Good morning, everyone. Hi, Scott. Thanks for joining. Well, welcome everyone. We're gonna go ahead and get started. Like to thank you all for attending our, I believe this might be our first investor event that we've done like this ever in our history. So thank you for joining us. I'm gonna first make note of our forward-looking and safe harbor language. We will be talking about some forward-looking have some forward-looking commentary today. So just please make note of that on page 2 in the presentation. With that, I am gonna kick it over to Jason to start things off.
You don't wanna read that?
No.
Okay. Well, Brian didn't tell me I could wear jeans today. I would've wore jeans if I would've known it was acceptable. You guys hear me okay? Okay, good. Look, I wanna start out by saying welcome to our new headquarters here. We just moved in a few months ago, and it's a pretty cool place. We're excited to be here. Thanks for taking the time out of your weeks to come here. It was a huge week for the industry, obviously. We got the open house going on literally right next door. We're anxious to hear how everything works out for the dealers and the OEMs by the end of the week. Then I just wanted to make a quick note.
After the event here, after we wrap up, we have a OneControl unit out in the parking lot here. We'll be available to demo that. We've been talking about OneControl for about five years, so you guys have heard about it, we've talked about it, but if you actually wanna see it work, we have it all set up in one of the coaches, and the OEMs are adopting it at a pretty good rate right now. We also have our Edison concept vehicle, which is our electric vehicle chassis. We announced that we did that sometime in the last 12 months. We've got that here, we can demo that. Then we can look at some of the other innovations that we've got here that if you guys wanna see some other things.
First slide, global locations. You know, this is just a quick outlook of our footprint. We've expanded quite a bit, obviously, over the last decade. The key here is that we can produce our products for our industry. It's just about anywhere in the world that matters. Looking at our growth, especially looking at the last couple years, the thing that ought to stick out is that we put $2.5 billion to the top line, just about $2.5 billion to the top line, over the last two years of the COVID boom.
Probably if you look at the right-hand side of the chart, you know, no stranger to growth, we've been growing since I've been with the company was about $100 million in revenues. As you can see, we're currently twelve. We're over $5 billion today. We've grown the bottom line strongly as well. $800 million in EBITDA over the last 12 months. The last 2.5 years was extremely difficult in terms of bringing that $2.5 billion to the top line of our business. It did not come easy. We had supply chain issues, we had labor issues. All the things you heard about were significant issues for the business, but we pushed through it.
We were able to convert, and I think what's even more important is that we gained market share over the two and a half years, last two and a half years as well. There were a lot of competitors and supplier peers that didn't really hold up to the challenge. They fell down. We gained significant market share in chassis, windows, and awnings, and some other components. It's just a testament to our leadership team and how we managed through a pretty difficult time. Like I said, I came to the business in 1994 when this was about a $100 million business. I came to the business, we had a singular industry. It was a manufactured housing industry. We supplied roofs and some steel parts, and that was about it.
I stumbled onto RVs and put together a team, and the next decade and a half, we really pushed hard to grow the RV business. We did that so well that by 2008, 2009, we were about $1 billion and almost 100% in the RV business. After 2008, 2009, the recession hit, and it was pretty painful, and the board challenged us to push into some new areas and diversify a little bit further past RV and housing.
We wanted to do that with as little risk as possible, so we kinda said, "Hey, look, how can we look in our backyards here in Elkhart County where a lot of our facilities are, use our, you know, leverage our leadership team, leverage our facilities, and just build more in the plants that we already have?" We didn't have to look too far, and we saw that, you know, Elkhart County was home to, you know, the largest population of shuttle bus manufacturing in the country. We adapted our RV windows, you know, started making shuttle bus windows. We then moved from shuttle buses to school buses. We're really the only guy making school bus windows today in the U.S.
We looked in our backyard and we saw there were lots of cargo trailers and equestrian trailers and utility trailers to the tune of 800,000 being used a year. A lot of those are produced right here in Elkhart County. So we produce the axles and suspensions and steel parts for those. If you look at marine, you know, it's home to the largest population of pontoon builders in the country. We adapted our furniture manufacturing to the seating for pontoons and our glass to the glass systems in the boats. We adapted our vinyl windows and manufactured housing to residential windows. We said, "We're building vinyl windows for manufactured housing all day long. Why can't we do stick-built housing?" We did that. Obviously, we got into the aftermarket.
All of our existing components, we just had to work on packaging and, you know, develop relationships with the dealers versus the OEMs. That was an easy change for us. What I can tell you today is sitting here when the RV industry is kind of, you know, seemingly going over a little bit of a cliff and into a down cycle. Our business feels so much better today than what it did in 2008, 2009 when we were just literally in the RV business. I can't even tell you. We're able to focus on a lot of different things, where we've had great people that in 2008, 2009 would've had to leave the business or we would've had to exit the business. We're moving them into the aftermarket. We're moving them into the marine business.
We're moving them into the residential business and some of these other diversifications that we went through. We've obviously grown internationally too. Taking our same industries here, making some of those same applications over there. We'll talk about that in a minute. If you look at kind of the 80/20 of our business, RV, marine, aftermarket, that's 80% of our business. That's, you know, what gets most of our focus in this business. I'll talk about aftermarket for a quick second. You know, that's driven by OEM products. The more OEM products we sell, and you guys know we have high market shares, the more that's just gonna drive aftermarket business. The more units that are produced, the more our aftermarket business is gonna grow.
Really, it works like this. Customer has a problem with a part or an assembly in their unit. They call the dealer. Dealer says, "Okay, what do you wanna replace? Slide out or a leveling system or an awning? What brand is it?" "Well, it's a Lippert." They come in for service, and they get a replacement on that part. It's a really simple process that drives a lot of business for us. International other adjacencies, it's still a focus. There's still a lot of opportunity there with all the things that I just mentioned in the previous slide. It's just gonna be slower growing simply because the customers respond a little bit differently. It's not here in Elkhart County. The customer relationships work a little bit different. We're still gonna focus on those areas.
It just, it's just a slower growing part of our business. I have to mention our manufacturing capabilities. I think what gives us one of our greatest competitive advantages is that we can do so much. You look at from furniture and soft goods and mattresses to glass processing and coatings, to the electronics business we have in Detroit, lamination, metal fabrication, aluminum fabrication, plastic molding, power and motion systems. We can do electric motion systems. We can do hydraulic motion systems. We've got all these capabilities. When a customer comes to us with need, with some kind of need on product, there's nothing in our manufacturing disciplines that won't allow us to build some of those products that they're gonna ask us to build.
Our daily production, I think, you know, besides the staggering number of products we build every day, you look at 2,500 chassis a day. Some of these structures are 40-foot long. We build a lot of chassis. Our axles and suspension systems, 20,000 windows a day for RVs and boats and manufactured housing. 2,200 awnings a day, 2,000 doors a day. We build a lot of product. It's really important for you guys to know that there's a lot of SKU variability with those products. It's not chassis with 5 SKUs. We've got, you know, 750 SKUs of chassis. We've got 5,500 SKUs of windows. We've got several hundred SKUs of entry doors.
We not only have to be good at producing a mass amount of product, but we have to do it with a significant amount of SKU variation and complexity. Our key competitive advantages, I think, you know, if I'm sitting in your guys' chair, the one thing I'd wanna walk away from this meeting with is, okay, everybody competes on quality, price, and service. What does Lippert have that sets them apart from the rest? As I talk through some of our competitive advantages and our pillars of our business, our foundation of our business, what makes us successful, just keep track of how many times I tell you we're doing something different, but we put resources there.
A lot of companies talk about culture and innovation and customer experience, but when you turn around and ask them what kind of resources they have in place, they'll, they kind of blank out. I'll talk about the resources that we've got toward all these critical things that are separating us above and beyond quality, price, and service. I'll start with just the customer relationships on this slide. With RV and marine, most of those customers are right here in Elkhart County. I've been in the business for 28 years. My team's been in the business for almost as long. We've got significant relationships with all these customers, so that allows us to make decisions quicker with them.
It allows them to trust us more and bring us more opportunities and revenue and things like that. You know, we go to church with these guys. We eat with these guys. Our kids go to school together. We just have significant, deep, meaningful relationships with our customers that frankly I don't think exist in a lot of other industries and businesses. I'm familiar with a lot of other businesses around the country. I interact with a lot of other businesses, and a lot of businesses typically see their customers a few times a year. It's really difficult to establish a meaningful relationship with a customer when you only see them a few times a year. We're seeing ours literally every week. These are the pillars of our business.
