This past week I had the chance to do a part of my job that I just love – telling the SpringHill story by giving golf cart tours of our camps. Actually I got to do it twice. The reason I love doing tours is because we don’t just show off our property, instead we use the property to “tell the story” and show how we create the SpringHill Experience.

And what made these two tours even more fun were the people I had the chance to share the SpringHill story with.

The first tour was with my former boss, mentor and longtime friend from Steelcase, John Fynewever. He made an effort to reconnect with me by offering to ride his Harley up to Evart to see SpringHill. I learned more from John about organizational leadership than anyone else I worked for at Steelcase. So for part of our tour I was able to share with him how we’ve implemented many of the leadership practices he taught me.

The second tour was for my parents and their life-long college friends Art and Judy Koller and Ken and Jeneanne Reasor. Like John, the Koller’s and the Reasor’s have never been to SpringHill and didn’t know much about our work, so the tour provided me an opportunity to introduce them to SpringHill.

Because my goal for any tour’s for people to understand SpringHill I look to see whether at some point they “catch” the essence of our ministry. I know this is happening because people will start to anticipate what I’m going to say at a given stop on the tour. Thankfully in both cases I believe  we meet the goal.

So as summer comes to a close it blessed me to be able to “tell the story” to longtime friends and in process, maybe make new friends for SpringHill.