Advanced RV cut its week to 32 hours at full pay — output nearly recovered in 18 months

Advanced RV builds custom luxury motorhomes from Mercedes-Benz vans in Willoughby, Ohio — 50 employees, no outside shareholders, builds that take two years. CEO Mike Neundorfer, who founded the company in 2012 and never ran it around overtime, joined the 4 Day Week Global trial in early 2022 and moved everyone to 32 hours at full pay that April. He put the odds at 50/50: almost all other trial members were offices, not workshops.

The skeptics were internal. Tricia Eller, who ran customer relations, raised her hand against it — 'This is not going to work' — and quietly worked Mondays from home to cover customers. The craftspeople went hunting for minutes: the upholsterers asked for an industrial sewing machine that binds carpets in a quarter of the time ('a no brainer'); the finishing team made more templates, jigs and boxes for repetitive work, and reassigned tasks to whoever did each one fastest. Six or seven minutes saved on six or seven things, as finisher Bill Kowalcic put it, starts to push the envelope.

Eighteen months in, the honest ledger: output dipped at first — 'you lose productivity, you lose some volume, you lose profit,' Neundorfer says — and has nearly recovered, with some improvements expected to take the company beyond its 40-hour baseline. Employees stayed, and the mood flipped: the same Eller now calls Sunday her best day because Monday is hers. Across the trial, none of the 41 American and Canadian companies that started in 2022 had gone back to 40 hours.

Hours cut 20% (40 to 32) at unchanged pay; after an initial dip, output nearly recovered to five-day levels within 18 months.

It proved the four-day week outside the office: hand work is where skeptics said hour cuts had to fail.

The owner absorbed real cost — an honest, temporary productivity and profit dip — instead of faking the result.

The recovery came from workers themselves: departments requested the tools and designed the jigs that saved the time.

A 50-employee, no-board structure let it experiment without investor optics, a luxury most manufacturers lack.

A shorter week is not a gift you hand out — it is an efficiency mandate. The hours only come back if every department is pushed to find the minutes hiding in its processes.

A year and a half in, Advanced RV remained on four days with output nearly back to baseline and hiring unimpaired by the shorter week. The global trial it joined kept reporting zero returns to 40 hours among its 2022 North American cohort. The material records nothing further.