How Bongiorno Conference Center combined outside perspective, intentional marketing, stronger systems, and team leadership to build new momentum at Bongiorno Conference Center.
Growth is exciting when the numbers keep moving in the right direction. More groups are coming. Beds are filling. Revenue is climbing. The organization has momentum, and it can start to feel like the next year will naturally build on the one before it.
But what happens when it doesn’t?
That was the situation Carl Redding and his team at Bongiorno Conference Center found themselves facing. Bongiorno had come out of COVID with strong momentum. The conference center had continued investing in marketing during a period when many camps were forced to pull back, and when groups were ready to gather again, Bongiorno was positioned to welcome them. In 2022, the organization operated in the black for the first time in its history. Results improved again in 2023, and by 2024, revenue had reached approximately $2.5 million.
Then 2025 arrived, and the trajectory changed. Revenue slipped to approximately $2.3 million. The organization wasn’t in crisis, but Carl could see that the growth he expected wasn’t happening. Something had changed, and simply hoping the momentum would return wasn’t a growth strategy.
In this episode of the Grow Your Camp Podcast, Carl joins Mark Fisher and Carl Lefever to tell the story of what Bongiorno did next. It’s a conversation about marketing and growth, but it quickly becomes about much more than generating leads. It’s about knowing when to seek outside perspective, building systems that can support growth, bringing trusted leaders into important decisions, addressing difficult cultural issues, and recognizing that every stage of growth eventually reveals a new constraint.
Most importantly, Carl’s story keeps coming back to why the growth matters. More inquiries and more bookings ultimately mean more groups and more people getting the opportunity to experience the ministry of camp.
Quick Camp Marketing Tip: Don’t Sleep on Your Guest Groups
When camps talk about growth, much of the conversation naturally centers on finding new groups. How do you generate more inquiries? How do you get more retreat planners to your website? How do you turn those inquiries into bookings?
But Carl Lefever opened this episode with a reminder that there’s another side of growth that’s just as important: keeping the groups you already have.
That’s where retreat coordination can make an enormous difference.
Carl shared the example of one camp whose coordination process was about as simple as it could be. A week before a retreat, someone from the camp would call the group leader and confirm the details. The problem was that many of those groups had booked nine to twelve months earlier. A lot can change in that amount of time. A group that expected to bring 90 people may now be bringing 120. They may have added an activity, changed their schedule, or discovered dietary restrictions the camp knows nothing about.
By waiting until the final week, the camp wasn’t just making its own job harder. Retreat planners were literally asking the guest services coordinator to communicate with them sooner because they needed help staying ahead of the details themselves.
Carl has also seen the other side of that equation. Another camp he works with has formal coordination touchpoints at several stages before arrival—roughly 12 weeks, eight weeks, four weeks, and two weeks out. That organization receives rave reviews from its groups and has a rebooking rate above 70%.
The goal isn’t simply to add more emails to the process. Each checkpoint should help the camp and retreat planner move the event one step closer to being ready. Nine to twelve weeks out, the conversation can focus on the big picture: who is coming, what the event is about, what meeting spaces are needed, and how the schedule is shaping up. Six to eight weeks out, the team can begin locking in activities, meal selections, AV needs, lodging details, and special requests. By two to four weeks out, the camp should have a reliable guest count, arrival schedule, transportation information, and the other details staff need to prepare confidently.
Then that process needs to become a system. Create checklists so every group gets a consistent experience. Put the checkpoints into your CRM if you have one, or somewhere visible and usable if you don’t. Use templates and automation for routine reminders, and don’t let the process end when the buses leave. Build in a post-event follow-up so someone reconnects with the retreat planner and begins the rebooking conversation while the experience is still fresh.
That kind of coordination makes life easier for the kitchen, housekeeping, maintenance, and guest services teams because they’re getting accurate information sooner. It also makes the retreat planner feel like the camp is helping them succeed rather than chasing them for information at the last minute.
“When you make your retreat planner’s job easier, you make it easier for them to make a decision to rebook with you.”
