Last post, I wrote about the 3 lessons that corporate America can learn from summer camps. In this post, I’ll describe the inverse… the three largest lessons that summer camps can learn from the traditional business world.
1) Feedback is a gift – seek it out
The single most important lesson I learned at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business is the immense value of feedback. The GSB’s culture is supremely influenced by the seminal course Interpersonal Dynamics, and this leads GSB graduates to seek out and provide feedback ad nauseam. The tremendous impact that timely and direct impact can have on businesses is well-documented, such as the benefits accrued to American Express when they used the Net Promoter System to identify and cater to their most profitable customers.
Summer camps should take this lesson from corporate America, embracing the gift that is feedback. This was the largest improvement area I noticed across my camp tour this past summer – most camps can place a greater emphasis on feedback mechanisms. Though current systems exist including end of summer surveys and 1:1’s between staff and their direct supervisors, providing greater 1) formality, 2) specificity, and 3) consistency could propel camp operations to new heights.
For further detail on proposed feedback structures at camp, keep your eyes peeled for my next blog publication.
2) What’s on the shelf?
In consulting, the term “on the shelf” refers to materials or processes that exist as institutional knowledge within the firm. Rather than creating an Excel survey analyzer or PowerPoint geographic map slide from scratch, individuals are encouraged to leverage previous work to speed up the production process. Notably, a consultant can only take something off the shelf that is digitally memorialized and crafted with future use in mind.
Summer camps should take this lesson from corporate America, investing effort into creating and recording repeatable processes for future summers. Orientation schedules, reference check questions, and lost camper item email templates are examples of a borderline endless list of materials that should be digitally saved and leveraged year after year. One of my favorite axioms is “If it’s not written down, it does not exist”… what processes are digitally memorialized and easily referenced at your camp? How can you spend time this off-season bolstering the tools on your “shelf?” These are the questions that camp directors should be asking themselves.
Look out for a bulleted list for the top 10 items directors should be placing on their shelves.
3) What is my golden metric?
A golden metric can be considered as the key measure of success for a company, defining the relationship between the customer problems and the company’s offering. It’s easiest to think of a golden metric as a non-revenue figure that signals the health of the business. For example, Doordash’s golden metric is meals delivered and WhatsApp’s golden metric is messages received. Knowledge of a singular golden metric gives a company and its employees increased focus and a real-time scorecard.
Summer camps should take this lesson from corporate America, defining for themselves what they’re golden metric should be. This will depend significantly on where your camp is in its growth / maturity cycle. For a nascent camp, new families enrolled per month could be a suitable metric. For a long-standing organization, camper return rate could be the best signal of health. By aligning on a single influenceable and strategically central metric, camps can boost their operations to the next level.
Keep an eye out for a future post where I share what I believe is the most impactful golden metric for mature camps.
What other lessons can camps learn from corporations? Let me know in the comments and look out for future posts with more tactical details on the lessons shared above.
-Mario
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