Good evening and good afternoon, depending on where you are. If you're here in Salt Lake City, it's obviously still light outside. For those of you on the East Coast, thank you for joining us, and welcome to the 2021 Camping World Holdings Investor Conference. We have decided as a management team, after we did one last year virtually, that this is something that we're going to do on an annual basis. In addition to doing some non-deal road shows, in addition to going to conferences, we like the idea of bringing people into an intimate setting where they can get to know the management team a little better. Then after each conference going forward, we'll visit a location that has something new or innovative about it.
We expect this to move to a different city every single year, and we'll provide the same lead time that we did this year. As we go through this presentation, please remember that we are a public company. The questions that we'll be answering today must conform with what we're permitted to say in the middle of a quarter. Because it is being webcast, we are permitted to answer questions to a degree. I'll have everybody around the room, we'll start on my left side, introducing themselves, and then they'll reintroduce themselves when we get deep into the presentation. I'm Marcus Lemonis, I'm the Chairman and CEO of Camping World Holdings. I've been part of this organization since 2003 and plan on this being a part of my life for the foreseeable future.
Hi, everyone. I am Lindsey Christen. I am General Counsel for the company, and I also work very closely with our people organization. I joined the team about 13 years ago in 2008.
Hi, my name is Wallace Ng. I have been with the company for three months, and I'm part of the corporate development group, as well as Good Sam. Prior to joining Camping World, I was with Houlihan Lokey, a mid-market investment bank, for about four years. Prior to that, I was with Deloitte, which is one of the Big Four accounting firm, advising clients on M&A and valuation.
Hi, I'm Karin Bell. I'm the CFO of the organization. I started with the company in May of 2003 on the dealership side of the business.
In a cubicle with me.
Yes. We used to throw paper airplanes at each other.
That's right.
I am someone who is excited to be here today as I was 18 years ago. This is a super story that we're about to tell you, and we're excited to let you hear it.
Matt Wagner. I've been at the business now for over 14 years. Actually started at the company as an intern. Marcus and Karin, respectively, kind of reared me within this business. I now work closely with this entire group, managing the entirety of the dealership group and the retail group.
My name is Brent Moody. I'm the President of the company, and I've been here since 2002, so 19 years. I'm going to have the longest tenure until I hand the mic over here. I'm really excited for the presentation and really excited about you all getting to meet and see some of the people that you haven't before. A really impressive team.
I have such tenure, I don't need your mic.
My name is Tamara Ward. I am the Chief Operating Officer for the company. I started with the company in April of 1989, so that makes me 32 and a half years old. You know what I mean? Same. Great to see all of you here and excited for the presentation.
Hi, my name is Saurabh Shah. I've been with the company now for nine months. I recently joined Camping World from IBM, driving all their IT.
Hi there. My name is Ryan Biren. I'm the Senior Vice President of Corporate Development. I've been with the company for about a year and a half now, where I focus on strategic initiatives and retail product sourcing and innovation. Before Camping World, I worked in the semiconductor technology space industry, and even before that, Wallace and I actually both worked together in Deloitte in financial advisory.
My name's Josh Erickson. I've been with Camping World for 18 years now. I manage the dealership group, sales and service to our 174 dealerships. I think I'm the head cheerleader more than anything else at the end of the day, right? I'm the lead salesperson, if you will, so I take a lot of pride in that. This past year's been amazing for us. As a sales organization, these last two years have not been an idle place for us. We have changed who we are as a sales organization, and it's been an exciting place to be. Looking forward to the next 18 years.
Thanks so much.
Hi, everyone. My name's Will Colling. I help oversee our digital products and our customer-facing websites and apps, and I also have the opportunity to work closely with our membership and loyalty business as well. I've been with the company for just about five years now.
Brenda?
Hi, everybody. I'm Brenda Wintrow. I've been with the company for 14 years, and I'm the Senior Vice President of Sales and Customer Experience.
Scott?
I am Scott Jensen. I run the dealerships, mostly with Josh, the West Coast, the 62 dealerships. I started with Marcus in 2004. I've been in the business since 1976. RVs is all I've ever known, and I'm so happy. It's been invigorating the last couple of years to change our perspective on how we do business and how much better we are. It's exciting. I can't wait for the next five.
Want to introduce your boss?
Sure. This is my sister, Rebecca Couser. We've been partners like this our whole lives, and we are a heck of a team. She and I, we've been, same year, 2004, and we've been with Marcus together. She is my boss.
I am the safety net. I couldn't think of better people to work for than the people who are in this room. Very proud to be here in this organization for 18 years.
The reason that it's important to also note that Rebecca and Scott's family was one of the first dealership acquisitions that we made when we were starting FreedomRoads. They're base camped here in Salt Lake City. They'll be providing us a tour of their facility tomorrow. One of the things that makes us different about a roll-up type company is we understand that we need people with experience that have been in the industry for a long time. Scott and Rebecca have been valuable to not only myself, but the rest of the organization, because decade after decade, gas crisis, 2001, 9/11, when you have people on the team that have decades of experience to give you some foresight into what the risks are and what the opportunities are, it really is a good balance, and they do a great job together. Kelly and Melissa here.
Hello, my name's Kelly Allen. I'm SVP over operations and logistics. I've been with the company 24 years. I can't believe it's been that long. It's been a lot of fun. It's going to be a lot of fun to come. Happy to be here.
I am Melissa Schultz. I head up the organization. Brenda has the customer experience through people and service. I have the customer experience through facilities. Everything inside the facility, everything outside of the facility, is what my team manages. I'm so excited for you guys to be here tomorrow. I'm looking forward to showing off our new Electric World. I think you're going to love it.
Brandon.
Brandon Mulhall, I'm the clock guy. No, I'm SVP of Marketing. I've been with Camping World for seven years. It has been an absolute pleasure to work with this team that you see on the stage, to work with this company, and I am so excited about the future and where we are headed.
For those of you that follow the company on social media, we have a character known as The Intern. It is not him. That person, gender not to be revealed, is on his team. This is actually a big day for me. I think about being with people like Andris Baltins and Dillon Schickli and board members, Mary, Michael Malone. Who else is here? Brian Cassidy, there you are. We have our board members here as well, not all of them. Andris and I have been together for a long time. We've seen the Affinity Group days, with Araceli, right, on the bond side, Sal? That's right. When we made the decision to go public in 2016, it was a big decision. We had a lot of wrestling and wrangling. Will the market understand this company? Will the market recognize the real value of the different pods?
Will they understand the structure? The one thing about the company, if you're not familiar with it today, is it has a lot of moving parts and pieces. I think one of the negative things that happened was when we went public, the market didn't really know where to put us, and they put us up against auto dealers. While we're flattered by being in the group of auto dealers, we're more impressed by the management team's ability to put up numbers that look nothing like an auto dealer, both on the gross margin side and on the EBITDA margin side. I think there's one big difference why we struggle with the analysis and the correlation between auto dealers. As you know, auto dealers have a couple of things in front of them as barriers to entry. One of them is the franchise agreement.
The second is the manufacturer who really controls output, supply, territories, et cetera. The beauty of our business, while we have amazing manufacturers, both in Thor and Forest River and Winnebago, the beauty of our industry is that it isn't regulated like the auto business. Our barriers to entry are really the ones that we put in front of us. In 2003, when Karin and I were sitting in two cubicles, the business was next to nothing. At the time, as Tamara mentioned, Camping World, I think, had 30 some odd stores.
Not even.
Not even?
20 something.
20 some odd stores. Good Sam was a much smaller business. It really took this team's, I think, vision to see what was possible. When we first started the business, I remember going to meetings in Louisville, investor conferences. When we weren't a public company, we were small, and people said that this investment roll-up strategy would never work. It's a cyclical industry. People don't like RVs. They're discretionary. As we go through these slides today, my least favorite part, which I always get scolded for, is the one on the right. That's the revenue. It's not how we pay our bills, but it's important to show that every single year since we've been public, we've grown. When we get to the earnings, I think you'll see it's far more impressive than that. The components of revenue are actually interesting, but the components of gross profit are more interesting.
As the industry leader, there's not a close second. I'm sorry, there's not a close second. Number one RV membership community with over 2.2 million paying members. Number one in plans and services, which is our Good Sam business, which is credit cards, warranties, roadside assistance, insurance, travel assistance, health, refinancing, all the products that make up the Good Sam business. Number one RV retailer in America, which is our field operations that both Kelly and Josh are involved in, 170 some odd locations with another 24 on the board in the next couple of years. The Number one RV Park network, over 2,000 Good Sam Parks, and a lot of history and tenure, founded in 1966. Our path to $1 billion of adjusted EBITDA. I want to change that. Our path to exceeding $1 billion in adjusted EBITDA.
As we go through this presentation today, you'll do a little tally like Mike Malone did for me before this meeting, saying, "Your $1 billion seems light." Well, that's a typical board member, always asking for more. I think we believe we can get there. I want to start with our people, and I'm going to have Lindsey take us through that process.
Hi, everybody. Lindsey Christen. As I said before, I'm General Counsel for the company. I also oversee our people function. I have been one of the fortunate people to be with this team for over 13 years now. I think as we each introduced ourself, one of the most impressive things about those introductions, I found, was the mix between those people who have been with the company and who have grown with the company through some couple of decades, and those people who are newer to the organization, Ryan and Wallace and Sora, and how we have really found talent to come into our organization to bring us to the next phase. I think as we think about what our path to exceeding $1 billion in adjusted EBITDA is, it starts with our people. They're the heart of our organization.
When I started with the company, there were just about 3,200 employees, now we have grown to just over 14,000 employees. Not only are they employees, but they're families, and they're families who depend on us to earn a living. They also depend on us for so much more than that. Like so many of us up here and so many of us in the organization, they depend on us to grow them professionally, but also as humans. As we think about how we create that path, it's about supporting each individual's journey along the way and not only enhancing their professional capabilities, but giving them the skill sets that are going to allow them to succeed within our organization, but also out in the world, wherever they may go next. As we think about the philosophy we take on that approach, it's founded in education.
We need to take an approach similar to what you would see with a college or university, where we feed individuals curiosity, where we give them the knowledge and tools to grow. We also need to give them the path. What is their individual path to success? This really depends on us defining for individuals how they are able to succeed in their individual positions, but what their opportunities are in the expanded organization as well. A lot of us have had the opportunity, as we've grown with the company, to get our hands in different parts of the business. I know I had that opportunity myself. I started really focusing on litigation and employee matters when I first joined the company because that was what the need was.
As we expanded the company, as we joined with Good Sam in 2011, the world opened up, and I started working with each different department and each different business and really joined forces with those people who are driving the operations. We need to lay that path out for each of our employees so we can show them what the future could be for them. We also need to show them where we want to go as a company. I think importantly there, we want to have them understand what behaviors are important for us to demonstrate to help get on that path. I think as we look at what that future brings, we also want to make sure, as I said earlier, that we are able to identify, recruit, and retain talent to grow us into the future.
A lot of the individuals up here, Wallace and Ryan, they've come into the organization a little newer. Their fresh ideas, their energy, they saw what we had been doing, where we wanted to go, and they're able to suggest new ideas for us to bring into our systems, but really give us a path to what the future will hold for us. It's important that we stay focused on being able to get that talent into the organization. It also means being able to get the right talent into our retail and service operations. You'll hear us talk today about our service organization, where we are investing in what our customer experience looks like there and what our employee experience looks like in service. We need the individuals, the technicians, to be able to support those operations. We also know we need to invest in their education.
How are we giving them the tools and the path they need to be able to succeed to serve our customers better, to be able to really define our customer experience in one that is positive? And I think as we look at that marries into what our primary objectives are. As we think about that, we think about how we grow our top-line revenue. I'm going to pass it off to.
