences in every area. It just has its own vibe, not only parts of the country, but individual stores. And it’s, you can be a store that is very successful doing X and another store is very successful doing Y and that’s okay. As long as you implement it well and you’re following the core values, there definitely are more similarities than differences. One of the big, one of the differences we see though are in four plans. You might have areas where the normal camping is in a park where you have full facilities and hookups and you’d have areas where a lot of the camping here in Arizona for example is what we call dry camping. So you can just go off on some logging road and be out in the forest by yourself. You don’t have any kind of hookups. The Arvitas self-contained so you can do that. You can do dry camping, but those things definitely have differences.

Anthony Codispoti: So that dry camping is more common in Arizona than other parts of the country?

Deborah Brunoforte: Yes, I think it’s more common anywhere where you have that access. We have a lot of that access here in Arizona. There’s a tremendous amount of the state is owned by the government. It’s a public land and you can just go off and anywhere you can get your RV is where you can stay.

Anthony Codispoti: You Debbie emphasize enriching customers lives by helping them find their way. Is there a particular customer success story that illustrates the impact that campers in RV can have on someone’s RV journey?

Deborah Brunoforte: Oh Anthony, there are so many stories. I’ll tell you it’s one of the things that I absolutely love about this business. I don’t think I’d be in the business if it were the automobile business because nobody needs an RV to go to work tomorrow. You buy an RV because you want to have fun. You want to go out and live your life and have that adventure and the RVs bring freedom, adventure, family, togetherness, bonding. You can explore the wilderness, get out there in nature. It’s healthy and it’s just I love it with kids especially because if you can get your young kids out in nature that is so valuable for them and the whole family bonding and we see that on a regular basis where people come in and they’re just they’re just so excited and then sometimes we’ll get photographs or they’ll come in for service and tell us stories about it.

It’s just it’s just really great. I had one customer few years ago and it was an elderly customer and they came in and they were in a sad story. They were buying the RV because the wife had been diagnosed with cancer and she only had a couple of years to live so they thought if we only have two years we’re going to get out there and see as much of America as we can and go exploring and have fun and they bought an RV and then the man came back I don’t know a few years maybe six years later and was wanting to treat it in for a new RV. He was remarried to another woman and wanted to start that adventure all over again which I thought was pretty cool. Well there’s just some fun stories. That’s though the best is I thought if I got you only have a couple of years to live well instead of staying home and just being preoccupied with that and being so miserable all the time they decided to buy an RV and go have some fun.

Anthony Codispoti: Well it sounds like the kind of person you’d want working for you. There’s that level of optimism you know when you’re facing down you know the the worst time that you could imagine we’re going to get out there and make the best of what time we have left that there’s a there’s an optimism gene in that person.

Deborah Brunoforte: That’s right yeah they were they were an inspiration to me for sure.

Anthony Codispoti: I’m curious Debbie if your education at was at Arizona State. Yes yeah if your if your education at Arizona State has influenced your leadership model at all.

Deborah Brunoforte: Well I was seeing no to that and the reasons I never graduated Arizona State University and it was never my intention to anyway. The courses I took I went through a course called Advanced Business Administration.

There was another one as well but that was I was there for the skill set. I wasn’t there for the degree and it just wasn’t that prevalent in my family. You know I grew up my parents were entrepreneurs and starting businesses and it just wasn’t top of mind awareness for me so I wanted to participate in programs that gave me a skill set. There were many programs with not many but there are a few programs within the RV industry specifically and specific business programs that I intended. I was a sponge in trying to learn as much as I can and those benefited me much more in my opinion than even the advanced business administration in the issue.

So although I’m an advocate of that all of all of my kids have advanced degrees I believe and that my own personal journey that was not a big part of it outside the university education courses that I took were more influential than that of any student.

Anthony Codispoti: So we’ve already talked about how COVID has kind of paused the growth plans for the moment but once things pick up in the RV industry again what do you foresee the growth being like?

Deborah Brunoforte: Well that is our intention is to continue to grow and especially out here in the west you know grow our footprint because we don’t have much of Arizona is the only one in the west so we do want to to grow that and we’ll get the same way that has been done in the past you know you just we have certain key things and occurrence specific size of business that we look for and there are specific things in the businesses that we look for that kind of set our model.

