Intro/Letter From the Editor - Ryan Main - Sales

I lead this newsletter off with a sincere apology to those of you who have been anxiously awaiting the October issue of the Pik-A-Dilly newsletter.  As we approached the end half of the month we kicked around ideas for this month's theme and realized that with the colder fall we've had thus far we had already covered RV storage and winterization.  Therefore, we decided to do something a little different this month and hold off until Dave and I returned from our trip to visit our manufacturers in Goshen, Indiana.  Below you'll find a bit of a diary style recap of our adventure.  We hope you like it, as we had a blast on the trip.  Be sure to watch for the November newsletter in a couple of weeks for holiday gift idea's for the RV'er(s) in your life.  As always, please contact me with any questions, comments, or general musings at rmain@pikadilly.com, now without any further ado, please enjoy October's read!!

Sales Trip Recap - Dave Shepherd - Sales Manager - Ryan Main - Sales

Day 1, November 1st, 2009, 8:00am CST
Dave rolls into my driveway in the shop truck to hit the road, Tim's in hand of course (I'm sure many can relate to jump-starting the day with their morning Timmie's)!!  Roughly twenty minutes later and we're on the road, heading for Winnipeg (have to use the Pembina border for importing and the convenience of our broker being located there).  After a few hours on the road with the satellite radio airing the NFL pre-games and kickoffs, we stop for burgers, gas and a driver switch in Fargo, ND.
Heading further south we pass North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin and Illinois, before crossing into Indiana and finally rolling into our destination of Goshen, Indiana at roughly 3:00am (they're 1-hour ahead of us, so it was only roughly 17 or 18 hours on the road).
On a side note, this was the first time I had encountered toll highways as a driver.  Interesting experience watching all the 'local' drivers whip through with their E-passes, while we waited to fork over cash for the priveledge of driving in the middle of the night.
Day one closed with us checking into the newly built Holiday Inn Express and trying to get a little shut-eye before heading to the factories in the morning.

Day 2, November 2nd, 2009, 7:45am EST
Really??  It's morning already??  I feel like I just got comfortable after tearing the tucked in portions of the sheets out from under the mattress.  We may have slept in a little, since we had planned on meeting our Passport rep around 8:00am.  After getting changed and grabbing a quick coffee, we depart to meet Ryan Shuff at the Passport office.
He greets us at the entrance, which is filled with people filling out job applications, (most plants in the area are now getting closer to full production and have started hiring back alot of the workers that had previously been layed-off) and escorts us back to meet some more of the Passport team before starting our tour.
From the offices, we walk across the parking lot to the siding building (where they put all of the fiberglass and aluminum sides together for each of the Keystone RV lines).  It really is something to see how the walls of your trailers are individually laid out and put together.

Every employee has his/her specific job, and are all extremely quick at what they do (one slight delay can put production behind by a lot).  The building in which they construct the walls has a very sensitive humidity control, and if the humidity rises or falls from the 'ideal zone' the result will be delamination in your fiberglass walls.
Once we've got through the massive siding building we head back to the Passport construction building and wander through the various stages of construction.  Every step has several workers doing their specific jobs at seemingly 'warp speed'.  We watch them put together a floor, string together wires, install the axles and tires, and every step thereafter to the final wipe-down at the end.  Interesting fact, the furniture and cabinetry in your RV are put in place and secured BEFORE the walls and roof are attached to the unit.

 

Every station has the corresponding materials pre-constructed and ready to be fastened in place as the trailer moves down the line.  We get to see how the slides are constructed, the windows are cut-in, the roofs are built and installed, right down to how they put the decals on each unit.
Once we're finished the plant tour, and Ryan has showed us a couple of new floor plans, we part ways and make our way down the hall of offices to the Springdale division to meet our Springdale rep, Brad Bontrager.  Once again, we take some time to meet a few of the other reps prior to departing for the Springdale plant.  This one is a little further away, so it's a short drive this time instead of a walk.  **In Goshen, there are literally dozens of RV plants that would each house several football fields, and that's why the area is the RV capital.**  We've already seen the wall construction, so we forgo that plant and get right into the plant tour of the Springdale/Summerland product.  This plant works much in the same way as the Passport plant did, with one exception, Springdale's have an aluminum construction.  This allows us to see how they put everything together on a wood-framed unit.  Much of the construction is the same, however the walls go on with no insulation or outer finish on them.  This adds a couple of steps to the process as there is a step where the glue is sprayed in and insulation laid in the walls prior to the step where the aluminum sides are fixed to the trailer and windows, baggage doors, etc., are cut out.

 

Upon reaching the end of the factory, we again are taken to view a few new floor plans before Brad takes Dave and I for a quick lunch.
It is at lunch that we meet our Sprinter rep, John Thomas, who will be our guide once we're finished lunch.  Being as we have spent our morning at Keystone factories, this tour will be very similar, with a few differences thrown in.  The Sprinter product is a fiberglass construction (like the Passport), but with full size slide-outs, heated, enclosed underbellies, and fancier interior design.  So rather than get into all the same details again, I'll keep the Sprinter tour short and leave it with our standard viewing of a few new floor plans at the end of the tour (Sprinter has done away with all but one of their 2009 5th wheel [Copper Canyon] floor plans, so there was plenty of new plans to look at).
Our evening consists of a relaxing evening at a restaurant called Wings Etc., a sports pub type place comparable to the lounge at Boston Pizza, where we can watch the baseball game and Monday night football.