I think as you can tell, between Marcus's messaging and Lindsey's, ultimately, we're using this opportunity to de-anonymize the leadership group that's really propelled this organization for many years with this growth playbook that Marcus, Tamara, Karin, Brent started many years ago. We wanted to show you the breadth of talent to achieve what some might suggest is a relatively ambitious goal of $1 billion of earnings, where we're going to lay down a very clear pathway as to how we can get there, and we're going to utilize the different talented team members within this room to articulate very clearly each initiative that we're going to attach to actually hit this goal. The playbook's been very simple. We've been a roll-up business ever since our inception back in 2003.
When we think about really what we want to do, it's grow revenue, however, profitably grow revenue, which is really a tenet that Marcus and Brent had really focused on when initially starting this strategy. Much as we could right now, as everyone in this room knows, approach the business as though we just want to grow top line. We've also acknowledged that given the lack of supply in the industry, it doesn't make sense. We want to optimize every transaction so that we're able to return, more equitably, dividends or set up a stock repurchase program, as you see in the second tenet of just employing capital in a more agile environment. We also could continue this growth playbook of just M&A. As you see with the third business move of an investment in technology and human capital.
The last two components of technology and human capital being really two that we haven't spoken about perhaps as much as we should have in prior years, where throughout the entirety of this presentation, you'll see us hit home on those two elements more and more because we know it's that dependence upon human capital, which is why we're continuing to show each one of our talented team members as to how we're to achieve that goal. I have the distinct pleasure to turn it over to Tamara to walk us through really what our focus is from the COO as to how we're going to achieve each one of these goals.
If we think about it, can you guys hear me or do I need the mic?
If you think about it, we are the leader. Marcus kind of reiterated that with that first slide. The leader with the largest RV community, leader from a dealership standpoint, been around since 1966. One of the things that keeps us up at night is our competition. As we went through this, you guys could tell I was the old lady, right? 1989. A lot of things were going on in 1989, right? When I started, we had just opened our 16th retail location. It was just the accessory dealership over here. In 1997 when Affinity Group bought Camping World, now we had the Good Sam business also with the retail locations. In 2003, that's when we started leaning into the dealerships. As we started, we were these three separate pieces, and we pulled them together.
Marcus had the vision to pull it together to start creating this ecosystem. Our competition today, they're still in those separate businesses, whether it's an individual retail store, the marts, right? You go to Target or Walmart, they have a 16-ft section of accessories, individual dealerships. You've got roadside assistant companies. We started building that ecosystem years ago and laying that platform. Where we're going to go and how we make sure that we can keep focused and keep serving our customer is building that ecosystem. Instead of just selling you the RV and the accessory, and oh, by the way, a couple memberships and things, we're going to do more. We're going to do more for the consumer, more for the lifestyle, more for all of the people today who really didn't care or even know about the RV lifestyle.
That's how we're going to beat the competition because we are going to be ahead of them. Our trajectory is going to help build and broaden the RV lifestyle for our existing customer base and for the new customers. Marcus talked about That previous slide, which talked about when the manufacturer said, "Hey, I'm going to go and we're going to make some more units that are very lightweight." You know what that did? That opened that funnel a little bit more. Now people who didn't even think about the RV industry previously were like, "Hey, you know what? I don't have to buy a big truck. I don't have to buy something big to pull it." Now with COVID, to be honest, COVID helped open that funnel a little bit more for us.
As that funnel opens, we need to be there to embrace the new customer. We also have to take care of our installed base, our existing customer, the retention of our customers who have been with us for 50 years, the generations of customers that, "My grandfather did it, my parents did it, I want to do it." "You know what? My friend's cousin, gosh, they did that, but I thought I'd never try. I didn't want to invest in it." The ability for us to expand and broaden that to more customers, that's how we're going to take charge and grow the industry. Marcus introduced the Jensens back there, right? The Jensens and the generations that they've been able to show and grow, that's really how we continue to expand on that install base.
Scott, anything you'd like to kind of tell the group about your tenure or what you've seen over the years?
I will just talk a little bit. When we started, I started back in the 1970s, and back then the question was always asked, "Is this sustainable with RVs? Is this going to be around?" Yeah, it's been around. In 2003 and 2004 when we joined the Camping World team, the same question. Today, the same question is asked, but I'm telling you the reason why it's sustainable is. We have methods, we have processes, we have team members, we have the inventory. We have unbelievable amount of people that understand this business to help us succeed. This is going to be a great next five or six years.
We've had some great success, but you know what. We're going to have some more.
Right?
Absolutely.
How are we going to do that, right. We've got to get that next step with technology and innovation. Right. We talked about Saurabh. Saurabh, go ahead and stand up. I'm going to get you in the spotlight for just a little bit. Saurabh is a new member to our team. I know you guys were like, "Okay, which one is who?" After we did the little introduction. Saurabh is a new member to our team who brings a fresh set of eyes and an understanding of processes, technology, innovation that we really haven't had previously to take us to that next level. I'm going to let him talk to you guys for a few minutes.
Thanks, Tamara. Like she said, when I introduced myself, I just said IT, but what I was brought in for was really driving innovation and digital transformation. As part of that, when I was going through the interview process and kind of getting to know the company and all, what really struck me was the point you just made, right? The company has a vision to touch a customer at every step of their RV experience or their outdoor lifestyle experience. It's not about just selling an RV. It's not just about selling a camper or anything like that. It's taking them and touching them and holding their hand across the entire experience over there. That to me was very, very different. As a consultant with IBM, I've worked with many different industries. They typically kind of have their niche play and they stick to that.
Not over here, right? We want to really drive the experience home. From a digital transformation perspective, and please feel free to ask questions. It's easier for me that way. Otherwise, I'll just keep rambling about technology. From a digital transformation perspective, we are driving a lot of change, right? You talk about a $1+ billion in terms of earnings. We are getting ready for way more than that, right? We are driving a lot of change in terms of our foundational capabilities that we are creating, which will basically help us expand our businesses and also expand our growth and our membership base and everything else. We are looking at every aspect of our process in terms of how can we drive improvements. Scott mentioned the fact that our processes are extremely tight.
We are looking at it and saying, "How can we further drive efficiencies in these process so that we can even further drive earnings and, what do you call, benefits back to our shareholders?
Saurabh, can you talk a little bit about cybersecurity?
Sure. Obviously, our digital footprint has grown significantly in the last year and a half, and you'll hear a lot more about the digital products that we've introduced. Underlying the digital products, there's a lot of technology that sits there, a key part of the thing that we have to keep ahead of us, as we roll out the digital platforms, is really about cybersecurity. We are proactively investing significant amounts of our time and money in terms of making sure that we are taking care of these things before as opposed to thinking of it after. We have a team that is dedicated to cybersecurity. They are looking at it at every aspect. When we start thinking about development, that's when we start thinking about cybersecurity today, as opposed to thinking about it when we are ready to roll things out.
Part of that importance of what Saurabh Shah was talking about is, as we expand our ecosystem and as we bring more things to the consumer that surround the RV and outdoor lifestyle experience, we have to make sure that we're prepared for that. The ability that we've got him being forward-thinking as we move into the peer-to-peer marketplace, as we bring in other types of new initiatives that we have in the organization, it helps protect us and also helps us build this moat. Marcus will talk sometimes about the moat we have around our business and some of the barriers. We want to help make sure that we're building stronger and stronger so that we can make sure that those consumers come to us as the number one and the leader in the marketplace.
One of the things that we talk about is Thank you, Saurabh.
Yeah.
From a service and campground standpoint, right? If we think about how are we going to expand our relationship with the consumer, there's some things that we need to do, and Will's going to talk a little about some initiatives that we have.
Hi, everybody. My name's Will. I, again, help oversee our digital products, and I've been with the company for about five years now. I work very closely with Saurabh across the technology side of our business, helping us concentrate on where we're going from a digital product standpoint. When we're thinking about the increased demand that we're seeing across the campground front of the overall industry, we have built this network of parks that have existed for almost 50 years now, next year will be its 50-year anniversary, of over 2,000 parks within our ecosystem that we share strong relationships with as they are affiliated with Good Sam. We also have the relationship with over 8,000 parks in general that exist to take the RVer to their next destination.
Today, this ecosystem really has an amazing amount of growth opportunity as we think about the technological evolution of what we are here to do for them. Good Sam has the opportunity now, as far as a product standpoint with campgrounds, to take that connected community of over 2,000 parks and drive that connection through additional marketing efforts, through the ability to build out a reservation system that will enable Our over 2.2 million membership base to be able to easily and proactively go and see where they are looking to stay next in a very seamless manner. We are looking to provide the appropriate solutions for campgrounds to be able to sustain the demand, but more importantly, more easily connect the individuals that RV and outdoor enthusiasts to the campground where they're looking to go.
I think one thing that you can expect in the coming years that you haven't heard us talk about in the past is us delving into the science and the mining of data that exists in the campground space. One of the barriers to entry for a typical new RVer into the marketplace is the availability of service base and the availability of campgrounds. I would expect that over the next five years, you'll see us play a larger role, both in propping up the campgrounds that we're affiliated with today by providing them new booking systems, new technology to access their own customers, but it wouldn't surprise me if we started dabbling in that space as well. We really understand that that ecosystem has one final resting place, which is at the place where they're going to enjoy their mode of transportation and the domicile.
When you think about the RV lifestyle, it's important to recognize the unit itself as having two components to it. It's a domicile that I stay in while I'm enjoying my activity, and it's a mode of transportation. It's all the other things that happen when they park and when they get there that we need to tap into. If we look back at our previous 10, 12 years, we may have missed the market opportunity to explore that a little bit. It wouldn't surprise me if we dedicated some financial capital and some human capital to really understanding how we can make our mark in that space and make our circle even stronger.
As we continue to look at the evolution of our digital platforms, we have the ability, and we've brought in through, whether it is an acquisition like the campground booking platform, or using or working with our people management team to recruit fresh talent that's enabling us to really drive forward that innovation that we're looking to bring to the table for the overall industry. When we're thinking about the service demand, I'll take it from a little bit of a digital product standpoint first, and then hand it over to Josh to talk a little bit more about our RV dealership and service body.
When we're thinking about that service demand, we have the opportunity with the over 3,000 independent service providers that we have relationships with today to build that same network of service providers that we did 50 years ago when we were building the campground network and bringing them to the forefront, connecting them with that same installed base of RVers and outdoor enthusiasts, and enabling them to quickly find the service that they need on the go.
Much like our roadside assistance gets dispatched, you have a roadside assistance membership, you have a problem on the side of the road, you call the phone number, we dispatch somebody. Will walked into the office one day and said, "Why are we not doing the same thing with mobile service? Why are we not using our different 170+ locations as jumping off points for a fleet of small trucks that can go to a campground and fix a plumbing leak, that can go to a campground and fix something with a step handle?" We know that the consumer doesn't want to leave the campground to park, to come to a dealership where the unit's going to sit for three, four, five weeks because they can't get parts.
Will will be working with Kelly to make sure that this mobile service network is not only technologically accessible to consumers, but the actual experience will happen. Over the next, call it 12- 15 months, we'll stand up a few markets in a big way with a fleet of trucks coming out of there that'll have fuses, light bulbs, hoses, plumbing things, electrical things to be able to hit the campgrounds, hit wherever the customer may be to get that small repair done. If the job is bigger than that and we need to do warranty work, of course, we'll go ahead and bring it on in. Want to talk about service a little bit?
Yeah. Again, Josh Erickson.
Josh Erickson.
Yeah. Is anybody hearing me?
No, you need it for that.
Sorry about that. Yeah, if you were to ask me today if I wanted 100 new units or a new technician, I might take the technician. That is really one of the biggest opportunities that we have here at Camping World, not just from a revenue standpoint. I could break that down across two avenues. One, we are so good at sales, we outsell ourselves. We have a challenge in getting to all the customers we sell to. The industry, and many of you may not know this, but our competitors don't like to do service. They tell their customers to go elsewhere for the service. Where do they go? They come to us. We're overwhelmed by our own customer base, and we're overwhelmed by the industry. That tells you the upside in service is, I don't want to say infinite, but it's huge.
