How SpringHill turned lessons from rapid expansion into a stronger approach to capacity, pricing, retention, guest groups, and sustainable growth.
Growth is usually treated like an unquestioned good in the camp world. More campers mean more opportunities to fulfill the mission. More programs mean more people reached. More revenue means more resources to invest back into the experience. When the numbers are moving up and to the right, it is easy to assume the organization is getting healthier along with them.
But growth has a way of exposing what is underneath it. Staffing models that worked at one size can begin to strain at another. Systems that were adequate for a few thousand campers can break when asked to support many thousands more. Low prices that seemed sustainable at a smaller scale can leave little margin for additional staff, equipment, or infrastructure. And eventually, an organization can find itself asking a difficult question: Are we building something sustainable, or are we simply getting bigger?
Eric Bartz has experienced both sides of that question during his 13 years at SpringHill Camps. He joined the organization as its traveling day camp program was beginning an extraordinary period of growth, eventually climbing from roughly 3,000 campers to around 19,000. He later helped lead through a much different season marked by COVID, staffing challenges, program closures, organizational refocusing, and difficult decisions about where SpringHill should invest its resources.
Today, as Director of Customer Engagement, Eric is helping SpringHill pursue growth again. But the lessons of the earlier season haven’t disappeared. They are shaping how the organization thinks about pricing, retention, capacity, guest groups, quality, and what healthy growth should actually look like.
In this episode of the Grow Your Camp Podcast, Eric joins Mark and Carl to tell that story—not as a warning against growth, but as a reminder that growth works best when the systems, margins, people, and quality behind it can grow too.
“Bigger isn’t better.”
Quick Camp Marketing Tip: Stop Saying “We’re Full”
Before getting into Eric’s story, Mark shared a marketing lesson that connects directly to the larger conversation about sustainable growth: camp leaders need to stop using the word “full” so casually.
When Mark became the Director of Sales and Marketing at Forest Home in Southern California, several staff members approached him and essentially asked why he had been hired. From their perspective, the camp didn’t need sales and marketing. Their popular summer weeks had waiting lists. They were always full.
Except when Mark looked at the numbers across the entire year, they weren’t. His estimate was that Forest Home was probably operating at less than 50% occupancy. A handful of high-demand weeks had created the impression that the organization had nowhere left to grow, even though substantial capacity remained unused during other parts of the calendar.
Camps make that calculation more complicated than a hotel would. If a hotel has 100 rooms and 80 are occupied, it has 80% occupancy. At camp, you might have a cabin with 10 beds and only two people sleeping in it. Operationally, the cabin may be occupied because there isn’t another group you can put in the remaining space. But from a capacity perspective, you are still using only two of the 10 available beds.
That is the number Mark wants camp leaders to understand. Rather than looking only at whether cabins or sessions are technically occupied, look at the beds, cabins, weeks, and seasons you have available and determine how much of that capacity is really being used. In the episode, Mark mentioned one camp that completed the new Grow Your Camp assessment and discovered it was at roughly 45% occupancy. Another was at just 6%.
There is also a marketing problem with declaring yourself full. When a family visits your website and sees “Week Two: FULL,” you have effectively told them to stop asking. They don’t necessarily know that another session has openings, and they have no reason to give you their contact information. They simply start looking somewhere else.
Instead, Mark recommends changing that message to “Week Two: Join the Waiting List.” Now the family has somewhere to go. By joining that list, they are raising their hand and telling you they want to attend your camp. If a cancellation occurs, you have a ready-made group of interested families to contact. If Week Two remains booked, you can reach back out and offer space in Week Three instead.
“Full is a stop sign. A waiting list is an invitation.”
The larger principle is simple: never throw away demand. Capture it. Once you know your actual capacity, actual occupancy, and unmet demand, you can begin building a plan to fill the empty beds and weeks you already have.
That is also the thinking behind the Grow Your Camp Growth Planner that Mark and Carl discussed in the episode. Rather than assuming growth requires another building, another cabin, or an entirely new program, the tool is designed to help camps identify the opportunities already sitting inside their existing operation. Sometimes the first growth question isn’t What should we add? It is How full are we—really?
