Jason LippertThe following is a report from Inside Indiana Business with Gerry Dick.
Elkhart, Indiana-based Lippert doesn’t make the boats, RVs, tents and more used by outdoor enthusiasts, but the public company makes parts and accessories that make those products better.
Awnings and screen rooms for RVs and campers. Shades and covers for boats. Hitches and electrical systems for trucks and trailers.
Many of those products go straight to manufacturers for use in assembly. But consumers can also buy Lippert products directly to repair, upgrade and decorate their existing RVs, campers, boats and more.
The company — whose corporate name is LCI Industries and trades as LCII — is led by Jason Lippert, whose grandfather co-founded the company in 1956 as B&L Industries to make roofing for manufactured homes. LCI went public in 1985, and Jason Lippert became the company’s third-generation leader in 2003.
Since then, the company has been growing in part through acquisitions—it’s done 70 since he became CEO.
Today, Lippert has 140 factories around the world and about 14,000 team members worldwide. Jason Lippert has focused on overhauling the company’s culture with an emphasis on personal and leadership development.
IBJ talked with Lippert about the challenges and opportunities facing the company.
How do you describe what Lippert does?
It’s evolved obviously, but today, we just say we’re a global manufacturer of engineered products for various industries. Those industries are RV, the marine industry—and we’re aftermarket for both of those businesses.
We do transportation vehicles. So for just about every school bus out there, we do their windows. … We do a lot of windows for buses and do almost all the windows for shuttle buses. And then we have a housing business where we do a lot of residential type products, and then a European business where we primarily serve the RV, marine and train industries there.
You never hear us say: Hey, we’re a leisure products company. We do so much more than that. So we say we’re an engineered product solutions company for all these different industries.
We do glass processing. We do steel fabrication, welding and painting. We do aluminum fabrication.
How do you approach acquisitions?
So typically we try to stay in six legs of the business: RV, marine, aftermarket, transportation, housing and Europe. We like to buy smaller businesses that have the ability to scale versus going in and buying this big behemoth that we might not be able to do a ton with because they’re already big and doing well.
And the competitive landscape is of the utmost importance to me. I do not want to get in and spend a lot of resources fighting against somebody that’s really, really good. I’d rather go into a market that’s underappreciated and customer service is poor and the competitive landscape is relatively weak—and then it’s got to fit into one of those disciplines in one of those markets.
You have several dozen plants in Indiana. What is it like to do business here versus other states or countries?
Indiana is a great place to do business. It’s very business friendly; it’s very manufacturing friendly. The last four governors we’ve had in here have been really pro-business. We’re in a lot of states where it’s not pro-business and [that’s where] we’re trying to exit and shrink, which shrinks the jobs, it shrinks the footprint print in those states. I think that kind of policy is bad for the people in those states.
But Indiana, Indiana has been pro business. And the other factor is the RV business and the marine business continue to really grow here. And I would throw the bus business in there, too. I mean, 80% to 90% of all the shuttle buses built in the country are built right here in Elkhart, Indiana.
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