Mike wrote this while flying out to Utah last week, as he was so frustrated that he needed to put it all down on paper before he forgot what he was frustrated about.

I am currently 30,000 feet in the air on my way out west for a few days of skiing in Utah, and I am very frustrated.

I am frustrated with the in-flight DirecTV service that Delta offers along with their on-demand touch screen game center in the back of the seat in front of me. It’s truly an amazing invention as I can watch live TV and also play games. Currently, I am taking a break from playing trivia with other passengers on the plane. I have continued to get third place while Bucky in 33F keeps beating me.

Anyway, after playing around with the screen for two minutes, I learned its entire function and I was pretty much an expert. But, during the first 20-minutes of the flight, a crew member got on the PA system to make nine announcements, with seven of these announcements having to do with the in-flight touch screens and how to use them. The problem with this is that every time an announcement was made, the game would get interrupted.

The same thing happened on my JetBlue flight last month. While watching an episode of Tosh.0 I missed the night before, the show was interrupted four times to talk about their amazing in-flight service, usually during Tosh’s funniest parts, only to be brought back during a commercial.

The point I am trying to make is that the airlines cared more about teaching newcomers about all their cool new functions rather than not annoying their customers who have actually flown on one of their flights before. They make the same announcements and interrupt their in-flight services to tell you about how amazing their in-flight services are and to thank you for using them.

How often do we do this at camp? We spend so much time trying to recruit new campers that we sometimes annoy the returning families. We can sometimes send the same information out year after year to the same parents, and eventually they will stop reading it. When was the last time you read the emergency manual in an airplane? We all know by now. But, what happens if they change something? We won’t know about it, and those parents won’t know about your changes if you just send it along with all the other information they have received year after year.

Are you making sure to cater to both new parents and veteran ones? Do you make two different FAQ lists? Do you create videos geared to new parents and ones geared to returning ones?

We tend to worry so much about making a good first impression that we sometimes forget about those customers who we have already impressed. We need to continue to focus on those customers and those parents while simultaneously creating ways to inform our new parents about how we run our camps. We need to make the extra effort to make a great first impression, but continue to be impressive to our fans years down the road.

I think a lot people read Dave’s “Mission Accomplished” post on Monday and thought that this spelled the end of CampLeadership.org. I think Dave even thought about this for a minute or two. He asked me to edit the post over the weekend, and then asked to go to lunch on Wednesday. As the second-half of CampLeadership.org, one would think I was freaking out.

I wasn’t.

Why?

Because I know Dave Bell.

Dave is the Chief Visionary Officer of CampLeadership.org, a title we made up. He came up with the idea for CampLeadership.org as he explained in Monday’s post, but needed me to get it off the ground. What he doesn’t always realize, is that he also needed me because I am very logical and I know how to work with someone who is a visionary. From now on, we will call these people “dreamers.” You can’t have CampLeadership.org without a “dreamer.” But, you also can’t have CampLeadership.org without someone who is grounded; someone who is realistic and know that boundaries exist. We will call these people “groundlings.”

Yes, I know how to design a Web site, edit video, and I write fairly well. But, I know that the most important function I have in the CampLeadership.org team is to be a “groundling.” I know that I need to bring Dave back to earth when he wants to change the world, and I know that I need to explain to him that what he is doing at CampLeadership.org is important to a lot of people when he wants to tear it all down. Why do “dreamers” continually want to either save the world, or blow it up? Because they get bored very easily. They need motivation to continue to do a good job. More importantly, they need a “groundling” to make them understand that changing the world does not happen overnight, and neither does destroying it.

It’s that simple.

On most days, Dave is pretty realistic. He has fun at work, he rides his bike before or after it, and he hangs out with his awesome wife and incredibly cool son at night. When the weather gets weird, Dave gets antsy and he starts to think too much. He usually calls me up to have lunch on these days.