A Camp Story That Started With “No”
Eric Bartz’s story with SpringHill Camps did not begin with a childhood love of camp. In fact, it began with repeatedly refusing to go.
When Eric was in late elementary or middle school, his sister signed up to attend SpringHill with a friend. His mom asked whether he wanted to go too, but Eric was shy and had no interest in putting himself into an unfamiliar environment. He said no. The following year, his mom gave him another opportunity, and he turned that one down too.
Then, sometime during high school, something changed. Eric still isn’t entirely sure where the idea came from—possibly a family friend—but he decided that when he got to college, he wanted to become a camp counselor at SpringHill. He made plans to do it with his best friend after their freshman year. Then his friend backed out, leaving Eric to pursue the idea on his own.
SpringHill happened to be recruiting at Taylor University, where Eric was a student. The organization had built the kind of booth designed to be difficult to ignore, complete with recruiters, screens, and plenty of energy. Eric, still very much the introvert who had refused to attend camp as a kid, walked straight past it without talking to anyone. Then he went back to his computer and filled out the application online.
“My camp story begins with saying no to camp—multiple times.”
Eric pictured himself working at SpringHill’s Michigan property in a classic camp role, perhaps as a counselor or high-adventure specialist. During the interview, though, SpringHill asked whether he would consider working in its traveling day camp program. Eric said he was willing, although he would prefer overnight camp. Then they asked whether he would be willing to serve in Indiana rather than Michigan. Again, he said he would do it, although it wasn’t his preference. Naturally, the job offer that followed was for Indiana day camps.
That reluctant assignment became the beginning of a career. Eric discovered that the traveling day camp experience had its own kind of richness. The team spent its days working with kids in local communities and its evenings staying with host families, eating meals together, playing games, and building relationships. Because they weren’t responsible for campers overnight, the staff also had time to experience the communities they were serving and develop close friendships with one another.
Eric had found his place at camp, even though it looked almost nothing like the role he had originally imagined. He also happened to arrive at a pivotal moment in SpringHill’s history. The day camp program he had reluctantly agreed to join was about to begin an extraordinary period of expansion, and Eric would spend the next several years learning both the possibilities and the costs of rapid growth.
When Rapid Growth Outruns the Organization
When Eric joined SpringHill’s day camp team in 2010, the program was serving roughly 3,000 campers. The concept was relatively new and innovative: instead of requiring families to travel to a traditional camp property, SpringHill brought a portable camp experience directly into communities, primarily through partnerships with churches.
Several factors came together at the right time. Churches were becoming more intentional about children’s ministry, working parents needed summer activities for their kids, and families had fewer competing summer options than they do today. SpringHill was also bringing high-quality programming into those communities at an accessible price. Churches liked it, parents liked it, and the program found a genuine need in the market.
SpringHill began building day camp hubs around cities such as Detroit, Indianapolis, Chicago, and Grand Rapids. At times, the organization was operating 15 sites simultaneously, with some individual locations serving hundreds of campers. By around 2015 or 2016, the program had grown from approximately 3,000 campers to roughly 19,000. Eric estimated that SpringHill was serving only around 6,500 to 7,000 overnight campers during that period, which meant day camps had grown to nearly three times the size of the overnight program.
The organization had even bigger ambitions. SpringHill adopted what it called a “Big Hairy Audacious God Goal”—its variation on the familiar BHAG—to serve 250,000 kids annually by 2025. Given the trajectory of day camps, the program appeared to offer a path toward reaching that kind of scale.
Then the growth stalled.
The Consolidation Phase That Never Happened
Looking back, Eric doesn’t think the mistake was pursuing growth. The problem was that SpringHill never really paused long enough to consolidate what it had built. The program kept reaching for the next level while the infrastructure underneath it was being asked to support more and more.
“When you grow rapidly… you reach these next levels where something has to change.”
The financial model was one example. SpringHill had intentionally kept day camp pricing low—Eric remembers a week costing around $150 or $160—and fundraising helped pay for some of the new equipment and expansion required to enter additional markets. But operating margins remained extremely thin. As the program grew, SpringHill was trying to preserve affordability, maintain quality, make the finances work, and continue hitting aggressive growth targets at the same time.