Everything we do needs to tie back to one of these four things. If we're gonna be successful, these need to be the foundation of business. I'll just start with innovation. I think the most important thing, again, going to resources, is we've got over 200 people in this business dedicated to R&D and innovation. Again, I know a lot of businesses around here. A lot of them don't have any. A lot of them might have one or two. We've got 200. So when you talk about why are we good at innovation, it's because we've got a lot of people lined up behind the innovation part of our company. The RV industry and the marine industry, in general, tell you that we're their R&D lab. We're their innovation lab.
When they need innovation or they need ideas, they come to us. They might have an idea, and they come to us to have us build it. You know, one of the things with respect to the products you see here, they're not really new products. They're innovations or 2.0 or 3.0 iterations where we've added bells and features to our existing products. That's where we get most of our content growth. That's where we get most of our revenue growth. Our addressable market growth is through, you know, bells and features and whistles on existing products. Yeah, do we build new products once in a while and come up with some new ideas? Yes. A lot of this stuff is taking an existing product and developing the next generation of that product.
I'll give you a couple examples. You know, the glass entry door, we launched that here recently, and it's taken the industry by storm. We've got other entry door competitors. We typically build a fiberglass wall. We decided we're gonna do a glass look and match it with the windows. Well, guess what? Our competitors don't process glass. We have this unique capability to process an entire door exterior and glass, provide a different look and a different opportunity. By the way, at a significant upgrade and increase in cost to the customer, and they're buying it, and there's no answer from our competitors because they can't do it. The On-The-Go ladder. Our RV customers came to us last year, about middle of the year.
The biggest ladder supplier in the supplier community could not keep up. They came to us and said, "Hey, what can you do? Can you make ladders?" Our innovation team came up with an idea to put a prep on each of the RVs, so a bracket that sits at the top of the RV, and we found a ladder that was compatible with the bracket, so the ladder can be snapped in the aftermarket. We now sell ladders to the dealers. They don't all come standard on the OEM product anymore. We sell an aftermarket ladder that didn't even exist for us prior. You look at the axle products. Again, the axle's been pretty similar standard over the last handful of years.
We added an independent suspension, and we now do an ABS. Neither of those have existed prior to this year. We launched ABS with Grand Design. People have had ABS in their cars for decades. Wasn't available in RVs until this year. Again, significant upgrade in cost to the customer, but huge innovation. We're doing a lot of our marketing right to the retail customer today, so they're driving some of this pull-through. That's innovation. On quality, our quality focus continues to get stronger and stronger. If you look at the automation projects we've put money toward over the last five years, it totals about $100 million in projects we've put toward in the last five years. We've got about 20 more projects in the queue right now.
We put those in play by how they rank in ROI. If you were to go to Goshen and see our beam processing facility, it's about a $30 million project with 11 automation stations all lined up. It's pretty impressive. Our most successful projects are $1 million-$3 million projects that provide significant return, quality improvement, safety improvement. Obviously improves the whole labor situation. You know, we need labor when the market struggles to find it, and automation's a good answer. We hired an outside VP of quality, 17 years at Eaton just this year.
One of the things we decided to do was say, "Hey, look, we wanna bring some outside thinking into quality." This quality in the RV business and marine business, I think in large part is homegrown, for the most part. We've brought some external focus in. Her name's Catie Grubb. She started this year. Like I said, 17 years at Eaton, and she's gonna revamp, you know, structure and processes and people. Leadership and culture, probably the most important thing I'm gonna talk about. You know, our business isn't good unless our people are here. We realized about 10 years ago when we went on a culture journey that, our attrition was probably average. It was probably the same as everybody else. 125% here in the county.
We said, "Hey, look, that's not good enough." We went, and we said, "Hey, look, what's driving that? Well, people are leaving. Why are they leaving? It's leadership." We introduced our core values to the company. We've got our leadership values here and our core values over here. We just hold people accountable to these values now. If you wanna lead in this company, you need to have our core values. You need to have our leadership values. If you wanna be an independent contributor here in the company, you've gotta be aligned and live to the core values or you can't be here. What that's done is drive more people to wanna be at our business. We've got people coming today with passion and energy because things are fair, things are consistent, things are predictable.
They know their leaders are being trained, and we've got resources in this company. Again, the resource thing. We've got 30 people in our culture and leadership development department. You ask most companies if they have a culture and leadership development department, they'll say, "What are you talking about?" We've got 30 people in that area, and they do jobs from leadership development and coaching, personal development and coaching, philanthropy. We've got an external facing leadership academy. We've got a health and wellness group. We've got a company chaplain. We've got all these resources that are dedicated specifically to culture and leadership development where most other companies don't. I know because I talk to business leaders all the time.
So again, I'd say the number one thing on culture and leadership is just the resources that we've put in place to make sure that our people are better taken care of. They know that we're serious about culture and leadership development because we've got people there, and they've all worked at companies where they don't have anybody in culture and leadership. Another area where we've really innovated is customer experience. We had an epiphany a few years ago, and you'll hear from Nicole Sult later, who's our customer experience VP, that service isn't experience. You know, taking 100,000 phone calls and emails a month, customers needing replacement part, customers needing a repair on their part, dealer needing a part, questions on how a part works or how a product works.
100,000 a month. Well, we can give a good experience on that call, and we do our best there. What we weren't doing is going out to the customer to see what they needed proactively. In 2020, we sent Nicole on a mission to develop a team that was just gonna do just that, go out and meet the customers, the retail customers where they're at, on the campgrounds, at rallies, social media. We got 20 people on our team now that are dedicated to making sure that that customer experience is better. We wanna know from the retail customers what we can do better, you know, how our products can be better, how the OEM products can be better, how the industry and lifestyle can be better, you know, from there.
We just listen. We've been listening for a couple of years now. We get hundreds of thousands of engagements through social media, through our campground project, through our getaways, through our giveaway, and our Scouts program. You'll hear more about this from Nicole in a little bit. Probably the biggest thing and biggest takeaway here, again, not that we dedicated 20 people in terms of resources, but this is probably the single largest thing that's elevating our brand today. You know, because people see that we care. They see that we're out there meeting with them when other customers, you know, whether they're OEMs, whether they're dealers, whether they're other suppliers, they're not necessarily doing that.
They don't have people dedicated to just go out and check up on people as they're using their RVs or boats and see what we can be doing better. They know we care, that's elevating the brand, which is important for us. Then lastly, sustainability focus. What I wanna say about our commitment to sustainability first is that, you know, when you think about sustainability, we think about recycling, we think about waste, we think about power consumption, we think about reducing emissions. We did hire a sustainability director this year. His name is Kartik. He started, you know, so he's excited. He's got a whole lot of initiatives. I did wanna highlight a project we did the other year, where we automated a glass processing cell.
Because we're starting to think about, you know, how sustainability should factor into any new project we do with respect to continuous improvement, this particular process, we were processing glass with 100 people, used 1 million gallons of water a year to clean the glass through all the different processes, 'cause the processes need water to complete the process. We reduced from 1 million gallons a year to 80,000 gallons a year in that one particular project. Just making environmental and sustainability a part of the continuous improvement process can yield good results. Most people know that we have one of the only serving commitments to our community through our team members. We do 100,000 hours of community service every year.
We've been doing it for several years. A lot of other businesses have followed our lead, and they're doing some of the same things. For us, it's really simple. We have a philanthropy team. Again, go back to the resources. We've got four people in philanthropy that drive a lot of these engagement projects for our facilities. All we ask our facilities to do, work with the philanthropy teams and do three projects a year. If they can do three projects a year and bring their team members and their families to those serving events, we can make a pretty big impact in the community. Environmental health and safety. We've got a picture of our mobile medical unit here. We launched that last year, and basically, it's a rolling doctor's office. We've got, again, resources.
We've hired three people that can run around, dispense medication, do some exams. We've done over 2,000 blood panels just in the last handful of months that we've had it on the road. It leaves here at 8:30 A.M., and it sees a bunch of patients during the day, and when it's done, it comes back, leaves the next morning, does the same thing. Our whole goal is just to help people start a health journey. Really, a lot of that starts with just people getting their simple blood panels to understand what their next step is in their health. Real quick, before we get Brian on the stage here to talk about financials. Really simply, we have a lot of opportunity with our existing markets.
RV, marine, aftermarket, our international adjacent markets, $11 billion in addressable market. I remember when we did our first slides, you know, and they were in the middle of 2000s, and we had, I think, $1,000 in content, and we thought the RV addressable market was $2 billion. You know, it's pretty incredible how far we've come, but how much is still left to go. I tell you that innovation is driving that. Because we continue to innovate, we continue to find ways to increase the opportunities in existing products and product lines and find some new products every once in a while. We've got lots of runway on RV and marine, and aftermarket and adjacent products. Then growth of the outdoor lifestyle.
