B (3:36)

I had been in the auto business my whole life. My family had an automobile dealership in Tampa and in Miami. And it was really embedded in me and the rest of our family that that's what we do for a living. And I went off to go to school in Milwaukee from Miami, which is the natural progression. You go from Miami where the weather's terrible and the people are not good looking, and you go to Milwaukee where the opposite is true. And when I went back to South Florida in 1996, I went to my family's car business for a while and I decided that I didn't want to do it. And I got recruited by the Democratic party to run for the state house at 20 or 21 years old. And I did that. And coming out of doing that, I met Wayne Huizenga and a number of other folks who were just really paramount in dragging me into the auto business. About four years. About four years. 1999. At the end of 1999, I got a phone call from Lee Iacocca, who's a family friend of mine, and he asked me to come out to California to meet with him. And he said to me, if you want to make a difference in the world, I need you to get out of the auto business and I need you to get in the RV business. And I said to him, well, geez, I work for a big public company. I make great money. My career's going in the right direction. He said, I understand, but it's going to go nowhere. At some point, you're going to reach a ceiling. And he was on the board of a small, publicly traded rv company where he was selling his electric bikes. And back at the time, gosh, 25 years ago, when electric bikes were a thing, they weighed about 1,000 pounds and they cost about $3,000 compared to what they are today. And the reason that he was in that business and he was connected to an RV business is he understood segments and industries inside of the general economy. And he looked me straight in the face and he said, listen, I'd like you to trust me. I want you to leave the auto business. I want you to get into the RV business, and I want you to take everything you've learned in the auto business and transfer it to the auto business, to the RV business. And I said, well, I don't know what that means. He goes, well, you. You learned how to do acquisitions. You understood what consolidation was. You knew what worked and didn't work in a consolidation. And you're going to go into an industry that doesn't have a lot of competition, and you're going to come out of an industry that has competition that will eat you alive. And you'll thank me 10 or 20 years from now because you'll take the skills that you have and you'll get into this industry and you'll break it. You'll change the way people think about it. You'll be the least popular person for the first five years because people will see you as a disruptor and not a creator. And in the end, if you do everything you're supposed to do and you stay disciplined, you will change the RV industry forever. And when he said it to me, I was 26 or 27, I can't remember exactly. And I thought, well, I have two problems. One, I like the income that I'm making. I like the company that I'm working for. But I have Lee Iacocca, who I trust dearly, that's telling me that I should go do this. He told me that I would take a cut and pay to do it and that I would be able to be the CEO of a publicly traded RV company. Lee Iacocca tells you you can. I'm going to make you the CEO of a publicly traded RV company. You're going to get a cut and pay, and you're going to change the world. You got to consider it.

A (7:14)

Was that a Holiday rv?

B (7:16)

It was Holiday RV Superstores. And so you did that research?

A (7:20)

Yeah. Oh, man, I got lots of research. So you. You start in that business and just to drill down a little bit for. For the viewers here, in my opinion, and tell me if I'm right or wrong, I would think the automotive business, obviously automotive, is challenging for all sorts of reasons, but in the RV world, I'd imagine there's a lot more mystery. And where there's mystery, there's margin, because people are more passionate about it. It's more of a lifestyle. There seems to be all kinds of factors here that would make RVs a better business in general. Was it that or was it just that it was fragmented?

B (7:49)

I think I didn't really appreciate the mystery of the margin, the black box. I didn't appreciate it at the time. What I appreciated was, is that it had been a cottage industry and no big company, no big private equity firm. Nobody had really thought about rolling it up because it was such a cottage industry that maybe people thought that the juice wasn't worth the squeeze. And so I liked the fact that it was so small as an industry and so quiet as an industry that I could really become a trailblazer. And he did a great job of selling me on. Like, you can change it forever. And when you're 20 something and even 50 something, when somebody you have a lot of respect for that had accomplished things like that in their lifetime, you're like, yeah, this is probably possible. I did not anticipate that the industry would be as rewarding financially for the business as it was. I did not appreciate the lack of sophistication at the time from technology and from small mom and pops, and I did not appreciate what it could become at the time. I liked the fact that I was being given a chance to try something totally different.

A (9:03)

So you are setting up on this mission at 26 to roll up the RV industry. And how did that go?