Eventually, those goals began competing with one another. Reaching additional campers sometimes meant serving smaller churches where the economics weren’t as strong. Controlling costs led to greater reliance on seasonal leaders instead of having full-time directors for every team. Those seasonal leaders couldn’t always recruit staff, develop partnerships, or execute the complete experience at the same level. The organization was still growing, but some of the ingredients that had made the program successful were becoming harder to sustain.
With the benefit of hindsight, Eric can imagine a different approach. Instead of continuing to push from 19,000 toward an even larger number, SpringHill might have deliberately stepped back. Perhaps the program could have served 12,000 campers for a season, raised prices, removed the parts of the model that weren’t working, strengthened its systems, improved margins, and then launched into another period of growth from a healthier foundation.
On paper, that would have looked like contraction. In practice, it might have been exactly what the organization needed to prepare for the next stage.
When Growth Becomes the Goal
There was another shift taking place as day camps expanded. Originally, SpringHill saw the program partly as a way to introduce families to the organization and eventually move some campers into its overnight programs. Internally, they called that process “matriculation,” and it was one of the outcomes the team watched.
Over time, the growth of day camps themselves became more important, and matriculation became less central. As the program expanded farther geographically, the actual movement from day camp into overnight camp declined as well. Day camp had become a major ministry in its own right, but one of the strategic purposes behind the original model was becoming less prominent.
By roughly 2015 or 2016, the rapid expansion had stopped. Enrollment remained relatively flat and then declined somewhat through 2019. The organization was still trying to make the model work when COVID arrived and disrupted camp operations on an entirely different scale.
Eric describes day camps as having a “shaky foundation” going into the pandemic, and COVID shook that foundation hard. Coming out of it, staffing became one of SpringHill’s biggest constraints. There were weeks when the organization had campers who wanted to attend but couldn’t recruit enough staff to operate the program. The problem was no longer generating demand; SpringHill sometimes had demand it simply couldn’t serve.
Eric eventually returned to lead the day camp program in 2023 and spent considerable time studying what had happened and what it would take to rebuild. He could see signs that the program might grow again, but doing it well would require real investment: year-round leaders capable of recruiting teams and developing church partnerships, refreshed programming and activities, stronger systems, and a financial structure capable of supporting the quality SpringHill wanted to provide.
That forced a harder question than whether day camps could be rebuilt. SpringHill had to decide whether rebuilding them was the best use of the organization’s people, money, and attention. Ultimately, leadership decided it wasn’t. The day camp program was sunset so SpringHill could concentrate more of its resources on its core overnight operation.
For a ministry that had once grown day camps to approximately 19,000 campers and imagined them as a pathway toward reaching hundreds of thousands of kids, that was a significant decision. Eric doesn’t look back on the growth as wasted. Thousands of kids were served, churches were supported, and meaningful ministry happened through those years. But the experience taught him that a program’s past impact doesn’t automatically mean continuing it forever is the healthiest choice.
Sometimes protecting the mission requires being willing to let go of something that grew.
No Margin, No Mission
The decision to sunset day camps was part of a larger change in how Eric had come to think about growth. Earlier in his career, he had been one of the people pushing back against price increases. Keeping camp affordable mattered to him, and raising prices felt like it could work against the mission by making the experience harder for families to access.
Over time, though, the realities of running a large camp organization changed his perspective. Eric began to see that price wasn’t separate from the mission. If a program didn’t generate enough margin to hire and retain good people, refresh programming, maintain facilities, and absorb the inevitable challenges that come with running camp, eventually the experience itself would suffer. Affordability mattered, but so did building a financial model capable of sustaining the work.
That led Eric to a phrase that has become increasingly important in the way he thinks about camp economics:
“No margin, no mission.”
As Eric explained, camps have several levers they can pull when they need to improve the financial health of a program. They can increase enrollment through marketing. They can build stronger partnerships and improve sales. They can look for new audiences or additional capacity. But price is one of those levers too, and SpringHill’s experience with day camps had shown what could happen when an organization expected enrollment growth to carry too much of the burden.