I think, you know, Camping World said it best in one of the recent calls. I've quoted what he said a bunch of times. It's just, you know, every decade, wholesale shipments increase. Every decade, more people move into the outdoor lifestyle. We saw, you know, obviously a boom during COVID, where there's just a reconnection with the outdoors, and that's never gonna go out of style. Family, community, the outdoors, it's never gonna go out of style. As the population grows, and I think as we look at, you know, you'll hear from Jen later on digital marketplaces, you know, social media, just word of mouth, we're gonna continue to grow, especially the RV and the marine businesses, because they cater to the outdoors. Lastly, on our acquisition pipeline.
Most of you guys know that we've done a lot of acquisitions over the last handful of years I've been with the business at least. Not only can we do a lot, we pick the right ones, we pick good companies. We really look for companies that have great leadership, great products, great growth opportunities, but most importantly, we really evaluate the competitive landscape. We do not buy companies that have 10 or 15 competitors. We don't buy companies that have really, really strong competitors because we just end up dumping a lot of resources into those businesses to fight. We really are picking and choosing about our acquisitions.
If you look at our last 20 years, you know, we started with RV, sprinkling in some marine, and then we eventually added in some international adjacent opportunities. You know, most of the businesses that we bought have been, you know, really additive to the business. They've brought a lot of value. We've brought a lot of great leaders on. Even our executive leadership team, they've come from some of the acquisitions that we made. I think that closes my part of the presentation. We'll give it to Brian, and then we'll get into panels, which I'm really excited about. Okay. There you go.
Thanks, Jason. What does all that mean financially? Obviously a lot of growth. I go back to touch on one thing that Jason touched on there at the end. You think about all that growth and look historically and the addressable market, and he mentioned the couple billion. I think just in the 10 years or so that I've been with the company, I think that went from a couple billion to $5 billion to $6 billion, $9 billion, and now it's at $11 billion, just through all the diversification and expansion into these different markets. That makes the business much more complicated. I think that's one of the things I wanted to address today is, what does all this look like? It's changed so much. We've grown so much. We went through the boom of the last couple of years.
What are our thoughts when we look forward? I'll touch on some of that here today. Obviously, you know, you guys can you've seen the history. Jason touched on it a bit already. We've seen tremendous growth. The last couple of years have been significant. The one thing that I will make note of is that I wouldn't expect us to stay at those levels. You know, we've already guided that things are declining in the RV market here currently. There's, you know, certainly in a recessionary type environment that we're gonna find ourselves in the coming months or however long it lasts.
We certainly would expect these things to pull back a little bit, but hopefully offset by many of these touched on when we start to break some of that down. Certainly from an RV perspective, you know, that's where we've seen tremendous growth when you see, you know, increasing to over $3 billion for our North American RV OEM business this last year. Tremendous growth. You're hearing it. The data is out there. Things have slowed down over the course of this last 6 months. I think, you know, if you look back through recessions, and I'll talk about that a little bit more, it's to a level where I don't think it creates much of a challenge for our industry.
Certainly, it changes from all-time record highs, but they're certainly at levels that we think are meaningful and good for our business from a financial perspective. As we've expanded into the marine market, you've seen tremendous growth there, 52% CAGR over the you know since 2017. Certainly some acquisitions in there, but tons of runway for further growth as you look at that market, just because we're so much younger in that today and expanding into many different product categories through the different diversified manufacturing capabilities that Jason touched on earlier. Same thing with aftermarket. I mean, been tremendous growth. Certainly, CURT was a big part of that growth back in 2019 when you see the jump from 2019 to 2020.
Still continuing to turn in double-digit type growth rates in that and expect that. You know, it is softening a little bit, I think, when the consumer is trying to wrap its head around everything that's going on today in the marketplace that you guys are all trying to figure out as well as us. Certainly that it's gonna temper spending a little bit, but certainly not to the degree that we would anticipate on the OEM side of the business as production rates decline as much as they have. Continued long-term growth in that. You know, I'm surprised Jason didn't comment on it because I've heard him say it so many times.
You know, when he talks about all that content that we've added, and the industry has never put more RVs on the road than it has in the last 5 years. That's our content that in the next cycle, which typically RVers would be trading their units 3-5 years, that's when you see a lot of aftermarket sales as they look to repair, replace, and then upgrade components to sell it to the next individual. Certainly tons of runway on the aftermarket side of the business. Then international and adjacent markets that Jason mentioned earlier, certainly tremendous growth there. You know, maybe not as aggressive as some of these other ones, given the dynamic in the European market that we're experiencing today. Certainly great opportunities there.
I, you know, would be remiss if we didn't go back to our roots and comment on manufactured housing a little bit too. Certainly seeing some really nice growth rates there. You know, the number of shipments in the manufactured housing business is, you know, I didn't think we would get back to these levels back from, you know, when it dropped below 50,000 units a number of years ago. It just seemed like it wasn't gonna get back to these levels, and it has. That's great opportunity for us and a business that we really requires very little capital fo r us.
I mentioned earlier the recession. I thought it would be interesting to go back and look at the RV industry, look at Lippert, through some of the at least the last environments that we've been in. You know, certainly 2008, 2009 that Jason mentioned. I don't, you know, I haven't heard anybody talk about that being the expectation for a recession for us. Certainly wouldn't expect it to be that dramatic. I think it does tell the story that you can typically see RV lead into those and then lead out. If you go back to 2008, 2009 specifically, we were actually able to take advantage of a lot of acquisitions during that type of environment.
You can see our growth rates skyrocket as we come out in 2009 into 2010. You would typically see in a recession a 10%-15% type decline in the RV market. It would typically come down for, you know, anywhere from 6-18 months. Like I said, we'd lead out, and it tends to pick up right where we left off heading into a recession. You would, if you look, you know, back through 40 years, you'd see a good consistent trend line across many of our consumer discretionary type products like RV and Marine. Then today, you know, as Jason mentioned, and we continue to talk about, you know, our business looks far different than it did back through these last recessions.
You know, the fact that you can see RV production decline as much as it has and then see our other markets hold up to either be flat or up, it certainly is a meaningful difference from a financial perspective and what it's doing for our financial results today and what we would expect it to do as we work our way through a difficult market. To touch real quick here since we got, you know, this group here today. ESG, some of the quick updates on things that we've done this year. You know, we did. Jason mentioned our new director of sustainability.
We spent a lot of time, you know, to do the SEC requirements and reporting on greenhouse gas emissions, putting those systems in place so that we can continue to report on those as we're gonna be required to do so. We've also done some materiality assessments just to make certain that we're aligned with our investor community, our customers, our suppliers internally across leadership in the company, just what is important to everybody and make sure that we're focused on the right things. A lot of this, you know, we'll look forward to having our second sustainability report. We launched or issued our inaugural one in the last 12 months. We'll have an update on a lot of these initiatives here in the coming, you know, 6 months or so.
Capital allocation, I think you guys are pretty experienced with what we've done from a historical perspective. You know, always trying to look to make sure that we've got a balanced deployment strategy. You see, when we look forward, we would plan on it to be a pretty good balance, looking for the greatest return, investing internally, returning capital to shareholders through a dividend or possible share repurchases, and then acquisitions. It's a part of our DNA and will always be a part of our DNA. Lots of opportunities out there. We'll continue to look to deploy capital as balanced as we can on a go-forward basis. Long-term outlook, what does all that mean as we look forward?
Certainly, I wanted to make note that, you know, coming from these all-time record highs, you know, we are expecting things to slow, you know, here in the coming months, however long this lasts, but certainly then back to our long-term growth trajectory. Put some targets out there for ourselves. You know, really looking for North American RV OEM to slow, as I mentioned, but then to return back to its traditional long-term CAGR. You know, I think by 2027, we think we can be north of 500,000 units again. You know, again, this is based on our crystal ball today, so everybody's got a different crystal ball.
You know, the marine market, I think it's as we've been continuing to say, it's performed a little bit different this go around than what RV did. It certainly didn't ramp up as quickly. So it's gonna extend the restocking cycle a little bit longer than what we're definitely seeing on the RV side of things. Then would expect that to slow at some point. I think most are saying, you know, it's much further out into 2023, possibly, you know, some particular product categories, maybe even to 2024. There would be some slowdown. On top of that, we would be continuing to add our content per unit at historical rates like we've seen on both RV and marine.