What do we need? We need technicians. Technicians are a challenging resource to find. Why? You have automotive pursuing technicians, you have your typical HVAC people, right? Our technicians are not chassis technicians. They're plumbers, they're carpenters, right? That's who we compete against, HVAC and some other industries and trying to source these people, which has been incredibly challenging in the last five years. What did we do? We built our own universities. We have two of them now to begin to source and build our own technicians in-house. That's just in its infancy, but we have a tremendous shortage in technicians. When we resolve that, the business is there. It's waiting for us. Secondly, we will drastically change our customer experience. No secret, we can disappoint people in service. It's not exclusive to us, right. These things are made with human hands. They break down.
All dealers disappoint customers. We seem to do it more than others because of our volume. When we change our ability at Camping World to communicate with the customer, which we are actively doing right now, thank you to Saurabh's addition. When we change our ability to communicate with the customer, we are going to have a whole different customer experience, and you'll see their appreciation for the brand skyrocket, and that'll do one thing. That'll sell more RVs ultimately. There's huge upside for us in service, not only in the actual labor hours, and actually hiring technicians and changing our process with a better system that we are actively shopping right now, but we know the upside in the customer experience is exponential. We struggle with that today, but when we communicate better than we do today, I'm looking at you. We're shaking our heads together.
It'll be a different customer experience at Camping World, and we will definitely sell more RVs.
Just to give you some perspective, there are approximately 11.5, who knows if the number's right or not, but 11.5 million-12 million RVers. We are the largest, we have 2,100 service bays. If we had 12,100, it still wouldn't be enough. We'll talk a little bit more about the money that we're investing in that, what the return is and what the revenue is a little later.
In order to make sure that we can sell the RV, service the consumer, get the accessories, we got to look at the supply chain. COVID has done a lot of things with the supply chain. Ryan's going to come up and tell us a little bit about some things that we're doing to help improve this for us.
Again, my name is Ryan Biren. I'm the SVP of Corporate Development, and I support strategic initiatives and also drive retail product innovation and sourcing. When I joined Camping World a year and a half ago, I was new to the RV industry. Working with Kelly, and Tamara, and Melissa, I learned a lot about the space. What I learned is that we're really, really dependent on a few select suppliers, and they're doing a great job to support the industry as a whole. When we think about certain areas of improvement to drive the industry forward to new markets, to new customers, and improve the experience for existing customers, what we really don't see is improvements in the innovation side. That's where we stepped in in a meaningful way.
In addition to innovation, we started to establish an internal platform where we control elements like quality, cost, and availability, because those are the big three challenges we see in the industry right now, is the quality, the cost, and the availability. Internally, we're building a platform where as we build out our new design centers, we can control our own destiny and build what we need and so forth. With that whole platform we're building, the innovation we're driving with some of the products we'll talk about tomorrow, we're going to drive revenue growth and margin expansion in a very meaningful way. Very exciting stuff ahead.
I'll be more bold and tell you that we are not going to enter the next decade with the same dependency on our suppliers that we had in the last decade. That doesn't mean that we're changing who our vendors are. That doesn't mean we're changing what our relationships are. We found soft spots and opportunities, and I think those opportunities are driven by two primary things. One is we want more margin, and we're not going to allow other people to source and develop products, and then for us to lose 14, 15, 16 points of margin because we don't have time for it. We've hired the staff, we're dedicating the resources, both in financial and human, to lessen our dependency. That doesn't mean that we're going to start manufacturing RVs. Let me make that clear.
RV manufacturers shouldn't be in the retail business, we shouldn't be purely in the manufacturing business. That doesn't mean, however, that we're not going to make investments, which we'll talk about a little later, in small little operations where we can learn something. We invested in a business this year called Happier Camper. A lot of people scratched their head when we did it. It was the adaptive technology that they came up with that I think will revolutionize the industry forever.
When you think about the B van market or any shell of any kind, they have come up with an amazing proprietary system to understand what the inside of that cube looks like and to design things that allow that cube to come to life affordably and effectively to the point where, in the future, we believe that the cube kit can be transported to one of our locations with a code one, two, or three and can go in a Sprinter van, a Transit van, or any other kind of product we have, and we now become 178+ mobile upfitters. For those of you that remember conversion vans with the shaggy carpet, Explorer vans, where they used to all get made and they'd take a G-van from Chevrolet and cut out the windows and put in the velour seats, we don't want to do that.
We want to do this generation's version of that. It allows us to grow our DIY category, which Melissa will talk about in a little bit. It allows us to expand our design and renovation centers, which Melissa will talk about a little bit. When you look at what Ryan's bringing to the table, he's now tasked with growing the number of retail products on our floor to 50% internally sourced in the next five years. We think that's 10 points of additional margin on about $800 million. It's 10 points. When you keep hearing us talk about exceeding $1 billion of earnings, we're going to show you these little things that we think will help us get there.
Because most people in their mind will say, "Well, what happens when new RVs soften?" We're already starting to prepare ourselves for that question, and more importantly, the fact that it happens every so often. Okay. Tamara?
As we've kind of talked through some of these things that we see as things that we need to work on so that we can make sure that we're growing our business, Brent's going to talk a little bit about how some of these turn into actual growth opportunities for us. Brent?
Hello, everyone.
I said earlier, I joined the company in 2002, and we had somewhere in the 20 Camping World retail stores. The Good Sam business was a fraction of what it is today. We had one clear mission: we were going to be the clear number one player in this space. Playbook was pretty simple. What are we going to do? We're going to do 8- 10 acquisitions or new store development a year. Many years we've exceeded that number, but we've held true to that, and like I said, the playbook's simple. We can go out and we can buy businesses. We've bought from zero multiples on the low end to 4x- 5x on the high end. We do those deals all day long. We did our first acquisition in 2003 to 187 stores as we sit here today. I talk about those multiples.
It's important to know that that's a multiple based on the business that we're buying, the earnings that they're generating. That's before we put in what we do in F&I, the margin that we pick up there. What we do in the service, we're getting 70% margin on that business with the sales processes that we put in. That number grows exponentially after we do the acquisition and the pro forma effect of that. What gets lost in that, you're going to see some numbers here with the IRR on these investments, on these acquisitions, where you're probably going to say, "Why aren't you doing nothing but acquiring these businesses?" What's not going to be included in the number you're going to see is what happens in our Good Sam business. That's the piece that I feel that Marcus mentioned when we took the business public in 2016.
We had a hard time telling that story. Everyone wanted to focus on our dealership business with the tourists, with the cars, which is fine, but as he mentioned, our margins, our EBITDA margins, our gross margins, don't even compare then. One big reason for that is we have this business, this Good Sam business, that generates over $100 million of recurring high-margin earnings every year. One of the things when we took the company public on the road, what was the most common question that we got? Cyclicality. You got cyclicality in the business. Where are you in the cycle? What they didn't get, and what we always focus on is this $100 million+, $150 million in our Good Sam business. That's steady eddy business. That's not going away during a downturn. That is our hedge. The other piece, what do we do during a downturn?
We do acquisitions. We do acquisitions at zero times, one time. If you look at what we did in 2010, coming out of the downturn, the earnings and the revenue that we added to this.
We bought $1 billion of revenue for inventory value.
The answer is, yeah, the business is cyclical, but we prepare for it. We hedge against it. We manage our cash. We build our war chest so we can do acquisitions during the downturn and come out of it much stronger on the other side. We have our service business that 70%+ margin. Josh touched on that a little. What's happened in this space is the business, if you look at the install base, for 35 years, it hasn't gone backwards, and I think it's probably around 11.5 million, 12 million RVers today. What has happened is that business has outgrown the service infrastructure.
For the industry.
For the industry, not just for us. We're at 2,100 bays today. Between new stores that we're building, new service bay additions, adding service bays wherever we can, we've got about 350+ service bays that are in process to add to our network. Just to give you a little perspective on that, Matt, what do you do? What's revenue?
$22,000 per bay.
Per month.
Per month.
Per month. Yeah, that's not an annual number. You can do the math. What's 70% margin?
It's about $100 million of revenue for every 350. More importantly, it's 70 %+ margins. Again, when we talk about blowing through that billion-dollar number, we know we're adding these bays. We know we're adding it to our existing locations. We know that as we build new stores and acquire stores, we're doing it disproportionately. I told you that in the first two decades, we learned a lot. We learned that we built too big of a box up front and not enough bays in the back. We learned that the land that we built, as we built it, we didn't leave enough room for expansion and service. As we do these today, in a small market like Georgetown, Delaware, we're putting up 16 bays, 10 years ago, we probably would've put eight, and it's not just because the market got bigger.
It's because we realized we were leaving money on the table. When you look at the profitability of these locations, and you look at the ROI, when Josh talked about the fact that we buy stores that don't do service, our secret formula has always been and will always be, no matter who the other consolidators are, they will never be able to execute what we do in the F&I side and on the service side. We buy stores that sell a lot of units that have EBITDA margins of 2% and 3%, and 12 and 18 months later, they're 8%, 9%, 10%, 11%. Not because we sold more, even though we do. It's because we put the Camping World store in there. We start selling the Good Sam products. We add service to it.
We add F&I, our F&I process to it, and a store that looked like it made $200,000, $300,000 will now make $2 million, $3 million. It's a big game changer for us. I'll give you an example. We opened up three stores. Excuse me. We acquired three distressed stores in the middle of COVID. The rest of the market was taken off. One was in Pennsylvania, one was in New York, one was in South Carolina. Melissa went in for months and weeks, renovated the place. We have a good amount of money invested in them. Those three locations have been with us less than a year, and they'll throw off collectively, on an annual basis, $8 million, $7?
North of that.
North of $8 million. They were losing money when we took them over. It's 20 years of understanding where the process works and where it doesn't. You take an individual leader like Brenda, who goes in and says, "Okay, salespeople, there's no more just waiting for enough to come in." Will's going to put his digital process in. The leads come in every morning. Who's calling them back? What's the process? When are the appointments getting set up? It's a totally different process, and I think that's made a big difference for us and our members.
It's made a huge difference for us. I will tell you that one thing that you have to key on is you have to look at the install base. I know I said that before, but that number has never gone backwards in 35 years. You see, we took a slight dip maybe to 1988, whatever that year is. Nominal. There's been a lot of talk and a lot of conversation in the past year. Well, you guys are blowing it out of the park. Your earnings and your EBITDA are off the charts. COVID effect. We look at the COVID effect as being something that introduced a large number of people to our space. We don't expect that those people are going to get in the lifestyle, buy a unit, and then exit the lifestyle, and all of that business is going away.
We get the full cycle of that customer. We do everything we can to touch that RV customer, anything that they need, whether they need toilet paper in their unit, whether they need chemicals for the unit, whether they need a satellite dish.
New couches, tires.
New couches, any of that stuff, we're there. We want to get everything that they do around the RV space. Yeah.
What would be the lifetime value of a customer versus the gross profit on a new RV?
I'll address that in two ways. One, we don't report lifetime value. We do it intentionally, but we'll talk about it offline. Our gross profit in a normalized environment, because our gross profits on new RVs are slightly elevated today, is probably around 13%-14%. For us, this is a real important factor, the gross profit generated from the sale of new RVs is the least profitable thing we do as a company, but it is the gateway to all the other stuff. The reason that volume is important to us, the reason that growing our used when we can't get our new is important, is because without that transaction count, we can't bring somebody in, and let's say we make, what's our total combined front and back now, Matt?
We're up to 30. Yeah.
Front and back.
32, was that?
34, 35.
Dollars.
Oh, 15.
Yeah. In a normalized environment, it's like 8,000, 9,000. Today, it's probably north of 10. When we look at the lifetime value, and we look at the stickiness and the retention of that member, in roadside, it's over 70%. On the warranty side, it's over 70%. On insurance, it's 60%. On the club, it's north of 60%. We look at that recurring revenue, and we know that's our secret sauce. When we took the company public in 2016, Good Sam, the branded products under Good Sam, had an EBITDA of around $58 million. Today, it'll be north of $120 million. By the way, last year it was north of $115 million, so it isn't like COVID took it from $60 million to whatever it may be.
