Is Fear Keeping Your Camp From Growing?

Why protecting the budget can cost your camp growth, plus a practical framework for investing, testing, and measuring marketing ROI.

There’s a tension almost every camp leader eventually runs into. You want to grow. You have empty beds you could fill, retreat weekends with room for more groups, and facilities that could serve more people. You can see the opportunity, but pursuing that opportunity costs money. That’s often where fear begins to creep into the conversation.

There’s the fear of spending money and not getting a return. There’s the fear of making the wrong investment. There’s the fear of sitting in front of the board and explaining why the marketing budget went up. Those concerns are understandable, and sometimes we even describe them as responsible leadership. But in this episode of the Grow Your Camp Podcast, Mark and Carl challenge camp leaders to consider whether being careful with resources can sometimes cross the line into being afraid to put those resources to work.

“Scarcity asks, what can we cut? Growth asks, what can this investment produce?”

That distinction changes the conversation around marketing. Instead of only asking, How much is this going to cost us?, Mark argues that leaders also need to ask, What is staying the same costing us? An empty cabin represents capacity the camp built but isn’t using. So does an open retreat weekend or a phone that isn’t ringing. Those empty spaces may not show up as an expense on the budget, but they still represent a lost opportunity to generate revenue and, ultimately, serve more people.

As Mark puts it early in the episode, “Empty beds aren’t free.” The question, then, isn’t whether camps should simply start spending more money on marketing. It’s how leaders can invest responsibly, test ideas before making bigger commitments, measure what those investments produce, and become willing to put more resources behind the things that are actually working.

Quick Camp Marketing Tip: Don’t Guess—Just Ask

Before getting into the bigger question of how much a camp should invest in marketing, Carl offers a much simpler place to start: figure out whether the marketing you’re already doing is working. His recommendation doesn’t require a new CRM, complicated attribution software, or even a marketing consultant. Just ask every new inquiry, “How did you hear about us?”

The important part is asking consistently. When someone calls about booking a retreat, make the question part of the normal conversation. When a parent reaches out about summer camp, ask how they found you. On your website, add the question to contact forms, retreat inquiry forms, and registration forms. Carl recommends using a consistent list of broad categories—online search, social media, word-of-mouth referral, billboard, email, and other—so the answers become easier to compare over time.

Phone conversations give you an opportunity to go a little deeper. If someone says they found you through Google, ask whether they remember what they searched. If they mention social media, ask which platform or post they saw. If another person referred them, find out who it was. Those details can help you understand not only which channels are producing inquiries, but what specifically caused someone to notice your camp in the first place.

“You want to know if your marketing is working? Don’t guess, just ask.”

None of this requires a sophisticated system. If you already use a CRM or booking system, add a lead-source field. If you track inquiries in a spreadsheet, add it there. If you don’t have any system at all, Carl says a clipboard and a sheet of paper are still better than not tracking the information. What matters is recording the answers somewhere and then periodically looking at what they tell you.

Over time, those patterns can become useful when deciding where to put your next marketing dollar. If one source repeatedly brings new inquiries while another rarely gets mentioned, you have a reason to investigate further. More sophisticated tools such as Google Analytics can provide better attribution later, but camps don’t need to wait for perfect tracking before they start learning.

When Protecting the Budget Starts Holding Back the Mission

The larger conversation in this episode grew out of a difficult week Mark had been having with several camp clients. Three camps had recently asked his team to conduct audits and help them identify a path toward growth. They wanted to know what needed to change and what it would take to reach their goals. But once the recommendations were on the table, another question quickly followed: How are we supposed to pay for that?

Mark understood the reaction. Nobody wants to spend an organization’s money carelessly, and every leader has to make choices about limited resources. What frustrated him was what sometimes came next. Instead of evaluating the potential return from the recommended investment, the conversation immediately shifted toward finding a cheaper way to do the same work. Maybe, for example, a recent college graduate with a marketing degree could build the website instead.

