Ketelsen Campers Business Profile

Once a year, the kindergarten and first-grade classes at Pennington Elementary School go camping - practically in the school's back yard.

The kids take a field trip to Ketelsen Campers, a Wheat Ridge trailer dealership that shares a fence with the school. They climb inside the campers, run around the water features and faux wilderness in the showroom and learn about camping and wilderness safety.

The field trip is one of many ways owner Randy Ketelsen reaches out to the community while building and promoting his business. Ketelsen is known throughout central Jefferson County for both his showroom off Interstate 70 and his community service.

His 52-year-old business is a 13-acre dealership near Kipling Street and Interstate 70. Ketelsen Campers has 65 full-time employees and sells roughly $17 million worth of campers each year. The store also services trailers and sells a wide variety of accessories.

Wheat Ridge Mayor Jerry DiTullio said Ketelsen does even more.

"It's a destination business for Wheat Ridge," he said. "He puts Wheat Ridge on the map. I hope he stays in Wheat Ridge a long time."

Ketelsen Campers focuses on basic, inexpensive trailers for young families in a middle stage of camping. They want to upgrade from stuffing the Jeep with gear and sleeping on rocks but they aren't interested a full-size recreational vehicle.

Ketelsen said such small pop-up campers are ideal for Colorado, where many campsites are off small roads not accessible by a traditional RV. He said the store is selling a lifestyle as much as a product.

"The driving need is growing all the time," Ketelsen said. "If you want to get the kids away from the computer ... and go out and hike a little bit and get dirty and fall in the lake and have those stories to tell and bond with whoever you're with. ... I wish we could supply the world with campers because there's so many kids that need it. They really need it."

In a quiet, naturally lit showroom, he invites customers bring their families, lie on the camper cots and test the gear.

"They can get a feel for the lifestyle," he said. "We have lots of families who come in and spend hours here."

The dealership is part of a family business that started in Iowa in the late 1960s. Randy's father Johnny Ketelsen was prominent musician who performed with Johnny Cash and Gene Autry. He wanted to buy a camper to haul around his family and music gear. When he called the trailer factory asking for a deal, the firm said he could only get a discount by buying three and becoming a dealer.

He bought all three. The Ketelsen family kept one, sold another to a neighbor and parked the third in the front yard. A passerby wanted it, but in a different color, so Johnny Ketelsen called the factory again, and was convinced to buy three more trailers - in a different color.

The three trailers in the front yard eventually evolved into a business. The family first opened a dealership in 1973 despite the oil embargo shrinking all vehicle sales. In 1979, another oil shortage that brought famously long gas lines also brought the demise of 85 percent of all RV dealers in the nation.

The Ketelsens survived both tight markets and by 1985 were ready to open a second outlet. Randy left his brother in Iowa and moved to Colorado and started his first dealership across from Lakeside mall

"There was really a void in the marketplace of people who wanted to emphasize young families who can come in and start here," he said. "All the emphasis was on the other end of the spectrum. ... We wanted to bring a quality operation to the entry level market."

The store later moved to a larger, higher profile site off Kipling Street. Ketelsen and his dealership have won awards from the city and local chambers. In 2002, the store also won an award for service from the Recreational Vehicle Dealers of America.

Ketelsen believes the trailer business is still expanding, despite busier schedules and longer working hours.

"We all have 24 hours a day for a limited time on this earth and more and more people are re-evaluating how they divvy up those 24 hours," he said. "If there's not something left over for me and my family, then I am doing something seriously wrong. A lot of people are coming to that conclusion that there has got to be a balance. We are at the other end of that teeter-totter in that balance that people need."

Ketelsen also has become deeply involved in Wheat Ridge schools and other local community service.

"When you have a little bit of extra time because you're surrounded by such quality people running the business every day that you get to go out and do those things in the community that are so rewarding," Ketelsen said. "It's awesome."

His first project with his neighbors at Pennington started when some kids were not being so neighborly.

"They threw a rock and got my attention - literally," he said. "I went over and said 'I don't want to be a complaining neighbor but we had some damage from a rock from one of the kids in the playground.' Well, we turned that into a positive and we started talking to the kids about citizenship."

He soon started the field trips and established his store as an emergency evacuation site. He also collected money to donate computers to the school, and he formed Friends of Pennington with Dave Holland, another neighborhood businessman.

"He's really an addition to the community because he's so willing to help out," said Holland of his partner Ketelsen. "He's willing to go out of his way to help other people get involved in the community as well."

He involved Wheat Ridge High School students at Pennington by having computer club kids train Pennington students on their new donated computers. Ketelsen also brings his passion for music to the high school. The Farmer marching band houses and repairs his trailer at Ketelsen's shop.

He also volunteers to help the choir and bands at the school even though his daughters have graduated from the school and its musical groups.

One of those daughters is now married to Ketelsen's information technology director, guaranteeing a third generation of Ketelsens selling campers.

Randy Ketelsen is also seeing second generations of customers. In fact, he has sold a camper to a young man who, many years ago, was among the first kindergartners on a Ketelsen Campers field trip.

This story was originally published in the Golden Transcript.