The downside of that business for us is that we haven't invested nearly enough in the Good Sam business, and so some of the new additions, particularly Wallace and Ryan and Will and Saurabh, were largely to say, "We need a quarter of a billion dollars or more out of earnings out of our Good Sam business." When you look at the last 12 months, you'll start to see jumps. We need those jumps, but the lifetime value far exceeds the gross profit from the front and the back 3x over. Far exceeds.
Quick question. You mentioned the questions posed to you by analysts is, but you're cyclical. You've been with the company long enough to know what's the depth of these cyclicalities, what's the length of them, and all of this technology and innovation that you're putting in play, the next cyclical cycle, quote-unquote, "downturn," what does that look like?
When you look at the industry over 40 years, you have to extract 2008 and 2009. The reason is that the credit crisis exaggerated the downturn because 800 credit score, you couldn't get a loan. In a normal case, new sales draw anywhere between 10% and 15% on a regular basis, and it's a dip, and we saw a little bit of as an industry in 2019. We'll talk a little bit more about what we're doing on the used side, but we need that used business to become a bigger part of our company. Quite frankly, I think we're agnostic of whether the customer buys new or used. We are totally agnostic. I'd be lying to say we wouldn't prefer them to buy used because our front-end grosses and our back-end grosses and our service grosses historically are a little better.
For their experience, we're agnostic. We'd like to get that to a 1:1. We know that even in a down year, there are still north of 800,000 private party used transactions that happen in this country, even in the worst new RV sales year. We got to grab more of that, and we have to lessen our dependency on how many new RVs are being sold and expect that if a 10%-15% draw happens, how do we catch ourselves on the bottom side? For those of you that are familiar with the business, because there's always this weird elephant in the room, you go and look at 2019, and I think what the market has really struggled with is seeing 2019's results compared to 2017 and 2018, which were much better, and then a big jump in 2020.
2019 had a huge paper charge for the strategic shift of getting out of the Gander business. Huge. A couple hundred million dollars. When we normalize what that looks like, we know our EBITDA wasn't that bad. When we came back in 2020 and made $565 million and everybody other than us was high-fiving each other, we were like, "Well, yeah. We made $400 million in 2017, $565 million, that's okay.
77 less stores. We think that's really important, and we know that we can't ever make 2019 go away. Maybe in 10 years we can, for now, we want to make sure that people understand that 2019 wasn't the market softened, your grosses dropped, your expenses went up, and everything happened. This, we shut down a whole business that we bought. That, I think, I lost credibility in the public marketplace because of it, and we're working hard to gain that back. What technology is doing for us as we invest in it going forward is it's improving the efficiencies. If you look at the SG&A overall, I think we're down below 68%, and we think we can get even better than that.
What Ryan and Saurabh and Wallace and Will and the rest of the team are doing is saying, "When the market softens again," not if, but when it does, if it drops 10%-15% and we lose $500 million-$600 million worth of revenue and we have $80 million of gross profit go away, how are we filling that bucket? We know today that it's inevitable. History repeats itself. Because it's inevitable, that's why you see this mad dash to build 350 bays. That's why you see this mad dash to grow the amount of imports we have. That's why you see this mad dash to digitize things, to take some of those costs out of the business. It will happen. All we're trying to do is mitigate it to the best of our ability.
We think we can still exceed $1 billion once we get all these things right, even in a downturn.
That's really the crux here, Marcus, that the people who don't believe in what you guys are doing think that this is your grandfather's Camping World, that in the next downturn, everything's going to hit the wall and the doors are going to fall off and you're not going to make much money. What the old cycles used to look at.
It is true, Mark, that I would almost play into that argument and I would say to you, "Okay, I'm going to make less. Am I going to make $600? Am I going to make $500?" What I will enter that period with is a boatload of cash, a boatload of available credit, and the ability to buy up, like we did in 2010, $1 billion of revenue. What happens is when you look at that five-year average, and if you look at from the moment we went public to today, including the disaster of 2019, our EBITDA CAGR is still almost 30%. You normalize that thing, and it's like 38%. When you look at what this free cash flow can throw off, are we going to have a cycle again? Probably. Are earnings going to probably drop in that year? Maybe.
Are we going to have a lot of cash and be opportunistic and make up for it in the next two years after that to sort of create that average? Yes.
Therein lies the rub, because everyone here is interested in the stock. You guys all own the stock. Everyone's here because they own the stock. Stock's $40. Stock yields 5%. Stock roughly trades at somewhere between 5x and 6x earning, right? Which to an old person like myself, implies that the market is seeing some disaster out there, right? That the out year is going to be $2, the out year is going to be $3. The out year is some disaster. What I would encourage you guys to do on a go-forward basis with all the new initiatives, with all the high-margin services and products that you're getting into, emphasize that this is not your grandfather's Camping World, that your sustainable margins in bad times with all the technology initiatives and things like that are significantly higher than anyone can guess.
When the next upcycle organically appears, you guys will be at $1.4 billion. I mean, screw $1 billion, screw $1.2 billion. If you start running these numbers in your head, you're far bigger, and I don't see how, who is the number two, three , or four player?
Nobody.
I would argue with every analyst in here that there are other people exclusively rolling up dealerships, and they're doing a fine job doing it. We've seen our competitor that is public. I don't know what their EBITDA margins are, but I think they're almost half of ours. They're a really good operator. What they don't have are all the other bells and whistles that we have. I think it's really important to start to see the value. Dillon was running Good Sam in 1989?
Yeah, well, we bought Good Sam in 1989, and then 1993, four to five.
It's a different business today.
Yeah, it's totally different. We didn't have the retail stores, we didn't have the dealerships. What we did have was the affinity and the membership that we could sell products and services to. To get that business, we outbid the CEO and Bear Stearns because we saw what they didn't see, which is a pretty amazing story when you think on the outside you can come in and outbid the CEO and his financial backers when we sell them the company. I think there's tremendous upside.
I think we learned a lot. I learned a lot going into this public environment. It was very daunting. I made a number of mistakes, and I feel like I learned. What I learned more than anything else is to keep our leverage down, build our cash, so that when there is a soft spot, we can scrape off the top as much revenue as we possibly want. What you see different today than even when we went public is the arsenal that really runs this business. By the way, this is just a subset of talent. We couldn't fit everybody here. The arsenal that runs this business that is so laser-focused on a specific discipline, driving a specific KPI is very different. I used to run the business a little looser when we first started it. We were running it like auto dealers.
We're just trying to buy stuff and grow stuff. I think what's happened is the newer generation has taught all of us, and COVID taught all of us that without technology, without the ability to transact remotely, we'll lose. Matt will talk to you in a little bit about something that we think will add $1 billion of revenue without adding one dealership, without actually that dealership even doing one more dollar of business. When we think about where we're going, we couldn't be more excited. To address Mark's point, and I say this as politely as I can, we will build cash, and we will stop complaining about the stock price, because that means there's more for me to buy and there's more for the company to buy.
When we look at acquisition opportunities, the best acquisition right now for us to make is ourselves. We have to balance that with our strong desire to grow our top line. I know for sure, Andy and I have been together even before Karin and I, and when we started this whole circus, we said, "Do you think we could get to $100 million of earnings? Do you think we could get there?" As we sit here today, we're going to kick down the door of $1+ billion in very short order because we know what mistakes we made that we won't repeat. For those of you that have been investors for years, we know what those mistakes are. I think in any big business that grows like this, you got to try some stuff.
We are an entrepreneurial organization. We try things. Some things are home runs. Nobody ever talks about them. Some things were total misses. The one thing that you'll find out about me and the rest of our team is when we make a decision, if we make a mistake, we react quickly, we own it, and we move on. We don't have a pride of authorship, or we know so much that we can't acknowledge, "Yeah, that didn't work out." We made another strategic shift in the last 30 days. When we look at our floors and Ryan brought it to me, and he just said, "Marcus, we're not getting enough return on the capital invested in our retail floors." We got to do more of this. Melissa and Kelly came and said, "We see a real shift in our DIY category.
We see a real shift in people's ability to want to hold onto their units longer. We need to launch home improvement on wheels. We got to get rid of these categories. We got to make room for that. As this team works together to try to find new ways to make money, we're all focused on one thing, because every single person you see in this room has real RSUs at stake. Not some options, not their pay plan. They have real long-term generational wealth at stake.
Well, I tell you, I think $1 billion, excuse me, in revenue without adding a store is a pretty good segue to turn the mic over to Matt.
High expectations.
I don't think we could say this enough. We are truly the industry leader. There is no one like us that exists really in any industry, frankly. If you just take a step back and objectively look at what we represent and the ecosystem that's been built, going back to Dillon's days of understanding the data that's available and our ability to monetize this data and make much more intelligent decisions than any one of our competitors. When we think of a cycle of any kind, we have basically insulated ourselves with our ability to give ourselves better insight to predict roughly when it should happen, to understand when it is happening, how can we deploy that capital in much more intelligent ways, be it the share repurchase program, be it other ways to actually go back and actually acquire other dealerships to actually put within our fold.
Other businesses that aren't dealerships.
Other dealerships, and especially technology, where you've seen this now, and we see the value of engaging with the customer so intimately, so that on a one-on-one basis, we know exactly where they are in the cycle.
Just to give you a little perspective, we have investments in the furniture business. We have investments in the appliance business. We have investments in the fintech business. We have investments in the campground booking business. These are all things that I think give us some insight into where we're going. I would expect those types of immaterial in size, but material in knowledge of making those investments will continue to do that.
You think of the ecosystem of, we try to get a customer in to buy an RV, and it's the attachment of each one of the products, as we've hit home on almost ad nauseam. The component that we don't speak about is how we're really an amalgamation of like a AAA insurance compared with an AutoNation, as you've heard Marcus say before, and a Pep Boys. What we don't speak about enough perhaps is the technology component, where you could almost throw in there a Carvana and an Airbnb, because we've reached this critical mass now where we have so many transactions. We've had 5.4 million unique active customers. We have 2.2 million paying members.
We have the most visited sites in the entirety of the RV industry by far and away, that's just looking at Camping World, never mind if you're looking at Good Sam and Gander, and every one of the other domains we have out there. We pretty well know everyone that's actively in the lifestyle, really what we're focused on is de-anonymizing each one of these customers. That's where Brenda and Josh and Brandon and Will and Saurabh, all of them have combined as a team effort to really invest in different customer data platforms on our websites that understand who these people are long before they even show intent that they want to buy. We continue to reinvest in the technology. I can't emphasize that enough. That's something that we've not talked about historically.
We really haven't even started to mine the data until maybe a year ago, as effectively as we should. You look at how many different records. We had over 30 million active customer records. Some of them obviously were old, some of them were relatively new, but when we're talking about 11.2 million RVers, we know who they are. We will engage.
5.3 million active customers, Tamara, transacting with us in a period of time. Active. Giving us money. 5.3. We know we always default to the Good Sam number of 2.2, but not everybody's a club joiner. We really have started to think about the excess above 2.2, and how to really create affinity with them with other products and services.
Leader in the business, I know we talked about almost ad nauseam for a moment about the cyclicality that exists, let's be honest, you look back to the 1980s, that cycle generally lasts 12- 18 months.
Scott?
Yeah?
Gas crisis, what year was that?
It started in 1979. Gas and interest went crazy.
Did you sell RVs when interest was 17%?
Absolutely.
Did you sell RVs when gas was high?
Absolutely.
Okay.
Made it through.
People always ask that don't know our space, what are the risks in the business? Credit, and the availability of it, is the biggest risk. Gas prices? Sure. If it's $25 a gallon, it's a problem, but it's not. Remember, the bulk of what we're selling is travel trailers. Interest rates? Sure. Rebecca, you've done interest rates in the days of 11%, 12%, 13%, 14%, and demand was still strong.
It was very strong. We also, Mark, moved into a venue where we expanded the terms with the higher rates. We were concerned that maybe we were selling our future. All we did is just expand and build our future. It's always there. The people are there. Vendors, lenders are always there for us.
