Workplay USA: Transforming Summers into Adventures at American Camps

It’s moving from the UK to the US. I have been traveling a lot to experience as much of the country as possible. And with that, I get asked a lot by potentially rude people what I do for work that enables me to travel so much. And there’s any two real viable answers to that. One would be, I’m rich off family money and don’t work. And that is absolutely not true. I was raised working class. So was my husband. The second is we own our own business, which is true. And I’m gonna tell you about it. So I probably should also say I’m talking about my own business.

So hashtag ad Josh and I own a summer camp agency. I am at summer camp right now, the middle of nowhere. It’s called Workplay USA. I’ve tagged the account in case she wants to be nosy. And basically, a summer camp agency is like a recruitment agency, but we send people usually between 18 and 25, late 20s from all over the world to work at summer camps in America, mostly on the East Coast for the summer season as camp counselors. If you’re American, that probably makes sense to you. If you’re foreign, basically the American culture in a lot of places is to send your kids away to camp for the summer. If you’ve seen the film Parent Trap, it’s kind of realistic. They go away and these camps are staffed by internationals teaching them different activities, different sports and just looking after them. And that’s the job that we recruit for basically. Obviously, it lends itself well to students. We get people from all over the world, a lot in the UK, just cuz that’s where we’re from, that’s where we were founded. But it’s an awesome cultural exchange experience. And if you are someone in the kind of late teens, early, mid 20s age, you has their summers free. It is something that I would hand on heart recommend everybody to do because you meet people from all over the world that you would never normally cross. Pathway, do you go through this amazing experience together. It opens up so many doors for travel and for me, I mean, I got a husband, a child and a green card out of it. So that ain’t half bad. And I know that sounds like, oh, that would never be me. But trust me, we know so many people at this one summer camp who have been through the same experience as Josh and I. But anyway, Workplay USA, I should talk more about that cuz my husband is gonna be like, stop talking about us, talk about the business.

Yeah, we started 3 years ago. You might have heard of agencies like Camp America or America, great agencies, massive agencies. They send thousands of people to camp every year. We send hundreds of people to camp every year. We’ve been going for three years. It’s growing every year. It’s doing really well. I’m really proud of Josh, who does most of the work, and that’s what allows us to travel and have time off. The biggest goal for us and the reason that we send hundreds and not thousands is because we wanted the work life balance, the flexibility to be able to enjoy, I mean, Florida is where we live now, but you know, enjoy the lifestyle. The other reason that we wanna stay small is because it does mean that you get really good customer service. So you will be speaking to the same person throughout the whole process. Cuz as an international, particularly if you’re only 18 as well, it might be your first time traveling away from home on your own. There’s a visa process to go through. It can be a little bit confusing, a little bit scary, a little bit daunting. So we try and, you know, hand hold as best as we can. And it also means that we can work with a smaller number of camps, which we personally, no. So there’s the camp that I’m at right now is a big one, but we work with, I don’t know even how many, 20,30,40 camps, something like that, which is a small number compared to a lot of the big agencies.

But we know them all. We know the directors personally. And we put ourselves in the shoes now that we’re parents is like, would I want my child to spend the summer there? And yes, it’s the answer to all of them. They’re nice facilities there, great people, and we always get people at the end of the summer like, oh my god, I’ve had the best summer of my life. And if there was ever a camp that people weren’t saying that every year, then we wouldn’t work with them.

I’m gonna be talking a lot more about this and showing you around this particular camp. Just as an example, on my YouTube video this week, which is now live. So head over there to see a bit more behind the scenes and I’ll talk more about what POC.

I will try and get Josh to say a few words too, but he is crazy busy at this time of the year. And hopefully that answers some of the questions about work. So if you have any more questions, let me know. And the other thing to say is our green card is sponsored by the camp that we’re working at right now. And so, or Josh is working out right now. So when that does get issue, Josh will go to work for them full time as is required by the green card, and I will take on more of the business responsibilities. So yeah, we’re just enjoying it whilst we can. Shoot me any questions in the comments, cuz I’ve probably done a terrible job of explaining that and Josh is gonna be like, this is why you don’t do the marketing for business. She said.