For Mark, those conversations revealed something deeper than a disagreement over marketing costs. They raised a question about the mindset leaders bring to growth: Are we approaching the opportunity from scarcity, or are we approaching it from growth? A scarcity-minded leader looks primarily at the resources already available and asks how to protect them. A growth-minded leader still cares about those resources, but also asks what investment is required to produce the result the organization says it wants.

“It’s not just to protect the money, it’s to produce the mission.”

Carl points out that camps live in an interesting tension here because they are ministries with very real business economics. In some ministry settings, the financial transaction and the ministry itself can feel somewhat separated. Camp is different. A parent pays to send a child to summer camp. A church pays to bring a group for a retreat. That revenue pays for staff, food, facilities, maintenance, and all the other things required to make the experience possible.

Acknowledging that reality doesn’t make camp less of a ministry. It simply means that camp leaders have to understand the business required to sustain the ministry. If the organization continually underinvests in the things required to bring people through the doors, eventually there are fewer people to serve. That is why Mark keeps returning to the same tension throughout the episode: protecting money and advancing the mission are not always the same thing.

Fear Is Real, So Test Instead of Guessing

Mark has seen the same fear outside the camp world. Years ago, a friend gave him the book Same Kind of Different as Me, a story that significantly affected the way he thought about people experiencing homelessness. When the book was eventually adapted into a film, Mark had an opportunity to work with Paramount and Pure Flix on getting the movie out into the world.

What struck him during that experience was how often fear sat behind business decisions. An idea might sound promising, but the immediate concern was what would happen if they tried it and it failed. Failure would mean losing money. Mark doesn’t dismiss that concern; in fact, he sees it as the reason leaders should test ideas rather than make huge bets based on instinct.

The alternative to fear isn’t reckless spending. It’s responsible experimentation. Start with a smaller test, measure what happens, and use the results to decide what to do next. If something doesn’t work, stop putting money into it. If it begins producing a measurable return, increase the investment. That principle—test, measure, and respond to what the data tells you—becomes one of the central threads running through the rest of the conversation.

When the Results Say “Spend More,” but the Budget Says “No”

Carl then asks where trust fits into this conversation. After all, telling a camp that spending $10,000 could generate $100,000 sounds compelling, but the leader still has to believe there is a reasonable chance of that actually happening.

Mark responds with an example from an established camping ministry his team had worked with. Rather than asking the organization to make a large investment based purely on a promise, they started by testing several marketing efforts and tracking the results. Because the advertising and website activity were measurable, they could connect marketing spending with actual sales. As Mark describes it, they eventually reached a point where roughly every $100 invested was producing about $1,000 in verified revenue.

At that point, the logical question seemed obvious: if the investment is reliably producing that kind of return, how much more money should be put behind it? But the response Mark encountered was, “It’s not in the budget.”

That answer captures the tension at the heart of the episode. The additional marketing expense wasn’t in the budget, but neither was the additional revenue the marketing had generated. The budget, which was supposed to help the organization make responsible financial decisions, was now in danger of preventing it from responding to a demonstrated opportunity.

Mark sees the same problem when camps treat every unbudgeted expense as something that automatically has to wait until next year. If guests are repeatedly saying the mattresses are uncomfortable and it’s affecting whether they want to return, waiting a year to replace them may protect this year’s expense budget. But it may also cost the camp future bookings. The decision needs to account for both sides of the equation: what the improvement costs and what failing to make the improvement may cost.

That’s the broader shift Mark and Carl are arguing for. A budget should guide decisions, but it shouldn’t replace judgment. When circumstances change, demand increases, or an investment proves that it can produce a return, good leadership may require changing the plan rather than protecting the original numbers at all costs.

A Hole in the Drywall Can Tell a Bigger Story

The conversation about stewardship reminds Mark of an experience from his time leading a camp and retreat organization. When he arrived, he noticed “no” signs all over the property: don’t go here, don’t play there, don’t skateboard, don’t fish, don’t skip rocks. Mark wanted the camp to feel like a place where guests were welcomed and encouraged, so he started asking why so many of the messages were focused on what people weren’t allowed to do.