The day camp program had been intentionally inexpensive, especially compared with other forms of childcare. That helped make it accessible, but it also meant SpringHill needed enormous volume for the model to work. A healthier price could have reduced some of that pressure, allowing the program to serve fewer campers while still generating enough margin to invest in the people and systems required to deliver the experience well.
Competing on Quality Instead of Price
That lesson now influences the way SpringHill approaches its overnight camp pricing. Eric described a tendency among camps to look at what neighboring organizations are charging and become reluctant to move much higher. Nobody wants to be the camp that suddenly looks expensive, and the result can become a kind of race to the bottom where everyone feels pressure to keep prices artificially low.
SpringHill has chosen to move somewhat differently. Eric said its overnight program is priced higher than some nearby camps, giving the organization more room to reinvest in the experience. The goal isn’t simply to charge more. The goal is to have enough margin to invest in staff, facilities, programming, and the other pieces that ultimately determine whether a family feels the experience was worth what they paid.
“I see more room for us to compete on quality than for us to compete on price.”
That distinction matters because lowering price isn’t free. If keeping tuition down means cutting back on full-time leadership, postponing program improvements, stretching staff too thin, or reducing the quality of the experience, the camp may eventually undermine the very mission it was trying to make more accessible. Eric had already watched some of those tradeoffs emerge during the day camp years, and he didn’t want SpringHill to repeat them in its core business.
None of this meant SpringHill had stopped caring about accessibility. In fact, later in the conversation Eric described how the organization uses financial assistance to help individual families who need it. The shift was more fundamental: rather than trying to make the published price artificially low for everyone, SpringHill could charge a price that better reflected the cost of providing a strong experience and then find more intentional ways to help families for whom that price was genuinely a barrier.
That was one lesson from the day camp story. Another was about focus. By the time SpringHill emerged from COVID, the organization wasn’t simply reconsidering one program. It was looking more broadly at where its people, money, and attention were going—and whether trying to maintain everything it had built was keeping it from investing deeply enough in the parts of the organization with the strongest future.
Pruning What Wasn’t Working
At that point, SpringHill’s footprint extended well beyond its Michigan property. It had the Indiana overnight camp, the traveling day camp operation, staff working remotely in different cities, and an office in Grand Rapids. Those pieces had been built during seasons when expansion made sense, but as some parts of the organization struggled, the healthy core in Michigan increasingly had to help carry them.
Eric described the underlying question in straightforward terms: if the Michigan operation was generating resources that were continually being used to support struggling parts of the organization, was that actually the best way to advance SpringHill’s mission?
Leadership eventually decided it wasn’t. Day camps were sunset, the Indiana property was put up for sale, and SpringHill began concentrating more of its energy around the Michigan property. The process was difficult, particularly because these weren’t meaningless programs or places. People had invested years of their lives in them, and real ministry had happened through them. Refocusing required acknowledging that something could have been valuable in one season without assuming it needed to continue in the next.
Later in the episode, Eric described the period using the biblical image of pruning. Pruning can look like loss because something that was once growing is deliberately cut away. The purpose, though, is to allow healthier growth to emerge from what remains. For SpringHill, the contraction created a level of organizational focus that Eric believes had been missing when the organization was spread across multiple properties, programs, and markets.
The early results have given him reason for optimism. Over the last few years, SpringHill has seen growth again, but Eric believes the organization is approaching it with different habits than before. There is greater attention to financial sustainability, greater awareness of the limits of capacity, and a clearer understanding that simply adding more isn’t always the same as becoming healthier.
And once SpringHill narrowed its focus to Michigan, it discovered that one of its most promising opportunities for growth wasn’t somewhere new at all.
It was sitting inside the property they already had.
Finding Growth in the Capacity They Already Had
Once SpringHill began concentrating its attention on the Michigan property, the organization had to take a fresh look at the capacity it already owned. The site had roughly 1,600 beds, but during a typical week of summer camp, only about 500 to 600 campers might be using them. At the same time, SpringHill was receiving calls from large churches interested in bringing groups to the property during the summer.
