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Welcome to the RV Park Mastery Podcast, where you will learn the correct way to identify, evaluate, negotiate, perform due diligence on, renegotiate, finance, turn-around and operate RV parks. Your host is the 5th largest owner of RV and mobile home parks in the United States, Frank Rolfe.
I like to read biographies. Many of my mentors are printed books, and I think you can learn a tremendous amount from reading biographies of many, many successful business people, and some of my favorite are the ones based on sales. If you look at many of America's greatest corporations, they were founded and managed to success through salespeople, but what have I learned from reading all of those various biographies of master salespeople? Well, this is Frank Rolfe of the RV Park Mastery Podcast. We're gonna talk about the lessons I have learned from master salesmen from reading all these various biographies over the years. Let's start off with Joe Girard. Joe Girard holds the Guinness Book of World Record for most number of cars ever sold by an individual in a year. It was numbered in the thousands. Now, how did he do this? He did this because he was an early adopter, before anyone thought of it, of mass marketing, particularly in the car industry. It used to be in the olden days, if you worked at a car dealership, you stood around and waited for people to come in. Girard didn't like that. He wanted to make more money. So he realized every second there was not somebody in the dealership looking to buy a car, he would start cold calling, literally through the phone book, starting with the A's.
He would call people up and say, hey, are you interested in a car? Are you in the market for a car? Shockingly, many of them said, yeah, I am kinda thinking of getting a new car. And he would tell them, well, come on down to my dealership and I will love to show you around what we have, and it started to work. Then he realized he could even ramp it up a bit by doing direct mail. So he started doing direct mail to people saying, are you looking for a car? I'm Joe Girard. Come on down. So what did I learn from Joe Girard? I learned the concept of mass marketing, and if you're looking to buy an RV park, where this really ties together is regarding finding them through brokers and cold calling and direct mail. Because Joe Girard tells you in the book, it's volume that's the key to success in life. Then I read the biography of J.W. Marriott of the Marriott Hotel fame. In his biography, there's a passage where he's giving a tour to banks, walking around one of the new properties. And suddenly, in the midst of telling them how great Marriott is and such, he gets down on his knees and starts picking up little granulars of that stuff they have in the ashtrays by the elevator banks in most hotels. And one of the bankers said, hey, J.W., what are you doing, buddy? We're all kind of standing here.
And he said, yeah, I'm sorry, but I just can't bear to see things like this because it's the little things that make the big things possible. And what he meant is that attention to detail is what separated Marriott at that time from the other hotel chains, and that was just the way he was wired. And the same is true in RV parks, those little things that you do, making sure there's no litter on the ground, making sure that everything is painted properly, those can pay huge dividends regarding your occupancy or financials, but even the way you're looked at and treated by appraisers and by lenders. Another biography I read was the one of Stanley Marcus of Neiman Marcus fame. His famous quote was, take your markdowns in people and merchandise as quickly as possible. What he meant is, if you brought in a bunch of Christmas sweaters and they didn't sell, they're not gonna sell any better by hanging them around. You're not gonna get anywhere by putting them in the back and bringing them out next Christmas. Just mark them down and get them out the door. What he meant by merchandise and people was just that: merchandise that doesn't move, you need to liquidate quickly, drop the price and get it out. But the same with people, if an employee is not working out in your RV park, the best thing you can do is cut them loose and move on.
They will simply not age well with time. Another one was Chainsaw Al Dunlap. Now, Chainsaw Al Dunlap was an early corporate raider, and they called him Chainsaw Al because it seemed that every time he got involved in the takeover of a big corporation on Wall Street, he would start just slashing costs like crazy. Traditionally, the biggest thing he took the chainsaw to was the payroll. But Chainsaw Al Dunlap, he had just one simple motto: sell, sell, sell and cut, cut, cut. That was his theory on how to revive any failing business, and that's the truth, of course, true with RV parks, too. If your RV park is not hitting budget, what do you need to work on? Sell, sell, sell, more customers in the door, and cut, cut, cut, let's get rid of all unnecessary expense. Then I turned to the biography of P.T. Barnum. We all know Barnum & Bailey Circus. It's not around, I don't think, anymore. I remember as a kid back in the 1960s, it was a big deal when it came to town. P.T. Barnum in the book says, without promotion, something terrible happens... Nothing. So true in business. If your phone isn't ringing, if you're not getting reservations as an RV park owner, you're in big trouble. So you have to be constantly pushing to make the phone ring, and that means different promotions, marketing, advertising.
You ever notice that most of the RV parks you drive by that are completely full have all kinds of things going on at the front? Banners, inflatable things. That's P.T. Barnum's level of promotion, and you've gotta be a promoter if you wanna be successful. Another one is, why join the Navy if you can be a pirate? That quote came from Steve Jobs. Now, what was Steve Jobs talking about on that quote? It's kind of an odd quote, right? Well, if you read the books on Jobs, Jobs liked to think like an outsider. And so what he's saying here is, don't think like as just one naval commander of thousands, but think completely outside the box. Be a pirate. In fact, if you ever go to the pirate museum out there in the Bahamas, you'll see most of the name-brand pirates out there began as naval commanders who just got bored of the routine and not getting paid much, and they all changed over to being a pirate. So as Steve Jobs says, dare to be different. Dare to do something crazy. For many people, buying the RV park is itself crazy, a little bit being like a pirate. But my favorite quote ever in any of these books I read, of these biographies I read, was not one that came out of a business biography. It came out of war biographies. I like to read about warfare, too, because warfare and business have so much in common, particularly today where it's almost hand-to-hand combat in a troubled America.
And it was not just a quote from one general, it was from many back at during the time of the Civil War. And the concept was, the quote was, your best odds to win are to run at the enemy screaming with your bayonet on. And to me, what that quote represents is all-in and total commitment. That if you really want to succeed in buying an RV park, running the RV park, you have to put your bayonet on and run at that goal screaming with all your force. You can't just be partially in, you have to be all-in. And a lot of that ties back to all of our gut feeling, because our gut feel that we receive as humans comes from that old fight-or-flight mentality, which dates all the way back to cave people. So it's that old fight-or-flight bit. You either attack the Bengal tiger or you run away from it, both based on survival. Number one, you need something to eat, but number two, you don't want it to eat you. But if you do make the choice, if you are going to buy an RV park and run the RV park, you can't hold back once you've decided it's the right idea. The best way to win is to go at it with full force. This is Frank Rolfe with the RV Park Mastery Podcast. Hope you enjoyed this. Talk to you again soon.