For those of you that are unaware, a traditional RV is financed anywhere between 180 and 240 months. The interest is tax-deductible as a second home. In addition to that, we have the Good Sam credit card. We have a buy now, pay later. We have an internal charge, then we have something that we're not ready to discuss yet.
We could. It's up to you.
Go ahead.
Love to. As you heard me mention earlier about Carvana, and what Carvana has really done effectively, and there's a few others that have done it just as effectively, like a Lithia Motors and Driveway, is really build this environment where a consumer can truly transact in a digital space. It's in that digital space where they secure the financing, they identify their RV, they're able to deal with a customer service agent, and they're provided certain guarantees so they actually have the peace of mind and comfort to transact in the space. There's nothing like that that exists in the RV business.
Let's deal with the barriers. I'll give you the objection, you give everybody the solution.
Certainly.
Okay. You need a license to sell RVs, right?
Conveniently enough, we'll be in all 48 states. As a result of that, we'll have a dealer license secured in all states, whereby we can transact at least with a used asset. At least. Never mind the access that we have to private label products in particular, be it Coleman, Pioneer, Mallard. By the way, these are the best-selling brands in America that we perhaps don't boldly speak about as much as we should. These are private label brands.
Well, what percentage, say, of our business is private label?
Of our new inventory sales?
Owned brands.
Of our new inventory sales.
Of inventory sales.
About 34% of all new assets that we sell is a private label product.
Growing.
That could easily grow.
What about delivery, Matt? I don't want to come get it.
We have exclusive partners in the transport space, whereby those transport carriers could actually deliver to any place in the U.S. Given that we'd have a license in all 48 states, we could cross over state boundaries, just because we'd have to change the paper on which that used asset is transacted on. The bill of sale, no issue. Transport, Driveway arrangements to campgrounds, to your home, wherever you'd like.
In the 48 states, can you sell new, unlike Carvana?
That is the major differentiator compared to us and any one of the other major automakers. If you look at a Lithia, they're not in all 48 states. AutoNation, CarMax even.
Let me be super clear so that nobody leaves here with any confusion. There is nobody in America today, auto dealer, boat dealer, RV dealer, powersports dealer, that will be able to, tomorrow, sell their product, new or used, in every state in America online. What if I don't have financing?
We are strategically working in partnership with an online virtual financing company that would afford a consumer that entirely seamless transaction experience, whereby the consumer would only have to engage with the customer service agent to just secure the last bits and pieces of actual digital signature, and then also to arrange for delivery or transport. There's once again, nothing quite like that seamlessly integrated into the process where we could build into our own homegrown platform, thanks to Saurabh and Will, where we could develop all of our own in-house customized APIs. It's literally that seamless.
If I buy in a market and I'm 120 mi away from your local dealership, does that mean I can't get service?
The other benefit of this is not only the service network that we have established, obviously, with the 185+ locations, but also, as Will touched on earlier, which perhaps it would even be worthwhile to clarify, we have ongoing relationships with over 3,000 standalone service facilities. 3,000 outside of our network. When Will was speaking about the Good Sam Park network, you're talking about the Good Sam service network, where this is what we had announced a year ago, and we actually are at this point where we're launching it. We have formed these relationships over years with these service centers.
When you think of someone on the road, or someone that's taking a used delivery, or someone that's going to a campground, you could literally tap into the power and harness the power of this network that's as expansive as any other network in automotive or RV for that matter.
When we talk about adding $1 billion of revenue with a traditional 24% margin that comes with that, in markets where we don't have stores, that's the mechanism and the vehicle, and no other dealer will be able to compete with it. Period. End of story. When you think about a prizefighter, we know we have our core business very strong. For us, the brand RVway, which we'll roll out in the first quarter, hopefully of next year.
I'd say by no later than April.
Will be the knockout punch. I promise you, we are bracing and preparing for it, both on the service side and the inventory side. It is the knockout punch because I don't know how you compete. You've seen these steps that have happened. We added Good Sam RV Valuator, which was 13 years of proprietary data that Chris Johnson, raise your hand, who oversees our $1 billion of inventory, the biggest asset and the biggest liability in our business, does a great job. That's the reason we have the turns and the margins. Thank you, Chris. When you look at the way we manage that inventory, Good Sam RV Valuator was created to give us a competitive advantage. Our used inventory has grown. When we keep hearing there's no inventory to buy, Karin, you know what our used inventory is as of today, roughly?
In excess of $360 million.
What was it a year ago?
Oh, I don't think.
Half of that.
Yeah. I only think it was $200.
It was $100, like $130.
Yeah.
You'll see that these steps that you're seeing on the balance sheet are preparing for that moment when Highways launches nationwide, when Highways has the iframe in there, so you can do the entire transaction remotely. It took you how many years to get your transport process set up and get it, Lindsey, I know, was involved in that as well to meet all the regulatory standards.
Gosh, started back in 2012, we officially launched that home delivery campaign in 2018.
It isn't like home delivery. There is a lot of regulatory interstate commerce issues. I don't know if, Lindsey, you want to deal with all the stuff that we have to make sure as we're transporting units around.
Sure. As Matt touched on, we are a regulated business. We have different laws we need to consider when we're rolling out these new programs. We have partnered with transport companies who hold licenses to transport units. We also wanted to make sure that we were doing the right thing as it related to our manufacturer licenses. We really leaned into our legal grounds to be able to execute on this in our used inventory. We take a very thoughtful and methodical approach when outlining what these new products and services are to make sure that we're delivering a high-quality product, with a great experience across the board that we can trust.
Want to touch that slide, Matt?
Oh, sure. It's almost just further belaboring the point that this is really a long-term game that we keep on trying to emphasize, where our CAGR has been double that of the RV industry going back to 2010. When we talk about a cycle of any kind, hopefully this is working, but when we talk about a cycle of any kind, we ultimately have outpaced the market with a rare exception. Even in that rare exception with 2019 where you saw a slight dip, it is literally ever so subtle, and it actually followed the trajectory of the industry at large. As I said earlier, we kind of see it coming, which as many of you might recall, we were the first ones saying that, "Hey, beware, the RV industry is going to cool off for a moment," but we always know that it bounces back.
That's why we continue to emphasize this 5- 10-year game plan, where we are incredibly bullish on the prospects of it. A 12- 18-month cycle is nothing. It represents opportunity and an abundance of opportunity to go out and just reinforce what we're doing already and actually validate all those initiatives that we've spoken about today. As we talk about Highways, that's just one of many things, and we've almost loaded our arsenal and our bazooka for the past few years to completely dismantle any one of our competitors. When you think about RVR or Lazydays or General, which there really are no other competitors that even come close. They don't operate in the same centralized manner as we do, and as such, they're weakened. As an RV retailer, they still operate under different brands all across the country. They'll never get to our scale.
They'll never get to our ecosystem. They simply can't replicate what we've built going on four, five, six decades. As I look at Dillon, he started to build this database in the 1980s and 1990s, and now we're truly able to bring in the talent to help mine it to an extent that this CAGR and this household information should continue to grow at a rate that's actually been more disproportionate than the prior 10 years. Which I think is a good opportunity to speak through really the Good Sam attachment rate and all the different products that continue to propel us and differentiate ourselves. I don't think we could honestly hit home on this enough times. We have world-class margins because of what our Good Sam business does. Our 36%+ margins are attributable to this. I don't know what other peer group we even fall under.
You could throw out a Winnebago or MarineMax, you could throw out any automotive. We far exceed all of them. With Wallace, I think it's a great opportunity to speak through Good Sam and all the different products and what this means to the overall ecosystem.
Thank you, Matt. I'm the new guy. I'm Wallace. I'm not going to step down because this is the time I can actually see Josh's head. The top of his head. It empowers me just to be able to do that. I just kind of stay on the stage. Again, as Matt, Marcus, everybody, we talk about this ecosystem ad nauseam. I want to switch gear a little bit and talk less about the ecosystem, but talk more about demystify and to Mark's point, how the discount that is applied to the stock price as well, or the risk that is burdening our business.
When you look at the composition of the business, not only you talk about the active customers, the install base that we serve, not only the people that we sell RVs to, but the people that is in the install base that we could potentially serve through the service base through other part of the businesses. You're talking about the businesses that are synergistic in nature, just the fact that we have all of this all together, and the fact that it de-risk our business. Meaning as we have more services, more revenue streams, that is not tied to only the up cycle or down cycle of the RV industry. We talk about these businesses that help to de-risk, stabilize it.
As we grow more and more of these businesses, the contribution of these recurring high-margin business is going to have a much more pronounced impact when we go through that down cycle. That de-risking element, it's not really reflected based on if you look at the analyst consensus, when you try to go see what is the implied discount rate based on our stock price, you will see that there's a huge risk premium imposed on our stock right now. What that means is, I really think Marcus has always talked about this top line, these growth initiatives. I really want to focus more on the de-risking side of it. That should act as a value enhancement, just having all these businesses together. Good Sam.
Oh, sorry. I was just going to ask about the potential to increase this recurring part of the business via acquisitions. What would acquisitions look like on the Good Sam side of the house? Remember you bought a few trade shows or something like that, or magazines. What services could fit in there that you don't have today? What do you think?
It wouldn't surprise me if we bought another insurance-type business a competitor in the roadside space. It wouldn't surprise me if we got into the campground acquisition business. As we look at that business, we know that the organic growth is only going to give us so much. As we look at the amount of cash flow that business kicks out, it hasn't necessarily been able to keep that cash to reinvest in itself. I would expect some pretty significant acquisitions in the next three, four years that will bolster that business and give it a greater share inside of that specific discipline.
Thank you.
What's the EBITDA of Good Sam?
The challenge with Good Sam EBITDA is we have two reporting segments. We have the plans and services segment, and we have the field operations retail segment. The credit card and the club, which are Good Sam products, we actually put under retail because our retail organization needed to feel like they weren't just giving discounts and signing people up and having nothing to show for it. It's north of $120 million when you add up all those products together. We don't report it that way. We report the segment.
What's the potential?
$250 million is our target in the next five years. We have to get to $250 million. Every single person that's here knows that is the KPI that will determine their financial success as well. We have to get Good Sam to $250 million.
How for Good Sam credit very high multiples. To apply some kind of a spin out of Good Sam?
No. We've talked a lot internally. You've asked me that question before. Have we ever thought about spinning out Good Sam either to a tracking stock or selling it to somebody else at a 16, 17 time multiple? The answer is no. Not today we haven't. We obviously always keep our options open. When you look at the overall story, that ecosystem feeds itself. We just need to do a better job of telling the story. We need to do a better job of showing explosive growth in Good Sam. If you go to a Q or a K a year or two from now, and you see the trend all of a sudden starting to jump and you see the stability there, we believe that the market will recognize that. We have to earn it by performing.
While it's been stable and had good growth, we need it to have the kind of growth that our dealership businesses have, and that's our focus right now. It's actually a disproportionate focus. When you see us marketing over the coming years, you're going to see a huge slant. The reason that we called our peer-to-peer business Good Sam is because we wanted to create awareness, and we didn't want to confuse it with the selling of RVs. The reason that we're thinking about getting more into the campground space is because we know that's the happy place for people. You'll see a lot more of Good Sam. Yes, sir.
Yeah. If you want the benefit of the value of a recurring revenue business, why aren't you adopting things like customer lifetime value and cost of acquisition and churn and those things that are always reported with recurring revenue business? Because if you manage those metrics, the margins are huge and the revenue multiples dwarf what you.
You could probably expect that in the future when we're not in the middle of a reporting year. You could probably expect that in the coming years, that we will do that. Internally as a team, much like your question and much like yours we recognize that we have to provide that roadmap for people. We agree with you, and thank you for that feedback. Yes, sir.
To throw a little more gas on the fire.
That's great, Mark. Thanks.
With Outdoorsy going to go public at a $4 billion cap.
Yep.
For the week.
Yep.
That doesn't tempt you to maybe spin out a small fraction of what you would call either Good Sam or Good Sam Rentals?
