Meet the NATM Dealer Committee Members: A Conversation with Ronnie Enns

NATM Dealer Committee – Interview with Ronnie Enns  

In July 2024, NATM staff members Andrea Boetticher and Izabella Chesney began a new series of interviews to learn more about the members of the 2024-2025 NATM Dealer Committee. We are excited to be continuing this exciting series of giving you an inside view of who represents out Dealer Affiliates. We got the opportunity to speak with Ronnie Enns, Chief Executive Officer of Happy Trailers. 

What brought you to the trailer industry?  

I grew up in Paris, Texas, where within about a 60-mile radius I’d say probably half of the black iron trailers in the country are manufactured. Because of that, I was always around trailers. A lot of my friends, their parents either worked at a trailer company or owned a trailer company. I was kind of an outsider in that my dad did construction and we had a used car lot that we would work on weekends.  

When I graduated high school, I went to go work with my dad in his contracting business and hated it. So instead, he knew a guy that owned a trailer manufacturing company and helped me get a job there as the owner’s assistant. In that job, I learned everything about trailers, talking to dealers, invoicing and inventory, pretty much anything that you would have to do in a small trailer manufacturing company.  

When I was 19 working at the trailer manufacturing company, I learned that the owner of one of the dealerships we worked with was planning to retire and wanted to sell his business. I always had an interest in dealerships from my experience with our car dealership, so my dad and I decided to combine the two, and we bought this trailer dealership – Martin Trailer Sales. My dad wanted to continue his contracting, so he put me in charge of the dealership, and we officially renamed it Happy Trailer Sales.  

Very quickly, we realized we wanted to grow and after 9 months, Johnny Loewen, my brother-in-law and business partner, opened our second location. And almost every year after that we opened another location. We will be opening our tenth location in a few months from now.  

Tell us a little more about your company.  

We have 5 partner owners and 56 employees at Happy Trailer Sales. Earlier this year, we acquired another trailer business to open our first location outside of Texas and one of the owners joined our team at Happy Trailers as an owner. We operate pretty lean, with about 4-5 employees at each store. We also have a back-office team that support the stores, some who work at one of the store locations, and others that work remotely.  

Our core purpose as a company is to create a dealership experience that doesn’t suck. It is a simple phrase that is very blunt and it can mean a lot of different things. When people hear the word dealership, there’s a certain angst that overcomes them and the start to feel stressed. When they hear the word salesman, they think “Oh this person is going to try to get me.”  

We’re focused on trying to make the process straightforward and transparent. We are striving to make the buying process easy. We were one of the first trailer dealerships to advertise our trailers with pricing online. I started by creating a WordPress website and just posted pictures of every trailer we had. People were going to know exactly what we had in stock and what the price was. At the time in 2013, it seemed somewhat revolutionary because it was rare to see that from any trailer dealership.   

More recently though, we have been focusing on ecommerce, working with a company to allow customers to buy a trailer from their couch. People can go through the whole process from start to finish, or they can use it to speed up the process with e-signatures, deposit collection and the financing process. It really saves customers time, allowing them to not have to spend so much time at our dealership. 

What do you find most rewarding about what you do?  

Empowering others and building teams. It has been hugely rewarding for me to find people’s skills that surpass my own, or being able to train people to do things better and then watch as they take it further than I ever did.  Building a skilled team makes owning a business more enjoyable because when you’re doing everything alone it is exhausting. I didn’t take a vacation for I think four or five years and I missed so much at home. An important family function would be coming up and then some disaster would happen at the business and being spread so thin I had to deal with it.  

For the first several years, leadership was just not that important when I had to focus on running the business. 

A huge turning point for me as a business leader happened about halfway through my journey. John Maxwell, leadership guru, held a conference in Waxahachie, Texas of all places. Before attending that conference, most of my knowledge and expertise came through experience, but he inspired me to pick up a book, to learn to get better as a leader, and to help other people grow as well. That inspired me to start listening to podcasts and audiobooks, just trying to learn more and more.  

And as I continued to learn and grow, building a good team and focusing on leadership has become really important and I think that’s probably the most rewarding part. I realized that if I want to keep doing this, I want to get the right people around me and invest in the people I work with.  

What changes are you excited to see in the future in terms of benefits for the NATM Dealer Affiliate Program and what the committee is working on? What are you most excited about for the future?  

I’m excited for the networking opportunities with other dealers. I’m excited for hopefully increased information sharing between manufacturers and dealers and collaboration together to build a healthier industry.  

What are you excited about for the inaugural NATM Trailer Expo in 2025? 

I am excited to see what the approach for the new show will be. Of course, I’ll be excited to see what trailers are there. I’m a trailer nerd, so I will want to see what people are building, how they’re building it. I think my favorite part of any trade show is getting to connect with everyone, so getting to do some networking with other dealers and other industry members. And, you know if John Maxwell shows up, that’d be exciting. 

We are excited to see all the great things Ronnie Enns will be doing on the committee! We are also looking forward to sharing more insights with our members and dealer affiliates on who is representing our dealer affiliates and assisting in growing the Dealer Affiliate Benefit Program. Keep an eye out for our next conversation with one of our Dealer Committee Members!