What other directors are working on right now

Published about 14 hours ago • 1 min read

Hey Reader,

November sometimes feels like the first real breath.

Camp is behind you. Staff have scattered. The inbox is finally quieter. For most directors, this is the first time since February that you can sit down and actually think — which usually means noticing everything that felt harder than it needed to be this past summer.

This is the season where I do some of my best work alongside directors.

Here's what a few camps have been building lately, right at this time of year:

One camp director I work with was spending every Sunday on staff scheduling. She managed 55 people, and the schedule involved availability windows, certifications, ratios, and seniority. After one session, she set up a scheduling approach that runs in a single afternoon. Her words: "This used to take a whole weekend."

Another director put it plainly in a session last November. She told me she felt like all she was doing was going to work, going home, and crashing. Everything ran through her. We spent a few sessions rebuilding how her team made decisions — who owned what, what didn't need to come to her anymore. By the time camp opened the following summer, she told me: "Decisions that used to come to me are getting handled below. That's what we built toward."

A third director started working with me after a rough year — too many decisions, not enough trust in the team, registration falling behind. By the time early-bird season opened the following year, they were 39% ahead of where they'd been twelve months earlier. Not because we did 39 things. Because we did one or two of them well.

None of these started as big projects. They started with focused work on the right thing at the right time.

If you've been wondering what that kind of support would look like for your camp, I'm opening a few spots for new camps this winter. It starts with a 30-minute conversation about what's costing you the most right now. No pitch, no pressure.

If you're curious, just reply to this email, or grab a time to talk here.

Take good care,

Travis

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