The answer was that staff felt responsible for taking care of the property. If people drove on the grass, the grass could be damaged. If kids got rowdy in the buildings, somebody might put a hole in the drywall, and repairing drywall costs money. From one perspective, preventing all of that looked like good stewardship.

Mark reframed the problem. A hole in the drywall certainly isn’t something to celebrate, but wear and tear is also evidence that the facility is being used. Guests create messes. Kids are hard on buildings. A full dining hall costs more to operate than an empty one. Hospitality and ministry inevitably consume resources.

“There is a cost to ministry.”

The goal isn’t to stop caring for the property or let guests destroy things. It’s to remember why the property exists in the first place. A perfectly maintained cabin with nobody sleeping in it may be protected, but it isn’t serving anyone. If the desire to preserve resources becomes so strong that leaders become afraid to use them, stewardship has lost sight of the mission.

That story brings the conversation back to Mark’s opening point. An empty facility may look inexpensive because there is less food to buy, less cleaning to do, and less wear on the buildings. But there is another cost that doesn’t appear as neatly on the expense report: the opportunity to serve people that the camp was built for in the first place.

How Much Should a Camp Invest in Growth?

Once Mark and Carl establish that unused capacity has a cost, the conversation turns to the practical question every camp leader eventually has to answer: how much should you actually be willing to invest to grow?

Carl puts some simple numbers around it. Imagine a camp currently generating $1 million in revenue but with the capacity and market opportunity to reach $1.5 million. There’s another $500,000 in potential revenue available, assuming the camp can create enough demand to capture it. How should the leadership team think about what it is willing to spend to pursue that growth?

Mark uses a straightforward starting point: expect to invest roughly 10–12% of the gross revenue you hope to achieve in marketing. If the goal is $1 million in revenue, he says to think in terms of roughly $100,000 to $120,000 in marketing investment. It’s not a guarantee that spending that amount will automatically produce the revenue, and it doesn’t eliminate the need to test and measure. It simply forces the organization to connect its growth expectations with the resources required to pursue them.

Mark had recently seen the opposite happen. A leadership team wanted to add another $1 million to the following year’s revenue budget, but when the question turned to what they were prepared to invest in marketing to produce that additional revenue, there was resistance. They wanted the growth without the corresponding investment.

For Mark, that’s where the mindset needs to change. If leadership decides it wants another million dollars in revenue, the next question shouldn’t be, How can marketing somehow get us there without spending anything? It should be, What do we need to invest to give ourselves a reasonable chance of reaching that goal?

Sometimes Growth Is About Using the Capacity You Already Have

That doesn’t mean every growth problem is solved by increasing the marketing budget. Sometimes the opportunity is already sitting inside the camp’s existing demand and capacity.

Mark describes reviewing a camp that considered one of its weekends essentially full. But when he looked at the actual numbers, the camp was operating at around 62% capacity. From the organization’s perspective, the weekend felt full because of the way groups and accommodations were arranged. From a capacity perspective, there was still room for another 38%.

Making better use of that space can become something like a game of Tetris. Groups come in different sizes. Certain cabins or lodging areas work better for certain groups. High-demand weekends create pressure while other dates remain open. The job isn’t always to generate more leads; sometimes it’s to get more strategic about fitting existing demand into the capacity you already have.

That distinction matters because growth is ultimately about more than increasing traffic to the website or getting the phone to ring. A camp can generate plenty of inquiries and still leave revenue on the table if it doesn’t understand its inventory, demand patterns, and available capacity well enough to convert those opportunities into bookings.