B (9:12)

Well, my first day at the office after accepting the job, I walked in and the CFO asked if he could see me. And he said, I just want you to know we have no money in the bank and we're out of compliance with all of our lenders, we're in default. And I picked up the phone and I called Lee and I said, hey, what did you do to me here? And he said, lesson number one, you should always trust, but verify. And you should have done your own research and done your own due diligence instead of just taking my word for it. And there's going to be people over time that you trust and you believe that are going to give you their word or tell you something. And unless you do your own research and do your own work and make your own decisions, you're going to end up where you are now, which is a little screwed. And I said to me, why did you do that? To me, why did you do this? Like, this is like not a good thing. And he goes, it's easy to go into a business that makes money and it's easy to run a business that has a lot of cash. Try running and growing a business that is in turmoil and it is on the cusp of closing. And I wanted you to learn from the inside out. I wanted you to understand how difficult it is and I wanted you to learn how to negotiate with lenders and how to raise capital and how to solve problems because the rest of it'll be easy once you figure that out. And I was pissed.

A (10:35)

You were pissed. But it sounds like it's a really school of hard knocks lesson to come in, have to deal with the hardest stuff first and then I'm sure once you got that out of the way, the next 20 years were cakewalk, right? Well, sort of.

B (10:50)

I took, I took a cut in pay. I'm now the leader of a public company that's at the risk of failing and there's reputational risk. And so every day that I would get up, money became not even a small factor. I moved back in with my parents. I drove an hour and a half each way and I made the decision that I needed to really become as draconian as I could about my own life and about the business just to get it to survive. And I would say to you that as I sit here today, like every good child from a very tough parental lesson, I'm grateful as I look back, but in the moment, it was a tremendous crisis because I didn't think I could go back to the auto business. And I didn't know that if it failed, what would I do? I had never raised capital before. I had never run a public company before. I had never even been or sold an RV. Pride never even gone RVing before, let alone deal with all that trauma. And that to me was, it was pretty frightening.

A (11:50)

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B (12:46)

Well, I will tell you, the first go was actually good for me because I spent about 18 months selling off the assets, raising the capital necessary that I needed, and winding the company down and paying all the banks off. And the only reason the company went through bankruptcy is just to ensure that the NOL could be preserved and that the assets would be good. But what I was always proud is that nobody, not one person, ended up not getting paid. And so from a reputational standpoint, while it was the end of the road, at least I thought it was, I learned the lesson about proper wind downs, how to make sure that you do what you say you're gonna do and you pay people. And I've never. I actually was not at the company when it filed bankruptcy. I had already left and it was already wound down. The assets were sold and the lenders were paid. And it went through a cleansing for all the reasons that I mentioned on the nol. But it turned out to be that whole experience turned out to be the reason that Camping World in the form that it is today exists. Because in that process, I got calls from the two banks, bank of America and Chase at the time were the lenders in the business. They financed all the inventory and they all got paid. And they called me and said, hey, I have great news for you. You didn't screw us. You did everything you said you were going to do. We think you understand the business and we're willing to give you a line of credit if you can raise some equity and start over.

A (14:33)

Wow.

B (14:34)

Because you did everything you were supposed to do and nobody got hosed. And now we know that you'll put the business in front of yourself, you'll put the banks in front of the shareholders, and you'll take care of every single bill that you know exists at whatever cost it is. And now we know the character of the man. We now need to get you the experience and the capital to be able to build something much bigger.

A (14:58)

So you run that business and obviously it goes public, it does extraordinarily well. You roll up the industry. Lee Iacocca is intuition was correct in the end. And then around 2013, you become a TV star. What was happening in your life that that was on the roadmap?

B (15:15)

I'm probably more comfortable talking about it today than I was at the time. But I tend to get bored very easy and I tend to reach a certain level on a certain topic. And I need different stimulation to keep my mind and my excitement going. And while camping world will forever be the most important thing that I ever did in my life, not just my career, and I want to make that distinction because my wife doesn't love it when I say that. But it was the most important accomplishment of my life. I needed to fill my life with other things. I needed to not be so one dimensional. And when I came out of college and got in the car business and then went into the RV business, I never really got a chance to learn other things, see other things, demonstrate my skills. And television ended up being something that I think fit my personality, it fit my appetite to be a teacher, and it fit my desire to prove other people wrong. And I remember sitting with God, six or seven networks trying to pitch the profit. And the name didn't exist at the time. I can't remember. I think it actually may have been called like the Fixer or something at the time. And everybody other than two networks said, you can't carry a show, you're not talented enough. You need to be on a panel, you don't have enough experience, you've never invested in anything else. And the list goes on and on. And the History Channel and CNBC said yes. And in that moment in time, I remember going to 30 Rockefeller center where NBC Tower is and meeting with the then chairman of cnbc. And he said to me, because I fibbed a lot, I said, oh, there's a lot of networks that want to do this. And I only had one. And I said, I'm down to making a decision. I'm going to make it in the next week. I have like three networks that want to do this. This is the budget they have. I was doing my pitch.