I want to focus on the sustainability of a valuation, not the flash in the pan, because the sustainability matters, and at the end of the day, investors are the brightest people. They're going to look at the peers, they're going to look at the comps and what Outdoorsy has to be prepared for is, does it make any money?
Well, let's say Outdoorsy is going to lose. When you started the grand analyst meeting today, you said that analysts wanted to lump you in the car dealership category.
Yep.
Everyone's always looking to lump you somewhere, and you don't really fit because there's no comparable to those clowns at Lazydays. That's really it.
I don't know if they're clowns, but we'll go ahead with that.
I'll leave that one.
Yep. Yeah, okay.
If you guys were to show something to make people more aware of exactly what you have.
It could be coming up with another reporting segment. One of the things that we've discussed internally is as the materiality of things develop, Karin will make the decision whether she wants to create another reporting segment, and that would be our opportunity to highlight something that we're doing that we believe will supersede someone else's performance.
The margin profile in those diagrams are all very different. Some are very high, and some are probably lower. People, I think, need more help, if you will, identifying exactly what the pockets you are. I think he has a good point.
Yeah. We agree with it. We also want to make sure that we don't have our core business distracted from it. We still have a core business, while we want to do all these other things, they need to come to fruition before we start tooting our horn. I think at the end of the day, when we look at the comps that we're dealing with, having Lazydays out there is helpful, I guess. It's helpful. Having Outdoorsy out there is helpful.
Usually helpful.
I guess, from a valuation standpoint. At the end of the day, I've said this to you and other people before, at some point, if the market doesn't recognize the value that the business has, the board and the management team will look for alternatives. I'll just leave it at that. We're going to build our cash, we're going to keep our leverage low, and we're going to ensure that we have maximum optionality because everybody up here, including me, we have a lot at stake, like all of you do. At whatever valuation it is I believe that the valuation that exists today is still a little bit of a hangover from people being pissed off in 2019. Okay. We can't debate it. It is what it is and the math is the math.
Quarter after quarter, most of the analysts in the room have really good questions and really good objections. Even Craig said to me, I love him to death, said, "Okay, I'm going to admit, you guys kind of kicked ass in that one." That was a good quarter. Over time, as we continually deliver and we do what we say we're going to do and we execute, those things will resolve themselves. If they don't resolve themselves and the value is there, and we believe as a board and as a management team that the value isn't right. We'll figure out what our options are.
Today, we're throwing off a lot of cash, we're sitting with a lot of cash, and in fact, when you look at our leverage as a company, and you compare it to how the public autos report their leverage, Karin will talk about it in a little bit, there's a lot of little nuance things. Remember, we've only been public for five years. We're learning how to be a better public company, but we don't ever want to forget that we're an entrepreneurial, family-type organization that happens to be a public company, not a public company that acts exclusively like a public company. That last graph on the right-hand side is the one that I'm leaving up as long as I can so that it can imprint in your mind.
When you ask about cyclicality, when you ask about the fragmentation of the market, there's a couple things to note there. Number one, it had a pretty steady 1980s, 1990s. It was pretty steady. I told you that in 2010, things changed dramatically. When the gas crisis happened and the market crashed, the manufacturers realized, as we did, that innovation had to be at the forefront. Make units lighter, allow a Prius to tow it. Look at companies like Happier Camper. Look at all these companies that have developed these smaller, lightweight units. Give them a lot of credit. Look at the jump from 11 to 20. Very different than from 1 to 11. Much bigger jump. I think you'll see that number continue to grow. For those of you that wonder if this is a fad or if this is going away, I wanted Becky and Scott here.
Dad used to sell campers in a gas station?
Yeah.
In what year?
Well, he started in 1969.
Okay.
Just grew it, but the gas station years were the early years.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Dillon, 1989?
Yeah.
While we can't tell you that this is the biggest industry that we'll ever be, we can tell you that it's relatively protectable, it has a lot of growth, and you're dealing with a company that has a variable cost structure and the desire to crush $1 billion of earnings. We're not that far from it. As we look at our 2021 year, we obviously can't tell you where we think we're going to end up, but we're feeling very good about the third quarter. While the supply constraints are still very big on the new side, I think everybody's written about them. They're very big.
What we've done on the used side, what we've done on the SG&A side, what we've done on the service side, will deliver earnings that people will be happy with, we believe, even though they may not like the new sales number that, quite frankly, is out of our control. We can't make more inventory ourselves. How do we pivot and how do we adjust? We go out, and we do other things to offset it. Karin?
Hi. Again, Karin Bell, CFO, and I go way.
Is your mic on, Karin?
Green?
I think so. Can you hear me?
Yeah.
We've been talking about growth. We don't want to go back all the way to the beginning of time. We want to just talk about growth since we went public. In 2016, our EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA, was over $200,000.
$265.
$265. Our trailing 12 through the end of June of 2021, we were in excess of $800 million. That is a CAGR of 27%. That's huge. Okay? I know we've talked about it. I want you to be able to see it in a graph. I want you to be aware that the calculations are in the back in the appendix of this deck that is posted on our website. It is a huge difference from going public in 2016 and only five years, having a 27% CAGR. The other thing that's really worth noting is our leverage ratio. Our leverage ratio has come down from in excess of 1.6, it was about 1.8x in 2016, to less than 1.2x at the end of trailing 12 June of 2021.
That was a concerted effort on our part to make sure that we were developing our cash, or excuse me, banking our cash and making sure that we have the appropriate debt levels. When we refinanced in our senior secured debt in June, we paid down a substantial portion of that debt because we knew it was important to deploy our capital in that way.
I know we've talked about this on our calls, but I want to reinforce it. Today we're sitting with over $300 million of used inventory not subject to floorplan financing.
Correct.
Not allowed to say free and clear, right?
That's right.
Okay. I got it in, though. We have over $250 million of unencumbered retail inventory.
Yes.
We have, Brent, how much real estate unencumbered by mortgage?
Close to $200 million.
When you ask us about where our cash is, it's important that those things are in addition to our cash balance. We have a floorplan availability of?
Currently $1.379 billion.
How much is drawn on it today?
Roughly half.
A revolver?
Of $60 million with a $20.885 million draw.
Which is just LCs and a little bit of cash?
No, that's actual draws.
Okay.
It's not LCs.
When we think about the availability of cash and our access to cash and our availability to credit, I want to just reinforce it that it's important for everybody to know we're going to continue to stockpile cash. We're going to continue to make acquisitions. We're going to continue to de-lever so that we can be opportunistic however we need to be.
Can I make a point?
Yeah.
We have two revolvers. The revolver I just quoted is on the FreedomRoads dealership side. We have another revolver on the total company, $70 million?
Part of our senior secured.
Part of our senior secured, of which we have nothing drawing. Nothing. We have access to capital.
If we wanted to make a $300 million strategic acquisition tomorrow, we could do it without borrowing a dime. I really want that to sit with you for a minute. I'm not saying that we're going to, but we can, and we want to make sure that we have about $500 million of available cash and credit to make an acquisition if it presents itself, up to that amount.
Thank you.
Yeah.
The interesting thing about this slide, the portion on the right, is to talk about the internal rate of return on our dealerships. Remember, this is a range. There are some that come in on a low end, there are some that come in on the high end. The interesting thing on top of this, and Marcus mentioned this earlier, this doesn't include the Good Sam products and services side. This is purely just retail.
We don't do that because we don't report it that way.
That's correct. Yes. I'm going to have Wallace talk about our weighted average cost of capital.
Just so there is no confusion, we want to clear that up.
The weighted average cost of capital, again, it's a long-term view considering the cost of equity, the cost of debt, as well as our capital structure. It's not to say that, well, if we were to borrow more and buy, we will have that cost of capital. Obviously, if we were to finance it through debt, it's way lower. This is just an illustration to show that the internal rate of return compared to our long-term weighted average cost of capital, considering those things together, it is still a much higher return than our cost of capital.
One, a couple housekeeping items. Brent, want to talk about, for those that were unaware of the senior facility that we closed on recently?
The refinance of it?
Yes.
Yeah. A few months ago, we did refinance our senior secured credit facility, lower our interest rate by an amount. We extended the term, so we have a senior secured facility with maturity in 2028. Put an end to that, and it's the same structure as we had before. It's a covenant- lite deal. Really, in effect, we have no covenants, no financial covenants in that facility unless we draw on our revolver to a certain amount, which we've never done. I think we've drawn on that revolver since one time, it's a small amount maybe, if that.
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
Working on the floorplan.
Feel good about that. We're working on our floor plan facility, working on the refinancing of our floor plan facility, which will probably close in the next 30-ish days. Terms very similar to what we have today. We have a grid on our interest rate pricing, so with the working capital that we have in the business, we'll improve on our rate, an amount there, and looking at a five-year maturity on that. We'll extend our floor plan facility out. For five years, we'll increase the size of the facility, an amount, and then add an accordion feature on top of it, so if we need to expand in the future.
That's the longest facility we've ever had.
Typically been three years.
Okay.
Yeah.
All right. The industry disruptor slide is a slide that we use internally to understand our milestones. We decided to share it with the group, and we park things in here. The internal joke is what exactly near term, medium term, and long-term actually are. For most companies, it's years. In some cases, it's months or a year. In a lot of these cases, in the near term, Good Sam RV Rentals launched. I believe there's close to how many units online already in a couple weeks?
2,000.
About 2,000 listings already with very little marketing so far. The Good Sam Parks business we continue to grow, and we're using the new campground booking system that we bought as a new lead generator. We relaunched RV Magazine and RV.com, which is essentially an editorial marketplace, a lifestyle marketplace that people use to get information. On the right-hand side is Highways. That is our purely digital transaction framework, both for new and used, that we expect to execute in all 48 states with financing happening exclusively online. Exclusively online. For those of you that are Carvana fans, we think this is maybe even better. RVs.com will launch in the spring, early summer of next year. That is a private party marketplace. 985,000 individuals sold their used units to a private party and did not go through a dealership in the last 12 months.
We know that we've had requests from Good Sam members over the years to help them with that process. Maintenance process, inspection process, titling process, finance process, sell all the products and services. RVs.com will be that marketplace for individuals to private party transact with us acting as a facilitator and a fee collector through that process. No inventory on our part. As we look at Good Sam RV Service Plus, obviously we want to continue to grow our service business. Down at the bottom, you see some omnichannel experiences. We made an investment in Happier Camper, an unbelievable management team, some of the smartest people that I think we've met in the industry. Innovative, really intelligent, great customer experience, really thinking about things. We have the ability to upsize our investment there. Allure is historically a furniture manufacturer. You'll see us continue to grow on the supply side.
We believe we can be a disruptor in aggregating parts and pieces. When you hear the word manufacturer in the RV industry, it's a bit of a misnomer. They're assemblers, and they're aggregating parts and pieces. What we noticed is we wanted to play in the things that we believe have the most margin opportunity and make up the biggest ticket. When you look at the inside of a unit, furniture is a big part of that. Ryan heads up that organization. I think you came up with the stat of how much furniture makes up. You want to speak to that?
Yeah, absolutely. From a furniture perspective, I don't know how much, $100 million or $200 million, $300 million opportunity in the RV furniture industry, and we're just right here, right now, we're looking to take major share, major margin in the space, so we're just getting started. Next year's going to be a big year in expansive growth in that category.
Melissa came to us from, raise your hand, came to us from very successful retailers like Cabela's and Lowe's Home Improvement. She has taken over the visual merchandising of the customer experience, both when they pull up to the store and when they get inside. What you'll see tomorrow, she has been the architect of our new home improvement on wheels. We talked on our last call that we will be the Home Depot, Lowe's equivalent of the RV space. What you'll see tomorrow is just a sampling of what's to come. You could expect us to be in the flooring, cabinet, countertop, lighting, toilets, showers, everything that it takes. Part of the reason why Highways and the design renovation centers are coming out at the exact same time. Josh, you want to talk about your reconditioning standards and Highways real quick?
Yeah, make no mistake.
How many years ago did we meet?
You and I. A long time ago.