Historically, the answer to those groups had been no. Summer was when SpringHill ran summer camp, and opening the property to guest groups at the same time challenged a deeply held assumption about how the site was supposed to operate. As Eric described it, there was real pushback around the idea. Summer overnight camp was central to SpringHill’s identity, and bringing outside groups onto the property during those weeks felt, to some people, like it could interfere with that experience.
But the numbers were difficult to ignore. SpringHill had a 1,600-bed property with hundreds of beds sitting unused, while missionally aligned groups were actively asking to come. After the contraction the organization had just experienced, turning away that demand simply because “this is how we’ve always done summer” became harder to justify.
The team began experimenting with ways to make both uses of the property work. One creative solution involved the seasonal staff who had previously served at the Indiana property. They could operate several weeks of camp in Indiana and then move to Michigan for the remaining part of the summer, creating windows when SpringHill could host groups at Michigan without sacrificing the core summer program. Rather than treating summer camp and guest groups as an either-or decision, the organization began looking for ways to use its people and property more strategically.
The results were significant. In the conversation, Mark noted that SpringHill’s group revenue had grown from roughly $1.2 million to around $2.4 million. The opportunity hadn’t required SpringHill to acquire another property or build an entirely new ministry from scratch. Much of it came from recognizing that existing capacity wasn’t being used as fully as everyone had assumed.
That brought the conversation right back to Mark’s opening marketing tip. A camp can feel full because its traditional programs are operating normally while still having substantial unused capacity. The better question isn’t simply whether camp is running. It is whether the organization understands how its entire property is being used—and whether there are compatible ways to serve more people with what it already has.
Growth Creates New Constraints
Of course, filling unused capacity doesn’t make operational limits disappear. It simply reveals the next set of them.
SpringHill had historically operated much of the summer on a six-day rhythm. As guest groups filled more of the available calendar, the property increasingly became a seven-day-a-week operation. That was good from a revenue and capacity standpoint, but it created a new challenge for the people responsible for making camp run.
Eric pointed to areas like food service, facilities, and activities where an operation can become too dependent on a particular person being present. If the kitchen can function only when one leader is there, or if an activity area requires the same key staff member every day, seven-day operations quickly become unsustainable. Growth therefore required SpringHill to build enough depth into its systems that people could take days off without bringing the operation to a halt.
It was another version of the lesson Eric had learned during the day camp years. New revenue and higher occupancy are only part of the growth equation. The systems underneath them have to mature at the same time. Otherwise, the organization can once again find itself growing faster than its infrastructure can support.
Not Every Bed Is Created Equal
There was also a more subtle capacity lesson emerging. Just because SpringHill could technically put a guest into an available bed didn’t necessarily mean it should.
As demand increased, the team began discovering that some of its theoretical capacity wasn’t especially good capacity. A group might fit on the property mathematically, but if accommodating them meant squeezing them into an inconvenient corner of camp or giving them an experience that felt like an afterthought, filling those beds could create a different problem.
Eric had become increasingly focused on what happens after the first booking. If a group comes once but doesn’t return because the experience wasn’t strong, SpringHill hasn’t created sustainable growth. It has simply filled space for a season.
“Not every bed is created equal.”
That realization changed the way Eric thought about capacity. The goal wasn’t to squeeze a person into every available bunk simply because it existed. The goal was to identify the capacity SpringHill could use while still delivering an experience strong enough that campers, families, churches, and groups would want to come back.
In other words, occupancy and retention couldn’t be separated. Filling more beds might create short-term growth, but keeping those beds filled year after year required something more: a consistently excellent experience.
That same idea was already becoming one of the most important parts of SpringHill’s summer camp growth strategy. Instead of focusing only on finding more new families, Eric and his team began looking closely at the families they already had—and asking why so many of them weren’t coming back.
Growth Through Retention, Not Just Acquisition
SpringHill’s summer camp had another capacity problem, but this one wasn’t about beds. The organization was getting families through the door, yet too many of them weren’t coming back the following year. Eric said retention had been hovering around 52%, and when the team looked at why summer camp wasn’t growing the way they wanted, that number stood out.