Proactive retreat coordination is good hospitality. It’s also a practical growth strategy.
Carl Redding’s Camp Story
Carl Redding’s connection to camp didn’t begin the way you might expect from someone who now leads a conference center that can serve more than 500 guests. He wasn’t a camp kid. He didn’t grow up spending his summers in cabins or counting down the days until he could return.
His camp story began as a youth pastor.
Carl spent 23 years in youth and children’s ministry, and shortly after graduating from Bible college and getting married, he found himself serving in Pennsylvania. During his first year, his pastor told him they were taking the kids to camp. So around the summer of 1998, Carl stepped onto the property of Bongiorno Conference Center for the first time.
He quickly began to see why camp could be so powerful. Students were removed from their normal routines and distractions and placed in an environment where they had space to engage with their faith differently. One student in particular made that lesson impossible for Carl to forget.
A girl in his youth ministry named Amber was struggling significantly in her life when she came to camp. Over the course of several days, Carl watched something change in her. When she returned home, the difference was significant enough that her parents immediately noticed and wanted to know what had happened. Carl had the opportunity to tell them about the experiences their daughter had at camp and the spiritual transformation he had witnessed.
For Carl, that wasn’t simply a good camp story. It changed how he approached youth ministry.
Camp became a non-negotiable part of his program. He saw students return home energized by what they had experienced, and that energy carried into the school year. Because Carl also believed strongly in giving students opportunities to lead, those campers would share with their peers, participate in worship, and take on visible roles in the youth ministry. The impact didn’t stop with the students who had gone away for a few days. One changed student could influence others who hadn’t even attended.
Years later, that connection to Bongiorno would become much more personal. Carl and his wife had moved to Illinois, where he was serving as a lead pastor, when one of his former students called unexpectedly. Bongiorno was looking for a new Executive Director, the former student told him, and Carl should consider applying.
His first reaction was essentially no.
They weren’t looking to move. Things were going well at the church. Carl didn’t even initially make the opportunity a matter of prayer. Then Bongiorno’s outgoing director called him and asked him to do exactly that: pray about it.
Carl and his wife began considering the possibility more seriously, and eventually the pieces started moving. About a year later, they returned to Pennsylvania, and Carl stepped into leadership at a place where he had already spent years watching camp change students’ lives.
That history matters to the growth story that follows. For Carl, increasing occupancy at Bongiorno isn’t an abstract business exercise. He remembers Amber. He remembers the students who returned from camp different from when they arrived. He knows what another filled bed can represent.
What to Do When Growth Starts Moving in the Wrong Direction
First, Carl Had to Learn the Organization He Was Leading
Becoming Executive Director didn’t mean Carl arrived at Bongiorno already knowing how everything worked. In fact, he remembers those first days sitting at his desk and feeling overwhelmed by how much there was to learn. Moving from pastoral ministry into responsibility for an entire conference center meant understanding the people, finances, operations, facilities, guest groups, and organizational structure behind a ministry he had previously experienced primarily as a customer.
One of his early surprises was discovering just how broad Bongiorno’s guest base actually was. Although BCC is connected to the PennDel Ministry Network of the Assemblies of God, only about half of its business comes from within that constituency. The other half comes from outside organizations, including a significant number of other church groups. That opened Carl’s eyes to an opportunity that was bigger than he had understood before taking the job.
But some of what he discovered was harder.
There were leadership and cultural problems inside the organization that needed attention. Carl had heard about some of them before he even took the position, and once he was in the role, those issues surfaced quickly. If Bongiorno was going to become a healthier organization capable of growing sustainably, he couldn’t ignore the people problems while focusing only on revenue.
Growth Required Addressing Unhealthy Culture Too
One afternoon, an issue in the housekeeping department boiled over into a literal screaming match between a department leader and another staff member. For Carl, there wasn’t much ambiguity about the first step. He brought both people in and told them clearly that this kind of behavior wasn’t acceptable.