When Demand Is High, Your Pricing May Be Too Low

In another example, Mark had been reviewing the guest-group business for a camp that was doing exceptionally well at rebooking. The camp was retaining roughly 85% of its groups, which immediately caught his attention. But the leaders also told him they were full and regularly turning potential customers away. Despite all those inquiries, they were closing only a relatively small percentage of the leads coming in.

To Mark, those numbers were sending a message: raise your rates.

That recommendation immediately runs into another version of the fear they’ve been talking about throughout the episode. If you increase the price, won’t some people decide they can’t afford to come?

Probably. But Mark argues that the answer isn’t to artificially suppress prices for everyone. If an October weekend has more churches trying to book it than the camp can accommodate, that demand is telling you something about the value and scarcity of that space. Charging more during periods of high demand can create additional revenue that helps the organization cover its real costs and become more sustainable.

For guests who genuinely cannot afford the higher price, camps already have a mechanism designed to address that problem: scholarships. Instead of discounting the experience for every person because some people may need financial help, Mark argues for charging a sustainable rate and then intentionally helping the people who need assistance.

He had recently seen how significant the gap can become when camps don’t do that. One organization was charging about $825 for a week of camp. When Mark looked at the numbers, however, the actual cost of providing that week was closer to $1,140. The camp hadn’t realized how large the gap had become, and its answer for making up the difference was donors.

In practice, that meant every camper was receiving a subsidy whether they needed one or not. Rather than charging what the experience cost and providing scholarships to families with a genuine financial need, the organization was effectively giving everyone a discount and relying on fundraising to make the math work.

Sustainable Ministry Requires Sustainable Pricing

Carl and Mark’s concern with that model goes beyond balancing this year’s budget. Underpricing eventually shows up somewhere else in the organization. Facilities don’t receive the investment they need. Depreciation isn’t adequately funded. Employees don’t receive competitive wages. Leaders spend more time fundraising simply to cover ordinary operating costs.

Carl puts the principle succinctly:

“Fundraising should be going to furthering the ministry, not covering operating expenses.”

Mark connects the issue to something he discovered when he began asking employees at an organization about their experience working there. As he talked with staff, he learned that a significant portion were relying on government assistance. Some hadn’t received raises in years.

That disturbed him because camps can sometimes spiritualize low compensation. Employees are told that ministry requires sacrifice, so accepting significantly less than they could earn elsewhere becomes part of serving the mission. Housing on camp property may help make the arrangement work in the short term, but it can also mean an employee spends years without building the same financial stability they might have developed elsewhere.

Mark’s point is not that camps need to become expensive simply for the sake of generating a larger margin. It’s that the price of the experience has to reflect what it actually costs to deliver that experience responsibly. Food costs money. Facilities have to be maintained and eventually replaced. Staff members need to earn sustainable wages. If a camp wants to be serving people 20, 30, or 50 years from now, those realities have to be built into the financial model.

That is also why growth matters. Filling unused capacity produces revenue that can support the people, facilities, and programs required to carry the mission forward. Marketing investment, pricing, staffing, and sustainability aren’t separate conversations. In a healthy camp, they are all connected.

Marketing Is an Investment—If You Treat It Like One

That connection brings Carl back to the argument that started the episode. If camps need enough operating revenue to pay people well, maintain facilities, and continue serving guests, one obvious way to improve the financial picture is to fill more of the capacity they already have.

But filling capacity requires growth, and growth generally requires some form of investment.

Carl is careful here because the familiar phrase you have to spend money to make money can be misleading. Spending money doesn’t automatically turn an expense into an investment. A camp could spend thousands of dollars on marketing that produces nothing. The important distinction is whether the organization is putting money into the right places, measuring what happens, and adjusting based on the results.

The approach Mark and Carl are advocating is much more disciplined: invest with an expectation of a return, track the return as carefully as possible, put more resources behind the things that work, and stop funding the things that don’t.

That sounds simple, but it raises another important question. If a camp doesn’t already have the marketing expertise internally, how does it know who to trust with that investment?

