Entrepreneurs and husband and wife Ronny and Tania are the founders of Achtung Camper, a unique bespoke, designer campervan conversion company based in Geelong, Victoria. They travel six months a year, both within Australia and abroad, while running their successful business.
Their next trip in May will see them and their three year old daughter campervan throughout Eastern Europe through Czech, Austria, Hungary and Slovenia to Croatia, Italy and back to Germany. All the while they’ll manage the business remotely using a laptop, a good internet connection and the cloud!
Achtung Camper was born from Ronny and Tania’s love of campervanning which began when they met 15 years ago. Ronny was a backpacker from Germany who was just about to set off on a year-long campervanning trip around Australia in a banged up campervan. He and Tania met in Torquay and a week they agreed they’d fallen in love and she joined him.
Over the years they were approached by so many people asking if they’d do a van for them and Tania did a bit of market research and discovered the lack of design focused/high quality/bespoke campervan conversion companies in Australia.
So they took the plunge, quit their jobs and started Achtung Camper. It’s been rough ride at times but they now have a very successful business that supports their lifestyle. They’ve gone from converting one campervan per month and making a loss to over 40 conversions per year and highly profitable.
Tell us about Achtung Camper.
Clients order a new VW Transporter through us and choose the vehicle specs, they then choose their campervan features and colours and we convert the van into their personalised freedom machine!
What inspired you to start Achtung Camper?
A real love of the freedom a campervan brings into your life and seeing a whole in the market for good quality, stylish looking campervans.
Tell us about your career and background.
I studied PR at Deakin University and then worked in advertising agencies in Geelong and Melbourne, working on digital for BMW as my last client before leaving the industry. I started out working broadly in advertising doing a bit of everything but mainly account services. I ended up specialising in digital so understood a lot of how to market a business when we started Achtung Camper.
Now I’m managing Achtung Camper which includes: managing staff (we have 8 now), understanding the accounting and finance part of running a business (not my forte!), still managing/overseeing the marketing, client services/sales, sourcing new suppliers if need be, test driving campervans and meeting with our business coach to work on business growth.
Describe a typical work day for you.
As a working mum of a 4 year old, I work kinder hours so only 5 hours a day, 3 days a week. I’ll speed through what I have to do quite quickly due to not having much time at work…I typically check and respond to my emails which will take about an hour, sit down for a team meeting for about 30 minutes, catch up with our social media manager for 30 minutes, catch up with our sales manager for 30 minutes, log into our CRM system and make any calls to clients/follow up any leads that need doing that day, meet with our business coach for an hour to discuss anything and everything, look at new products/accessories for our vans, work on an ongoing marketing project if I have time left over!
What advice do you have for those wanting to start a business?
Spend the money to do things right the first time. Saving money initially and getting a ‘cheaper’ website, marketing, tools, workshop etc. will mean you waste more money in the long run when you realise it has to be completely re-done soon after.
If a supplier or staff member is letting you down move on quickly and find someone new. It takes time initially to replace a supplier or staff member but in the long run it’s better than putting up with someone that’s continually unreliable or causing issues.
Leaning to distance yourself personally from business issues and not letting them affect you personally/bringing them home. The business is like our first child. We’ve grown it from a baby, to a toddler, it’s totally independent now and we love it dearly. It’s hard not to be personally offended/affected by negative issues and deal with them in a non-emotional and professional way. This is something we’ll never nail but will continually be trying to improve!
Always always always test your products before you sell them. It’s lucky ours are a fun one to test!
You can do anything if you are passionate and smart about it. Don’t wait to live your dreams, do them now. It was super scary to make the jump and start our own business with no reliable income but if you are passionate enough and smart enough to enlist help where your skills and knowledge are lacking then why shouldn’t you succeed?
Accept that you don’t and can’t know everything relating to running a business and make it your number one goal to enlist professionals to help you on your journey. You can’t be an expert in HR, accounting, marketing, book keeping, SEO….the list goes on…
A good business coach is invaluable!
Never stop learning or improving yourself personally and professionally so you are able to grow with the business as it needs you to. Invest in courses, read business related books, sign up to the amazing app Blinkist and do some courses on LinkedIn Learning.
Accept
that you probably won’t make any money for a while in the beginning or for the
foreseeable future but as the old saying goes – if you do what you love you
never have to work a day in your life.
Don’t underestimate the importance of marketing, having a good website, SEO, etc etc. Your product can be the best in the world but you can’t sell a secret!
Lean about and apply automation to your business in every way you can. Tim Ferris’s ‘The 4 Hour Work Week’ helped immensely in giving us new ways of thinking in terms of creating, growing and running a ‘lifestyle business’.
Employ good staff that you can trust completely.
What’s next for you, and Achtung Camper?
Once Layla starts school we will look at branching out into Motorhomes but will need to do a lot of research/test drives first!