A (17:37)

We were talking to game.

B (17:39)

Yeah. He said to me, Mark Hoffman is his name, is a wonderful man. He said to me, well, we do not do programming at night on cnbc. We're a daytime show. The ratings are going to be terrible. Nobody's going to watch it for the first couple of years. I have a limited budget and I have no idea if it's going to work. But if you want to be seen as a credible business guy and not a TV personality, you do it here. Because I'll embed you in the rest of my network in the day. And at some point, you may want to do something different with your business. You may want to take it public, you may want to buy another business, you may want to raise money, and you need credibility. And I have it and you don't.

A (18:28)

And it was a great sales.

B (18:29)

It was a great sales pitch.

A (18:33)

That's really good. And you went ahead and was it a success off that? I remember it. I remember seeing the trailers and just thinking, wow, what kind of show is this? And, I mean, I don't know if it was just you on camera or how they positioned you, but it was, for me, it was a hit from the start.

B (18:46)

It was a hit conceptually, but the ratings in the first. First season was only six episodes. And I didn't understand the TV business or the ratings business at the time. And the first episode, if a good show on TV today gets 3 or 400,000 in the demo, in the demo, and maybe 500,000 overall, that would be like a good show today. The first episode got an 11. 11,000.

A (19:19)

Okay.

B (19:20)

And I didn't understand what that meant, but there was an article written that said that it was a total bust of a show and nobody watched it and CNBC failed or some crazy stuff. And then the second episode did like a 35. And then it sort of started to build from there. And what I learned in the business was it's not where it starts, it's how it builds and what sort of retention and how sort of the buzz happens. And by the end of the first season, I think it had gotten up to. In 80. 80,000.

A (19:51)

Yeah.

B (19:52)

And I said to myself, like, oh, this is going to get canceled. This is bad. I'm so embarrassed. I just. And they renewed it again. And when they renewed it in season two, it came out of the gates really strong. And the reason it came out of the gates really strong is that CNBC didn't have a lot of programming at night. So it just took the first six episode and it aired it and it aired it and it aired it. And if you thought about it like a. Like a fishing net, they just kept throwing the net out there and picking up more fish. But what would happen is the viewer that they would catch would stick. And in season two, I think it opened up to like 200,000. And then by the end of season two, beginning of season three, it was the highest rated show that had ever been on CNBC. And it was a top 10 cable show, and it was winning Tuesday nights and it was getting all this attention and then my life really changed.

A (20:51)

It's interesting, I remember that period. It was you and Tilman Fertitta, and it was just you guys on CNBC at night.

B (20:57)

Wait a minute. No, no, no. I love Tillman. Tillman came in five years after I was there and was a copycat show. And I love him to death, by the way. He's a friend of mine. But CNBC had found this formula in a bottle that they really liked. And they kept trying to take the formula, including my infographics and the format, and kept trying to reinvent it in other formats. And I'm proud to tell you that Shark Tank came in a year and a half after I was there with reruns. And it was a huge contributor to my success because it brought an audience. And as you would imagine, I felt sour about it. I was like, wait a minute. I thought it was just about me, but it helped me. And then the CNBC would bring in in other things year after year. And from the moment I started in 2013 to the moment I ended in 21, Shark Tank. And the profit started relatively around the same time. I started first and we were the two last men standing.

A (22:01)

I, I, 100%, I, I concur with you on that because there's a few others that will mention that an amazing guy.

B (22:08)

He had, I think billionaire, billionaire, buyers.

A (22:11)

Club, billion dollar buyer.

B (22:13)

Yeah, but what a great guy. Just a salt of the earth guy.

A (22:16)

So you said your life really changed. How, how was, what was the change? You went from being, you know, a public company CEO that nobody knew to all.

B (22:25)

Actually, at the time, Camping World was private.

A (22:27)

Oh, private company. And what was the change in your life at that point?