A 52% retention rate meant SpringHill was effectively replacing nearly half of its campers before it could produce any net growth. Marketing could bring in new families, but if almost as many existing families disappeared out the other side, acquisition alone was never going to solve the problem. The team set a goal of getting retention to 60%, which shifted part of the growth conversation from How do we find more campers? to Why aren’t the campers we already have coming back?
That question appealed to Eric’s interest in data. SpringHill already had information from parent surveys, so the team began using those responses to identify likely barriers to rebooking. In some cases, the reason was relatively clear. For the families where it wasn’t, they sent a short text asking a simple question: What is holding you back from rebooking right now?
The response surprised Eric. Roughly 35% of the families who received the message replied, giving the team a much clearer picture of the reasons behind their decisions. Instead of treating every non-rebooking family as the same kind of customer, SpringHill could begin grouping people according to the actual obstacle they were facing and respond accordingly.
Turning the Data Into a Conversation
Collecting the information was only useful if SpringHill did something with it. Once the team understood why families were hesitating, staff began following up personally. If a parent identified finances as the issue, for example, someone could call and ask what that meant for their family rather than immediately assuming the solution.
That conversation might reveal that the family needed financial assistance. It might lead to a discount or another available option. In some situations, bringing a friend could help. The important part was that SpringHill was no longer sending the same generic rebooking message to everyone and hoping it worked. The team knew the barrier and could have a conversation specifically about solving it.
Mark pointed out that these were also unusually warm phone calls. Staff weren’t cold-calling strangers and trying to convince them to consider camp. They were talking to parents whose children had already attended SpringHill and who had told the organization exactly what was keeping them from returning. That meant the team didn’t need an elaborate sales script. They could simply listen, understand the problem, and see whether there was a reasonable way to help.
Eric also wanted the people making those calls to have enough authority to solve problems while they had the parent on the phone. If a family genuinely needed financial assistance, he didn’t want the staff member to end a productive conversation by saying, “Great, now go fill out this other form and wait for someone else to review it.” Within reasonable parameters, the team could offer assistance directly and remove the barrier while the conversation was happening.
That approach reflected a broader philosophy Eric had developed through his different roles at SpringHill. Good systems shouldn’t add unnecessary steps simply because those steps have always existed. Whether he was working in IT, operations, marketing, or customer engagement, he was interested in finding friction and asking whether it actually needed to be there.
From 52% Retention to 61%
SpringHill ultimately moved its retention rate from roughly 52% to 61%, passing the 60% goal the team had set. Eric was careful not to credit that improvement entirely to the rebooking campaign. Program quality mattered too, and some of the work SpringHill had been doing to strengthen the actual camp experience was almost certainly contributing to families’ willingness to return.
Still, the result reinforced an important growth lesson. A camp doesn’t have to generate every additional camper through advertising or new customer acquisition. Sometimes one of the biggest growth opportunities is already sitting in the database: families who know the camp, have experienced the program, and may need only a specific concern addressed before they are ready to come back.
The economics become more attractive as retention improves too. During the conversation, Mark and Eric worked through SpringHill’s approximate customer acquisition costs and the value of keeping a camper for multiple years. The precise numbers can vary, but the principle was clear: every dollar spent acquiring a new camper becomes more valuable when that camper stays longer. Better retention means the camp doesn’t have to continually spend money replacing as many families just to maintain the same enrollment.
For SpringHill, that made retention more than a customer-service metric. It became part of the growth strategy. The goal wasn’t simply to fill an empty bed this summer. It was to create an experience strong enough—and remove enough unnecessary barriers—that the family wanted that bed again next summer.
And that brings the story back to Eric’s earlier observation about capacity. Not every bed is created equal, and not every filled bed represents the same kind of growth. A bed filled once is valuable. A bed filled by a family that returns year after year is the beginning of something much more sustainable.
Making the Next Season of Growth Last
SpringHill has now seen meaningful growth in both guest groups and summer camp, but Eric knows the next stage will require a different kind of work. On the guest-group side, much of the easiest available capacity has already been filled. Over the last three or four years, that part of the business has grown dramatically, which means the question is shifting from Where do we have empty space? to How do we keep growing once the obvious space is gone?