Looking at some of the other markets, I would say, you know, some slowness in them today, but not expecting to see a great deal of that. Most of them are performing at, you know, either a flat to up 5%-10%. I would expect that to continue from what we're seeing into the near term. Long term, we would expect to continue to be able to deliver at our historical growth rates. What that means is a top line by 2027 of over $7 billion. This does assume, you know, some typical acquisitions, at least the magnitude that we've done historically, so that you can see what that could look like. Over $7 billion in revenues, over $1 billion in EBITDA, and over $24 of earnings per share.
Certainly exciting times for us. You know, to think back to, you know, I think in 2013 when I started with the company, you know, to share a story like not like Jason's, where it's only doing $100 million, but I remember tracking the first time we eclipsed $1 billion in sales for a trailing twelve-month period. To be looking at $7 billion is pretty exciting for us and our leadership team. Tons of opportunity there, as you look at our addressable market, and we think that, you know, given our leadership and all the things that Jason talked about, that these are definitely, you know, great opportunities for us to deliver for shareholders. Now for the next part, I'm gonna turn it back to Jason.
This is the part I'm probably the most excited about. Put a panel together. You hear us talk about a lot of these things on our earnings calls and some of the one-on-one discussions that I've had with you. But to hear it directly from some of our customers and other participants in the market, hear it from their mouth themselves, I think is pretty meaningful for you guys. Excited for this next part.
Yeah. It's much better than hearing us talk, so. Nobody's laughing. You guys in a, like, an okay mood today? Something happened last night? Jeez, Louise. Okay, I'm gonna ask our panelists to come up. Got Jon Ferrando, Jennifer Young, Nicole Sult, and Phil Smoker. We'll do some introductions, and then we'll jump into some our panel discussion, then do some Q&A afterward. Yeah, if you just think about questions you might wanna ask these guys, too, 'cause they'll stick around for the Q&A and,
I think I'm sitting.
Yeah, go ahead and sit down, guys. I'm gonna do the same. A little bit over here. We good to go? All right. Before we get into some of the discussion, just let's go one to the next and just introduce yourself. Quick blip about who you are and what you do, and that'd be a great place to start. Nicole.
Great. My name is Nicole Sult. I have t he opportunity of leading our customer experience team. Really excited to be in this area of the business, leading for RV and marine. I have about 9 years here at Lippert, 20 years in the industry.
Great. Good morning. Jon Ferrando founded RV Retailer in 2018. Since then, grown the company to 106 stores in 33 states. Jason was, when I jumped into RV in 2018, Jason was one of the first ones to reach out. It's been, you know, a really great relationship since then.
Thanks, Jen.
Good morning. My name is Jennifer Young. I'm the co-founder of Outdoorsy, and I'm the new kid on the block, so haven't met anybody here. Can I just get a show of hands from anybody in the room that has heard about my company before today? Okay, that's great news to start.
That's pretty good.
Okay, good. That definitely changes how I answer the question. We founded Outdoorsy back in 2015. We're an outdoor travel marketplace. We've grown the business to 11 countries, 4 different cities, and we fulfill on the consumer side, easiest way to search, find, and book quality recreational vehicles, and on the owner side, providing all the tools, support, insurance products to make the safety of the marketplace work for fulfilling vehicles on the trip. Behind the scenes, we're building an InsurTech business and we're excited to share a little bit more, as we go through the questions today about what the future looks like for us in terms of new products and fulfilling customers' journey in stays and accommodations.
Thank you. Phil?
All right. Well, good morning. I'm Phil Smoker. I'm the Executive Vice President of Sales at Smoker Craft. We're fifth generation. We're over 100 years old, and we build under the brands of Starcraft and Sylvan and Smoker Craft. We build pontoons, fiberglass, deck boats, and fishing boats, and we're the fifth largest builder in the U.S.
Awesome. We got an awesome group of diversified panelists up here that can speak to the industry and the lifestyle and, you know, what the retail customers are feeling out there. I do wanna say that probably the most challenging part, because you guys are all so passionate about your businesses that to get through all the questions or get through most of them, it's like 1-2-minute answers, and then we'll move on. If you could just help me with that would be great. I'm gonna start with Jon. First off, yeah, I mean, having you in the business has been a breath of fresh air.
I think before you, no dealers proactively reached out, so you know, it's just good to see somebody come into the dealer community with your kind of energy and innovation, and we're like excited to just ride your coattails. Welcome. RVR has grown to $3.5 billion in just a few short years since entering the RV space. What is RVR doing differently than the rest of the field in the realm of customer experience to set yourselves apart from the other dealers?
Yeah. Thanks, Jason. It really is around a couple things. Jason has been a great mentor and example on the culture side. For one, we're very focused on building a tremendous culture. At retail, we have close to 4,000 associates servicing our customers every single day across our 33 states. We're investing in training and development, driving our core values. You can see Lippert's core values and leadership qualities right here. We're very focused on building an exceptional associate experience, investing in our leaders, and that is core to providing a great customer experience. We're investing across the board in the customer experience, probably to get the short version of it done.
You know, right now we've got over $100 million of construction projects going on between that started last year, that'll roll into 2023. A lot of that is building service capacity, but also you know, great sales showrooms so that our customers have and associates have great facilities. We're investing probably more in training and development than any other retailer out there, period. We're very focused on the customer experience, and this is where I saw the big opportunity in the industry, but the customer experience from delivery to service and then building an owner relationship. We're there with the customer until their last RV trip.
Investing a tremendous amount, making sure we have so many new customers coming in, that they have a great experience in their RV, and then they'll come back and buy and service again and again. Huge investments on that side of the customer experience, which is really unique.
Yep. Yep.
In the RV industry.
I've seen you guys commit a ton of resources to training and service, and the industry badly needs that. Jen, I'm gonna go to you next. One of the most impactful things, I think, for the RV industry and more people coming into the RV lifestyle is a proposition for RV owners to offset their ownership costs. You know, they have a payment to make. They thought about only using their RV for an average of two weeks a year, which is what most people do. You know, they've got 50 other weeks they could offset that cost of ownership, whether it's insurance or the mortgage payment by just running their unit a little bit, and you guys offer a marketplace to do that.
What's the most impactful things about that part of the proposition?
I mean, that's the no-brainer value proposition, as you just said, and glad that we can, you know, talk about that freely in this room. The truth is, most of these vehicles only get used about 12 or 14 days a year. So what happens to the depreciating asset? The world's moved on in understanding how to take unused assets and make them or turn them into investment vehicles, and that's where I think Outdoorsy drives a ton of value for not just the homeowner, but also any young person in particular that's growing up these days not wanting to have a boss, not wanting the traditional, like, work in a company model. We're fueling a whole new category of power sellers supported by everyone's interest in getting into the outdoor recreation and lifestyle. It's this perfect combination.
It's like, I have this thing, I don't use it. I could use it for my own personal interest, or I could use it to start to build a little bit of a small business. I could get one, two, three of these things through mobile products and software and insurance that protects me all around. I don't have to build the resources, the assets, the operating system to do that. I just plug into Outdoorsy or Wheelbase, and I can start to figure out how I grow rental income. Well, first of all, how I pay back the units that I bought, and then how I grow rental income and potentially build a business around that. What I love about that story is not just like the payback period.
We can tell you what number of bookable days we think you'll get in an individual market, and so you can easily calculate what that payback period is. Even more interesting, you now own the asset that you can also sell. It's like you're every time you're buying something, you're actually making a significant return as well as paying it back. It's the second largest purchase past a home. I mean, I could go on. I love the fact that we're actually driving GDP. Most of our revenue is driving GDP to households and income. When we take a look at the recessionary times ahead of us, what is one of the four defensibilities? Side hustle. This is just a perfect side hustle.
We should, you know, you should quarter in Jen after the discussion here today because, I mean, she has 20-year-olds on their platform making over seven figures, running, you know, multiple RVs on the platform. Some pretty incredible stories. I'm gonna turn to Phil real quick. Phil, pontoons are the largest and fastest growing segment. I don't know if anybody in this room knows that, but in the boat category, it's the largest and fastest growing segment. Why are more and more people turning to pontoons versus the other segments?
Yeah. It's been pretty visible because you can see how many units are getting in the market. I think the first thing is the aging population. It's so much easier to get on and off a pontoon and to use a pontoon. That goes for the lower, the small families too, young families. I had a young family, or I do still have a young family, and it's so much easier to operate a pontoon than it is to deal with some of the other opportunities out there with boats. Then there's also the size of the boat. Everything right now is about experiences. When you go out on the water, you wanna have an experience, you wanna have experience with people, with your friends and family.
The idea that you can get more people on a pontoon than you can other boats goes a long way. I think the last thing that I would point out is the multifunctionality. Now you can use pontoons to do all of your tow sports. You can do it for tubing, you can use it for fishing. It's just so versatile that it makes it a lot easier to go that direction.
