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The scariest camp number
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I looked across the Zoom window at Hunter and he’s there just shaking his head. It’s one of those slow, sad, side-to-side (while sighing) shakes. The ones you see when someone is looking at the same problem he’s seen over and over. The kind that bums you out a little bit. Hunter is the finance expert on our Immersive1st team. He’s an accountant, a former day camp owner, former nonprofit executive, and a fractional CFO for camps around the country. Need a real look at numbers? Call Hunter. He was shaking his head about a real problem in our industry. It’s a compression effect because literally everything (salaries, insurance, food, program costs) is going up, up, up. That’s one graph. The other graph is camper enrollment, which, for many camps, is going down, down, down. That squeeze is especially tight for camps under about 400-500 day campers a day, or under about 200 overnight campers a day, at the median industry price. The exact number will always depend on the camp, but the pattern applies to everyone. If your camp is under those thresholds with enrollment dipping, the math just stops mathing. So how would a camp know if the squeeze is happening (or worse, has already happened)? Hunter’s answer is three numbers. All you should be able to run in about 60 seconds.
Draw that line. Going up? You are probably fine. Going down? The next thing to look at is how steep. The steeper the slope, the more honest you have to be about what is happening with recruitment and retention. I’m purposefully not mixing words here. It’s worth saying this all the way out loud because so many camps aren’t doing these checks. They think everything is hunky-dory (not an official financial term), right until the very moment when they clearly are not. And that “uh-oh” moment comes a summer or two too late. Bills are still getting paid, sure, which can lead to a false sense of security. But that’s usually paying this year’s bills with next year’s deposits. Not the same as being fine. There’s also the staffing side. These camps still hire the way they did when the camp was humming. Enrollment drops thirty percent, but the staff numbers stay the same as last year, and the year before that, and the year before that. Camps will often tell themselves this is cyclical. It’s going to turn around! Hunter calls it hope-ium. We look to the past and think we’re going to be back there again. Just give it enough time and things will turn around. Which brings me to what I worry about most for camps. Many cannot take on that ONE significant event. A market downturn or a norovirus week or minimum wage going up or a storm forcing a week-long shutdown. When those happen (and they will), the whole graph tips over. So it’s back to that number. Start with running the three-year chart this week. If the line is going down and you want someone to look at the full financial picture? Someone to tell you what you are actually seeing, Hunter is here. He is blunt because, as he says, there’s no time to be anything else. The camps who get the blunt read usually tell me later that it was what they needed to hear. If this is you, pick up the phone. Sincerely, Senior Consultant at Immersive1st Learn more about Immersive1st's Approach |
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