But he also tried to move the conversation beyond the argument itself. He reminded them why Bongiorno existed and brought the discussion back to the organization’s mission. This wasn’t simply about two people who were angry with each other. They were part of a ministry trying to serve guests well, and their behavior had to reflect that.
Carl documented what had happened, established a corrective plan, and laid out expectations for what needed to change. Then he gave the people involved an opportunity to change it.
That’s an important part of Carl’s leadership style. He describes himself as “a grace guy.” He wanted these leaders to succeed and tried to give them the tools and time to do it. The process lasted roughly six months and included multiple conversations, documentation, and continued efforts to correct the behavior. Eventually, though, it became clear that some of those leadership relationships weren’t going to work, and Bongiorno made difficult personnel changes.
Later in the episode, Mark asked Carl about a leadership lesson he’d already paid the “dumb tax” to learn. Carl came back to this same instinct toward grace. His lesson has been to deal with issues when they arise rather than allowing them to grow into something larger.
The experience is an important part of Bongiorno’s growth story because the organization’s later progress didn’t happen independently of its culture. Before Carl was talking about hundreds of new inquiries, he was working through difficult conversations with the people already inside the organization.
Bongiorno Had Already Seen What Marketing Could Do
The marketing side of Bongiorno’s growth story actually started before Carl became Executive Director. Around 2018, the conference center had hired outside marketing help to improve areas such as SEO and digital visibility. By 2019, Bongiorno had reached roughly $1.7 million in revenue, its strongest year up to that point.
Then COVID changed everything.
Like camps and conference centers across the country, Bongiorno faced an extraordinarily difficult period. But BCC had one advantage that many organizations didn’t: financial backing from its parent ministry network allowed it to continue investing in marketing when other camps were being forced to cut almost everything just to survive.
That decision mattered when people were ready to gather again. Bongiorno didn’t have to rebuild its digital presence from scratch because much of that work had remained in place. As demand returned, BCC was already positioned to be found.
The results followed. In 2022, Bongiorno operated in the black for the first time in its approximately 40-year history. The following year was better, and 2024 was better again. By then, the organization had reached approximately $2.5 million in annual revenue and was operating in the black by hundreds of thousands of dollars rather than simply breaking even.
From Carl’s perspective, that history provided an important lesson: he had already watched intentional marketing contribute to growth.
Then 2025 gave him a different lesson.
Then the Momentum Began to Slip
Carl went into 2025 expecting the previous trajectory to continue. Instead, the organization hit what he described as a lull. Revenue declined from roughly $2.5 million in 2024 to $2.3 million in 2025. Bongiorno wasn’t falling apart, but after several years of increasing results, the change was significant enough to get his attention.
His first instinct wasn’t to assume he knew why. He wondered how much the economy was contributing. He started asking questions and trying to narrow down what was happening. As he looked more closely, though, he also became concerned that Bongiorno’s marketing effort had lost momentum.
Carl tried to work through those concerns with the existing marketing team, but ultimately BCC decided it was time to move in a different direction.
That became an important decision point. The easy response to slowing growth would have been to push harder on the same activities—to ask the team to make more calls, send more emails, or simply hope the next season would be stronger. Instead, Bongiorno stepped back and asked a more fundamental question: What is the actual growth opportunity here, and what would it take to pursue it intentionally?
The Growth Action Plan Changed How Bongiorno Saw the Opportunity
Bongiorno began working with Improve & Grow and went through a Growth Action Plan process designed to examine where the organization was, where growth could come from, and what might be standing in the way.
What caught Carl’s attention most wasn’t a particular marketing tactic. It was the size of the opportunity.
The analysis suggested that over a three-year period, Bongiorno could be missing roughly $1 million in additional business. Carl described the numbers as staggering, especially because the projections were being presented as conservative rather than best-case assumptions. For a team that had been wondering why its growth had stalled, seeing the opportunity quantified changed the conversation.
“The potential was the biggest kind of revelation to me—the potential of where we could be in one, three, five years.”
