Caravan business rides Covid-19 border closures to growth

Crusader Caravans says business is booming from a nation at home, but finding workers and sourcing products from overseas is proving tough.

Crusader Caravans has seen a surge in sales, but also challenges, during the coronavirus pandemic.

Making caravans is an essential service in a pandemic, so the latest Victorian lockdown has done little to crimp the operations at Crusader Caravans.

Things are going so well at Crusader that the business is running out of space.

With borders closed and Australians looking at the national backyard as they haven’t in a generation, Crusader Caravans is on track to sell 2000 units by the end of the year.

This is well up on the 1115 the manufacturer rolled out in financial year 2020.

The business, which came from humble beginnings, now boasts 130 people at its Epping manufacturing facility in Melbourne’s outer-north.

The challenge the business faces now is access to labour, space and parts.

The surge at Crusader comes after several challenging years at the business, which brought in advisory firm Mawson in 2014.

Mawson director Michael Paidoussis, who works closely with the business, said Crusader was now reaping the benefits from decisions taken in recent years to bring parts production close to home.

“When we got here there were 71 people, producing 10 vans at a time, it was not the most efficient beast,” he said.

“We’re very keen to grow the brand, we want to get up to 4000 to 5000 vans a year.”

But getting access to labour has required creative thinking, with Crusader offering skills training and recruitment incentives to staff.

With borders closed and Australians looking at the national backyard as they haven’t in a generation, Crusader Caravans is on track to sell 2000 units by the end of the year.

Crusader managing director Serge Valentino said while the business was opening up recruitment to grow its workforce, finding people in the current environment was difficult.

“We’ve introduced a buddy system and incentive program for our existing workers to bring in people,” he said.

“They bring in their friends and family here and we find it works really well.”

Mr Valentino said the business had opened up the scope of who it was recruiting.

“We believe if they’ve got the right character and attitude we’re super confident we can put the skills on them,” he said.

Meanwhile, Crusader has just signed a lease on a new premises, which it hopes will allow it to triple production.

“There are new products in line that we want to produce that we can’t here because we don’t have space,” Mr Paidoussis said.

Mawson, which owns a stake in Crusader, has also taken strategic stakes in parts suppliers – which build the caravan chassis, walls, doors and floors – to keep production close at hand.

“We recognised a while ago we needed to reshape the supply chain,” Mr Paidoussis said. “We, like lots of other industries, are battling costs and shortages, so we decided that we wanted to own our supply chain.”

Originally published as Caravan business rides Covid-19 border closures to growth