RV Business Features Kunes RV COO Ron Baker in the Latest Dealer Spotlight

As featured in RV Business and written by Travis O. Pryor, we are proud to recap the latest RV Business article featuring our Chief of Operations, Ron Baker, as he discusses our exciting new Camp Critical initiative.

Sometimes, even with the hardest of problems, a solution can be found if just examined from a different angle.

One of the country’s newest family owned large dealership groups is taking just that kind of look at a potential fix to the RV industry’s never-ending struggle to get vehicles repaired while making sure the owners are losing the minimum amount of time in the campground.

Delavan, Wis.-based Kunes Auto & RV Group, with 12 dealerships across the upper Midwest, has put its Camp Critical Program in place with just such a goal in mind. 

The brainchild of Ron Baker, COO of the RV division of Kunes, the program has been 13 or 14 years in the making and, said Baker, has the potential to take a lot of tension out of an often-adversarial relationship between customers and service shops.

The business started in 1996 on the automotive side of things, but moved into the RV space about five years ago and found success right away. Initial plans were to make the expanded business cover commercial trucking, but Baker said RVs proved too attractive to pass up and brought immediate success, adding that the business has thrived with a dedication to its employees, its customers and the beliefs of owner Greg Kunes.

“I believe the customer’s outcome is what all of this is truly about,” Baker told RVBusiness. “When you are both focused on the same outcome – to us that outcome is them camping because that’s why they bought their trailer — you’re both working to make it happen.” 

Baker said too often, service shops have customers bring their units in with minor problems and their RVs tend to sit on the lot until a spot opens up for diagnosis — and then they continue to sit on the lot until parts arrive and they are finally repaired. To make matters worse, often these repairs have no bearing on whether or not the RV could be used for camping — so the unit sits unused and the customer begins to steam as the camping season fades away. 

Baker set about finding a better way to both fix the unit and please the owner based on the servant-based faith beliefs of owner Greg Kunes. The result is the dealership group’s three-pronged Camp Critical Program that, if successful, has the potential to help relieve roadblocks in service shops across the country.