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The RV industry is revving up, again, and Coach House, a south Sarasota County manufacturer of a niche line of motor homes, aims to get ahead of the competition.
One way to do that, says Coach House President David Gerzeny, who co-founded the company with his brother, Steve Gerzeny, in 1985, is to take more control of the manufacturing process. The company, with that in mind, is having a 13,000-square-foot addition built on to its 30,000-square-foot facility. It's a $1.5 million project, overseen by Lakewood Ranch-based Halfacre Construction. Halfacre built the original Coach House building in 1995, and built the company's RV dealership in nearby Osprey.
“We have gotten more and more into the manufacturing process,” Gerzeny tells Coffee Talk. “It warrants us having more room.”
The space will be used to house fiberglass and painting production areas, and an extension to the assembly line, according to a statement. Coach House's core product is a patented, one-piece hand-laid fiberglass body that's mounted on a Ford E-450 or Mercedes Sprinter chassis. Sizes range from 23 to 27 feet, and the body is reinforced with carbon fiber to prevent water leaks and rattles.
Annual sales at Coach House were as high as $12 million in 2006, when the firm had 100 employees. But the recession crushed the company, and sales dropped 60%, to $4.3 million, by 2009. Coach House has since had five straight years of revenue growth, including $8 million in 2015, up 6.7% from $7.5 million in 2014.
But the investment in the expansion, expected to be ready early next year, is about more than a return to growth days. The company, for example, will no longer have to pay what Gerzeny calls “ridiculous transportation costs” to get fiberglass covers from its vendor in Titusville to its Sarasota plant, in Nokomis. Coach House, hopes Gerzeny, will also be more efficient in the assembly line process. “From a control standpoint,” says Gerzeny, “we can yield a much better product.”
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