Experience Helps You Avoid Paying the Same “Dumb Tax”

Mark’s answer is straightforward: look for people who have already succeeded at the kind of work you need them to do.

That doesn’t mean finding someone who has never failed. In fact, some of the value of experience comes precisely from having tried things that didn’t work. Mark calls those failures paying the “dumb tax.” An experienced marketer has already spent time and money discovering which ideas tend to fail, which ones deserve more time, and which signals indicate that it’s time to change direction.

That is why he pushes back on the idea that hiring an inexpensive, inexperienced person is automatically the more responsible financial decision. A recent graduate may be talented and may eventually become an excellent marketer, but giving an inexperienced person responsibility for a major growth initiative simply because the salary or project cost is lower doesn’t necessarily reduce the organization’s risk. It may simply move the cost somewhere less obvious.

Carl compares it to deciding where to put your retirement savings. There are never guarantees with an investment, but most people still look for someone with a demonstrated history of making sound decisions rather than handing their savings to someone with an interesting idea and no track record. Past results don’t guarantee future results, but experience gives you more information on which to base the decision.

The same principle applies whether a camp builds an internal team or works with outside specialists. The point isn’t that an agency is automatically better than an employee. It’s that camps should look for demonstrated experience doing the work they are asking someone to do.

“One thing we can guarantee is you will not get growth if you don’t invest your marketing dollars somewhere.”

The money is going somewhere already. The real question is whether it is being invested intentionally in the people and strategies most likely to produce the growth the camp needs.

Your Marketing Leader Should Be an Air Traffic Controller

That leads Mark and Carl into another problem they frequently see at camps: even when an organization decides to invest in marketing, it may expect one person to do almost everything.

The job description starts innocently enough. The camp needs a marketing director. But then the list grows. That person needs to be a graphic designer and copywriter. They need to take great photographs, shoot and edit video, manage social media, understand the website, run digital advertising, coordinate email campaigns, interpret analytics, develop the strategy, and report the results to leadership.

Carl calls that person a unicorn. Someone with all those skills may exist, but they are rare. And if you find one, they probably aren’t inexpensive.

Mark suggests thinking about the role differently. Instead of looking for someone who can personally execute every marketing specialty, look for an air traffic controller.

“You’re hiring an air traffic controller.”

An air traffic controller doesn’t fly all six planes. Their job is to understand where each one needs to go and keep them moving without allowing them to crash into each other. In the same way, a strong marketing leader understands the camp’s growth goals and knows which levers need to be pulled to reach them. They may bring in a copywriter for one project, coordinate with a digital advertising specialist on another, use someone internally for photography, and contract with another person for video.

The marketing leader keeps all of that work moving toward the same destination.

Mark contrasts that with what he calls the player-coach model. In that model, the same person is responsible for developing the strategy, managing vendors, reviewing results, writing copy, designing materials, posting on social media, producing videos, and handling whatever else lands on the marketing desk. Mark has seen leaders working under that kind of expectation become overwhelmed because they are being asked to manage the entire system while simultaneously performing every job inside it.

A healthier model allows specialists to specialize. The person managing Google Ads should be able to spend their time watching campaigns, studying the numbers, and adjusting what’s happening rather than being pulled away to learn Canva for the next social media graphic. Likewise, a talented photographer doesn’t necessarily need to become the person responsible for analyzing paid-search campaigns.

The marketing leader’s responsibility is to understand the larger goal, coordinate the right people, and keep looking at the results. What are we trying? What is working? What isn’t? Where should we invest more? Where should we stop?

That is a very different job from simply being the person at camp who “does marketing.”

Marketing Isn’t Just the Marketing Department

Mark then broadens the definition of marketing itself. Years ago, while speaking to a hospitality organization, he asked a room of roughly 120 people a simple question: Will everyone responsible for marketing please stand?

The marketing department stood up.

Then Mark gave them his definition of marketing: getting and keeping guests.