You know, some of your pontoons aren't cheap, right? I mean, what's the most expensive pontoon you build?
We get up to about 150,000, but there are other manufacturers that get quite a bit higher than that.
They're nice boat, and they're really nice boats.
Yeah.
Nicole, through our CX, our customer experience department, we've seen and talked to thousands and thousands of customers. I think we had 8,000 or so last month that your team had talked to through interactions. We've seen and talked to thousands and thousands of retail customers in person while they're using their RVs. What themes are you hearing, and how do you think the company is turning that into a competitive advantage?
Absolutely. Like you said, one of our core metrics is tracking how many one-on-one hours that we're spending with consumers to make sure that we're really bringing back great information. Some of the trends that we're seeing is that there's a lot of opinions out there about how to RV, how to do different things with your RV, and they're really looking for a trusted partner to give them sound advice. Whether that is products, whether that is how to use it, where to go, really bringing those trusted resources in, that's something that RVers are looking for. We spend a lot of time curating that content, curating those partnerships, to really make sure that we're enhancing that. The vehicle is just a part of it, but we know that there's a lot more that goes with it.
Like Phil said, it's about the experience. We know if we can help create those experiences, that continue to let families enjoy that and pass that down generationally, that we have a good opportunity, to get it right the first time and then keep folks in our industry.
I think one of the most powerful tools we use is just listening, right?
Absolutely. Absolutely.
Just being there to listen to what can make the experience better, either from the dealer perspective.
Absolutely. It's that one-on-one time that really builds that loyalty with Lippert, that they understand that we truly are listening, both one-on-one and at scale.
Awesome. Jon, what are your observations and RVR observations on the changes in trends around the demographics of the people and the types of uses. You know, we hear about overlanding, we hear about work camping, we hear about people just being able to work while they camp, and working remote, younger buyers. How are some of those trends favorable, and what are you guys seeing?
Yeah, yeah, great question. So when I jumped in in 2018, the demographics from my perspective were great, running out all the way out to 2030, thinking about the long term. You get 10,000 baby boomers a day retiring. That's still a core customer base. We also saw younger buyers coming in. OEMs producing a much higher quality, especially entry-level product than, you know, a decade ago with a lot more technology, Wi-Fi, solar. Nicer product to step into for a new buyer, a more diverse and younger buyer. All of that has only just really been accelerated the last 2 years during the COVID surge. All of those trends are in my mind, sort of multiplied out going forward.
The next decade will be even better than I thought when we stepped in. And to your point, there's changes in, you know, work-life balance, people having the ability to work virtually, having more time to spend in an RV. You can leave on a Thursday, spend time in your Class B, over the weekend through Monday, overlanding, off-roading. You mentioned those uses. There's just so many more diversified uses that have-
Drawn people in.
Drawn people in over the last couple years. We still see the trend of younger buyers and new buyers, so it's still above. As I look at the data this year, certainly the retail market has been more challenging due to the macro in 2022. We still see more new buyers and a younger buyer than 2018 and 2019. You've still got that trend running through in 2022, not at the same level as 2020 and 2021, but above where it was three, four years ago.
Right. I think ultimately, you know, as we keep talking about, the only way we're gonna see, you know, huge incremental increases in revenue for the business is more people coming and getting that, you know, wholesale and retail number, you know, up towards a million from where it's at today.
Can I jump on that?
Yeah, absolutely.
You know, we're nearing almost 6 million booked nights through just the Outdoorsy platform. Our-
A lot of those people, not to interrupt, but might never have tried out RVing otherwise.
Most of those people have not. Most of those people rented or tried RVing for the first time booking through Outdoorsy. What's interesting about the age groups and the landscape is, I think I'll have to confirm these numbers since we have a room of analysts here, but 70% of most of our booking transactions fall within a Gen Z, millennial or younger audience group. What's really exciting is the fastest growing segment for us is Gen Z. The younger people are growing up naturally rejecting hotels, Airbnb, and tourist attractions and city centers, and they're wanting to fold into the natural environment, and that's where their heart and soul resides. I mean, just look at the focus that all companies are having on sustainability, environment. I mean, these are the themes that matter to young people.
What I find most compelling and interesting about what we see on the demand side is these faster-growing segments. On the supply side, our average owner, I think, is 48, which is a lot younger than most of the traditional owner or buyers. From an RV sales perspective, you think about these Gen Z families and kids and young millennial moms that are trying out the lifestyle and where are they gonna go as their life moves into different life stages as they have a larger family, and they're trying to figure out, "Okay, do I have to do this every weekend and more full-time?" It's a pretty good lead, Jon-
It is a good thing.
for sales.
It is a good thing. I'm just gonna piggyback on that and just ask you real quick. You know, I'm an innovation junkie, so one of the coolest things that I've heard in a long time around our industry is you guys make it so easy for the renter that's looking or the guest. Right? Guest and host. Is that they will deliver the RV to the campsite so you don't have to worry about picking up a unit and towing it someplace if you really don't wanna tow it. Makes it even easier to draw people in to talk about that innovation or, you know, innovation in general, how Outdoorsy is thinking about that.
Yeah. It's a product category for us now, and we really see our competition being more centered around hotels. This is just a perfect way for us to steal share from competitors and also take, you know, capture more of the consumer's travel wallet through this product. 70% of all the owners on outdoorsy.com offer delivery, and we're continuing to innovate and build the product experience through mobile apps and through our desktop experience to understand what that means from a renter perspective, right? You can search and filter and find vehicles that are available for delivery in your area. What that means is the owner takes the vehicle, sets it up, so you've got predefined campgrounds, destinations, points of interest, boondocking, if you're looking at vehicles with that capability.
The owner will take the vehicle to the location, set it up for you, including, like, load up the fridge and all of the essentials that you need for the trip. It's literally like an outdoor hotel room.
It's what? Your take rate's about 20% or so on that? I mean, of your guests coming in want a delivery option?
Yeah, it is. I think what's even more compelling from the consumer's perspective is it's the cheapest product option available. Our average nightly rate is about $220. In a delivery vehicle, you save so much more because you don't have to. You've got lower insurance costs, you have even less gas. Not that, you know, I think that's one of the big myths we need to bust at the industry level, that recreational vehicle travel is gas-powered vacations, 'cause it's not. You use the vehicle on day one and day two. I don't think we're that influenced by fuel. When you look at a delivery product, it kind of, you know, is erased from the equation.
Yeah.
You can take a 4-day trip for anywhere between $700 and $1,100 for a family by getting it delivered.
Awesome. Phil, why don't you keep on the rental topic and talk about how rentals evolving in boats and how that's impacting, you know, you guys selling more boats and us making more parts for boats.
Obviously I grew up boating. It wasn't really a choice, so I was pretty comfortable with it. I did have an RV experience, and my RV experience was about four years ago. It was through two other families, and we didn't know what we were getting into, and it was a pretty intimidating experience. I can only imagine what the experience would be like getting into marine. It was pretty comical too. One way to work in or get involved with marine is, and try a boat out is the boat clubs and rental programs going on right now. It's pretty incredible how fast that's been growing.
What it does is it gives people a chance to try out a boat, see how it works for their family. They can try out different types of boats and make decisions on what they wanna do. I don't know the number, but I know that an increasingly larger quantity of people that go through it or percentage of people that go through boat clubs end up buying a boat. What that's done also is it's gotten people, traditionally it's a very rural buyer. In a lot of, if you're talking about Chicago or Miami or Toronto, it's pretty intimidating to get a slip, deal with maintenance and all those things.
You can get into boat clubs quite easy, without all of those costs and give it a try before you make a complete commitment to it.
If you're not pulling people for the first time, you've got these clubs that are just buying more boats so that they can rent more, right?
Right. The clubs tend to have a younger demographic, which is good for our industry.
Awesome. Okay, Nicole, next question. What kinds of programs are we doing in the customer experience world that have been the most impactful in enhancing an overall customer experience for RV or marine or both?
Absolutely. I think really for RV and marine, for us, building community. We know that RVers and boaters alike, that is part of the lifestyle, is having community. Whether that is new community every time you change your location or it's tying up in your same lake, with your friends who also live on that lake, we know that there was an opportunity through COVID where they didn't have that chance to really get together. For us, we created that space online, for folks to join in, to start conversations, to build those relationships in a time which we couldn't do that. That has gone really well for us. We've got about 18,000 people that are engaging with us on a regular basis through those online communities. That was great.
