In the beginning.... owner Alex Levitch (then known as Alex Goodwin) explains to Inc. Magazine the reasons he and Linda decided to buy Adirondack Camp.

reprinted from Inc. THE MAGAZINE FOR GROWING COMPANIES
FEBRUARY 1981
By Jeffrey Tarter, INC. Associate Editor

"CAMP WAS SO MUCH FUN, I BOUGHT IT"

As a result, entrepreneur Alex Goodwin rediscovered basic human and financial values.

Tall, bearded, and sunburned, Alex Goodwin guides his 18-foot motorboat along the rock-bound eastern shore of New York's Lake George. Spray breaks across the varnished teak deck while Goodwin shows off the cabins of Adirondack Camp, half hidden along a pine-covered peninsula. As the boat comes round a small point, three Adirondack campers climb to the top of a small cliff, wave to Goodwin, then dive far out into the cool, deep lake.

This August afternoon, Goodwin, Adirondack's 36-year-old owner, is glowing with the satisfaction that comes from achieving an important goal. His first camp season is about to end, and Goodwin knows he has accomplished, in both financial and human terms, exactly what he set out to do.

Goodwin is more than a typical summer camp operator. He is also an intense, aggressive entrepreneur with a knack for starting businesses that prosper in unlikely markets. He was a 25-year-old lawyer when he and a partner ventured into the moribund infant-products industry and began peddling collapsible baby strollers. Three years later, their company reached $14 million in sales, and Goodwin cashed in his chips at a healthy profit.

Since then. Goodwin has been working as a senior partner in one of the country's biggest executive search firms, where he spends half his time putting together venture capital deals and helping launch new companies. His schedule is a complex, 50- or 60-hour-a-week juggling act filled with meetings with corporate clients, financial experts, entrepreneurs, and specialists in industries as varied as medical diagnostics, recorded music distribution, and furnishings for the home.

Last summer, though, Goodwin pared down his usual schedule. Every weekend, he left his chrome-and-glass penthouse office in midtown Manhattan for a log cabin perched on a cliff beside Lake George. There, like a grown-up Huck Finn, he reverted to a simpler life as the head of a small children's camp.

Goodwin has owned Adirondack for less than a year, but he is hardly a newcomer to the values of camp life. More than 20 years ago, young Alex spent four joyful summers at Adirondack, and took away memories of canoeing, sailing, and hiking in a corner of wilderness that is almost as unspoiled as it was when the Iroquois camped along these same shores.

"Everybody has a place like this in his blood," Goodwin insists. But few people have been as successful at making a childhood memory part of their adult lives. He has even brought his family into the operation of the camp: His wife Linda manages Adirondack's finances and staff of 30; their 13-year-old daughter, Shawn, is one of the 98 campers enrolled for the summer and an informal adviser on programs. Working together on managing the camp yielded an unexpected dividend for the family, says Goodwin: It gives them a chance to share a common adventure.

His wife agrees. "Before we bought the camp," Linda says, "we led much more separate lives. When we got together, we often found ourselves simply reporting to each other about what we'd been doing. Now the three of us are involved in a very intense experience that adds a new dimension to our time together."

Goodwin adds that the camp has become far more than a quiet weekend retreat for him. It's a business, but one that forces him to look at a fresh set of values. "Basically," he says, "my work in New York requires tight allocation of time and money. The camp is a totally different situation. Human values always come first. There, camaraderie and time devoted to personal reflection are the norm rather than the exception."

To Goodwin's surprise, running a camp turned out to be not only a challenge to his personal values, but a tough business proposition as well. "It sounds strange that a tiny momand-pop business like this, with sales of maybe $150,000 a year and a total investment of less than $500,000, should be as hard to get started as a company where you have to put up factories and handle national television campaigns," he says. "But that's what I found. We had to learn all over again about marketing, about delegating, and about persuading people to carry out programs the way we want. There weren't any problems here we could solve with a new organizational chart-we were dealing with nonbusiness people on our staff, and with real, live children instead of products."

Nevertheless, Goodwin has succeeded in a business where veteran camp operators have lately been failing in droves. The 32-mile eastern shore of Lake George w.ed to be a haven for summer camps; today, Adirondack is the only survivor. In fact, Goodwin has done better than survive: In his first season he came close to turning a profit, and he expects the camp to become an attractive investment once he can build up enrollment and develop off-season activities. Already, he notes with some amusement, experienced camp operators are beginning to come to him for advice or to offer their own camps to him for sale.

Goodwin insists he hasn't discovered a magic formula for making a summer camp work. "In almost any business," he says, "there are going to be a few basic management decisions that will profoundly affect whether you succeed or faiL In running a camp, these decisions tend to be in such areas as marketing, financial controls, and pricing. Food and labor are two of your biggest variables, and one of the toughest decisions camp operators have to make is whether to cut quality to keep their costs down, or charge a reasonable price that lets them maintain high quality."

Though Goodwin has managed to turn Adirondack into a healthy business, he says the idea of buying the camp only occurred to him a year and a half ago. "We'd been driving around Lake George one weekend in September," he recalls, "looking at real estate, but not really seeing anything we liked. We ended up at Adirondack. with Linda, Shawn, and a school friend, picnicking down by the water. Linda and I were sitting on a rock. Shawn and her friend were out in the water, tipping over a canoe, laughing. Suddenly I knew-tbis was the place we had all dreamed of finding."

Goodwin knew that 76-year-old Adirondack, like a great many summer camps, had fallen on hard times, a victim of rising costs and declining enrollments. "The current owner was a previous camper, extraordinarily dedicated to the camp," Goodwin says. "But for the 10 years he'd owned the place, he hadn't been able to put any money into it."