That opens several possibilities. SpringHill can look for more opportunities during the school season, continue optimizing how the property is used during summer, and think more intentionally about long-term site planning. But Eric is approaching those opportunities with the lessons of the past in mind. Adding more people to the calendar only works if the facilities, staffing, and guest experience can support them well enough that those groups want to return.
Summer camp presents a different opportunity. Unlike guest groups, where much of the easy capacity has now been absorbed, Eric said the core summer program still has substantial room to grow. That matters because summer camp remains the heart and soul of SpringHill. Guest groups are important to the organization financially and missionally, but growing the traditional summer experience is still a central priority.
The encouraging sign is that summer camp recently grew by about 11% after what Eric described as a mostly downward trajectory stretching back roughly 20 years. One year of growth, however, doesn’t prove that the trajectory has permanently changed. The challenge now is to make sure that increase wasn’t simply a good year, but the beginning of a healthier pattern.
SpringHill is attacking that challenge from several directions at once. The retention work is one part of it. Advertising is another. Church partnerships remain important, and the organization is also thinking carefully about how it communicates the value of camp to parents who have more choices competing for their children’s time than families did when SpringHill’s day camp program first exploded.
A Week Up Here Shapes a Lifetime Out There
That last piece has led SpringHill to rethink how it talks about the summer camp experience itself. Working with BrandHaven, the organization developed a campaign built around a line that captures what it wants parents to understand:
“A week up here shapes a lifetime out there.”
The message is aimed at a concern many parents already carry. They want their children to become capable, confident people. They want them to develop character, build meaningful friendships, discover purpose, take healthy risks, and learn that they can do hard things. Camp creates an environment where many of those things can happen naturally.
For SpringHill, that is a stronger story than simply promoting a week filled with activities. The activities matter, but the deeper value is what kids carry home with them. A child tries something intimidating and discovers they can do it. They navigate friendships without a parent immediately stepping in. They spend time away from the usual distractions and routines. They encounter adults and peers who challenge and encourage them in a different setting.
That message also fits the larger lesson SpringHill has learned about competing on quality. If the organization is going to charge a price that allows it to sustainably invest in the experience, it also needs to communicate why that experience is valuable. The goal isn’t simply to persuade parents to buy a week of camp. It is to help them see what that week can contribute to the person their child is becoming.
Bigger Isn’t Better
When Carl asked Eric what he knows now that he wishes he had understood earlier, Eric came back to the idea that runs through the entire SpringHill story: bigger isn’t necessarily better.
That doesn’t mean growth is bad. Eric is responsible for growth now, and he clearly wants SpringHill to serve more people. The distinction is between growth that strengthens an organization and growth that gradually weakens the foundation underneath it.
The day camp years taught him what can happen when rapid expansion gets ahead of margins, staffing, infrastructure, and systems. The more recent guest-group growth has reinforced the same lesson from another direction. SpringHill can technically find ways to put more people on the property, but if doing so creates an inferior experience, those additional bookings aren’t necessarily healthy growth.
This is where Eric returned to one of the most important ideas from the conversation: some capacity simply isn’t good capacity. A group might fit into a particular corner of the property, but if the arrangement makes them feel squeezed in or secondary, they may never come back. Filling every available bed can make this year’s numbers look better while making next year’s growth harder.
“Not every bed is created equal.”
For Eric, sustainable growth means being more disciplined about what kind of growth SpringHill pursues. The organization needs margin so it can reinvest. It needs systems that allow staff to work sustainably. It needs enough capacity to serve more people without diminishing their experience. And it needs retention, because growth that continually “bleeds out the back,” as Mark described it, forces the camp to keep replacing customers rather than building lasting momentum.
SpringHill learned many of those lessons through difficult seasons. Now Eric sees signs that the pruning is producing something healthier. The organization is more focused around one location, the team is increasingly aligned, and recent growth has come with a greater awareness of the financial and operational disciplines required to sustain it.
That doesn’t make the next chapter easy. But it does mean SpringHill is entering it with lessons that weren’t as clear during the first explosive season of growth—and with a better understanding that the goal isn’t simply to become bigger.