Once he said it that way, the room started to change. People from maintenance stood up. Food service stood. Guest services stood. One by one, people began recognizing that whether a guest returns is influenced by far more than the advertisement that convinced them to come the first time.

That same principle applies directly to camp. Marketing may bring a family to the website and persuade them to register, but what happens after that is part of whether the marketing ultimately works. The food matters. The condition of the facilities matters. The registration experience matters. The way guests are greeted matters. The beds they sleep in matter. Every part of the experience can influence whether someone comes back next year or tells another person about the camp.

Marketing, then, can’t live entirely inside one department. If food service delivers a poor experience and guests stop returning, that becomes a growth problem. If communication is confusing or facilities consistently disappoint people, buying more advertising may simply bring more people into an experience they won’t repeat.

For Mark, that is why marketing is ultimately about both getting and keeping guests. Acquisition matters, but retention is where the work of the whole organization becomes part of the growth strategy.

Camps Are in the Hospitality Business

That idea connects to another distinction Mark wants camp leaders to consider. When he has asked camp executives what industry they are in, the most common answer has been some version of “the camping industry.”

Mark thinks that answer is incomplete.

Camps are in the hospitality industry.

That means camp leaders have something to learn from hotels, restaurants, resorts, conference centers, and other organizations that spend enormous amounts of time thinking about how guests experience their service. Mark recommends Unreasonable Hospitality as a resource because he believes this way of thinking is often a missing piece for camps.

One of his suggestions is remarkably practical: become a customer of your own camp.

Go through registration. Arrive the way a guest arrives. Stay overnight. Sleep in the bed. Eat the food. Pay attention to the service. Notice the small moments that regular staff members may have stopped seeing because they experience the property every day.

Mark suggests doing something similar with new employees. Have them stay at the camp and experience it before everything becomes familiar. Then ask them what they noticed. Their fresh perspective may reveal details that affect hospitality—and therefore growth—that longtime staff no longer see.

This matters because marketing can create the first visit, but the experience determines whether the relationship continues. If a camp wants people to return year after year, the promise made through marketing has to match the experience guests receive when they arrive.

Test, Measure, and Invest More in What Works

After spending much of the episode talking about investment, experience, and marketing leadership, Mark and Carl return to the idea that makes responsible growth possible: testing.

Mark is emphatic that investing in growth does not mean taking $100,000 and throwing it at an idea because someone thinks it sounds good. Marketing gives camps the ability to test ideas on a much smaller scale. An email can be sent with two different versions to see which one generates a better response. A digital campaign can use multiple images and videos. Advertising dollars can be shifted as the data begins showing which messages and audiences are producing results.

That may sound obvious now, but Mark points out that marketing wasn’t always this measurable. In the era represented by shows like Mad Men, a group of creative people might develop several ideas, argue about which one was strongest, pitch the winner, and put significant resources behind it. Often, the most persuasive person in the room had an outsized influence on which idea moved forward.

Today, camps don’t have to make those decisions entirely on instinct. Digital marketing gives leaders access to data that can show what people are responding to and, when tracking is set up correctly, which campaigns are actually producing registrations, inquiries, and sales. Creativity still matters, but it no longer has to operate without evidence.

Mark had seen that firsthand with a client that initially committed somewhere around $50,000 to $60,000 and essentially said, Show us what you can do with it. The results exceeded what even Mark’s team expected, at one point producing a return on ad spend of roughly 13 to 1. Once the organization could see that return, the conversation about investing additional money became much easier.

The important part was the sequence. They didn’t begin by assuming everything would work. They invested, watched the results, and then increased the investment when the evidence justified it.

Start Small Enough to Learn Something

Carl sees that as an important distinction for camps that may be uncomfortable making a large jump in their marketing budget. A camp spending little or nothing on marketing today doesn’t necessarily need to leap immediately to a $200,000 budget. It can start by setting aside enough money to test a few promising ideas and learn from them.

