Victoria Golden
Managing Director, Polaris Solutions
About the speaker
Victoria Golden is the Managing Director of Polaris Solutions, a fractional finance, HR, operations, and marketing team embedded with camps around the country. She works with camp owners and directors on the infrastructure behind staffing: hiring pipelines, onboarding systems, payroll, benefits, and the compliance work that can make or break a spring schedule. She and her team specialize in building systems that hold up across very different organizations while adapting to the team using them. Her secret power is getting people excited about their finance meetings; her Fixed Asset presentation was once called “the best meeting we’ve ever had.”
Before founding Polaris, Victoria spent years working inside youth-serving and arts organizations. She holds a BA from American University and spent her summers sailing at Bear Creek Aquatic Camp in Kentucky, as both a camper and counselor.
Sessions
The 10-Week Employment Cycle: Manage Your Team Like a CEO
Corporate HR runs every employee through a lifecycle: onboarding, check-ins, a written review, an exit conversation, a rehire decision. Your counselors get a lifecycle too; it’s just ten weeks long and most camps skip every step but the hiring. This session compresses the full employment cycle into a week-by-week calendar with a date and document attached to each step: an expectations doc signed in week one, a 15-minute structured check-in at week three, a written review at mid-summer, and an exit interview that doubles as your first returner conversation. You’ll leave with the complete schedule and every template in it. Nothing to build, just dates to put on your own calendar.
Training Week Is Too Late: Preboarding Your Summer Staff
In the corporate world, onboarding starts the day the offer is accepted, not the day someone shows up. At camp, paperwork and logistics get relegated to late-night sessions at lantern-lit picnic tables. Expectation-setting that could have happened in May gets condensed to an hour before lunch, with no time to practice the hard skills. This session builds a preboarding sequence that runs from offer acceptance to arrival day: an email cadence that keeps new hires engaged through the spring, an expectations doc signed before they pack, and short pre-arrival modules on the things that actually sink first-year counselors, like homesickness and behavior management. You’ll leave with a complete offer-to-arrival sequence, week by week, ready to adapt for your own camp before next summer.
