The Craft of Conscious Growth with Tim Elinski

**SPEAKER_1** (0:04)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection, and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media, and programmatic ad experts.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:17)
Welcome back to the show, everyone. I'm Stephen Sakach here with Tullio Siragusa as always, and we've got a special guest who we're going to introduce in a moment. So today we are exploring sustainable business practices and ethics through the story of a company building handcrafted solar powered travel trailers in rural Arizona. So sustainability can show up in the materials a company chooses, the durability of a product it builds, the community where it manufactures, even the building it preserves and the jobs it creates and the relationship it encourages people to have with the natural world. So we're probably covering all of that today.
Tullio, introduce our special guest today.

**Tullio Siragusa** (1:03)
It will be my pleasure. Our guest today is Tim Elinski, the founder and fabricator of Pin Drop Travel Trailers. Tim leads design and manufacturing for Pin Drop Travel Trailers, an award-winning micro camper company creating hand-crafted solar-powered trailers built for both rugged terrain and comfortable outdoor experiences, dare I say glamping. With more than 25 years of experience as a licensed general and HVAC contractor, Tim brings deep craftsmanship, restoration experience and energy-efficient design expertise to the business.
Today, Pin Drop operates from a repurposed historic building in Miami, Arizona, contributing to local revitalization through thoughtful manufacturing. Tim is also the former mayor of Cottonwood, Arizona, where he served nearly 20 years in civic leadership and helped advance historic preservation, community support and regional economic identity. Tim, welcome to The Bliss Business Podcast.

**Tim Elinski** (2:07)
Thank you, Tullio. Thank you, Stephen. Good to be here. Really appreciate this opportunity.

**Stephen Sakach** (2:11)
Tim, so when you think about sustainability, can you tell our audience what that looks like in the context of manufacturing travel trailers?

**Tim Elinski** (2:20)
Yeah. With Pin Drop Travel Trailers, what we really try to focus on is to make sure that we're building a generational teardrop trailer.
The RV industry in the United States is huge, 150 plus billion annually spent on travel trailers with about five to eight percent, I think, of US households owning an RV, which lasts 10 to 15 years at best. So that's just not good enough for us. So we really try to build a generational product that can last for a much longer time than you'd see other RVs on the road. So we know that people are going to camp. That's the kind of our American spirit is to get out in our RVs and tour the country, Route 66 and all that. But in doing so, we want to make sure that we're not impacting the environment negatively. So that's why we started out with solar-powered self-contained micro camper. So there's really no carbon footprint to these. They're great and sustainable, and just a really good alternative for those that want to be conscious of our impact on the environment.

**Tullio Siragusa** (3:24)
Super cool.
Now, your background is an interesting background. You've been in the trades, includes historic restoration, HVAC, energy efficiency building, and even civic servant capacity. How did that experience shape the way you designed and manufactured Pin Drop Trailers?

**Tim Elinski** (3:45)
That's a great question. So I often tell people that I was a general contractor with a camping addiction, which is very true.
I've been in the trades since, I mean, from growing up, my dad was in the trades, his dad was in the trades, so I've always just been around trades folks. And after high school, got my general contractor's license, went, you know, dip right into business and building homes, remodeling homes, but always had a great love for the outdoors. So I primarily focused on historic restoration. That was kind of my jam. I like, I like old buildings. I like old, you know, projects and, you know, the just the craftsmanship that went into some of these old historic homes. And so that carried over to my love of camping. So I would, you know, have vintage campers that I would, you know, work on and fix up and try to tweak to suit my wife and my, my wife's and my camping preferences. But they never really kind of fit the bill. So, so in my head, of course, being a tradesman, I was just always designing, you know, a better product, a better way to to stay out longer because really lack of power, lack of water, that's what's going to drive you back, you know, to civilization. So I was trying to figure out a way to keep us out a little bit longer and, but still maintain that vintage aesthetic. You know, I think I really accomplished that with Pin Drop. And that's really what it was. I built it for years in my head prior to actually building it in real life. And I built it for myself and my family selfishly, you know, but it turns out it's a great design. And I think it's been universally loved by all of our customers, even though I don't know if they know this or not, but I really am building it for myself.