The planning process also went deeper than Carl had experienced before. Leaders throughout Bongiorno were interviewed, and the conversation extended beyond advertising into the systems surrounding growth: how the organization generated inquiries, how those inquiries were handled, where opportunities were being missed, and what would need to change internally if more demand started coming in.
For Carl, that felt different. He wasn’t simply being handed a proposal for more marketing. His organization was being examined as a whole, and the team was being invited into the process.
Of course, seeing the opportunity on paper was one thing. Acting on it meant spending real money before anyone could guarantee exactly what would happen.
Carl Didn’t Make the Investment Decision Alone
Carl had more confidence in marketing than a leader who had never seen it work. He had watched Bongiorno’s earlier investment help position the organization for its post-COVID growth, so the basic idea wasn’t theoretical to him.
But that didn’t mean he wanted to make the next investment decision by himself.
Over the previous several years, Carl had intentionally surrounded himself with leaders he trusted, including Assistant Director Rob and Guest Experience Director Jill. Rather than seeing their role as simply executing whatever the Executive Director decided, Carl wanted them involved in the decisions themselves. He would bring an opportunity to them and ask what they thought. Did this make sense? What concerns did they see? Was this something Bongiorno should pursue?
Carl was still responsible for the final call, but he didn’t confuse responsibility with having to possess every answer.
“Empowering other leaders around me to have input into the organization has been—it’s changed the organization.”
Mark stopped the conversation at that point because he saw something worth emphasizing. Strong leadership wasn’t Carl walking into the room and announcing what everyone else was going to do. It was approaching the decision with enough curiosity and humility to ask other capable people for their perspective.
That approach helped Bongiorno make the marketing investment, but its impact reached well beyond marketing. It was becoming part of how Carl led the organization.
More Marketing Required Better Internal Systems
Once the decision was made, Bongiorno quickly discovered that implementing a growth plan creates work inside the organization too.
Under the previous arrangement, the outside marketing provider had handled the first contact with new inquiries. The new approach brought that responsibility back into Bongiorno, which meant someone actually had to receive those inquiries, respond to them, and move them forward.
Simply adding the job to Jill’s responsibilities wasn’t realistic. As Guest Experience Director, she already had plenty to manage. So Bongiorno hired a part-time team member to help handle those initial inquiries and began connecting the sales process more clearly through its management system.
Importantly, they weren’t starting from zero. Jill had already built a strong retreat coordination and follow-up process with forms, checklists, and established steps. The opportunity was to take those pieces out of separate spreadsheets and PDFs and make them more visible and actionable inside the CRM. That meant the part-time team member could participate in the process, Carl and Rob could see what was happening, and someone else could step in when a team member was unavailable.
The marketing plan was therefore changing more than Bongiorno’s advertising. It was forcing the organization to become more deliberate about what happened after somebody raised their hand and said, “We’re interested.”
That’s an easy part of growth to underestimate. More inquiries aren’t particularly valuable if they pile up in an inbox or depend entirely on one person remembering what needs to happen next. Generating demand and building the systems to handle that demand have to grow together.
The Numbers Began to Confirm the New Direction
Bongiorno entered the first year of its new growth effort with a goal of generating 216 inquiries. With one month still remaining in that first-year period, the organization had already generated 258.
The goal for new booked events was 20. BCC had already booked 22, with additional opportunities still being worked in the pipeline.
Those numbers mattered, but one of Carl’s stories showed what a stronger pipeline looked like in practice.
Near the end of the summer season, one of Bongiorno’s larger camps told the team it wouldn’t be returning the following year. For many camps, losing a major group can create a hole that takes months to fill—if it can be filled at all.
Bongiorno was in a different position. There were already groups in the pipeline that had been told no space was currently available but that they would be contacted if something opened. When the cancellation came, the team had organizations ready to talk. Less than a month later, Carl said they were preparing contracts with replacement groups and expected the summer camp calendar to be booked through the end of August. The fall calendar had very few holes as well.
That is where a stronger pipeline becomes more than a marketing metric. It gives a camp options. Instead of beginning the search for a replacement group after a cancellation, the organization can already have people waiting for the opportunity.