It’s to become strong enough to keep growing well.
What This Means for Your Camp
SpringHill’s story is not an argument against growth. Eric’s current role is centered on growth, and the organization is actively working to bring more campers and groups onto the property. The lesson is that growth has to be supported by the rest of the organization. Enrollment, pricing, staffing, systems, capacity, quality, and retention all have to move together if that growth is going to last.
That perspective was earned through some difficult seasons. SpringHill experienced the excitement of taking day camps from roughly 3,000 campers to around 19,000, but it also experienced what happened when the infrastructure and margins underneath that growth became strained. Later, the organization made painful decisions to sunset programs, put the Indiana property up for sale, and concentrate its resources around Michigan. What looked like contraction created the focus needed for another season of growth.
Eric described that process through the biblical picture of pruning. Pruning removes something that has grown, which can make it feel like the opposite of progress. But the purpose is to create healthier growth from what remains. Looking at SpringHill today, Eric sees an organization that is more focused and a team that has learned to pay closer attention to financial sustainability as growth returns.
Those lessons also change the questions camp leaders can ask about their own organizations. Instead of simply asking how to get more campers, it may be worth asking whether your current campers are returning. Instead of assuming you need more facilities, look at whether you’re using the capacity you already have. Instead of automatically keeping prices low, understand what margin is necessary to reinvest in quality. And before launching the next program or entering the next market, make sure the systems and people underneath the current operation are ready to support it.
None of those questions make growth less important. They help make growth more sustainable.
Getting the Whole Team Excited About Growth
Before wrapping up, Carl continued a tradition from the podcast by asking Eric to leave a question for a future camp leader. Eric’s question reflected another challenge he is thinking about as SpringHill moves forward:
“How do you get your entire team excited for growth, motivated for growth?”
For the people responsible for revenue and enrollment, growth can be energizing. But Eric pointed out that growth often means additional work for everyone else. More campers affect the kitchen. More guest groups affect facilities. A fuller calendar changes staffing schedules. Growth can interrupt long-standing routines and force departments to rethink ways of operating that have worked for years.
That means sustainable growth isn’t only a sales or marketing challenge. It is also a leadership challenge. If the organization wants to grow, people across the team need to understand why that growth matters and how their work contributes to it. Eric doesn’t pretend to have that question completely solved—which is exactly why he chose to pass it along to the next guest.
You Can’t Raise a Mensch in an Empty Bunk
Mark closed the episode with a story from another camp leader, Stacy at Tranquility Camp, a Jewish camp. In an earlier conversation, she had taught him the Yiddish word “mensch,” which she described as a good, honorable, responsible person of character. It gave Mark a new way of expressing why the work of growing camp matters in the first place.
“You can’t raise a mensch in an empty bunk.”
That idea reaches beyond any one camp tradition. Whether a camp is Jewish, Christian, secular, or affiliated with another organization, camp leaders are creating places where young people can step away from many of the distractions of everyday life. They spend time outdoors, build relationships, encounter challenges, develop independence, and have experiences that can help shape their character.
That is why healthy growth matters. Empty beds represent opportunities to serve kids that aren’t being used. But Eric’s story adds an equally important qualification: simply filling every possible bed isn’t enough. Camps need the financial health, staff, systems, and program quality to make sure the experience inside those filled beds is worth returning to.
SpringHill has experienced both sides of that equation. It has grown rapidly, contracted painfully, and begun growing again with a different understanding of what sustainability requires. The lesson isn’t to stop pursuing ambitious goals. It is to build the foundation that allows those goals to strengthen the mission rather than strain it.
If this episode gave you something useful to think about, follow the Grow Your Camp Podcast and share it with another camp leader who could benefit from the conversation. You can also visit GrowYourCampPodcast.com and complete the free Growth Planner. In about 15 minutes, it can help identify opportunities around capacity, occupancy, revenue, and processes that may be keeping your camp from reaching its potential.
Because the goal isn’t growth for growth’s sake. It’s creating a healthier camp that can keep serving kids, families, and communities for years to come.
Let’s grow camp—together.