So for example our particular business model if you have what we call in the industry a plateau one business which means a plateau one that’s how we started out that’s how it was when I started the company this is very very small operation that is only run by you know five or six people run the whole dealership and that is not really a good set for the organization that we have now at this point so those are the kinds of businesses that we would be least interested in

Anthony Codispoti: compared to the larger the growth plans are all about acquisitions then not starting up a new location.

Deborah Brunoforte: Oh no we do internal also you know if there’s a good location we’ll buy a piece of ground and we’ll build a dealership up new that’s how all the ones in Arizona were done just buy a piece of ground and build the dealership from there because it’s in the right location and everything’s right so we do both that’s called Greenfield we do both Greenfield expansion and acquisitions.

Anthony Codispoti: Outside of acquiring locations building new ones are there any thoughts to expand into any new products or services that you’re not currently offering?

Deborah Brunoforte: The RV industry is always evolving one of the great things about the RV industry is they are very quick to pivot and to adapt to the consumer demand and what the consumers want even during COVID for example the RV industry adapted very quicker than the marine industry quicker than power sports or motorcycle quicker than all the other outdoor leisure activities so we do a good job of that and that happens on regular basis as far as expanding beyond the RV industry that is not something that we’re pursuing right at this time.

Anthony Codispoti: Any other kinds of internal innovations that you guys are looking at?

Deborah Brunoforte: Well it’s interesting that you asked that question there’s something in the RV industry where they recognize the top 50 dealers in all of the USA and Canada so you know you’re choosing from I don’t know probably 2,000 2,500 dealerships and you’re picking the top 50.

Well in addition to that which we have won that award pretty much every year since they started doing it but they do have another one this and even one of the 50 this at a higher level called the Innovation Award and this past November the annual RVDA conference we were awarded the Innovation Award and the reason I’ll share with you why so you know that is one of our goals is to be a positive disruptor and really being on the front end of that innovation. You know how you have online chat and one of our challenges with online chat is because a lot of it occurs outside of business operating hours it might be at two o’clock in the morning, maybe four o’clock in the morning and we’re just not chatting with us people at all they might type in something but nobody’s going to see that message until we open in the next day. So we’ve gone to an AI agent her name is Fran and now Fran if you’re on our website and you’re doing chat hopefully she feels like a human being to you but it’s not it’s all artificial intelligence and our big driver of doing that is as I mentioned so that we could be there for customers whenever they had a question rather than only during an operating hours.

Anthony Codispoti: Has it been in place long enough where you can identify any particular success metrics like I know converted more website visitors to customers or you know fewer like shorter response times or anything like that?

Deborah Brunoforte: Well we definitely have shorter response times because that that AI agent is on there and their response is immediate you don’t have to wait for somebody to respond to you so we definitely have as far as the success metric no it’s new for us and our our success actually went down but that might be because that’s where you have to start you know and then you build from that so we do have high expectations for it but it’s too early to measure the success right now other than response time I’m talking about the success of actual sales.

Anthony Codispoti: So it could be that the number of conversions to sales has gone down because the AI still needs some tweaking it needs to learn it needs to be trained it needs new prompts it needs to do a better job of interacting with people doesn’t mean that it’s not going to be a helpful long term it’s just these are early days and you’re still kind of learning your way through that but that be accurate.

Deborah Brunoforte: Yeah that’s exactly accurate and you do have to train it you know we were training it before we went live with it but then when you go live you you see that there’s more training needed.

Anthony Codispoti: Yeah you know as business owners as business leaders Debbie we’re lots of things we’ve got to keep our eye on you know one of the biggest ones obviously is the bottom line the you know profit and loss and you know myself I kind of think about it there are these two big levers that you can pull right you can pull one to increase sales you can you know pull another one to decrease expenses I’m curious across your long business career are there any creative things that you’ve tried and found success with and pulling either one of those levers?

