Sometimes the phrase is a hokey expression, but in this case it’s quite literal: Jessica Rider is, in fact, one happy camper.
Rider is the new managing director of the RV Women’s Alliance, a role that allows her to combine her love of the RVing and camping lifestyle with her professional love and acumen for all things business.
“My background is in business operations,” Rider told RV PRO. “I worked as a consultant, mostly building companies and teams to purposeful growth. I’ve also done 15 years of my career just with different companies along the way.”
She most recently has been self-employed as a consultant.
“I do mostly business operations,” she said. “Systems and processes are my specialty.”
Rider is the only paid employee for the RVWA, now into its third year of existence. The group had just started to establish itself and cultivate a base of members when COVID-19 arrived and basically sidelined it from one of its primary missions: Networking.
Now that things are loosening up, however, Rider has been brought in to steer the group back on to its original course. Helping drive organizations forward, she feels, is one of her biggest skill sets.
“In addition to doing that for businesses I also own the company, Pull Through Sites, which is all about making camping easy and fun, specifically targeted at the weekend camper. So, this kind of combines my passion and love for the RV industry, as well as the business side of everything,” Rider said.
Expect the RVWA to have a presence at most of the RV shows going forward, just as it had been doing until the pandemic came along.
The RVWA welcomes support from both women and men, but its mission is to celebrate the women already in the RV world and recruit more into what has long been a generally male-dominated industry, particularly at the executive level. Educating its members is another foundational purpose of the group.
“I was a member of the group before, so when this (open position) came up I just thought this would be a great opportunity, so I threw my name in the hat,” Rider said. “And being there about a month now, there’s so much potential and there’s so much goodwill and women that are on fire and doing amazing things in the industry, and now I’m really excited in this role just to bring all of that together and again, help push the organization forward. Because you know, I’m the only paid employee of the organization. Everybody else is a volunteer, so they all have full-time jobs, so this is really exciting to have somebody come in and be able to really focus on RVWA.”