1996?
You were 24, I was 26. I'm older. Yeah, it's been a three-phase, right? If you look at our used inventory, there's three parts to what we wanted to accomplish this year. One , we wanted to prove this thesis that we could go out and acquire. You saw that we tripled the number from $130 million to almost $400 million of used inventory. We built out a very precise process for how we were going to use our existing database of the 2 million Good Sam customers, the 4.4 million transactions, and we sourced a lot of RVs this year, obviously. The next part of that phase is to raise the offering of that RV. Much like CarMax. CarMax sells the exact same cars as the Ford dealer down the road, but they get a premium for it because the customer's convinced that that's a better car.
We should be the brand to deliver that value to the industry. There is no industry standard today for what a used RV should be. That should be incumbent upon us to deliver. I mean, think about it. They're living on mattresses. They're in this residential space. There should be a quality of used that doesn't exist today. That's phase II. When we deliver on that level of reconditioning from our service departments, we're then going to go to the market and we're going to advertise that. We're going to market aggressively this new brand of used RV that exists in this industry. We're talking about coming back with a money-back guarantee. Majority of our units will leave with a 30-day warranty. There'll be a brand-new peace of mind in doing business with Camping World. Why? Because every mile you travel puts you closer to the next Camping World, right?
Nobody camps in their backyard. There's huge value in that service space for the used consumer. There's some unknown when you buy used. When you buy from a national network like us in the 48 states, you'll be willing to pay a premium for that sense of comfort, right? We believe that we'll deliver a quality used piece, and we're going to provide that peace of mind. The quality is going to come out of the design centers, working closely with these new design centers to bring the level of conditioning up. The design centers are twofold. They're built to work with the existing consumer out there that wants to do DIY, but the 12,000 used pieces that we now have in inventory would go through a much more, I don't want to say elaborate, but thoughtful process for what reconditioning means as far as the standards.
There is no current standard across the whole enterprise, but there will be by the time we start January 1 of next year, and the customer will have a better used unit to buy at Camping World. No question it.
The last long-term box, we weren't able to put logos together because we don't know what it all looks like, and we laughed at some of the team members who threw out things like blockchain and electrification and monetizing data via whatever all those words are. At the end of the day, what we know is that the customer has evolved. The way we communicate with them, the way we transact with them has to continue to evolve. We're one of the few companies that actually takes Bitcoin cryptocurrency as a form of payment. Brenda, I think we sold our first one not too long ago, specifically doing that. We take on no risk. We just have a partnership with the processor.
What it tells you is we're thinking about how the consumer has changed, how they want to be communicated with, what they expect, and at some point in time, getting into some augmented reality of how people would even shop walking through our front doors. I can't remember the retailer that you guys showed me the other day.
Well, there's a few that we've been working at and extensively pursuing that opportunity where imagine Highways, but imagine that same consumer that's sitting at home with their Oculus headset walking through the used RV that they want to purchase and being able to just check that box in this whole different unique universe to actually just have that same asset delivered to their campground, to their home.
We're really the only entity that could tie that together, and we could provide access to it in a much more affordable manner to the broader array within this Highways marketplace or our existing ecosystem of Camping World.
We still have to deliver communication in a historical way. Today we have multiple call centers, not 24/7, but pretty close to where we're taking care of our membership issues, our sales organization, customer complaints, and a variety of other things. Anything you want to add to that, Tamara?
I think the one thing as we talk about this, we can't forget the customer, the new customer who has never had an experience with an RV. How do we help them? How do we help educate them? How do we educate our teammates, going back to what Lindsey was speaking about? How do we make sure that their experience is solid and thorough? Because that's the other piece of growing the market. Making sure that we are taking care of our tried-and-true customers that have been with us for years, those customers that went and saw Mr. Jensen in 1969 at that gas station, the customers that take each year and the experiences and pass that down to their family and friends.
Years ago, Camping World worked with a couple of our vendors. They did a survey with a gentleman by the name of Clotaire Rapaille. Probably doesn't ring a bell to any of you guys. Clotaire Rapaille was behind the old Folgers coffee. Mmmm good. Any of you guys who drink coffee remember that old Folgers coffee? We had Clotaire Rapaille do a study on the RV industry. Why do people go in the industry? What do they do? What are the three elements? He came back with three elements, and this study was done, I'd probably say in 1993. There was three things. He said, food, family, and fun.
I think today, no matter who you're looking at from a consumer standpoint, those three elements of food, family, and fun as the RV community looks to connect, looks to connect with their family, looks to connect with who's at that campsite next to me. Where's that friend I'm going to experience? We know all these digital things are great, but the one thing we learned, I think, during COVID is that human interaction, gosh, if we don't have it, man, I miss it. I want it. That's what the RV lifestyle brings, and that's I think one of the most exciting things that we can bring to everyone. God, I'm going to get emotional. That's powerful, though. I think all of you can take that, and you think that's our lifestyle. That's what we're trying to sell. That's what we want to sell.
That's what we can do, that's how we expand and grow, and that's how we are going to build and broaden our ecosystem. That $1 billion, we're going to bust that thing. We're going to bust it.
For sure. That's a good segue to, I think, this is our last slide. Just reminding everybody what it looked like when we went public. Not that it matters to anybody in here, in December of 2017, our EBITDA trailing 12 was $365 million, and our stock price was $47. I know. It's kind of crazy. You see what our adjusted EBITDA is there now. Karin very elegantly stopped it at $800 million. It'll be nicely in excess of that as we finish the year out. We're starting to knock on that billion-dollar door in very short order. There's a lot of factors that have to fall into place for that to happen sooner than later. We think we're making the moves internally. Our goal is, as Tamara said, to bust through that number.
We're going to do that by growing top-line revenues, maximizing profitability, and doing all the things, investing in our business for growth, maintain a healthy leverage ratio, return capital to shareholders. For those of you that are unaware, we did increase our dividend recently. At this stock price, it's a 5% yield. The last is to invest in technology, which Saurabh and the rest of the team are doing. Lindsey overseeing the people organization gives us the chance to go from 14,000 employees, which is a lot, particularly when you're trying to manage through COVID, it's a lot of people. I wouldn't be surprised if a few years from now we had 20,000 people and growing. The task is daunting, but it's been an amazing journey, and we think that the sky is the limit.
If you want, I'd open up the floor for some questions for the team.
Hey, thanks. This has been a great event. I appreciate it. Matt, maybe you're the right person to address the question on sourcing. It feels like a huge opportunity in the used market. You've got the Good Sam RV Valuator. I'm really curious what your traction has been with this Good Sam RV Valuator and whether it's a game changer in terms of sourcing and so forth.
Yeah. I was asking the team record updates as of last evening, and I can tell you through our own dealership group, we've provided over 220,000 RV values, be it a consignment opportunity, a trade-in opportunity, or an outright purchase opportunity, and we provided another 240,000 records to consumers in the open marketplace since the beginning of the year. When you think of the opportunity there and just continuing to refine this lead source, which really that's where Brenda's been integral in setting up an entire team to manage it nationwide. We're really just getting started in terms of the sourcing. While we've been good, we still have a lot more room to identify and more cleanly close these consumers that are providing us this information and just continue to figure out that arbitrage. We don't ever overpay.
We want to identify where is that need in a specific marketplace, because once again, given the centralized nature of our efforts and our operations, we could take in a fifth wheel, for example, in the Dallas market, but we might have that same need for the fifth wheel in Florida. No one else can provide that level of insight as quickly as we can, where we still have, for now, a set of eyes identifying every single one of these being submitted, and they all have to abide by four minutes or less. We call it the Roger Bannister rule, who for those of you that are runners, know that he was the first one that had a four-minute mile.
Where they all know in four minutes or less, we have to review it, understand the arbitrage, understand the opportunity to redeploy that same asset anywhere in the country where it's most needed, where we know we can maximize that return.
May I just ask, how does it work with RVs.com, the marketplace? One, you've got a sourcing capability for Camping World, but two, you've got an opportunity on the marketplace side.
Once again, I view this as a lead source, much as the RV rentals campaign. When you look at RV rentals, our motivation there, while we see a clear path to profitability, unlike competitors like an Outdoorsy, is really to buy and sell more RVs.
Sell insurance and sell warranties and roadside and maintenance.
It's all the attachment off of that, no matter what. When we look at rvs.com, the second most visited site in our space is RV Trader. RV Trader has access, second to us, to this entire private party marketplace. What they don't have, though, is the same access to capital to be able to help financing these acquisitions, nor do they have access necessarily to the documentation and the legal backend, thanks to Lindsey's team, to allow us to help with a seamless transition of ownership from the seller to the buyer. Once again, we're just trying to help that consumer move through the whole ecosystem quicker and us just get a little bit of change, and hopefully we're able to earn their business with Good Sam, with retail.
Furthermore, if they don't want to sell to another private party, we're more than happy to buy or consign from them.
There's a hidden gem inside of the RV Valuator and why we branded it Good Sam is we want the marketplace to continue to see Good Sam as their ally, as their advocate, as the authority in the space, which is why we don't brand our dealerships or retail products that way. If an RV consumer goes onto Kelley Blue Book or goes into a dealership and gets a value, and then they go to their Good Sam app, or they go to the Good Sam website or the RV Valuator, and they see a higher value, we're essentially telling them that we think their unit is worth more, and we're putting greater value in that transaction. That grows the affinity of that individual to that brand. It grows the stickiness of that customer to our other products and services because they have their value and their decision-making justified.
When you tell somebody that their thing is worth more, don't listen to him, I'll give you more, it builds credibility, and that was part of our retention tool. We haven't really told people that publicly, but the RV Valuator had an intrinsic retention model inside of it to get our Good Sam members to go, "Okay, I trust these guys. They're not trying to take something from me for less. They could be 5%-15% higher than everybody else. Why? Do I really care? I just want the money." Within minutes, you can come in, get a valuation, and the same day, get a check. That's a big deal for people.
Craig, even to just further paint this picture here, we created the RV rentals environment with the same backend functionality that will exist and support rvs.com. Just imagine that you're an owner of an RV. You want to monetize your investment in an RV asset. You also want to just utilize Camping World's access to insurance, retail, all the other products. You could actually just toggle a button and say, oh, if I want to sell this right now, this is what Camping World will buy it for. Why don't I just hit a listing button? I could keep my asset still available on RV rentals, but also have it listed in rvs.com so that you could just sell it to whatever that individual is that most desires it at whatever price you name.
As a consumer, it's just emboldening them more, and once again, when we look at an Outdoorsy, it's so cumbersome for them to overcome that marketing budget. We already have the most visited sites. We have the domain authority that they literally desire and yearn for. We don't have to spend the same amount in marketing as they do, and we're able to compete on the back end with an RV Trader that, once again, has a marketing budget, frankly, that doesn't even come close to ours, but we don't have to spend incrementally really any more.
When you look at the rental marketplace, please know that it will have more than RVs on it in the foreseeable future. Campsites, cottages, cabins, anything that sort of fits in that zeitgeist, that inventory will be there. Who knows, down the road, potentially vacation homes, because RVers don't just RV. They do other things. When we look at that marketplace, we have relationships with certain companies that want to list their park models, their cottages, their yurts. All of those things, you could expect that to be on there as well. When you look at the fee structure, we intentionally came out with a very aggressive, competitive fee structure. Both RVshare and Outdoorsy are anywhere between 20% and 25%. We're 5%. People have said, "Well, why don't you be 10%? You could still be lower." Because that's not really the purpose behind it.
It's to get as many RVs on there as possible, have people get a great return on their investment, and it gives us visibility into thousands of units that we may want to make an offer on. It's like asking people to come to your party because you don't want to figure out who you're going to date next. That gives us the ability to see a lot of used units that we may want to buy. That business model, Mark, has a very different purpose. The business model is to be profitable, to sell roadside, to sell warranties, to get people in our shop, and to find more used. Oh, by the way, we'll transact at the same time on the rental side.
What does the supply of technicians look like today? Why would your competitors want to get in that business given the 70%+ margin?
