Brian Booker, Co-Founder of ExploreUSA RV Supercenter, Entrepreneur | Powering Drive

After years of growth and development working for the tow truck company, Brian was ready for his next career opportunity. He combined everything he learned about sales and leveraged his lifelong entrepreneurial passion to begin a new opportunity in the manufactured home industry in the 1980s and ‘90s. It was in this industry that Brian quickly progressed from sales to management, and soon became partner in a nationwide company with billions of dollars in annual sales. Brian knew there was more he could accomplish: by the end of the 1990s, his entrepreneurial nature started to pull him to the recreational vehicle industry—one ripe for innovation.

Buying his own RV and hitting the road with his family, traversing the United States multiple times over the years, Brian became passionate about travel and RVing. He identified a glaring gap in the RV industry with the service experience that regularly left consumers unsatisfied. Brian knew it was a challenge he could solve.

In 2000, a few months after the eureka moment of realizing he could start a company that provided better service, ExploreUSA RV Supercenter was born.

Over the next two decades, through close adherence to this philosophy and Brian’s day-in-and-day-out leadership, ExploreUSA became one of the top RV retailers in North America—the world’s largest RV market.

Throughout the 2000s, ExploreUSA continued to earn record-breaking sales and success, growing from its first location in Boerne to nine retail locations across Texas in San Antonio, Austin, Houston, Alvin, Seguin, Fort Worth, and Dallas by 2014. In 2017, the company built its largest Texas dealership south of Boerne, financed with a $10 million loan by The Bank of San Antonio with the leadership and counsel of Brian’s personal commercial banker, Alan Smith.

In 2019, nearly 20 years after the opening of its first location, ExploreUSA was acquired by a Dallas-based national company called RV Retailer. The acquisition took a year of meticulous behind-the-scenes work and negotiations. During the process, Brian and his business partner, Scott Chaney, made a pact never to show weakness and to never back down on any aspect of the deal that made them uncomfortable. The negotiations were arduous, and threatened to fall apart multiple times, but the partners stuck to their values. Brian and Scott saw through the successful close of the deal just before the pandemic hit.

Now, after success in the manufactured home and RV industries over the past four decades, Brian is actively engaged in his newest venture, Hawkes Design LLC. Just two months old, Hawkes Design is a vertically integrated company that retrofits vehicles for off-grid active camping adventures. A rapidly expanding consumer niche, overlander vehicles have created a $10 billion global luxury industry. Since launch, Hawkes Design has outfitted five vehicles and plans to have 1,200 vehicles on the road by the end of 2022.