40 Under 40: Thor Audiss
Chief Marketing & Sales Officer; Rossmönster; With company: 2.5 Years | In industry: 6 Years
Thor Audiss joined Rossmönster in early 2024 as chief marketing officer and was later promoted to chief marketing & sales officer, leading commercial operations for the 70-plus employee manufacturer, spanning roughly 20 locations, made up of some of the strongest independent RV dealerships in the country.
Thor’s leadership shows up in three places. First, in the teams he has built. He assembled and developed the marketing, inside sales, and dealer support functions from a near standing start, hiring for range rather than resume and giving young marketers real ownership of national campaigns.
Second, in the systems Thor has been willing to build rather than buy. He drove the implementation of a fully custom ERP platform designed for Rossmönster’s high configuration, high average order value production model, giving the company production visibility and order accuracy that off the shelf systems could not deliver at its size.
Third, in how Thor engages the wider industry. Rossmönster now supplies its dealer partners with finished marketing content, campaign assets and qualified leads, so dealers can concentrate on closing rather than on generating their own demand. That is an inverted, factory-led demand funnel, and it is unusual in an industry where the marketing burden traditionally falls on the retailer.
“When Thor got here, we had one dealer, no real marketing team and a spreadsheet where an ERP should have been,” one of Thor’s nominators says. “Two and a half years later, we have a national dealer network, an inside sales team feeding those dealers real buyers and a production system we built ourselves … Everything he built, he built inside the business, out of the business. That is the part I did not expect.”
As industry sales have continued their downward trend, he has built demand rather than discount. He restructured Rossmönster’s go-to market around three moves: repositioning the product line around customer expectations by shaping the lineup so buyers get a genuine sense of customization, building an inside sales function that protects dealer time by qualifying buyers first and handing dealers customers who are ready to purchase, and taking marketing off the dealers’ plate by producing marketing content and brand building.
Thor’s career in the RV sector includes multiple Silver ADDY Awards from the American Advertising Federation for creative direction, digital publications and film.
An endurance athlete, Thor has cycled across the United States, completed a 67-mile ultra-endurance run and actively competes in bike races. He resides in Colorado, where he centers his work and personal life around outdoor recreation and community building.
Thor’s advice for up-and-coming leaders in the RV industry:
Believe and live the product. Most of whatever success I’ve had traces back to the fact that I don’t just believe in what we build, I actually want the life it’s for. I’m out in these vehicles, on the bike, in the places our customers are trying to get to, and that means I’m iterating on the lifestyle at the same time I’m iterating on the product.
If you’re not living the lifestyle you’re selling, how can you expect a buyer to want what you’re building? You’ll end up marketing a spec sheet. The people in this industry who last are the ones who would own the thing themselves at full price, and that shows up in every decision they make, from how a rig is laid out to how it gets sold.
What it means to Thor to be a 40 Under 40 honoree:
It means a lot, mostly because of who else is on this list. The RV industry is in a genuinely hard stretch, and it would be easy for it to close ranks and wait out the downturn. Recognizing younger leaders during a contraction says the opposite, that the industry is betting on the people who will be running it in twenty years rather than just the ones who ran it for the last twenty.
Personally, I’d be lying if I said I built any of this alone. Ross and Luke handed me real ownership of the commercial side at a point when that was a risk, and the marketing, inside sales and dealer support teams are the ones who executed. I’m accepting this on their behalf as much as mine.