Josh, you want to take that?
Yeah. I'll deal with the latter. Service is hard. It is, in our dealership, the most amount of capital is dedicated to that department. For example, finance makes as much money as our service department with two people. You can see why usually our competitors are just not inclined to make the investment in a parts person, in a warranty person. Most of our competitors, when they don't make that investment, they find themselves losing in service because it is a relationship, in many cases, with the customer and the manufacturer that you have to deliver on. It becomes time-consuming, it becomes expensive. They find themselves losing money in it. It's been historically the case. Not all of our competitors, most of the mom and pops don't like to do the service work because they have not made the investment in their shops for those other positions.
This is why.
Which makes them great acquisition candidates.
Yeah b ecause i t's an upside for us.
If we see somebody penetrating market share by selling 79 units a month, and they're number two or three in the market, and they have enough land, that's a perfect acquisition target. Because if they don't have good service, they probably don't have good F&I. And if they don't have good F&I, they probably don't have good used, because without service and F&I, they don't have the excess cash to actually buy their used. When you look at that, we actually go out and look for people that are a little, less sophisticated in that regard because we know even if we pay them 4x $300,000 or 4x $700,000, that that $400,000, Scott, turns into $1.4 million in a year.
Service is hard. There's a lot of receivables associated with your service work, right? A lot of the mom and pops don't want to sit around and wait to get paid on that work. They generally just don't ever make the investment to be in that. Right? It's not as simple as the car business. As far as our supply on technicians, we're up 21% on technicians this year, some through internal growth, obviously some through we've recruited aggressively with our campaigns to build them internally. We know they're not out there, and we know with the hiring environment right now, it's going to be competitive for quite some time. We're committed to building them. It's a process to build them. The facilities are challenging. We're actually considering now what some other companies are doing with VR to see if we can actually accelerate the rate of training people.
It's an entry level position we get them into, but from there, the rest of the education happens in the shops.
We are making a massive investment in our training. Yes.
The margin affords us to be more competitive in recruiting.
Absolutely.
Because there's that margin there.
Yep.
Okay. Yes, sir.
What I'm curious about is the customer experience and how you guys are monitoring online, because I think a lot of people want to make a purchase, they'll go online to look at ratings. I've noticed they have both good and bad ratings, and it's not like the good is 98%.
I'm wondering, what kind of continual feedback do you get from customers? How you've specifically sought out different ratings that customers provide, and how you can improve upon that for the customer.
Yeah, that's the hottest topic in our building today, one of the things that's important to know, there was an article that came out yesterday about how pathetic the quality of RVs are. They're handmade. Because we're the biggest and because we slap our name on things, we get the biggest black eye. That's a nice segue.
I love this question. Yeah, this is a great question. We take our rating and our online reviews very, very seriously. It's something that we talk about every single day in our locations and what we can do to improve the experience and earn the right to ask that customer for a positive review when they interact with us. We've grown our online review score almost 1.6 points, 1.8 points. As a company, we average 4.45 on our Google scores. We are investing in surveying our customers. We want to hear from them at the delivery experience, at the service counter, what happens when they interact with us at roadside. We need to hear what they're saying. When we have opportunities, we need to pivot quickly, respond to the customer, improve the process, and make sure we do better the next time.
Our scores, online Google scores?
4.45%, t remendous growth there. We have put a lot of focus. We have technology that we use with a partner today.
A year ago? Be honest.
A year ago, we were in the low 3s.
Yeah.
It is important. We don't want to take away the negative ones. We want to respond to those customers and turn that negative into a positive and earn the right to ask them to come back and give us a positive review because we take the time to listen, to understand, fix.
Buy back.
Buy back.
Trade out.
Trade out.
How many people, let's talk a little bit about the organization that you've built over the last three years, and how many people are dedicated exclusively to take the phone calls, the emails, how there's combing social media, and how we're dealing with it.
In our dealerships today, we have teams that are there to cultivate the leads. These opportunities, the digital team, the marketing team provide to us, and we know that we have to be fast. We have to get to them quickly, and we want to take them out of the market as soon as possible.
On the customer service side, with Jason.
On the customer service side.
Yeah.
We have a team that's there, that is, if you guys have seen the campaign, "If you're not happy, I'm not happy," that's in every single one of our locations, and it's online as well, and there's a team in place of over 30 individuals that are set up to respond quickly. They partner with the dealerships, with Josh, with the team, the service team, to act quickly and respond to these customers when they have issues, right. We have the obligation and responsibility to take care of these customers if they're on the road, if their unit is not performing the way that it should be performing. If there are issues and they have.
With some of the products that they might have from us. It's how we respond to them. It's as much what we say, how we say it. We get to them quickly, and that team has done a tremendous job.
I tell you the biggest challenge that actually we have, because these units are made less sophisticated than the auto business, there's no robotics, if you've never been to an RV manufacturer, it would be good to go. Literally, they're like with a hammer and a nail. When the unit arrives at our store, it goes through the pre-warranty process before we sell it. When it leaves, things break. If built-in obsolescence was a goal, the manufacturers achieved it. They fall apart. The reality of it is, and the biggest challenge that we have, is that the replacement parts system doesn't exist. There actually is no such thing as a part number in the RV industry. Doesn't exist.
If you are at an auto deal, you go on a Bell and Howell, you see it, you pull it up, you order it, Ford, Mopar, ACDelco sends the part the next day. In the RV business, you better hope they didn't change the part in the middle of the model year, in the middle of the line, on the same day. Then you got to figure out if that's the part. You have a customer calling you from 400 mi away saying, "This broke." "Is it brown?" "No, it's green." "What? Wait, what?" The challenge we have, and I think one of the things that Kelly has been working on with our team is we're probably going to have to invest significant dollars in building repair and replacement parts, knowing that a certain amount of them are going to go in the garbage.
We're going to use our DCs to take matters into our own hands, particularly on the private label side. We'll just start bringing parts in every model year saying, "Okay, these are the things that continually break. We may just have to stock them.
What's a DC?
A distribution center, sorry.
We may bring them into our distribution centers and push them out through FedEx or through our trucks going to our retail stores the same way. We have to take matters into our own hands because no disrespect to the manufacturers, and the analysts that have covered the manufacturers for years know it's an unsophisticated process. Unfortunately, the manufacturer doesn't get the black eye like the dealer does. In the auto business, it's Ford, Chevy, you know it. In the RV side, it's the dealer. We sell so many different brands and so many different models, the customer just doesn't think about it that way. It is the bane of our existence. It is the hardest thing we deal with.
I get a lot of hate mail, as you would imagine, and we deal with it, and we spend over $2 million a year staffing people that do nothing but answer the phone that this is my office.
We resolve it.
I've noticed that all the competitors are, I don't know if the comps are better than that, but the second, third RV dealers get bad ratings.
Same issue. It's not an excuse.
It's the next decade as an industry, we have to fix it for sure. Yes, ma'am.
Yes. I actually have a two-part. One for you had mentioned about the Carvana experience for RVs and having financing for that for buyers online. Is it the same type of APR as they could get at their credit union or a brick-and-mortar store?
Incredibly competitive to what we already offer in our finance office already. In fact, this partner, which we should be able to finalize the arrangement over the coming month and a half or so, has committed to us that they'd actually just match the pricing. Whatever it is right now, what we would expect to be able to pass along those savings or at least that competitive rate to our existing customer base.
Very good. The second part is, my husband and I, we are full-time RVers, off and on for the last nine years. We actually, we're part of a program that Marcus created, the Goodwill Good Sam Ambassadors. We have done that since 2014. We interface with individual people in their parks, in the stores for several states, New Jersey, New York, Colorado. We have covered hundreds of campgrounds. The number one thing is what you said. People crave to be a part of Camping World. They're frustrated because of the lack of communication that they were struggling to get, whether it was the campground owner not being able to get the retail store manager to give them some type of discount for their park guests, or whether it was just getting an email answered.
The write to you was the best that you had because that really encouraged people to feel like they could get an answer. The Intern was the next best thing you guys ever created. Honestly. Because I watch social media all day long because we also have our own blog, Extreme RV, and we promote the lifestyle of camping for what you get, the friends, the family involvement. I guess the only wish I'd say, and the easiest way to get your people is to improve the communications. What's the plan, not just for ratings, but communication? What's the plan to be improved?
From our standpoint, we know that's a place that we have work to do, right? I think at that point, let's just own it, right? I think we have to do a better job of not only training our team members on how to work, because a lot of times, just as the examples that you mentioned, it's a problem, right? We have to make sure that at our team, we're saying problem, solution, and help create that word track so that we can make sure that we're providing an answer to you. Sometimes maybe the answer may not be what the consumer likes, right?
Right.
We have to make sure that we're helping, I'll call it teach not tell a bit as well, right. I think we have an opportunity to help build that relationship better than we have in the past. It's something that we have to work on, something that Lindsey noted from an education standpoint as well.
Well, we've seen the solution. I do want you folks to know that. We've seen it. It's there, it's tangible. We're considering two solutions right now. Fair to say that, Ray? To your point, we don't talk to our service customers. We have 69,000 open work orders today. We are overwhelmed by service.
69,000
5,500 more people
We have 2,100 bays
Yeah.
5,500 more people will drop off this week. We don't ever get to them. The average open work order for us is 22 days, which means it's about three weeks until they hear from us after they drop off the unit. Every one of our customer's expectation is built from the car business. You typically expect to hear something from that dealer by text in very short order. We've seen the systems to allow our customers the visibility to see where their units are in our shop, the status of their units, parts ordering, all these things that they desperately want us to tell them, but with that many open work orders, it's impossible for our service writers to make the phone calls at the end of the day. I live in the South. Every phone call comes with five minutes of pleasantries.
You just can't get enough phone calls to the customers. We've seen the solution, and it's not pie in the sky. This is not me hoping. I've been doing a lot of praying, and this man came into my life, and we've now seen the solutions. They're there, they're real, and I'm so excited about them. They're real.
Thank you.
I know some of you have travel plans out. Karin, first of all, thank you for putting this all together. Karin, thank you. How many years, Karin?
14.
It's been great for me.
I don't look over 18.
Yeah. Tomorrow morning, what time is breakfast?
At 7:00 A.M.
Okay.
At this hotel, if you're staying here, in the Fontainebleau Room ri ght over in the corner. 7:00 A.M.
Some of us will be there if we want to continue some discussions. Is there a shuttle?
There's two shuttle buses. They'll start picking people up around 8:00 A.M., 8:30 A.M., we'll depart to our Draper.
Tomorrow morning, I just want to say this again so we set expectations. We're about 15, 20 minutes, Scott, on the freeway? Okay. Scott and Josh will be providing tours of the traditional Camping World dealership. It's our Draper location. Just to give you some perspective, we built it about 14 years ago? Yeah. The store will make how much this year? $10 million or more. I'm sorry? $10 million? Okay. You'll get an idea of what a traditional location looks like. Next to that is our pop-up that we like to call. We test things out in there. That's where you'll see the future. Some things we'll have in stock, some are concepts. There are recreational electrification products there from small things to giant things. You'll see destination trailers, you're going to see a variety of things.
Melissa and Ryan and a few others will be providing tours of that. Obviously the rest of our team will be in both places to answer any questions. We will not have a standalone Electric World location. That is a sampling of what will be lifted up and integrated into the retail format that Melissa and Kelly oversee. We did it for illustrative purposes. Inside of there, in short order, will be one of the first Good Sam RV Rentals locations. While there is peer-to-peer, and we'll rely on other people's units, in certain markets, strategic locations, we will also be in the rental business. Part of the reason we're going to be in that rental business in short order is that we believe there's a franchisable model for Good Sam RV Rentals in the near future.
Whether that's a campground that wants to be in the rental business or a small entrepreneur who wants to have 3 acres, a small building, two service bays, and get a fleet, we're going to build that model for people so that we can grow that brand even more. We'll be available to answer any questions both at breakfast and tomorrow there. For those of you that have to leave, we hope today was helpful. All right? Thank you very much.