A repair shop that started selling RVs.

Branden Kollmar started selling RVs in 2006. He was good at it — the top salesperson in the country for national brands including Grand Design and Pleasure-Way. Sam Slaughter spent most of his career on the other side of the building, in RV finance and dealership management. Both grew up in California's Central Valley; Branden went to UCLA, Sam to Fresno State.

They worked at the same dealership, and they kept disagreeing with the same decisions. How customers were treated once they reached the service department. How employees were treated generally. Which RVs got bought for the lot, how they were marketed, where the money went.

The part that stuck was service. Customers who had just bought a new RV waited months to use it while it sat in line for warranty work — and when the shop finally got around to it, the workmanship was poor enough that it often had to go back. The dealership took their money at the sales desk and left them behind at the service desk. Branden was the one who had shaken their hand. Eventually the question stopped being "why do they do it this way" and became "why don't we just do it better."

So Unplug RV started with the part of the business that was most broken: service. Mobile first — a tech goes to the customer instead of the customer's RV sitting in a lot for two months waiting on a part. Written estimates. A labor rate published on the website. Technicians who are paid well and treated well enough to stay, because happy technicians are where happy customers come from.

Sales came later, because customers kept asking the same question after a repair: "can you find me a better one than this?" Most dealers sell you an RV and hand you somebody else's phone number when it breaks. Every unit on our lot goes through our own bays before it's listed — same technicians, same inspection, same standards we apply to a customer's coach. When something goes wrong afterwards, you're calling the people who worked on it.