Growth Started Changing the Organization Around the Numbers
Mark then pushed Carl beyond the spreadsheet. More inquiries and bookings were encouraging, but what else had changed because Bongiorno was growing?
One answer was staffing. Carl said the previous two summers had brought strong interest from people wanting to work at Bongiorno, with prospective staff reaching out as early as January. Many were coming through word of mouth—friends of existing staff, lifeguards inviting other lifeguards, and families recommending Bongiorno as a good place for their teenagers to work.
For Carl, that was another sign of how much the internal culture had changed since his early days as Executive Director. The organization had become more explicit about expectations during onboarding, and its leaders were intentionally investing in younger employees. The difficult cultural work from Carl’s first years was showing up in a very different staff experience five years later.
The growth of other leaders was visible too. Carl had elevated Jill to a director-level role and eventually asked her to lead the weekly guest services meeting. At first she was apprehensive, but Carl’s reasoning was simple: she knew the details better than he did. She knew which groups were coming, what they needed, and what the various departments had to prepare. There was no reason for Carl to insist on leading a meeting simply because he was the Executive Director.
Mark summarized the idea with one of the episode’s strongest leadership lines:
“People don’t lead organizations. They lead people.”
For Carl, empowering leaders like Jill wasn’t giving up responsibility. It was recognizing that a healthier and growing organization needs more people capable of owning important work.
Retention Is Part of the Next Stage of Growth
Bongiorno isn’t treating the stronger first-year results as the finish line. The planning document identifies a revenue goal of approximately $2.8 million for 2027, which raises the obvious question: what has to be true for the organization to get there?
Carl’s answer immediately brought the conversation back to retention.
He believes Bongiorno can continue getting better at keeping the groups it already has. Jill has a strong coordination and rebooking process in place, and the team’s newer systems are making that process more visible, but Carl still wants to push further. His aspiration is intentionally aggressive.
“I want 100% retainment. I know it’s crazy to think like that, but why not?”
The comment doesn’t mean every group will return forever. Groups change plans for reasons a camp can’t control. In fact, Bongiorno had just experienced that with the large camp taking a year off. Carl’s point is about the standard the team sets for itself: if a group doesn’t return, he doesn’t want poor communication, weak coordination, or a preventable guest experience issue to be the reason.
That brings the episode neatly back to the opening marketing tip. New inquiries create growth opportunities, but sustainable growth also depends on giving existing groups an experience they want to repeat.
The Next Constraint May Be the Campus Itself
The episode then turns toward a question left by Dave Crouse of Angeles Crest Christian Camp for the next camp director Mark and Carl interviewed: Have you identified the one or two main things holding your camp back from growing, and what are you actually doing about them?
Carl didn’t have to search long for his answer. At Bongiorno, one of the biggest constraints is meeting space.
On paper, BCC has capacity for more than 500 guests. But total bed count doesn’t tell the whole story. The conference center has large meeting space and smaller meeting rooms, but it lacks the right space for some mid-sized groups. Its largest meeting room is also a multipurpose facility, which means it can be used for a gathering or for indoor recreation, but not both at once.
That creates a practical bottleneck. Bongiorno might have a 300-person camp using the large meeting room while still having lodging capacity for another 200 or more guests. The beds technically exist, but without another appropriately sized meeting space, the conference center can’t necessarily serve that second group well.
So the next stage of growth isn’t simply about generating more demand. It’s about understanding how the whole property works together.
Rather than deciding on their own that the answer was simply to build another building, Carl and his team brought in a consulting firm with camp master-planning experience. They’re working through what the next 10 to 20 years could look like, including meeting space, additional lodging, dining capacity, and the other facility needs that come with serving more people.
Some of what the consultants have told them has confirmed what the team already suspected. Other ideas have made Carl and his team say, essentially, We never thought of that.
That willingness to bring in outside expertise mirrors the earlier marketing story. In both cases, Bongiorno had its own ideas about the problem, but the leadership team was willing to let experienced outsiders look at the situation and challenge their assumptions.