Deborah Brunoforte: Yeah you’re exactly right in times of a decreasing business environment we’re pulling hard on that expense control and in times of increasing business you know we’re not paying as much attention to the expense control you’re pulling hard on that increase sales and it’s always a balance between the two and that’s what makes a company sustainable or not sustainable it’s just being able to to manipulate that during the early days of COVID so as I mentioned we did not lay anyone off or furlough anyone we didn’t raise our prices what we did do though and we did this immediately is we went to all of our business partners and asked for either for example uniforms went to the uniform vendor and said we would like two months of free uniforms we still want the delivery service but we don’t want to pay for it for two months you know we think that we’ll get past this we went to every single provider that we had and asked them to either let us pay it later or just eliminate it for a short period of time and that was very successful most most businesses did it like you said okay you get it

Anthony Codispoti: so these were businesses that must have been doing okay themselves during this challenging time to be able to kind of float you that money

Deborah Brunoforte: well that was that was up to each individual business you know they could either say hey we we don’t have it either we can’t do that and and I understand or they could say yeah you you know you’ve been a good business partner all these years and we can do that we can forgo the bill for two months or a month or whatever it is

Anthony Codispoti: that’s tremendous I mean that speaks volumes to the relationships that you built up with those folks over the years

Deborah Brunoforte: we even did that by the way the banks are mortgages now that wasn’t a forgiveness that was added back onto the principal you know you’re tacking it back in but even the banks did that for us now mortgages

Anthony Codispoti: now again speaks volumes to relationships the importance of them um any specific mentors books or other experiences that have been particularly helpful to you in your trajectory

Deborah Brunoforte: yes when I was young he’s not around anymore but when I was young my dad sent me all of these courses with zig-ziggler and I read all the books and I went through all the courses I went through so many of them all different kinds of people but that’s the one especially at the young age that made the biggest difference to me little principles that I used to this day for example it used to be because I was young and single and went out a lot so it used to be the alarm clock would wake would go off and I would hate waking up by the morning especially if I hadn’t had much sleep than I would have had hate waking up by the morning that needed that alarm clock and one of the things that zig-ziggler said is she’s got to train your brain on the alarm clock and don’t even think of it as an alarm think of it as an opportunity clock and when it goes off in the morning force yourself to think something positive I still do that today yeah even if you’re sleepy or you know you went to bed late for whatever reason you know and you still wake up with the positive thought okay good yeah I feel great I had enough sleep it’s gonna be a good day there’s types of things

Anthony Codispoti: what was the positive thing you told yourself this morning you remember it

Deborah Brunoforte: was to sleep hey I had a great night’s sleep I feel good I mean that’s that’s kind of a normal one yeah always something positive

Anthony Codispoti: okay shifting gears on you now Debbie for just a moment curious to hear about a particular challenge that you’ve gone through there’s something personal or professional how you got through that lessons learned coming out the other

Deborah Brunoforte: side well challenges in business the great recession was a big one in the RV industry there was I believe that’s one third of all the manufacturers went out of business wow about about a quarter of all the dealers 20 or 25 completely out of business it was it was really quite devastating so for so many businesses so that was that was challenging and we had to get through it and one of the things that put the dealers out of business interestingly enough was you know we had bank loans to buy our inventory it’s called pluripanus but we had bank loans to buy the inventory all of those loans are commandments and during the great reception we had a lot we had not a lot but we had a couple of big lenders completely pull out and the dealers were not able to get lines of credit with other lenders and so many of them just had to close the doors and go out of business and that’s what a lot of the dealers had this is so anyway that was that was a challenging time in fact our own particular lender I won’t mention which one we had one month where we turned in a profit loss statement that was a negative we lost money that month and even our rep was telling the bank but it’s December most of the art industry loses money in December it’s just a soft month that doesn’t mean anything so they said no and they cut our line of credit from even though it’s a demand without they still give you a commitment for a year it’s the normal they cut it back to six months so we thought okay well what can we do so that we never turn in a P &L statement with a loss on it and we knew that many of the expenses are things that we control for example we control my salary we can control the rents because we own the properties and we charge rent on them and so we just started you know I went for a year without a salary now when business turned around I collected back I’m getting me to be a forever GF that’s one of the things that I got it went for a year with that salary so there was a little bit stressful but we were able to get through it we made the plans the things that stress me out the most are things that I don’t feel like I have control over dude there’s something that I could do to improve the situation or I’m thinking what should I do what can I do those types of things

Anthony Codispoti: so when faced with something like that how do you get through those moments those times when something is really difficult and you don’t feel like there’s anything that you can do to control the situation because I hear it like you’re a big planner like hey we got the you know the the great recession and we showed one month of loss and and so oh how can we not do that again you’re like well let’s think creatively and you came up with some things that you can control and there are some things in life that you can’t control how do you hope with things like that