When Dave thinks outside of the box, and sometimes extremely outside of the box, it’s my job to either get excited for the idea or play devil’s advocate. I always, always, ALWAYS, stall on his ideas. I usually talk above his head about technology, the CampLeadership.org budget, or new tax laws that have started to affect businesses in the state of North Carolina. If Dave brings the idea back up in two months, then he is dead serious about it, but usually he forgets about it or tells me his idea was crazy.

You all are learning a lot about CampLeadership.org this week, but the reason I am writing this is because every great camp, and every great business needs a few “dreamers” and a few “groundlings.” They wouldn’t exist without a mixture of the two. People who are always dreaming up incredible ideas will usually sink without constructive criticism that is rooted in logic. It’s what makes a great partnership.

If you don’t have a few “dreamers” and “groundlings” as senior staff members at your camp, your camp will probably get stale and boring, or it will be in a continual fluctuation of grandiose ideas.

After lunch, we were both assured that CampLeadership.org was not going anywhere, anytime soon. We both love it way too much, and we both understand that the site is neither one of our full-time jobs. If we want to take a break from it, we can at anytime. But, we know that we will always come back to it because we love camp and we love talking about it with other people who love it just as much as we do.

I no longer work at camp. But, since I help run a Web site that shares resources to camp professionals my mind stays focused on camp throughout the year. This can be great, but also annoying. I see camp everywhere.

For instance, this past weekend I helped out at my wife’s Rotary event called “Men Who Cook.” Being an Italian man, I know how to cook. My wife asked me to make a pasta salad I created last year that has Feta cheese and olives in it. I have to admit, it’s an incredible pasta salad.

Anyway, we arrived to the event early, and since my dish was a cold one, set-up only took a minute. I went to help my wife set up the drink table. As we were getting ice for the Sweet and Unsweetened Tea, two women were instructing us on the “correct” way to do it.

“We always put the ice in the cups first.”

“We always put Sweet Tea in the blue cups and Unsweetened in the yellow ones.”

“We’ve always done it this way.”

These statements made me automatically think about camp. I always hated when I would try to change something and someone would say, “We can’t change it, we’ve always done it this way.” I have worked for camps in four different states, so I don’t have the “We’ve always done it this way” gene in me. I’ve always believed that we should change anything if the change will make camp better. I have always assumed the reason people have felt this way is because they are traditionalists. But, hearing the two woman argue over yellow and blue cups, I’ve realized that it has nothing to do with tradition.

Some people just like consistency. Some people hate change, of any kind. It sometimes has nothing to do with how long something has been done before, just that it was done this way. No one, other than the two ladies, will remember each year which color cup had which tea in it. It simply doesn’t matter, as long as they let people know this year which is which.

I watched a TV show the other day called Fairly Legal, which is about a legal negotiator, and this episode dealt with consistency. It’s great. This episode was about a wife wanting to sue a trucking company who hit her husband. He barely survived, and had no permanent physical damage, but she wanted to sue the pants off the company — even though the husband didn’t — because the accident mentally changed him. He used to be predictable, but now he was spontaneous. He used to just go through the motions, now he is loving life and experiencing it full-on. But, this was not the boring husband she married. She didn’t want change, but was forced to when that truck hit her husband.

Some people want consistency no matter what.

The other amusing thing I saw at the lunch was a polite 10-year-old girl named April ask the women if she could help fill drinks. One said, “That’s OK sweetheart, we have it under control.”

I wanted to say, “She wasn’t asking to help because she thought you needed it, she was asking to help be she wanted to help.”

Why do we assume that accepting help will make us look weak? We all know the saying, “Don’t be afraid to ask for help.” I like this one, which I made up, better: “Don’t be afraid to accept help, even when you don’t ask for it.”
People like to help. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t ask. Some of you might think people are just being polite, and don’t expect you to say yes, and this might be a small percentage of the population, but accept it anyway. The next time they won’t ask. But, for those who ask to help, let them!

Helping others, even the most menial tasks, makes that person feel good. If it has no bearing on money, or the time it takes to do something, let the person help. She is 10-years-old, she is more than capable of filling up ice.