Growth had revealed the next constraint. Now the team could start planning for it.
The Leadership Lessons Behind the Growth
Deal With Problems Before They Grow
As the conversation moved toward a close, Mark asked Carl several quick leadership questions. One was about the “dumb tax”—the lesson a leader learns by doing something the hard way and deciding not to repeat it.
Carl’s answer connected directly to the staff issues from his early years at Bongiorno. Because he’s naturally inclined toward grace, he can sometimes give too much of it. The lesson has been to address issues when they arise instead of hoping they’ll resolve themselves.
That doesn’t mean abandoning patience or refusing to give someone an opportunity to change. Carl’s story shows the opposite; he spent months trying to help struggling leaders succeed. But grace and accountability have to exist together. Ignoring a problem isn’t the same thing as extending grace.
Give Strong Leaders Real Ownership
A second leadership thread runs throughout the entire episode: Carl increasingly understands his role as developing and empowering other leaders rather than making himself the center of every decision.
That shows up when he asks Rob and Jill for their perspective before making a major marketing investment. It shows up when he recognizes that Jill should lead the guest services meeting because she understands that work better than he does. And it shows up in his willingness to bring outside experts into areas where his own team doesn’t have all the answers.
Carl still owns the decisions that belong to the Executive Director. But he doesn’t believe ownership requires isolation. Bongiorno has become stronger as more trusted people have been given meaningful opportunities to contribute.
Communicate More Than You Think You Need To
Finally, Mark asked how Carl keeps important relationships healthy in a job that can easily become 24/7. Carl’s answer was communication.
“You have to communicate, communicate, overcommunicate.”
For Carl, that means making intentional time every week for key leaders. Some team members will naturally stop by, raise issues, and keep the conversation going. Others won’t. He used his maintenance director as an example of someone he has to deliberately seek out because, without that effort, it’s easy for a department to begin operating on its own island.
Busy schedules don’t make those conversations less important. They make them easier to neglect. Carl has learned that when communication starts breaking down, problems usually aren’t far behind.
What This Means for Your Camp
Bongiorno’s story isn’t a formula that every camp can copy. Another camp experiencing stalled growth may discover a completely different constraint. The problem might be weak retention, insufficient demand, poor follow-up, pricing, staffing, facilities, or something else entirely.
What stands out in Bongiorno’s journey is the willingness to keep identifying the real problem in front of the organization.
When Carl first arrived, some of those problems involved culture and leadership. When growth began slowing, the team examined its marketing rather than assuming the previous approach would keep working forever. When the Growth Action Plan revealed a larger opportunity, Bongiorno made an investment and then changed internal systems so the organization could actually handle more inquiries. As demand increased, the conversation shifted toward retention, staffing, meeting space, and long-term facility planning.
Each answer exposed the next question.
That’s why Carl Lefever’s closing thought captures the episode so well:
“Growth doesn’t simply happen because you want it. It takes clarity, it takes planning, it takes execution.”
But the final word belongs to the mission behind those efforts. Mark pointed out that 258 inquiries aren’t just leads, and 22 new events aren’t just sales. They’re groups. They’re people. They’re filled beds. They’re more opportunities for someone to experience the ministry of Bongiorno Conference Center.
Carl knows what that can mean because he has seen it since his days as a youth pastor. He watched a struggling student go to camp and come home changed. He watched other students carry their camp experiences back into their schools and churches. Those stories are why the numbers matter.
“When God changes a life, it’s forever and it’s eternal.”
If your camp is heading into a new planning season and you’re trying to understand where your own growth opportunities may be, visit GrowYourCampPodcast.com and check out the new Camp Growth Planner. The tool is designed to help camps look at their current capacity across different revenue streams, identify their strongest growth opportunities, and see practical areas where their processes could improve.
And if Carl’s story brought another camp leader to mind, share this episode with them. Follow or subscribe to the Grow Your Camp Podcast so you don’t miss future conversations, and join us as we continue helping camps strengthen both their mission and their margin.
Let’s grow camp together.