B (22:33)

Well, one, you know, NBC and CNBC sort of create, you know, created a personality and a Persona and spent a ton of money marketing it. And I would drive down the street and see billboards and see it on the cab and it changed that part of my life. And I'd be lying to you if I told you that wasn't super cool. Of course it was super cool. It changed the amount of inbound that I would get of everybody wanted to do a deal and I didn't have the gumption or the time to do. Changed my Camping World business dramatically. And it helped put Camping World more on the map because all of a sudden I was the prophet who happened to have Camping World, not the Camping World guy who happened to have the profit. And it put a really nice, in my opinion, halo over the company. And it Gave me the ability to do deals with like MLB and NASCAR and get bigger, get bigger deals with other, you know, big players. Because I would call not as the Camping World person, I would call as, hey, I'm this guy on cnbc. And everybody would answer the phone. And so it changed. It changed the Camping World business forever. It changed my outlook forever. And it changed CNBC's primetime programming, I think, forever as well.

A (24:02)

It's amazing. And this is still kind of a secret, but I think over time people start to realize this. I talk to a lot of very, very wealthy people. And the difference between having a lot of money and having a lot of celebrity, fame, name, you know, whatever you want to call it, it does get you into doors that, like you just said, people answer the phone, they take your call and they want to talk to you.

B (24:25)

It does. But much like you would tell children, getting into college is one thing, staying and doing well at college is another thing. And I will tell you, John, the pressure to perform in business, the pressure to be right, the pressure to have things that Camping World always be right exponentially grew because the reputational risk of those things not going well would almost defuse or defeat or mitigate or oh, it's a TV show. He really sucks at that.

A (24:58)

Yeah. Yeah.

B (24:59)

And so that changed for me pretty dramatically.

A (25:02)

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B (25:56)

Yeah. So I decided about two years ago that it was time for me to retire from Camping World on a day to day basis. Not because I didn't love it, not because the business wasn't going well, but because I'm a firm believer that every business needs an evolution and it needs a change of perspective. And if I'm going to be the Guy telling people how to improve their business and what to change and how to change their mindset. I have to drink my own medicine. And I had built an amazing team who was smarter and sharper and more creative than I ever was in that business and knew that there needed to be a moment where the baton passed. And so as part of that, I also knew that I needed to know what my next step would be. What would I do next after Camping World? It becomes such a big part of my identity with the Flag and everything else out there that I needed to know emotionally, to be honest and psychologically, how I was going to make a transition out of that company and mentally survive it and not feel like a retired MLB player who didn't have anything else. Went from batting every night, being on the road every night and playing in games and being on TV playing games and winning championships and then not playing at all. That's what it felt like for me. So I decided to join the board at Bed Bath and Beyond, formerly Overstock. And I knew that I had a plan to repair and fix and repair and fix the business while I was still at Camping World, while I was still making television. And towards the middle of 2025, I made the decision to leave Camping World to retire from it, to hand it over in a very elegant transition. And then in January, and the market didn't know this and I didn't tell anybody I was going to take on the job at Bed Bath and Beyond full time because I had had 14 months, 15 months to really craft what I wanted it to become and how I wanted to change it so dramatically. But I needed to make progress before I was willing to take on that risk. And so in January, I made the decision to go from executive chairman only to executive chairman and CEO. And then I rolled out my, what I would call a kind of a five year plan, which 95% of the world thinks is absolutely nuts and overly ambitious and not possible. And that's usually when it's the right time for me to do it, because I love doing what everybody else says is impossible.

A (28:36)

Seems like a recurring theme. So what is. It's a five point plan. But what is the vision? I sort of understand conceptually the brand has value, It's a nostalgic brand, it means a lot. But what do you think it can be in 5, 10 years?

B (28:49)

The goal in the next 36 months is to have people think about it as the everything home business. And so when I, when I always joke with people and say I didn't come here to sell towels or blenders. I don't want it to be seen as a retail company. I want it to be seen as a technology first, everything, home business second. That lays over the rooftop of a house in one sense and the homeowner in another sense. And I think about the omnichannel retail as the gateway for information and to meet new people. I think about all the things that people need when they own a home, from insurance to warranties to finance to services in their home, et cetera. And then I think about the last piece, which is I want to be in the home affordable home business. And it's no different than selling the homes that I sold for 25 years. They just happen to not have wheels underneath them. And so taking everything I learned at Camping World and everything I learned in that business about how to lay over a whole industry and modify the way people think of it, if somebody said to me, give it to me in one sentence, I would say, I'm going to do everything I did in the RV space, I'm going to do it in the housing space. And that ultimately we will sell homes, we will sell financing, I will have a home operating system, we will do insurance and warranties and all the other things. And yes, by the way, we will sell you things at Bed Bath, at Overstock, at Kirkland's, at Bye Bye Baby and a couple of other acquisitions that haven't been named as the gateway.

