How Rocky Mountain RV & Marine Approaches Relationships with Their Employees, Customers, and DMS Provider

Rocky Mountain RV & Marine is a family business, through and through. The business was conceived in 1985 on the back of a napkin at a local restaurant in Albuquerque. Between rounds of margaritas, Rick Scholl and Judy Roberts (brother and sister), planned out the model for a dealership that would do things a bit differently than what was currently in the area.

In 1986, the doors to Rocky Mountain RV & Marine opened, with a team of five running the show. Fast forward to today, and the dealership is going strong with a total of 61 employees. Among that team are three generations of the family—but what makes this dealership special is how they treat all their team members like family.

We chatted with Bob Scholl, Assistant General Manager at Rocky Mountain RV & Marine, about the importance of maintaining relationships with your employees, customers, and dealership software provider.

Putting relationships with employees and customers first

A lot of businesses will tell you they treat their employees like family, but Rocky Mountain has the average employee tenure to prove it.

“Our average tenure of employees is probably right at the 10-year mark. We’ve got some employees that have been here for 25, 30 years,” says Bob.

That focus on relationships extends to their customers as well.

“You know, we probably have one of the highest customer goodwill funds of most dealerships because it’s not all about the dollar to us. You have your doctor. You have your dentist. You have your accountant. We want to be our customers’ RV dealership. So, we put a tremendous amount of emphasis on the customers feeling like they become part of our family as soon as they walk through that door.

If you look at our Google reviews, we have over 1400 Google reviews at a 4.7-star rating. You’ll see things on there, like just recently a customer came in and we couldn’t get the part they needed.

We knew there were going to be power outages coming through and they had to have their furnace working. We made calls to places to find where he could go get the part, just to make sure he was going to be able to make it through the sub-zero temperature that we’re going to have without power.”

A long-standing relationship with IDS

Rocky Mountain RV & Marine is one of IDS’s longest-standing customers. But as with any relationship, sometimes you need to leave to know what you’re missing. A while back, Bob and his team decided to switch from IDS to a different DMS provider. But after just six months, he realized some important things were missing that their new DMS did not provide.

“Their stability was a huge issue. You’ve got to have a DMS system stable enough that you can trust the output of the data. We came to find that with all the cool features the new software had, there were too many ways to manipulate the system to where you could not then trust the financial data that was coming back out of it because it wasn’t accurate.

We couldn’t get the right answers and we couldn’t get to that level of comfort where we would have a true picture of what our dealership was doing—revenue, expenses, the income statements, the balance sheets, none of those were matching the actual hard numbers. So, after six months of fighting with that system, we realized that IDS is by far a more reliable platform.”

The importance of having reliable data

“I look at other DMS providers and I am very thankful that I have IDS on our side because of the data. It allows us to analyze not just the manufacturer/vendor relationship, but what’s going on in our backyard and that’s important. We get clear insights into areas of improvement internally, as well as our relationship with the vendors, and how we can work with the vendors to try to help the industry be better.

I’ve seen reports from other DMS’s and I think to myself, man, it is nowhere near as detailed, nowhere near as broken down, as is with IDS. With IDS, it’s really easy to trace the numbers back to where they came from and see what took place to cause them, and you can get to the root of the matter and make a decision. The KPIs and the basic reports—it’s like home cooking. It’s comforting.”

What makes IDS different?

When it comes down to it, it’s about the people behind the software.

“I will say that the entire group of people I’ve worked with at IDS are more than phenomenal. They have always been there for us when we need them. They’ve got the answers we need.

Bottom line, they make it work for us.”