Mike Lanciotti has hit the ground running since taking the reins of REV Group’s RV division, which had been without a president since late 2017.
“Implementing best practices in regards to pulling everybody together,” Lanciotti told RV PRO of one of his priorities. “There’s just a lot of talent in the group and having an RV decision maker at the top of the group that is using his best judgment on some of the questions they have will make us progress pretty quickly.”
Lanciotti was named president of the REV Recreation Segment last week. That role will have him overseeing all of the recreation businesses and brands under the REV umbrella, including Fleetwood RV, Holiday Rambler, American Coach, Monaco Coach, Renegade RV, Lance Camper, Midwest Automotive Designs and Goldshield Fiberglass. He will report directly to REV Group President and CEO, Rod Rushing.
The Recreation Segment represents 29 percent of REV’s total business; the other two divisions, Commercial – specialty vehicles such as delivery vans and tour bus coaches – and Fire & Emergency represent 21 percent and 50 percent of the company’s business, respectively.
“Today, roughly half of our Recreation business revenue is in Class A RVs,” Rushing told an investor conference last week. “Our Class A has shown great progress and promise over the past two years with improved quality, award winning new products, new dealer signings, and an improved bottom line.
“Our Class A business has been gaining share recently and has moved into a No. 3 market position. It includes the brands of Fleetwood, Holiday Rambler and American Coach.
The other 50 percent of the RV portfolio is from businesses that have been very profitable, in high-single- to low-double-digit margin territory.”
One initiative that Lanciotti said he will be jumping into immediately is to bring the RV Group up to the standards of the other two divisions in the area of “operational excellence.” Company-wide, REV has been making a strong push toward improving its manufacturing processes using methods such as Lean Manufacturing and Six Sigma techniques, and it’s where the other two company divisions are ahead of the RV division.
“Operational excellence was initiated earlier at the other divisions because they had group leadership that could pull it together and get it going, so ours is just kind of coming through here,” Lanciotti said. “It’s a great 2021 initiative for the REV Recreation segment.
“It’s just achieving operational excellence, and that’s about safety and quality, innovation and value engineering, inventory control, lean manufacturing – it’s all those things. It’s a pretty deep manufacturing operational program.”
Lanciotti joined REV in 2017 when REV Group purchased Renegade RV, which he had been with since 2008 and where he had quickly risen to the role of president and CEO. Prior to Renegade, Lanciotti ran a division of a large tubing company.
The RV business is a much different animal than the other manufacturing companies he’s worked for, he said.
“Most of the businesses I’ve been in were more B2B businesses, where it’s business to business, and B2C businesses are always exciting because the voice of the customer comes from everywhere, both good and bad,” Lanciotti said. “… We have to listen, we have to pay attention. Additionally, RVs follow trends in housing, so we have to follow designs and colors that come from the west coast (and move) east. And we have to be very forward-looking, so product innovations need to appeal to a wide range of people.”
Given the REV Group’s stable of well-known RV brands, Lanciotti is excited to turn his attention to growing that segment of his company’s business and making some waves in the marketplace.
“I think scaling the business in a controlled way is going to be very important. The focus will be on bolting on similar businesses to our existing businesses and/or looking for other opportunities in the market of RV classification to expand our portfolio,” he said.