I told her she could help me, and gave her my job of filling the yellow cups. I then took over placing the cups on the table (which was 50-percent of my full ice duties) and spent the other 50-percent of the time talking with April. Then, when she came through the line to get food, I gave her two scoops of pasta salad.

Since leaving the camp world, I have started to notice things that would have made my camp better. It just takes a little observation, which any of us can do. So open your eyes and start making your camp better.

I’m going to go ahead and say it, CampLeadership.org was my idea. The problem with having an idea, and I have lots of them, is finding the right people to make the dream a reality. Anyway, I have been a summer camp professional (yes mom i have a real job) for over 15-years and during that time I have attended numerous camp conferences and have been part of plenty of staff training events. At each event there would always be a new song, game or activity that was presented and I would try to take notes or do my best to remember it, but it never failed, after a few days I would forget the tune of the song, or I would lose the handout from the instructor. You get the idea.

During this time I started using Ultimate Camp Resource, which has tons of games, songs, teambuilding activities. But, I am a visual person and just reading the directions to a game wasn’t enough. I needed to see it being played or take part in the activity. The Web site had the words to songs, but if I didn’t know the tune it was worthless to me. So I had this idea, what if there was a way to video the songs and games and then put them on the Internet to share with others who struggled with remembering activities like I did.

Remember when I mentioned earlier that making a dream a reality is enlisting the help of the right people? I didn’t know the right people to help create this resource. I was a camp director living in Raleigh, NC with a great idea and a flip video camera and I didn’t know what to do next. About this time I began using twitter to connect with other summer camp people using the @CampLeadership name. I would find things that were interesting to me and had some connection to camp and would share with the hashtag #summercamp.

In September of 2009 I relocated to work for the YMCA of Greater Charlotte and connected with Mike D’Avria, who I had met at a camp conference. He had been a long time Y employee, but was going out on his own to do freelance work (writing/video production www.MikeDavria.com). We met after work one day and I told him my idea of this and told him I had a name already: CampLeadership. Mike (the right person) said that it would be easy to set up (me finding the right person to share with) and that night in Deceber of 2009 CampLeadership.org was officially on the web (thanks Mike).

We are now a year and half into CampLeadership.org and the original idea of a Web site where we could share videos of songs and camps is a reality. During this time we have added a blog, podcasts which are on iTunes and have been doing trainings for camps, YMCA Associations, and conferences around the country. CampLeadership.org has become more than I ever envisioned, and that is a problem.

Mission Accomplished, right? (picture George Bush on the deck of an aircraft carrier) What happens now? Everything I thought I wanted to do with CampLeadership.org has been done? Is it Mission Accomplished and I just walk away and do something else?

I remember feeling like this once before. I was the camp director of a Resident Camp and when I became the director enrollment was down, culture was bad, staff wasn’t that good and retention was in the tank. In my eight-years the enrollment went from the tank to its’ capacity with a waiting list every session. We changed the culture to that of customer service and campers first, we attracted an amazing year-round staff to lead the place, and our retention rate went from in the 30% range to more than 65%. Mission Accomplished! You know what I did after every piece was properly in place? I walked away. Left. Moved on to something else. Found another challenge. Hello YMCA of Greater Charlotte!

What does that mean for CampLeadership.org? I don’t know because I still love it, but I guess I have a question instead of a statement. What do you do to stay motivated over the long term? What happens when you’ve accomplished your goal? How do you find the next goal without completely leaving and moving on to something else? I know some people stay in the same job for 20+ years, and I continue to wonder if they are they always finding new challenges, or do they just get complacent? There’s a lot of people who use CampLeadership.org in this position. We’d like to know our thoughts.

Currently, as I type this, I am sitting at a car dealership getting my brakes fixed on my truck. I love going to this particular dealership because they have comfortable desks with fast WiFi. I can get work done while getting work done to my car. Other people also must like this, as I am sitting next to a woman who has done nothing but go on her e-mail, make business calls, and complain about everything about how much she hates her job.