Deborah Brunoforte: in business I try to do it personally also but in business we often talk about IMC and BMC IMC being in my control and BMC being beyond my control because oftentimes we get so stressed out about things that are beyond our control and things that are not even personal it’s not like my sister it’s the weather it’s the traffic it’s the you know you’re the occasional irrational customer or whatever it may be and we get all worked up about things that are beyond our control so we what we try to tell them you know out of your mind is BMC just get over it try to get it out of your mind focus on things that are within your control those things are stressful too but oftentimes there’s something you can do about it you might not be able to solve the problem but there is some impact you can make and some difference that you can make on all of those things and that’s why I only said you know things that are things that I do care about that are beyond my control might be some of them are stressful like the one that I shared with you or if you have a family member that gets a severe illness I had a brother in the hospital earlier this year we didn’t know if he would be able to make it or not and those things are you know keep pulled through thankfully those are the kinds of things that are really stressful but on things that are beyond my control I just either with my sister I try to not think about it as much as I could I told my mom don’t answer your phone just don’t answer the phones

Anthony Codispoti: out of sight out of mind sometimes huh yeah do what you can uh Debbie I just have one more question for you but before I ask it I want to do two things for everyone listening today I know that you love today’s content Debbie’s been great so please hit the like share subscribe button on your favorite podcast app I also want to let people know the best way to get in touch with you which is your email address uh D Bruno Forte so D B R U N O F O R T E at campers in dot com uh we’ll also have that in the show notes and then the last question that I have for you Debbie is how do you see the industry evolving the next couple of years what do you see the big changes are that are coming

Deborah Brunoforte: well the industry we do expect 2025 to be kind of a turnaround year for the RV industry we’re starting to see it already people seem to be more optimistic they want to get out there they want to get out in nature and have that that freedom to do it in their own vehicle in their own RV I’ll tell you Anthony one of the things that we look longer into the future that I’m very excited about is is uh the uh atomic am I saying the right word autonomous autonomous yes thank you autonomous driving can you imagine if you have an RV if you’re towing a fifth wheel or travel train or driving in a motorhome let’s say you’re driving in a motorhome and and you’d like to have a sandwich when you could just keep the motorhome going you wash that and yourself a little sandwich maybe you watch a little bit of the game on tv and the motorhome just keeps on going wouldn’t that be fun

Anthony Codispoti: that would be a blast yeah sinea now you hear a lot about that obviously in automobile as you hear about it in uh commercial delivery vehicles that it’s being worked on taxis I’m not in the space but I haven’t seen any articles about it coming to the motorized RV space is there conversations are the people working on this actively yes

Deborah Brunoforte: yes you know one of the challenges is the cost and then of course we need more technology improvements to get the range and there’s there’s it’s the same challenges as what you have in the automobile space but it’s coming there are people working on it and I just think that would be so exciting for our industry

Anthony Codispoti: yeah are are there any motorized RVs now that have like a less advanced version of that like I don’t know if you start drifting out of your lane like it turns the wheel back for you like does any of that exist presently

Deborah Brunoforte: I guess okay yeah yes some of that some of that does so you know it’s not just Tesla that’s doing that for you stage four and she you’re out and they make the chassis so yeah

Anthony Codispoti: so that same tech that’s being worked on in the auto industry is getting passed into the RV space as well

Deborah Brunoforte: makes a lot of sense and there are manufacturers that are working on battery powered only of RVs so that’s a little bit different than the auto driving segment that I was talking about but oftentimes those will come together so it’s not mainstream if you go buy a motorhome right now it’s not going to buy you would have to really if you want a battery powered motorhome for example you could do it but it would be very expensive and I’m not sure how dependable so it’s not really integrated in our industry yet but but it’s coming

Anthony Codispoti: it’s coming people are working on that one of the fun things to look forward to all right well Debbie I want to be the first one to thank you for sharing both your time and your story with us today I really appreciate it

Deborah Brunoforte: yeah my pleasure Anthony thank you so much

Anthony Codispoti: folks that’s a wrap on another episode of the inspired stories podcast thanks for learning with us today