Chuck Williams is a man on a mission. The owner of Ft. Myers, FL-based RVTECH wants to overhaul the repair business in the RV industry. He has a good start-rave reviews, air-conditioned service bays for his techs, trained technicians, even a growing line of his own products, all made in the United States. It seems like the RV industry has always had a bad name for repair, and there’s no reason it needs to be that way. People expect quality”, Williams says, “and the industry is going to have to evolve into high quality workmanship. It can’t be about poor work in service departments, high turnover, that kind of thing. It can’t be like that anymore.”

“My mission is to prove there is no reason for poor service, lack of knowledge or poor manners in the RV industry. We want to make a difference in this entire RV industry. That’s what we do.” Williams got his start in the industry in New Jersey. His company, RVTECH, has been around for 25 years. It has four employees, three of whom are techs trained by Williams, who is also a tech. The fourth employee is the company’s office manager. “They’re all very good at what they do”, Williams says, “We have high standards and the techs know all the machines. We train together all the time, and we are diversified in what we can do. We work on all makes and models.”

Williams says part of what drives a successful service department is communication, a team attitude and the notion that getting good results is important. When a customer brings in an RV for work, that customer wants to see superior results, not hear excuses. “Everything works smoothly at RVTECH”, says the office manager, “because we are a close-knit group. We are a solid team. Everything is discussed among all of us and that makes for a fine-tuned instrument. RVTECH views RVs as homes.” “Whether it’s for one day or 365 days, for our customers, it’s a home. If somebody comes into your house, you wouldn’t want them to make a mistake that ends up costing you more.”

RVTECH offers about 60 different services, including routine maintenance, roof seal + UV protection application, rooftop A/C service, water leak + water damage repair, hydraulic jack service, awning-window-slideout repair, collision repair, warranty + recall work, battery + electrical work, and detailing. The company works directly with several RV makers, and Williams says the manufacturers like RVTECH “because of our prestigious level of service.” An important tenet at RVTECH is what the company calls “The Ability to Anticipate”. “We don’t react,” Williams says, “We anticipate. Others tend to react.”

Mentoring he received from business-turnaround coaches, authors and leaders, Williams says, taught him to anticipate outcomes, which allows RVTECH to respond ahead of time to RV needs and “handle them in advance”. To anticipate needs, the RVTECH team meets three to five times a day to talk about the units in for service and to ensure everyone on the team is aware of any changes and on top of the day’s work. 

“One team, one mission,” is the way Williams puts it. “Each person knows their jobs and knows what’s not their job. I don’t hire people to just do a job, I hire people to produce results. There’s a huge difference. The result is raving fans,” he says. “You just do great jobs and you fix things that are out of line. You see something that’s not right, you fix it, and you don’t even have to always charge them. Just fix it.”

On a website called RV Service Reviews (http://www.rvservicereviews.com), there are more than 100 reviews that rate the company as “excellent.” “That lets me know what I am doing is correct,” Williams says, “I love it. People comes from hundreds of miles to see us here.” The company’s website offers an “Ask the Expert, Talk to Chuck” feature, where people can chat with Williams to ask questions and seek advice.

Service, repair and advice are not all that RVTECH offers. The company is also the manufacturer of its own brand of cleaning and protection products.  Williams says he began looking at creating his first product in his 20s, in part because he found that cleaning products in the industry were actually, in some cases, damaging the RVs they were supposed to help to protect. “I thought they either ripped the paint off or that they didn’t work at all, so I hired an independent laboratory, and we came up with a new product. There’s no citrus in it to eat away at the seals or coating.” 

The first product was SEAL N GLO Protectant. Soon the company will add another product to its lineup, Williams says, a vinyl awning cleaner he has branded as Awning Brite. Creating these products is difficult, Williams says. It can take a year or so to develop the product in the lab, and “then there is testing, testing, testing,” he says. The time and hard work, however, pay off. Williams says the products make up 25-31% of RVTECH’s sales. 

The bottom line for RVTECH, however, is all about the new frontier of customer service. The RV industry, Williams says does not need more managers. It needs leaders. “There is a new customer-centric frontier that demands of us to know customers and their RVs and to have the insight and skills to make their lives easier and add value, ” Williams says. “People don’t hold back from what they think, and they air their bad news for the world to see.”

“This frontier that is upon us in the RV industry is about how business is going to have to change. You are supposed to be a problem solver, not a problem creator. Dealers with poor service are making people afraid to buy from them, and you just cannot do that.” Williams reiterates that a guiding principle for the company is to anticipate problems before they happen and handle them in advance. He says following this principle has helped the company reach its status as a top service provider for the RV world. “We stay ahead of things, stay in control, instead of reacting,” he says. 

Robert Sweet, a resident of Lehigh Acres, FL, is a satisfied RVTECH customer-and is an example, Williams says, of the customer-centric frontier the industry must face. Sweet says, “We took our motorhome to other places and had horrible work done. Then we went to RVTECH, and they have been outstanding. We wouldn’t take our motorhome anywhere else.” RVTECH, he adds, has virtually rebuilt his 2005 Dolphin, a 35-foot gas-powered motorhome. Sweet lists some of the work RVTECH has done on the motorhome: resealing, roof repair, stereo and satellite TV installation and generator repair. Sweet says he is planning to have RVTECH do some slide-out work next. “It’s an older RV, so there is a lot of work needed. The RVTECH folks do great work and are very reasonably priced,” Sweet says. “They’ve done all kinds of work for us, and the service has been outstanding.”

Of the extensive, multifaceted service RVTECH has performed on Sweet’s and other customers’ RVs, Williams says, “The industry has grown, and things have changed. The days of simple service and basic skillsets are obsolete.” His take on service in the industry is on the verge of what looks to be a big payoff. Tiffin Motorhomes lists RVTECH among its service providers. Williams considers that a big endorsement that will pay dividends down the road. RVTECH has also been listed as a preferred service provider for Nappanee, Indiana-based ATC Trailers. 

“RVTECH did very well for us,” says Jason Schlabach, who works in the toy hauler division of ATC. “We had a customer who had an awning that he had to have replaced, and he also replaced the entry door,” Schlabach says, and RVTECH did the work. “We choose only excellent service providers. We just have good ones that fit our company, and we do that purposely. That’s why I chose RVTECH. We put them in our library of good service centers.” Customers are starting to get the RVTECH message that RV service can and should be great, Williams says, and the rave reviews and manufacturer endorsements are the proof. “Customers,” Williams says, “come into our business and are blown away. It gets me up early, and it keeps me up late. It’s what I do.”