Managing standardization during acquisitions  

Over the past ten years, the RV industry has grown primarily through dealership acquisition and consolidation. For Campers Inn, this has meant challenges with standardization. Each acquisition might bring 50-100 new employees and a host of HR considerations, from payroll benefits to workers’ comp and safety. And that’s on top of recruitment and team-building concerns. 

Laurie Hirsch has helped navigate these challenges as the company’s Administrative Services Manager. She initially joined Campers Inn in 2015 to lead acquisitions. Then, in 2018, her role grew to include HR as well. 

Dealership audits plus learning management equal a comprehensive solution 

Campers Inn was already a KPA client when Hirsch joined the company. In her early days, KPA was used primarily to support dealership audits. 

Since then, they’ve taken advantage of much more capability, adopting KPA’s EHS and HR course content as part of their internally developed Learning Management System. 

“That’s been a cool feature, to have that library of courses,” Hirsch said. “All Campers Inn employees take safety training by job role. I’m the course content person, which is insane because we have like 90 roles.” 

“Everybody in the company takes a core set of courses including: Slips, Trips, and Falls, Harassment, Ethics in the Workplace, and a few more. Then you get your job-specific courses on top of that.” 

Additionally, Campers Inn appreciates KPA’s quarterly site visits for both advertising, sales and finance and safety audits as a resource for compliance to complement the efforts of the company’s internal auditors. 

“The KPA team is quick to adapt to what we need.”   

“For instance, we have a safety binder, and they’re looking at it with outside eyes to ask, ‘Does this make sense if I’m a brand new receptionist? Would I know how to find an SDS and report an injury?'” she said.