Lerch RV’s Lessons in Success

Mistakes and successes go hand in hand, and Ed Lerch isn’t ashamed to admit it.

The founder of Lerch RV, a nearly 50-year-old dealership in central Pennsylvania’s bucolic Big Valley, recalls two such mistakes, and resulting successes, centered on expansion and inventory.

“In 1980, I ventured into a second dealership and incorporated under the name Recreation Vehicle Centers, Inc., with the idea that I was going to have whole lots of dealerships. One bad experience with the second lot and I refocused on one location,” he says. “Shortly after we did really well with trailers, I did take on motorhomes and pop-up trailers. It really wasn’t until about 2000, after I had been in business for 20-something years, that I saw that it would be much better to just focus on towables.”

When Lerch RV became a travel trailer- and fifth wheel-only dealer, it also moved to its present 25-acre site north of Lewistown, Pennsylvania. The location, a former cornfield, sits alongside U.S. Route 322, a busy highway that traverses the Keystone State from east to west, and allowed Lerch to design and build a sales and service facility completely from scratch.

“Once we moved to this location in 2000, we stuck with popular-selling product lines. We were a Fleetwood dealer when it was big and then we took on Sprinter and Keystone lines, and since the pandemic, we’ve been doing a lot of Forest River brands,” Lerch says.

The Lewistown native, who graduated from nearby Penn State University just before opening his dealership, realized his accounting degree wasn’t enough to make his enterprise reach its full potential. He eventually corrected that mistake, too.

“After I was in business about 15 years, I finally was talked into going to a Spader business seminar where Duane Spader raised my focus from instead of being cheap and superlow prices and not making any money to really becoming much more successful,” Lerch says. “That was definitely a life-changing moment for me. Something that I’ve always been thankful for is what I learned from Duane Spader.”

After Lerch returned from the seminar, he headed into work two hours early every day for a while just to work with numbers, he recalls, noting the experience opened his eyes to something he never thought was possible.

No doubt those lessons learned, plus the pandemic, later helped the dealership sell almost 800 units in 2021, a record high. Sales have slowed considerably since, according to Lerch, as the store moved just 466 units last year, but there are still plenty of successes he believes will keep Lerch RV going well into the future.

“We have tremendous longevity with our employees. We have techs who have come in as teenagers and they’re in [their] fifties now. We have multiple techs with 30-plus years of experience,” he says. “The youngest, newest tech we have has probably close to two years of experience, and he’s the son of our shop foreman. We really have very, very little employee turnover at the dealership.”

Having tenured technicians on staff has several benefits, according to Lerch, but one of them stands out for customers.

“We assign techs for life on each unit. If a customer buys a unit from us, the tech that preps it is the tech that shows that customer through the unit,” he says. “When the customer comes in the next year for warranty work or an inspection, the customer will generally get the same tech and will build a relationship with that tech.”

The tech-for-life offering isn’t the only notable advantage the shop offers; besides having a remarkable 32 bays, each bay is 22 feet wide so units can be serviced with slides extended on both sides as needed. Lerch RV can handle most every maintenance or rebuild job; major paint, body and motorhome chassis work is contracted elsewhere. In addition to long-serving technicians, Lerch’s service supervisor and shop foreman have extensive RV backgrounds, too, with a combined 69-plus years between them.

After several years of chart-topping RV sales recently ended, Lerch has noticed a situation the service side hasn’t seen until now.

“For the first time in our lives, us dealers are finding out that we have excess service capacity,” Lerch says. “We’re sort of struggling sometimes to keep 10 techs busy. I think everybody overexpanded when the pandemic hit, and because of that, there’s excess capacity out there right now.”

He’d definitely hire more technicians if he could keep them busy, but true to his accounting roots, Lerch notes the shop isn’t as efficient and profitable as it was a few years ago when work was piling up. Geography, according to him, plays a large role.

“We’re in a rural, economically depressed area in one of the poorest counties in the state. There’s no big market near us, but we draw from a larger area, so a lot of our customers are coming from one, two, three hours away. That affects the service end of it, too, because we don’t have a big local service market. We have excellent service, but the service is driven by sales, primarily, and not by the guy that wants to come in for an inspection or [to get] his air conditioner checked out,” Lerch says.

Unlike some dealerships, Lerch RV does not have dedicated pre-delivery inspection (PDI) bays. Such work, as is the arrangement elsewhere, is done by newer technicians so the more experienced ones can handle more specialized work.

“One thing that we do, and we’re not the only ones that do it, [but] we’re adamant about it is having the techs do their own show-throughs,” he says of customer deliveries. “We don’t have some old guy coming in who’s semiretired to do the show-throughs, so the techs show through each unit.”

Lerch also uses a hybrid pay system to compensate his technicians — an hourly rate plus a bonus — that’s a variation of Spader’s own Collect-able Labor methodology designed to improve service department efficiency.

Lerch RV has a well-equipped, 2,500-square-foot parts department run by just two employees. The lean approach works well for Lerch, as parts, like in many other dealerships, runs behind sales, service and finance and insurance (F&I) in revenue. The parts team does most of the merchandising, while the remainder is set by distributor Keller Marine & RV, another Pennsylvania institution located just an hour east of the store.

Today, Lerch co-owns the dealership, which employs 40 people, with daughters Stephanie Reeder, general manager, and Staci Lerch Arble, sales manager. Son-in-law Chris Reeder is the webmaster, runs IT for the store and handles marketing, too. It was his idea to partner with Penn State, located in State College just 23 miles west, to help boost the Lerch RV brand.

“Being in a relatively rural area and not part of a chain, it’s sort of how we identify and brand ourselves. We’re an official sponsor of Penn State football,” Lerch says. “I think it adds a sense of familiarity with a lot of our customers. They say, ‘You’re the Penn State dealership.’”

Reeder also has updated the store’s pine trees logo by adding a fox, Ed Lerch’s high school nickname. A corporate motto has even evolved from the addition; visitors to lerchrv.com and its YouTube and TikTok channels are urged to “Follow the Fox” for better savings and service.

It’s a natural progression for a dealership that was one of the first in the region with an 800 number as well as a website, and Lerch says a look at Lerch RV’s feedback proves customers are happy.

“We certainly take pride in the fact we have a 4.9 Google rating. We’re in it for the long haul. You have to get the customers in the door. You have to do the proper marketing, but in the same sense, you can’t give up the character of the dealership for short-term gains, either. It’s been interesting to try to navigate that,” he says.

Looking forward, Lerch is hopeful, despite recent economic challenges in the country and an unknown future.

“We’ve got some marketing ideas and some changes coming up that I think will reinvigorate things,” he says. “Right now, we’re at probably the lowest numbers we’ve had, but it’s not by any means indicative of what the future is. We’ve got a very good base that we are working with here, we’ve got an excellent location and employees. We’re extremely well-off financially, so we’re definitely optimistic about the long haul.”