Lessons from Summer Camp

When I was a young girl at summer camp, my cabin leaders had a huge impact on my life. Ever since then, I wanted to spend at least one week a year volunteering as a cabin leader.

The problem: teenage girls have always scared me.

Although I wanted to have a positive impact on a group of teenage girls by being their cabin leader, I kept putting it off. “Someday. When Jake is older.” I’d say to myself.

Then Jake started attending summer camp every year, which meant he was no longer the excuse. I had a week every summer where he was at camp, so why wasn’t I at camp, too? The new excuse: money. I was convinced I couldn’t afford to take a week off work to be at summer camp. At least this is what I had been telling myself since starting my Financial Advisor job in 2014. The other excuse was I didn’t think any camp would want a never-been-married mother as a cabin leader. More on that in a moment, but first I want to share with you how the money excuse ceased to exist…

Sitting in church one Sunday, I was listening to summer camp board members pitch their awesome facilities and camp experiences to our congregation. It was “Camp Sunday”, like a summer camp trade show with booths in the foyer presenting slideshows of kids having tons of fun at camp, and asking for volunteers and donations to help improve their facilities and programs. 

Right there, I made a deal with God: If you open a door for me to volunteer as a cabin leader at a camp, I’ll do it. I’ll trust that you will sort out the money part.

Long story short, God opened door after door and a year later, I found myself at camp for two weeks in the summer of 2017 (and four weeks during summer 2018 and 2019!)

It. Was. Amazing.

Volunteering as a cabin leader was a necessary step towards learning how to bring like-minded women together. Being trusted to lead those young girls was a HUGE honour that came with many challenges and twice as many rewards.

How did God sort out the money problem to allow me to volunteer at camp? This is a very fun story, but first, I need to take you back to 2014 when I got fired from my Financial Advisor job.

I got fired (thank God!)

Because I was more focused on sharing financial knowledge than selling financial products, I wasn’t hitting the commission targets. Thus, they fired me. I was devastated. I literally cried for 24 hours. My son was conveniently at his dad’s the day I got fired. I had one day to sob like a baby before he came back the next day. Then I had to get my game face on. So that’s what I did.

I met with three people in the finance industry in the next few days after losing my job. These three conversations had me off and running, not crying anymore, and seeing that this was the course correction I needed to get back on my right path. 

Hello again, entrepreneur life!

I was back, baby! (I had been a self-employed hair stylist for eight years prior to working in finance.) Actually, it wasn’t a completely smooth transition. It took me about 2 months and a few job interviews before my business was up and running, and another year before I was really on the right path.

What I did right: I kept kicking the ball. Although I had placed myself in another sales role, this time I was in charge. I was a real entrepreneur, not an employee. There were no commission targets, so the only way I could lose my contracts with the various financial companies would be to do something horribly wrong.

One of the companies I was contracting to held a three day conference for their reps. Now making better money and seeing the need for connections with people in the investment industry, I attended the conference. It was there that I met my first business coach and decided to write my first book.

It was around this time that I was at Camp Sunday and had my talk with God about improving my finances so I could volunteer at summer camp.

While writing my first book, I began experimenting with social media marketing in a way that was quite scary but felt right: sharing true stories about when times were harder, while I was “faking it” in my Financial Advisor role not long ago.

It was scary because many of my clients from the firm that fired me left that firm and became clients of my new business. I was worried they’d feel like I had lied to them in my “faking it” phase when reading my posts on Facebook.

The opposite happened.

I received positive feedback from the clients who were also my Facebook friends. They were excited and supportive that I was writing a book. It seemed like they felt honored to be part of my success story.

As I wrote my book, I posted articles on LinkedIn which were excerpts from my upcoming book. (I didn’t yet have a website.) After I began seeing success with more and more new LinkedIn followers, I learned that I could have them subscribe to an email list using a free app called Mailchimp. This, I was told, is the best way to have a growing list of people interested in my book that I can send more “teaser” chapters to, then the book pre-sale, then the link to purchase the book.

Mixed in with my raw bits and pieces of my upcoming book was my Mailchimp sign up link (in the article text.) My “hook” was a free ebook, the first 3 chapters of the upcoming book, and a pre-sale special of 50% off the book. My email list grew to 350 subscribers during the 9 months it took to complete my book.

As the news of my upcoming book was travelling through the mysterious algorithms of Facebook and LinkedIn, one post in particular went viral on LinkedIn, with over 40,000 comments after just a few weeks. Here are the numbers as of July 2021:

This post was seen by people who later became my clients, and one particular employee at Canada’s largest book store chain, Indigo, who offered to put my book on the shelf in Calgary stores once it was complete. (I was overjoyed - this is one of my life’s greatest pinch-me moments!!)

Because I was still pretty much broke throughout my entire book writing process with every penny going to hire a book cover designer and formatter (I now do all this myself), a book launch party was not a priority, plus I have never been any good at event planning. Today and in this book I have a simple and effective party planning checklist, but back then I was clueless and the idea of a book launch party sounded too… expensive.

When my book finally was born, I had so many new contacts. Because I marketed my book as I wrote it, I had met many people, both in person and through LinkedIn conversations. I had been told many times how huge writing a book is for connecting you with like-minded people and being viewed as an authority in your field, but I was still shocked at the impact it had on my image and most importantly, on my confidence.

Thank you!

Thanks for reading this excerpt from one of my latest books! Check out all of my books on Amazon by clicking here!

And if you’re interested in writing your own book, I’d love to help you! Learn more about my 90-Day Author Coaching Program here!