The opportunity there was for us to say, we don't necessarily care what make, model, style of RVer or boater that you are, you're all welcome here. That has been something that's really carried us forward and that people felt that opportunity to ask the questions because it is intimidating, right, to get on a boat the first time or take an RV out. What we're seeing now as we move forward, sort of out of this pandemic state, is that people are ready to get in one-on-one together. They're really driving us forward to say, "Let's get out in the field together. Let's camp together. Let's get out on the lake together and continue this sort of community effort." Of course we're always out there listening to what they're.
Yeah. Awesome. When you know, one of my favorite stories is when you were first tasked to start this department for us, your first thought was, "Let's go get a social community around and figure out what people wanna say." You know, I think you said you expected to see a handful of-
About 50 people. We thought we'd have about 50 people come together, when we first started this, and we put a very generic post out, and it said, "Wanna change the future of RVing?" We had 3,000 applications in the first week. We knew that we were onto something that was really impactful, that is these end consumers, the people that are buying these products from us, they want to have a voice. We're going to listen, and we're gonna incorporate that into our business. Again, we can't lose. We've got that customer in mind.
Right. That's right. Jon, what's the biggest challenge around product and customer experience you see for the RV industries, whether it's manufacturers, dealers, suppliers? What are the biggest opportunities in RVR's mind?
Yeah. I think it's really two things. One, from an industry perspective, the product quality. How we're attacking that is through our investment in service, which we're growing dramatically. I think the next 10 years, RV service could be one of the best businesses on the whole planet. We've had record years of sales the last couple years. The industry's amazing in its ability to ramp up and produce at the levels that it's produced. You still have quality issues, and with new customers coming in, repeat customers, you want them to have a great experience.
We are working very hard to build out tremendous service capacity, doing a number of innovative things also with LCI to create a great experience for customers both in their RVs through innovation and then in the aftermarket. A big investment in building that owner relationship so that we're there with them every step of the way, and they can have a great experience.
That's awesome. That's good. It'll ultimately keep them with your brand for life, and that's the goal. That's good for all of us, when they stick with something and they get a consistent experience. We're glad you're doing that, bringing that to the industry.
Yeah. If our customers stay with us in service at any of our 106 stores, they're three times more likely to buy from us again than if they don't come back or they go somewhere else. Providing that service experience is super important from a customer loyalty perspective.
Right on. You, you're the second largest dealer now and continuing to grow, and your footprint's big enough to service anybody anywhere now. We want you to keep growing and.
Right.
Keep doing all the cool, innovative stuff you're doing to help the customers, 'cause that's ultimately, again, that's gonna bring more people back into the RV business, or people are gonna tell great stories about the RV business. Jen, how's Outdoorsy planning to further innovate its platform to reach more people? You just talked about 6 million booked nights so far. You guys announced a handful of months ago you were over $1 billion since inception, so you're growing fast. What kind of innovative things are you planning next?
The future is bright, and our long-term vision and strategy was never just to be a rentals marketplace, so we called the company Outdoorsy. Our intention is to build a thriving outdoor travel ecosystem. For us, what that means is building all of the safety and trust mechanics that you need to be successful. All of the insurance products and the check-in, check-out safety points of measure to all of the panelists on the stage here today. If you don't have quality experience, if you don't have brands that you can count on, whether it's the servicing, the parts or the partnerships, then customers aren't going to come back and believe in the marketplace. That's a lot of work.
Anchoring in on our insurance products and our products that make the rental experience solid, and then moving across the journey for us, which is rent, stay, do. We're looking at innovating in new product categories, for stays, so accommodation stays and, activities that bring the customer to Outdoorsy for a surround sound, set of offerings for any type of outdoor vacation lifestyle, whether it's a day, a week, a long road trip, a month.
Awesome. Again, I think from an RV perspective and a boat perspective, you know, we've I think the business we've been doing over the last decades has just fallen in our lap without really putting significant effort into customer experience. What will happen if we put significant effort into customer experience in the coming years? I think it'll be pretty incredible. There's a lot of stuff being pioneered just within these companies here, so it's pretty cool. Phil, what favorable changes in boating geographies and demographics are you seeing to propel the popularity of boating in your lifestyle and your world?
Up until 2020, the age of the boat buyer got older and older. What's happened when COVID hit, there was a surge of first-time boat buyers. A lot of that first-time boat buyers were younger families who hadn't traditionally been in boating. That kind of jump-starting things as far as getting a whole new group of people involved. We saw it get younger, but like I said earlier, we've seen a little bit more towards the urban areas because of the convenience of clubs and whatnot. We're hoping that that will keep lowering the age and getting more people engaged with boating moving forward.
Awesome. Awesome. Nicole, how are we gonna keep up these initiatives to drive engagement even further? I mean, what are customers asking for right now? What's next for customer experience as you see it?
Definitely. Like I mentioned before, customers are really asking for that one-on-one. We know that with the younger generations coming in, that it's more about the experience, it's about understanding the company and doing good. It's a little bit less about price. We know that's where we can fit squarely in. Again, they're really driving us. They're driving our actions of, where we go next in terms of how do we show up for them. A lot of what they're looking for from us today is to continue to support them on their camping journey, their boating journey, again, through content, through sort of creating these training and engagement opportunities for them. Most importantly, we're seeing a lot of success with our getaway activities.
Last year, we hosted our very first getaway, which was kind of a traditional RV rally, if you're familiar with that, where we sell tickets and guests come in and just share their time and their family with us. We've actually found that through those engagements, we have one family in particular who was ready to give up RVing altogether. They had spent time in the RV, they had come out and weren't sure really where to settle in, where to settle down, so they decided to full-time RV. Well, our getaway rolled up to their front door quite literally in their campground. What has happened in that time is they found that welcoming opportunity, the welcoming guests and community, and they're full-timers now, and they're actually moving into being influencers for one of our OEM partners.
We know that opportunity of really getting one-on-one with them is going to extend their time in the industry.
This concept of engagement isn't really foreign. I mean, it's what we're doing in our business with culture. I mean, there is statistical fact that if we can develop a meaningful relationship with our team members, they're gonna stay in our business longer. If we develop meaningful relationships with our customers through any of these channels, they're likely to stay longer. Again, it's a point of, you know, people pivoting and changing the way they look at, you know, customer service and start making sure that there's an experience component to how we deal with the customers day in and day out so that they do stay longer. If they stay longer, guess what? They're likely gonna tell friends and family and everybody else kind of about this experience. I wanted to pitch this softball just to everybody.
You know, with respect to your different areas, how are each of your areas positioned should consumer demand decline? We're seeing a little bit of that in the RV business right now. How are you guys positioned, and do you feel the outdoor lifestyle's created a new baseline of elevated demand? It can be for marine or RV. How are we positioned to take on a decline in consumer demand if there's a recession?
Yeah, I would say I think we're already certainly in it. The retail market has been down 20%-30% year-over-year. Probably a lot of you know the numbers in RV, so we're in the middle of it. My takeaway is the underlying demographics are tremendous with all of the macro headwinds out there, from gas prices to war to interest rates, consumer confidence.
The fact that we're still running at a really good level in RV and our business is very strong, the service side is strong. I think the underlying demographics are excellent. Over the next decade, it's gonna continue to grow. If you're thinking short term, you certainly have those macro factors, but if we keep investing in the customer experience and service our customers, I think there's no question the trends are fantastic.
Totally agree. Those macro trends I think are gonna hit hotel and airlines and other travel options a lot harder than our space. Our focus is making sure that that quality experience and the ease of use, mobile booking, lots of quality supply, great end-to-end customer service experience, just steal share and compete well against a lot of the inn-based experiences that you're starting to hear about for air and hotel packages. Definitely agree with that point. For us in Outdoorsy, we are building out new products. I kind of hinted to that a little bit earlier around stays. That's a new category for us, and just love the bigger point around the underlying demographics and the customer base. I mean, the world needs more time spent outdoors.
This is where our company was founded on this human belief that.
That's pretty good.
Yeah, we have 100%. We're building it with you guys. Like, being a part of, like, inspiring people, like on this panel, that are actually putting in the effort and the energy to build products and build companies and teams that do this is where it comes from. For Outdoorsy, our company was founded on the human belief that nature is part of our human nature, and our mission is to restore our relationship with the outdoors. How we do that is through great partnerships with companies like this, stealing share from other travel options, and innovating through into new product categories that, you know, to all the points here made earlier, ask the young people what they want, tell you, and then go and make that.
The key to doing that well is the listening part.
That's right.
Being mobile.
