MT. COMFORT — When Ken Eckstein and his son, Rusty, started Mount Comfort RV in a former truck stop in 2006, their plan was to get going on a new building in 10 years.
A decade later, the dealership, at 5935 W. County Road 225N, was doing “incredible,” he said.
“At that point, it’s like, do we really want to invest in brick and mortar? Everything’s gone to the internet. Just keep the overhead down and roll with it,” he said. “We decided we didn’t want to do that. We decided we wanted to enhance the customer experience, make sure that the customer’s getting everything that they deserve.”
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Mount Comfort RV recently opened its new 37,000-square-foot indoor sales and service center. The contemporary lodge-style structure features an indoor showroom that accommodates up to 20 recreational vehicles, 20 sales offices, a parts store, administrative offices, training and meeting rooms, a customer lounge and children’s playroom.
Outside, more than 400 new and pre-owned RVs continue to spread out across 17 acres near the Interstate-70/Mt. Comfort Road interchange.
Eckstein said that while the business committed to a new building at a time when many are going the dot-com route, he respects those who prefer that way of doing business.
“Customers come in all different varieties,” he said.
For some, price is the only thing that matters, and they’ll accept sub-par service for a good deal.
“We want to focus on somebody that wants a quality experience, somebody that wants a dealership that will stand behind the product,” he said.
The new building helps the business do just that, Eckstein continued.
“We don’t want the customer to walk in and think they’re walking into a warehouse,” he said. “…We want them to have a good experience when they’re here, and our goal is not to sell them an RV, but to sell them an RV now, sell them an RV five years from now, sell them an RV 10 years from now, and basically earn a customer for life.”
Efficiencies for the staff resulted from the project as well. The business was able to create a service department much closer to its parts department and lay out everything as desired, as opposed to adapting to the former truck stop structure.
“This was built specifically for uses that we need,” Eckstein said.
He added that the company plans to raze the former truck stop building and replace it with a parking lot.
Mount Comfort RV employs about 65 and projects about a 50% workforce increase in 2020.
The project got started in fall 2018 and represents about a $5 million investment.
“We went out and we did the best we know how,” Eckstein said. “We didn’t try to cut corners, we didn’t try to be cheap; but with the space that we have, with the experience that we have, we did the best we could.”
And how does it feel to be done?
“It feels like it’s not done,” Eckstein said with a laugh. “That’s just it — it’s a new chapter, it’s not a new book.”
For Eckstein, that book represents a career in the RV industry that’s been going for 40 years.
“I’ve seen a lot of dealerships,” he said. “I stole ideas from everybody I could. When you do something like this, there’s a million things you think of. The problem is, there’s 2 million things you need to think of.”
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New Mount Comfort RV facility
- 37,000 square feet
- Showroom
- Parts store
- 20 sales offices
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