At the same time, Carl cautions against taking a small budget and spreading it across too many strategies. If a camp has limited resources and divides them among 18 different marketing tactics, it may never put enough behind any one of them to discover whether it actually works. Instead, he suggests concentrating on two or three things, monitoring them carefully, and giving them enough time to produce meaningful results.

Some tests will fail. That is part of the process. The mistake isn’t necessarily trying something that doesn’t work; the mistake is continuing to fund it simply because the organization decided months ago that it was part of the plan. If one of three experiments is clearly producing results while the other two are not, the data should influence what happens next.

That requires leaders to be comfortable changing direction. A fixed budget mindset says, We decided to spend this amount on these three things, so that is what we will continue doing. A testing mindset asks, What have we learned, and where should the next dollar go based on what we now know?

“Test. Keep track. See what works. See what doesn’t. Repeat what works. Stop doing what doesn’t.”

That is the practical middle ground between fear and reckless spending that Mark and Carl have been describing throughout the episode.

Sometimes the Best Test Comes From Listening to Your Guests

Mark shares an example from a camp in Southern California that had been using a traditional early-bird discount. Register before a certain date and receive about $25 off. The offer made sense on paper, and the camp had been using it for some time.

Then, during a board conversation, a pastor offered a different perspective. As someone bringing a church group to camp, the $25 discount wasn’t particularly meaningful to him. What mattered much more was the fact that his church had to pay for the leaders it brought along with the campers.

So he suggested a different incentive: instead of offering the small discount, what if the camp offered a free leader for groups that committed early?

They tested it.

The new offer worked better.

There was nothing especially complicated about the experiment. The camp listened to a customer, recognized that its existing offer might not be addressing what customers actually valued, tried an alternative, and watched what happened. The data showed that the new offer produced a stronger response.

That example captures much of what Mark and Carl are advocating. Testing doesn’t always require sophisticated technology or a massive advertising campaign. Sometimes it begins with paying attention to what guests are telling you and being willing to challenge an assumption that has quietly become “the way we do things.”

The goal is not to defend the old idea or prove the new idea right. The goal is to learn what actually works.

What Are You Afraid Of?

As the conversation begins to wind down, Carl asks Mark to leave camp leaders and their boards with one question. After an hour of talking about marketing budgets, pricing, capacity, staffing, hospitality, and measurement, what is the question they should continue wrestling with after the episode ends?

Mark’s answer is simple:

“What are we afraid of?”

He encourages leaders not to settle for the first answer that comes to mind. It’s easy to say, I’m afraid this investment will fail. But underneath that may be another fear. Maybe you’re afraid of disappointing the board. Maybe you’re afraid of being blamed for a decision that didn’t work. Maybe you’re afraid of looking foolish. Maybe you’re afraid that trying something new and failing could threaten your job.

Those fears are real, but Mark doesn’t think they should be allowed to quietly make the decision.

He tells the story of a leader who gives new events as much as three years to develop. That leader doesn’t try something once, see that it fell short of expectations, and immediately abandon it. He gives his staff room to experiment and learn. At the same time, he watches the numbers. Courage, in that model, isn’t the absence of accountability. It is the willingness to try something without demanding that every new idea succeed immediately.

That is an important distinction because testing requires the possibility of failure. If everyone in an organization knows that one unsuccessful experiment will result in blame, the safest choice will always be to repeat what has already been done. Over time, fear can disguise itself as consistency while opportunities for growth pass by.

Mark gives a camp-specific example. Suppose a camp has run a father-son weekend every October for 20 years and regularly fills only half of the available beds. The program team may be accustomed to treating the entire property as theirs for that weekend because that is how the event has always operated. But what would happen if the camp tested sharing the property with a guest group? The father-son program could continue while the unused half of the facility serves another group and generates additional revenue.

Maybe the idea works and maybe it doesn’t. The point is to be willing to test the assumption rather than protecting it simply because it is familiar.