A (30:23)

I love it. So there's something about the way you operate that it's always puzzled me. From way back in 2013, you come from this big company roll up architecture where we can talk about all kind of very, very big business type stuff. But then you seem to have this on the ground. Hustle and grind, mom and pop. You understand upsells, cross sells, packaging, product. You know, what's the term you use? People process product. That's a very small business, hustler type of mentality. How do you bridge those two worlds?

B (30:58)

I thank Lee Iacocca for forcing me to learn how to be a hustler, for learning how to start things and create things and reinvent things in the simplest way with no money in your pocket. I couple that mentality with coming from family business, which is what I came from, and the animosity and the tension and the resentment and the conflict and the love and the joy and all of those emotions. And I take that knowledge and I take the scrappiness knowledge and I put those together and that's what a small business is. And knowing how to Navigate around my own family, knowing how to do deals with family businesses when I rolled up Camping World, knowing how to not have money in the bank and how to figure it out by being resourceful. That whole salad, that whole sort of bowl of all the vegetables is really what gave me the resources. But here's the dirty little secret. When I first started making the profit, I did not know all of it, and I did a lot of fake it till you make it. And I used common sense and I used my grit and I used my willingness to do the work, and I learned and I was very methodical about wanting to cast businesses on the show that were principally good ideas by decent people that maybe hadn't had the resources or the education or the experience to know how to put it all together. And by the way, the other dirty little secret is anybody that can take a step back and is willing to do the work can go into anybody else's business and be critical and provide solutions, but they have to be willing to dedicate the time, the money, and the energy to it. And what I found, particularly even when CNBC tried to make all the other shows that mimicked mine, none of those entrepreneurs, including Tillman, had the time or were willing to put in the time that it took to learn that industry and learn that business and be boots on the ground and build the relationships. People weren't willing to do it. And that was probably the secret sauce that gave me the advantage. And after doing 110 of them, it became like all that for me, if you go back and you watch an original profit episode that was like, very different. I was like, I'm going to be in charge for a week and then I'm going to do this. And then all of a sudden it became to, I'm going to be in charge all the time. Like, I evolved.

A (33:37)

Yeah, we're 50, 50, but I am 100% in charge was your slogan for a week. Right.

B (33:45)

And then it turned into a month, and then it turned into a year, then it turned in forever. And now my personality was built to be in charge forever, and it kind of just became who I am. But I don't function that way outside of business, though. You'd be surprised. I'm a very different person outside of business.

A (34:02)

What do you think is your business superpower? You have this wide array of talents on TV at least. But, like, what do you really. If we were hiring you to be the Ocean's Eleven, to be one player on this power team, what, what do you do best?

B (34:16)

If I was on Ocean's Eleven, I would know what people to recruit and how to get the best version out of them by understanding what motivated them and what they were scared of and triangulating those things and getting the best version of you. That is my superpower and I'm the most difficult person to work with on a daily basis because my expectations are high. My work ethic is 247 and I will out argue you and out hustle you. But over time I have less sharp edges than I used to. So what you saw on TV and what you would have seen in real life would have been one in the same. And that same thing exists today. I'm just like a really crookedy jaggedy rock that's been smoothed over over time. But I'm still I will still hit you in the head with my rock.

A (35:07)

Marcus, this was awesome. I really appreciate it. Thanks so much for coming on.

B (35:11)

You got it.

A (35:12)

Thanks for listening. If you're a fan of the podcast, leave a rating and review on this episode and get my best stuff to your inbox@johndavids.com we'll talk to you next time. Quick break so I can tell you about Influicity. That's the little marketing agency I started in my apartment about 10 years ago. Well, fast forward. It is not so little anymore. Influenicity works with some of the biggest brands in the world, building customer communities that drive revenue. We do this through influencers, podcasts, paid media, social media, content, AI, and so much more. You can learn more@influicity.com and hey, while you're there, check out our case studies. We have a lot of them. That's influicity.com.