Absolutely. I have to agree, Jen. I think what we're seeing too is that accessibility is such a key in retaining future customers as well. Being inspired by nature, I was out in Yellowstone two weeks ago, and I was absolutely amazed to see how many young people, how many young families, all ages and demographics, and how they chose to camp differently. Seeing a lot smaller units, seeing, you know, people that feel so inspired, again, coming out of COVID, coming out of really being trapped in your house, of feeling like you wanna get out, and then once you're out there, you just see the possibility open up in front of you. Right with great partners like this, we can make that available to people to continue to grow. We know our biggest opportunity here is when you bring your family in.
Many people that we've talked to, they have a story about how they grew up doing this with their grandparents and how they are now inspired to bring their grandkids out, right? We can keep that moving. We've got to make it accessible and just really give nature the opportunity to shine.
This is where I think a company like Outdoorsy helps all of the businesses in the category. It's through the accessibility part, right? 'Cause typically what happened was you've got to save, you know, $15,000-$60,000. You've got to go and purchase a vehicle, figure out where to store it, all the rest of it. Outdoorsy just makes accessibility so much easier. It's like the thing, the line I always talk about is we're like ATMs, right? Like, we're on every single corner, or we're only 10 or 20 miles from your doorstep. Or if you fly into one of those magical places and moments, you can pick one up also, like, 20 miles from the airport. That access is what just, like, gets the ease of use and the trial moment.
I think you were saying, Jon, like you've got the trial moment, and then that is what drives customers into consideration for purchase and more days used over the course of the year. Yeah, accessibility and letting Mother Nature-
There's a great synergy with our business and Outdoorsy because a reasonable percentage of people that try it, and if they have a great experience there, they're then gonna wanna own it. Getting that younger buyer in, all of a sudden, they may buy 10 of them over their lifetime, whereas we wouldn't have had that consumer before.
Totally agree. Yeah.
You wanna comment or?
I was gonna comment back on the idea of the business and what if the industry takes a step back. Marine is in such a different spot. If you looked at Brian's slide a little earlier, it showed what's gone on over the last three years and we saw a little surge of growth, but we've had trouble actually seeing the increases that RV's seen. The inventories that are out there within the dealer network are, I mean, I think right now they're averaging about 13 weeks of inventory in the dealer network, and that's a lot more than last year, but it's half of what it would normally be during this time.
We're always kind of restricted because of engines, and so that's kind of left, you know, depending on who can get engines is who's able to to build and sell product, and I think that's kept our inventories up. I don't know who knows what the future brings as far as the market, but we're in a pretty decent spot.
Yeah. I've talked to some boat manufacturers that have some pretty long demand.
Yeah.
That's pretty great. I'd say two things just to comment on what these guys all just said is that, you know, there's 400,000-500,000 units built a year. You know, 360 million people in North America, it's pretty lopsided. There's a lot of opportunity there. You know, I'd say that there's opportunity for our industry in spades. You know, the more people that get into the lifestyle, the more opportunity we're gonna have to build more units. I think we're getting close on time, but if you guys have anything else you wanna throw out before we go to Q&A, now's your time if we didn't say anything that you want out there, you know, feel free to speak up.
Shout out to Lippert for being a real star in leadership.
Oh, thank you.
a good beacon for our company.
Awesome. Well, thank you.
I would second that. If you ask me, we're doing a lot of things with Lippert. One of the most influential is the positive culture that we're investing in and building at RV Retailer. A lot of the things that Jason is doing, I mean, it's cutting edge, not only in RV, but in any industry. We are actually, you know, replicating a lot of those things and-
We're sharing.
you know, mutually sharing a lot of great things that we're doing with the culture, which creates passionate associates around providing a great experience to our customers so that they can create, you know, lasting lifetime memories.
That's right.
You know, what you're doing on that side is, you know, very powerful.
Awesome. Again, that's how a partnership should work. I mean, partnerships should share their innovation, share their ideas, so that ultimately we can go to the common goal of getting more people into our business, right? Thank you.
Yeah.
The least sexy part of running a marketplace for Outdoorsy is supporting the owner through all of the difficulties, right? I talked a little bit about Roamly, which is our insurance brand and has all of the products to support rental or episodic insurance and run insurance products around tire and wheel and other categories. Those are absolutely core to get those right, but so is the service and the parts and the mobile mechanic side of the business. Like, when you think about the consumer's journey, yes, it's important that we make ease of booking and ease of use through mobile apps important, but what really matters is when something goes wrong, are we there for the customer at that time?
This is the hard yards that you have to do all day long and find great quality partners to work with, build relationships, put programs in place. It's one of the things that we're most excited about Outdoorsy is our mobile mechanics and parts program through Lippert. I actually feel really confident, and so do all of our CS agents when we say, "Okay, this is the partner that we're looking for for parts versus a variety of different providers." I know it's not as sexy as talking about, like, the culture and the lifestyle, but, like, this is.
This is the foundational bed that makes it work, and also through retailers like-
Yeah. Really, guys, digital marketplaces are what's gonna help elevate. I mean, if you look at the fact that, you know, companies like Harvest Hosts and the campground digital marketplaces, Outdoorsy, and the rental digital marketplaces, those companies don't exist. Our volume I mean, there's certainly people that are buying RVs and RVing more and having a better experience because those digital marketplaces have evolved and exist today. It's really important to our business those continue to flourish. You guys got anything else? You two? Good?
I just can't get over the whole comment about 12-14 days a year is all you spend in your. I'm sure marine is exactly the same. Obviously, the time on the downtime means a lot. We've all talked about experience, so as fast as we can service the customer means a lot.
Awesome. Well, listen, all four of you guys, I appreciate you being here. Hopefully, you guys appreciate a little bit different format for today's venue, and these guys are superstars, and they're gonna help elevate our industry and our business. I appreciate you guys all taking the time to come here today and help inform our guests. Let's give them a hand.
Thank you.
We're in a Q&A, and please, like I said, you know the questions don't need to all come to LCI. These guys would love to help answer questions. It's important that you hear from their perspective just as much as ours. I guess we can open it up. Jeremy, do you wanna pass the mic around, I guess? Thanks, Scott.
Hi. Scott Stember from MKM. Jon, could you talk about where you see, at least in your business inventory as we head into open house? A lot has been made of a rebalancing that could take place by brands. Just maybe, what you're seeing right now.
Yeah. At least, from our perspective. We've been going through a strategic realignment. A lot of dealers picked up tier C, D, brands on the lot and grabbed as much inventory as they could as we went through COVID, 'cause you couldn't get it and the demand was high. We're in a different position now, so, you know, the retail market is obviously down from last year. The production was strong in the first half of this year. From our inventory level perspective, we're pretty close to being where we wanna be. I think we'll be there by the end of the year from a RV retailer perspective. We're realigning, cutting off lower quality products, focusing on our premier product providers, and then working to drive market share with them.
I think other dealers are going through a similar thing. I think it's healthy. Some of the lower quality product providers that were able to step in and produce stuff that dealers bought and sold to customers, that's gonna get tightened down here. I feel like we're a little bit high right now. We'll be in a great inventory position heading into 2023.
Thank you. Craig Kennison from Baird. Jen, do you have any data that shows the progression of people whose first try an RV through Outdoorsy and ultimately decide, "Hey, this is a lifestyle we like, and we wanna buy an RV?"
Great question. Allow me to update the data in that regard. Some of the last indicative numbers were 7% of users that pass through outdoorsy.com after renting between 1 and 2 ended up starting and or completing a list your RV flow.
The inference is that they purchased a vehicle, and this obviously takes it one step further because now they're actually thinking about purchasing the vehicle and monetizing it versus your question, which is how many people that try renting a vehicle are interested in buying a vehicle for their own personal use, perhaps to support like a growing family or a stage of life moment. We're triangulating around all the data points to support that and would love to keep you updated and informed. How could you not? Right? Especially in the next coming years.
Yeah.
Hey, good morning. Gerrick Johnson, BMO Capital Markets. This question is for Jon and Jen. You know, the long-term demos that you talked about sound fantastic, but a governor on usage right now seems to be campground availability. Two questions here. What's the outlook for campground supply? Then two, what can you guys actually do about that?
Yeah, a great question. I'll take that on. I think there's clearly an opportunity for more both, you know, RV storage and then campground supply. What can we do about it? I think there's some great innovations coming into the market. You mentioned, you know, Harvest Hosts, opening up broader ways for people to enjoy the outdoors than going to traditional campgrounds. You can go to wineries, farms. It's great. If you look on that site, you can kinda see how people are able to enjoy the outdoors in different ways. But clearly, more investment in campground infrastructure over the next decade will be, you know, very helpful. People wanna be able to enjoy the RV when they buy it. We're providing.