Day 3, November 3rd, 2009, 8:00am EST
Our final day here in Goshen starts with the hotel check out, and takes us to Middlebury, IN to the Starcraft plant and our rep David Josephthal.  It is here where I am absolutely mesmerized by the speed of the construction.  We get a brief tour of the massive area that their plants cover, before heading to the Autumn Ridge factory.  Once we walk into the factory, we get to see the total construction of units, right from the building of the floor, frame and all.  Dave and I stood and watched these four workers as they tossed the lumber up onto the 'template' and proceed to construct the floor from scratch.

Assemble the framework, wrap the Darko underbelly material, flip the frame over, lay in insulation, lay the flooring, cut out venting, etc. holes, install wheel wells, fasten everything, sand the floor clean of imperfections, pass in on to the next stage and start all over again.  In the matter of roughly half an hour, these workers finished the floor they had going when we walked in, completed another from scratch, and were nearly finished a third one when we moved down the line to watch the rest of production.  If there's one thing I can say about the RV industry workers', it's that no one wastes any time and everyone is go-go-go.  The construction in the Starcraft plant was much the same as others with a few differences in procedures.  When the interior cabinetry and furniture is to be installed, it comes from the second floor.

 

The worker up top has a ramp that he/she slides the completed pieces down to the workers inside the unit to install.  They say down there that the less a person has to be in and out of each unit before it's complete, the less chance of bumping or breaking something that may not be completely attached at that point.  With this procedure the people working inside the unit fastening everything don't have to leave the box to get materials until their step is completed.
Once we finished the tour at Starcraft and had a look at the new colors for 2010 (which are great colors), David took Dave and I to Das Dutchman Essenhaus for an Amish-style eating experience.  All I can say about this place is that it cost way less than it should, and if you're ever in the area, be sure to experience it for yourself.  If you want to check it out go to www.essenhaus.com, it's a pretty famous place that has been visited by the likes of Muhammed Ali and former president Jimmy Carter.
After lunch, we went to a holding yard to pick up our other reason for heading down, a travel trailer for inventory.  We got everything hooked up on the truck and proceeded to visit a couple of other manufacturers that you may see as part of the Pik-A-Dilly family in the future.  As for right now, I can't let that information slip out though.
At roughly 3:00pm we jumped back in the truck, gassed up, and began the long trip back home past all the tolls, back into Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota (where we decided to crash for the evening).

Day 4, November 4th, 2009, 8:00am CST
After another night in a strange hotel bed (too bad, I was just getting used to the strange hotel bed in Goshen), we hit up the hotel restaurant for a quick breakfast before hitting the road for the final time.  Departing Minneapolis at roughly 9:30am we headed north for the border.  After many more gas stops on the way back than on the way down (on top of towing a trailer behind us, it was a rather windy day), we finally reached the Pembina border at roughly 3:00pm.  After doing all the necessary paperwork to transfer the trailer across the border we were back in Canada and heading for supper at home!!
We dropped our new piece of inventory off in the lot at roughly 6:30pm and made our way home to our families in time for a homemade meal.

In closing, I want to point out two insights that Dave had on our trip.  First, he decided on our travel down there that he would love to be the person in charge of supplying the large construction road-cones, as there were seemingly thousands of them all over the place (lots of road construction in the area of Illinois/Indiana).  And second, that he'd love to be the sales rep for rolls of red tape in Indiana,

 

(the quality control workers put red tape on anything that needs to be corrected before units are shipped to dealers).  I must say on the red tape part, that those folks have some very insightful eyes, as we couldn't figure out what most of the red tape was stuck to error-wise.

One last note, the horse and buggy mode of transportation is very much alive in Goshen.  So much so that the local Wal-Mart has a horse parking 'barn' so those that choose that mode of transportation can keep their horses out of the weather while they do their shopping.

All-in-all I would suggest that this was a tremendous experience that not all people have an opportunity to take part in.  We were able to gain further invaluable knowledge that we can now pass on to our friends and customers.  Judging by the activity and production in the manufacturing plants we visited, the RV business is certainly on it's way out of the economic slow down we have been experiencing.

I look forward to doing this trip again in December when I take David Hutchison down to take in this experience and bring back another new piece of inventory.

November Calendar of Events

November 8, 36th Annual Original Christmas Craft Sale, Royal Oak Inn, 10:00am-4:00pm
November 11, Remembrance Day, Be sure to get your poppy!
November 14, Operation Red Nose Volunteer Sign-up @ Shopper's Mall
November 28, Gala of Gifts Fine Arts and Crafts Sale, Art Gallery, 10:00am-5:00pm