Goodwin tracked down Adirondack's owner, and after three months of on-again, off-again negotiations, they finally closed a deal. "I violated all the rules," he now says with a grin. "I put my emotions first. I'd gone around talking to other camp owners about how you make a go of the business, and nobody could give me a straight answer. We didn't pay a lot of attention to the financials, and we didn't even see most of our inventory until the snow melted the next spring."

By December, when Goodwin took over the camp, most successful camp operators had already signed up their quota of kids for the following summer. At Adirondack, however, Goodwin had to start almost from scratch, recruiting campers, hiring a staff, and getting the camp's run-down facilities back into shape. The previous owner, he discovered, hadn't paid much attention to record keeping or paperwork. Addresses of previous campers were lost, most counselors had no contracts, and occasionally parents were never billed for camp fees.

Goodwin started by appointing an old friend of his, Chris Geissmann, as the camp's director. Geissmann and Goodwin had been campers together at Adirondack, but Geissmann-who had gone on to become chairman of the English department at the prestigious Park School in Baltimore-had also spent most of the last 20 summers as a counselor at Adirondack. "Ideally, you want a staff with a high proportion of people who've been with the camp a long time," says Goodwin. "Traditions are terribly important for a camp, and in Chris we had someone who had seen Adirondack's traditions develop for 22 years."

Geissmann was eager to help rebuild the camp, and agreed to take a year off from his job to serve as director. Many of the camp's other staff members, though, were skeptical. Some had quit, disappointed by Adirondack's declin,e, and the Goodwins had to cajole them back. "It didn't help," concedes Linda, "that we had never run a camp before."

The biggest problem the Goodwins faced was how to fill their cabins with campers. "Enrollment had fallen to a point where only about 30 campers were possible carryovers from the year before," Goodwin explains. "Most camps can count on carrying over about 80% of their kids, so they don't have to do nearly as much recruiting as we did. The problem we faced is that you've got to go through about 10 presentations to parents for every camper you sign up, so we faced 1,000 presentations just to find the hundred campers we needed."

The Goodwins and Geissmann began beating the bushes for prospective campers. "I'm an old encyclopedia salesman," Goodwin says. "I like knocking on doors and going to see people."

But the campaign was handicapped by their late start. They didn't get a camp brochure back from the printers until March (with photos of the new owne!'s in a wintry Central Park setting), and one of their few promotional aids was a 25year-old movie that had been made when the camp admitted boys only. "We'd start showing a film with scenes of naked boys in crewcuts swimming in the lake, and all we could tell parents is that they'd have to trust us that we were making changes," Linda says. "We really didn't have our act together."

By the first week in April, the Goodwins had exhausted their promotional budget-and had only a half-dozen campers to show for their efforts. "We were concerned," Goodwin now admits. "I don't think I'd ever admit to making a bad deal, but this was beginning to look questionable."

But the Goodwins weren't ready to throw in the towel. As they talked to parents and prospective campers, they began to learn how to explain their message more effectively. They started to stress the basic values that Goodwin himself remembered most vividly about his camp experience. Adirondack's strength, they felt, was its ability to inspire the twin values of individualism and community in its campers. Those values turned out to be a stronger selling point than mere lists of camp equipment and activities.

"We started to ask parents what they wanted the camp to accomplish," says Linda, "instead of giving them a hustle about what a great time their kids would have. Sometimes we even ended up recommending they try other camps, because we could see the parents couldn't handle a situation where their kids would live in open-air cabins without indoor plumbing, TVs, or blow dryers." Linda blitzed parents with letters, questionnaires, and telephone calls; Goodwin interrupted meetings to buttonhole clients and associates about the pleasures of camp. And their small, sedate ad in the back pages of the Sunday New York Times Magazine was transformed into a much clearer statement of the personal values that Adirondack Carr") was selling. Its new headline announced: "Camp was so much fun, I 'bought it."

The Goodwins also recruited Jeff Howe, a seasoned, well known camp director to join Adirondack. Initially, Howe served as Associate Director and replaced Geissmann at the conclusion of the '80 season. Howe's task is to insure the proper blend of tradition and professionalism. Considering the state of affairs, Howe signed on with a good deal of trust in his heart.

Slowly, the personal touch paid off. Goodwin had set a target of 100 campers as the break-even for the seven-week summer session; the camp eventually signed up 98, a few of whom were enrolled for only half the season. "On the strength of what's happened this year," Goodwin now predicts, "we'll be able to reach capacity and enroll twice as many kids next year."

Once the snow melted, Goodwin called in work crews for four months to shore up collapsing buildings, rebuild cabins and docks, resurface tennis courts, and patch a small armada of canoes and sailboats. When the camp staff showed up for a two-week orientation session in June, Goodwin's director put them to work scraping, painting, and cleaning. "They were a bit put out," Goodwin concedes. "The orientation period was traditionally a big beer blast for the staff, and that wasn't quite what they got".

But when the first campers began to drift in for opening day on June 26, Adirondack Camp and the staff were ready. And for the next two months, as the camp season unfolded with just the right balance between planning and improvisation, the Goodwins discovered still another basic pleasure-the delight of a job well done.

"When we got started," Goodwin recalls, "I told everyone I insisted on adding only three things to the program-a telescope for astronomy lessons, kite flying, and a pet goat The telescope wasn't delivered on time, the kites got caught in the trees, and the goat had a bad habit of breaking into the cabins. Still, the kids had an incredible summer-and my family and I have never had so much fun in our lives."