It's funny 'cause we do these listening sessions with our teams and our customers, and one of the suggestions for me was, "Hey, you should go buy 200 campgrounds exclusively for your customers to use." I thought, "Hmm, that might take $1 billion and 10 years to go do." Instead, we've done some partnerships with campgrounds to provide benefits. When customers buy, one of the things that we're doing is giving them a campground benefit, helping them with, hey, where they can go to enjoy the great outdoors. That's part of what we do, is educating them on where they can go to get that best experience.
Bret Jordan with Jefferies. Quick two questions. I might have missed it on Outdoorsy. Did you mention how many people rent—repeat rent of the 6 million nights rented? How many people came back and did it again? That's one question. Then, Jon, a quick question for you on retail financing. Are you seeing any pushback on negative equity as really high prices paid in the last 18 months depreciate pretty quickly? When their customers are trading up, are they being able to finance that negative equity pretty easily or are banks pushing back at all?
I didn't think I was the oldest person on this stage, but I am definitely the most hard of hearing. I'm not sure if the question was how many people repeat?
Yeah.
Okay. We have seen repeat rates increase year-over-year for the last five years, and we do nothing to drive repeat. I think our latest number is 26% of all users that come through Outdoorsy repeat purchase. That's just natural. I think my marketing team was mentioning that our first like push for encouraging repeat in different vehicle usage categories versus the same type of vehicle or the same type of a trip or it being on an annual basis is due to launch. It's a no-brainer for us to be able to move customers into different vehicle or different trip types. Even for myself, when we started the company, Jeff and I sold our houses.
We sold every single thing that we owned, and we moved into a 27-foot Eddie Bauer Airstream, and I thought that was the best vehicle like known to man, and like how could you want anything else? It looks so pretty to top it off. Then over that year and over the next couple of years, I got smaller and smaller and smaller vehicles. Now we just love to try different types because the type of vehicle can dictate the type of trip, and it just brings interest and intrigue. We expect to see repeat rates stay at that and increase as well as like test out new categories, new product categories for repeat.
I'd like to add to that as well. We are seeing in our connections with RVers that they too are an owner of an RVer, and yet they're still leveraging Outdoorsy because they either don't want or can't afford the gas to go to the next location. They will instead travel another way, rent an Outdoorsy rig, still continue in the lifestyle that they love. They just executed that in a different manner. That's been kind of an interesting thing we're starting to uncover as we see more users out there continuing to say, "I don't wanna go on vacation and, you know, via plane. Instead, I wanna get out into the world.
I think you had a second question. I'm not sure I caught it.
Yeah. Retail finance. Something about retail financing, please. Yeah, the second question was about negative equity financing. Are the retail lenders pushing back at all on the balances that they're willing to finance on trade-ups?
Yeah, I'd say it's a little bit more challenging, but retail credit is still very strong, so I've been very pleased with that as we've gone through the challenging market in, you know, 2022. The banks are absolutely still lending. We can get consumers financed a little bit more challenging. Certainly our interest rates are up 1.5%-3% from the bank. You know, monthly payments are higher. We've got to find ways to get consumers into more affordable products. One of the trends I have seen when you look at the new RV sales from a dealer perspective, consumers, and this trend has picked up all the way through August and into September this year, but consumers are stepping more into buying used RVs. Retail credit's really good.
With affordability and the pricing on new, you have consumers stepping into used. I think that'll cycle through. But to me it shows a healthier market than you can see from the new retail data. I just wanted to share that.
Yeah, that's great. Yeah. You know, with the costs of payments increasing because of the retail financing, I've heard of this company called Outdoorsy. You can offset some of that.
With the-
Yeah. Offset some of that increased payment with rental nights.
I'm glad you made that. Instead of me having to.
Just joking.
Thank you.
What else?
Jon, I'm just trying to think through as you shift from the tier C and D, I guess, in 2021 into the higher end and recalibrate in 2022, if I'm understanding that correctly. I guess you're paying higher prices for better product in 2022 versus what you were paying in 2021, so your purchase price goes up. If that's right, do you keep doing that? Or have you gotten to a point where you're comfortable with your inventory? Or do you keep paying higher prices for better inventory?
Higher prices for better products.
Yeah. I didn't quite hear it all.
Yeah. Are you asking if their incoming prices of RVs have tapered off, that part?
No. Sorry, I didn't make it clear. Let's say a year ago, you're buying like whatever you can get, tier C and D, right? I think that's what you were saying. We get into 2022, and you start realigning, as you said. You're buying higher end product, so not C and D, but higher end, so you're paying a higher price. Do you keep doing that, or have you gotten to an inventory level where you're comfortable with that higher end, and so you quit paying up for the higher end?
Just to clarify, I don't think he said he was paying higher end products. He was just talking about higher quality or premium brand.
Those are more expensive.
Like, not higher, necessarily higher cost, but a Cougar versus a, you know.
Yeah. We're focused on higher quality manufacturers. We are looking at lower price point products that are high quality.
Right. The prices you are paying now versus 2021, aren't you paying higher prices?
Yes, significantly higher prices today than we paid in 2021 and 2020. We sell products ranging from $10,000 lightweight towables up to, you know, $1 million luxury motor homes and everything in between. The great thing about RV is you've got a quality product at almost any price point. I also mentioned, hey, some people are shifting into used. We're, you know, dead set on focusing on.
That shift, that mix shift, have you reached a level where you're at a comfortable level, or do you keep realigning?
We're in the middle of the realignment, so we started it this summer. It will continue. We're getting, you know, close to being, you know, where we wanna be heading into 2023.
Thanks. Sorry I wasn't clear.
Anybody else?
Any further questions?
Brian Biros with Thompson Research Group. For RVR, have you had to start dropping prices for customers given you said you're paying significantly higher prices now, 2023 units are starting to come on. For the 2022 units there that are still very high priced, have you had to start discounting or how are you getting customers to buy those units knowing I could wait a few months and get a newer unit?
He's asking if we're
If you're having to discount much on product on your retail lots.
Yeah, no. I would say a little bit. We're very focused on holding margin. It's not at the level that it was last year. It's definitely not gone back to where margins were in 2018-2019 at retail, but we wanna offer a premium customer experience. Our model isn't to slash and discount everything and shove product out the door. We're being, you know, very thoughtful about our pricing so that we can provide that high level of customer experience. We're not running around offering dramatic discounts from where we were. It's a, you know, pretty rational process right now, especially given the drop in retail this year.
This might be helpful, but obviously we haven't seen retail numbers for September. How is retail traffic for boats and RVs?
It's actually really good in RV. We're having a better September, I'd say, than I expected. We'll see what the storm impact is here at the end of the month.
Yeah, true.
down in Florida through the Carolinas. It's, you know, it's been good.
Yeah. August, September, compared to last year, is definitely down. Compared to 2019, which is kind of a consistent year to check from, everything has pointed up from there.
I'll go with a follow-up. I'll get the LCI guys talking again. The target outlooks for 2027, the EBITDA margin looks like, I think it was 13.5%. I think that's about 200 basis points above pre-COVID levels, very roughly. Can you just talk about what is built into that assumption, if it's more automation, if it's volume leverage, although it looks like the volume levels you guys are expecting are at levels we've seen before. Just that bump up in margin, can you talk about what is embedded in that?
Yeah. I mean, a couple of different things, I would say, Brian. You know, one is, I think we've continued to say that every time we go through these cycles, you see our margins continue to get a little bit better. Even if you're just focused on RV OEM, I always like to say that, you know, at one point in time, it was always in this range of, you know, 4%-6% and then 5%-7% to 8%. You certainly, as we go through this cycle that we're going through, will hold on to more margin. We've proven that time and time again. You've got a little bit of that. Then as
Just to add to that, I mean, a lot of that's just automation is a piece of it. I go back to the pillars and say, you know, culture is a piece of it, innovation is a piece of it. You know, our aftermarket will continue to grow and develop, and the margins there on the RV side are significantly better than our OEM business. Those would be some of the things just to tag on to what he said as to why.
Yeah. Then second would be continued growth in some of these other markets, like aftermarket being one of the primary ones that obviously over the longer term, you know, the view has been that margin is typically quite a bit better than the OEM side. As that increases in share, we would have incremental margin.
Austin, is there anything, any other questions for LCI or the panel? Well, thanks everybody for coming. We'll stick around, answer questions, show you some products you'd like to see, afterwards. Again, thank you guys, first for being-
Great friends. Secondly,
For just doing so much for the industries that we're in and helping make it better so that we can sell more RVs and boats.
Appreciation.
Give these guys a hand. Thank you.
Thanks.
Thank yo u for coming. I appreciate it.