We were lucky to catch up with Sarah Sanville recently and have shared our conversation below.
Sarah, thank you so much for taking the time to share your lessons learned with us and we’re sure your wisdom will help many. So, one question that comes up often and that we’re hoping you can shed some light on is keeping creativity alive over long stretches – how do you keep your creativity alive?
One of the ways that I choose to keep my creativity alive is by constantly exposing myself to new design books, magazines, online resources, etc. It’s easy to get busy and not take time to feed my creative nature. However, I’m learning that spending even small amounts of time each week doing something creative or learning a new thing helps my brain me more creative in general. This in turn, keeps me motivated on my work projects and ready to come up with new designs and ideas for our work. Being outside in God’s magnificent creation also feeds my desire to see beautiful things. It might be an amazing sunrise, a walk at the beach, a drive in the mountains or a walk around the neighborhood. No matter what, time outdoors does my creative mind much good and encourages me to incorporate things I see in nature into my designs.
Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?
My husband and I are currently in year 3 of a business we started that is focused on luxury RV renovations and home construction & renovation. One of the most unique things about this business is that there are very few people in the country doing this sort of work on RVs. We have landed ourselves in a niche workspace and we are thrilled to take drab RVs and turn them into something that looks like a residential space! We work hard to make the interiors more functional and more beautiful. Jim brings over 20 years of construction and engineering experience to the table and that shows in our work. He can fix, build or design pretty much anything! That saves us a lot of hassle and money when we can fix pretty much anything and everything on site. Our RV renovations have all sold very quickly – in fact, the last one sold within 30 hours of being listed for sale. Most of our renovations are sold to clients all over the USA. These clients typically don’t even come to see the RV, they just do virtual tours and extensive discussions with us prior to purchase. And then the RV is shipped thousands of miles to them! We never anticipated the demand that would ensue regarding our renovations, but it’s a great problem to have. We just finished building a large guesthouse and a double RV garage on our property. We are enjoying using the new space for our RV renovation projects and we hope to add client owned RV renovations to our available services soon.
There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
1. An eye for design: over the years, I have grown my personal style and eye for design. The years of taking design classes, reading design books, and spending hours on Instagram and Pinterest have paid off big time in this business. I often use trending home designs to help guide my design plan for each renovation. For anyone wanting to enter the construction and renovation space, I would recommend focusing a good amount of effort on learning design first. Good design can literally make or break your business.
2. Willingness to learn new skills/business: I am a respiratory therapist by trade and Jim is an engineering manager. This was definitely stepping out of our comfort zone to renovate RVs! We had to be willing to learn a lot, be willing to fail and make mistakes. All of this was very new to us. While we had home construction skills, renovating an RV is very different. We had to learn to apply those construction skills in a new way.
3. Determination to start a business and take a risk on a new endeavor: starting a business is a daunting task – from setting up an LLC to the accounting software to the daily work and product management. There is so much to be done! Without a lot of self motivation and determination (and late nights and long weekends of work), we would not be where we are today.
Is there a particular challenge you are currently facing?
Our biggest challenge right now is how to scale our business up and be able to do more renovations each year. This is such specialized work that we can’t easily subcontract the work out. We are looking at ways to make our work more efficient and how to add people to our team that can be trained to do renovation work.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.sanvilleinvestments.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sanvilleinvestments/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sanvilleinvestmentsllc
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@sanvilleinvestments
Image Credits
Sarah Sanville