For Mark, that willingness requires courage, but it also requires data. He isn’t telling camp leaders to ignore the numbers and take bigger risks. He is telling them to use the numbers to make smarter ones. Try something. Keep track of what happens. Learn from it. Repeat the things that work and stop doing the things that don’t.

That approach gives leaders a way to move forward without pretending risk can be eliminated.

An Abundance Mindset Extends Beyond Your Own Camp

Near the end of the episode, the conversation about scarcity takes an interesting turn. Mark talks about the relationship he and Carl have developed even though, on paper, their businesses could be considered competitors.

They began that way, at least to some degree. But as they got to know one another, built trust, and understood each other’s work, they realized they shared a larger goal: helping camps grow. Mark describes his work as leaning heavily into stories and Carl’s as leaning heavily into systems, but those approaches can complement each other rather than compete.

Carl says that way of thinking is something he learned from camp.

During his time working in the camp world, he watched camps invest in other camps. He saw leaders share ideas, help one another, and work together even though they were technically serving similar audiences. That experience taught him something about the difference between scarcity and abundance.

Scarcity assumes there is only so much opportunity available, so you have to protect your piece of it. Sharing too much might help someone else compete with you. An abundance mindset sees a much larger need and recognizes that there are more people to serve than any one camp, consultant, agency, or organization could possibly reach alone.

That philosophy also shapes the podcast. Mark and Carl don’t want the show to feature only their own ideas. They want to talk with camp directors, marketers, salespeople, consultants, agencies, and others who are helping camps grow. The point is to create a place where useful experience can be shared across the camp community.

It’s another version of the same challenge they’ve been making throughout the episode. Scarcity protects. Growth looks for what becomes possible when resources—including knowledge and relationships—are put to work.

Where to Go From Here

Growth for a camp is not simply about putting a larger revenue number on next year’s budget. The financial side matters because it supports everything else. Sustainable revenue makes it possible to maintain facilities, pay employees appropriately, improve the guest experience, and continue creating meaningful experiences for campers and retreat guests.

That is why Mark and Carl want leaders to look differently at unused capacity. An empty bed may not create the same immediate expense as a full one, but it represents something the camp built and isn’t using. The same is true of an open retreat weekend, an inquiry that never comes in, or demand that exists but isn’t being converted into bookings.

The challenge is not to respond by spending indiscriminately. It is to become more intentional about investment. Understand what capacity you have. Decide what growth you are trying to achieve. Put experienced people in positions where they can help you pursue it. Test ideas at a responsible scale, measure the results, and be willing to move money toward the things that prove they work.

Mark also invites listeners to participate in an experiment of their own. He offers a $500 donation to five camps between now and the end of 2026 for camps that take an idea they heard on the podcast, put it into practice, and report back about what happened. The idea doesn’t have to work perfectly. In fact, part of the point is to hear what worked and what didn’t. He wants camps to try something and learn from the result.

Listeners can also visit the Grow Your Camp Podcast website to suggest questions and topics for future episodes. Mark and Carl explicitly invite disagreement, too. If there is something they are getting wrong, they want camp leaders to tell them and be part of the conversation.

Ultimately, the question they leave behind is bigger than marketing.

What are we afraid of?

If fear of wasting money keeps a camp from testing anything new, the result may look financially cautious in the short term while unused capacity continues year after year. If fear of raising rates keeps the camp from covering its true costs, the consequences eventually appear in staffing, facilities, and sustainability. If fear of making the wrong marketing investment results in making no meaningful investment at all, growth becomes something the organization hopes for rather than something it has resourced.

Good leadership doesn’t eliminate risk. It learns how to manage it. For Mark and Carl, that means testing rather than guessing, measuring rather than assuming, and having the courage to invest more when the evidence says something is working.

“Good leadership doesn’t just protect resources. It puts them to work.”

That may be the most useful way to think about the empty beds, open weekends, and untapped opportunities at your camp. The question isn’t only what it costs to pursue them. It’s also worth asking what it will cost if nothing changes.