She has vocally made it known that she works for a very, VERY, large bank here in Charlotte — and this being Charlotte makes this bank a very large bank here in the United States. So far, I have heard her complain about how she can’t get any work done because her VPN server is down — making her to-do list today virtually non-existent — I’ve heard her drop several F-bombs while reading her e-mail, and I have heard her call her boss a “Communist who must ride the ‘short bus’ to work.”

She also said the following, “It could all burn down tomorrow and I really couldn’t care less. I need the money, but I really don’t give a crap.”

I am probably not the only person who had mental images of Milton from Office Space burning down CompuTech.

What’s amazing about this is that at least 30-people can hear this happening. She has mentioned the name of her employer almost a dozen times, and she has cursed many times — all within earshot of several kids looking at the aquarium filled with “Nemo’s.”

I jokingly went on Facebook and said that this woman had single-handedly kept me from ever banking with this bank in the future. I then realized that this was not a joke. There is no way I want to keep my money in this bank, or get a high-interest loan from this bank, or a credit card, or anything at all if that interest and those fees are going to paying her salary.

She has seriously made me think twice about where I will bank in the future. She does not know that she did this, but she most certainly has for me — and possibly the other 30-people in the room getting their cars maintained.

Have you ever found yourself in this situation with your camp? You are always representing your camp, especially if you are wearing a staff shirt. With cell phones the concept of a “private” phone call no longer exists. Have you ever found yourself complaining about your boss, your job, your salary, or something else in a public place on the phone? You might not care about the way the people who overhear you perceive you, but if they know where you work, they will certainly have a new perspective of your place of employment.

That’s why we tell counselors to not wear their T-shirts out on nights off. That’s why we tell counselors to not donate their old shirts to Goodwill (sorry Goodwill, it can be bad marketing for your camp when someone buys a staff T-shirt for 50-cents and then represents your camp at a strip-club) and that’s why we have to think twice before talking about these things in public.

We need to make sure to illustrate these things to staff during the off-months especially. More damage can be done to your camp by the stupid actions of one employee than all the good things that can happen during an entire summer — sometimes by that same employee.

We need to acknowledge it during the hiring process, during staff training, and we need to acknowledge it when we — as Camp Directors — talk about our camp; no matter if it’s at a camp fair or at the local mechanic.

This video is from part of Susan Coker’s presentation Marketing Non-Summer Camp Programs at the Southeast Campfire Conference on January 11, 2011. Currently VP of Marketing for the YMCA of Boulder Valley in Boulder, CO, Susan has guided the marketing efforts of multiple YMCA associations in her career. Susan is also a freelance Marketing Consultant for YUSA and is leading the national camp task force on how the new brand will play a role in YMCA resident camping.

This video is from part of Susan Coker’s presentation Marketing Non-Summer Camp Programs at the Southeast Campfire Conference on January 11, 2011. Currently VP of Marketing for the YMCA of Boulder Valley in Boulder, CO, Susan has guided the marketing efforts of multiple YMCA associations in her career. Susan is also a freelance Marketing Consultant for YUSA and is leading the national camp task force on how the new brand will play a role in YMCA resident camping.

This video is from part of Susan Coker’s presentation Marketing Non-Summer Camp Programs at the Southeast Campfire Conference on January 11, 2011. Currently VP of Marketing for the YMCA of Boulder Valley in Boulder, CO, Susan has guided the marketing efforts of multiple YMCA associations in her career. Susan is also a freelance Marketing Consultant for YUSA and is leading the national camp task force on how the new brand will play a role in YMCA resident camping.

This video is from part of Susan Coker’s presentation Marketing Non-Summer Camp Programs at the Southeast Campfire Conference on January 11, 2011. Currently VP of Marketing for the YMCA of Boulder Valley in Boulder, CO, Susan has guided the marketing efforts of multiple YMCA associations in her career. Susan is also a freelance Marketing Consultant for YUSA and is leading the national camp task force on how the new brand will play a role in YMCA resident camping.

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