Hector Bevitt-Smith of Kamparoo Activity Camps: You Don’t Need Years in Business to Build Momentum
One of the things I loved most about my conversation with Hector Bevitt-Smith, founder of Kamparoo Activity Camps, was just how quickly he’s turned years of experience into a completely new business.
Hector is a finalist for New Business of the Year, sponsored by Popolo Ceramico, at The Class Business Awards 2026.
Kamparoo officially launched in summer 2025. Just one year later, Hector had grown the business enough to step away from teaching after sixteen years and go all-in on the next stage of growth.
That’s impressive on its own, but the bigger lesson here isn’t simply about speed. It’s about recognising the experience you already have, testing the model properly and then being brave enough to act when the evidence tells you it’s working.
Sometimes the business has been hiding in your experience all along
Before launching Kamparoo, Hector had spent years building up exactly the kind of experience he would later need.
He trained as a PE teacher, worked across a range of schools and spent around sixteen years working in children’s activity camps during the school holidays. By the end of that period, he was managing around twenty camps across Essex, Hertfordshire and Cambridgeshire.
At some point, the obvious question started nagging at him.
“I know this like the back of my hand. I understand the model, I understand the margins, I know why this works. Let’s have a go.”
That’s a really interesting place to start a business from because Hector wasn’t entering the sector blind. He had already spent years seeing how camps operate, what parents need, what staffing looks like and what makes the numbers work.
The business was new. His understanding of the model wasn’t.
That distinction matters.
The first year was about testing, not pretending
Hector didn’t immediately leave teaching and assume the business would work.
For the first year, he ran Kamparoo alongside his teaching career. That meant long days, a lot of juggling and the inevitable point where he could see the balance shifting.
He described it as teaching all day and then working on the business from around 6pm onwards. As Kamparoo grew, more of his energy was naturally being pulled towards it.
That test period gave him something incredibly valuable: proof.
Instead of asking, “Could this work?”, he could start looking at real demand, real bookings and real customer behaviour.
For anyone building something new, that first phase can be less about having all the answers and more about proving the fundamentals:
- Will people actually buy it?
- Will they come back?
- Can you deliver the experience at the standard you want?
- Do the margins work?
- Is there enough demand to justify going bigger?
Hector got the evidence he needed, and that gave him the confidence to step away from teaching and put his full energy into the business.
Sometimes you have to disrupt the market
Launching a new holiday camp wasn’t straightforward because Hector was entering an area already full of established national providers.
Parents had habits. They already knew where they booked their children during the school holidays, so Kamparoo had to give them a strong reason to try something new.
That’s where the launch strategy became really interesting.
Through the Market Like a Pop Star programme, Hector focused on creating an offer that people simply couldn’t ignore. The business launched a time-limited discount, but importantly, the work wasn’t only about dropping the price.
Hector also had to build visibility before he had years of photos, testimonials or customer history behind him.
“We couldn’t market photos of children because we didn’t have any.”
So Hector became the content.
He stepped well outside the comfort zone of his “prim and proper teacher” identity, showed up on social media, teased the launch and created enough noise around the new business that people started paying attention.
The result? Around £2,000 on day one and just under £12,000 in seven days for a business that had never run a camp before.
That launch didn’t just create revenue. It created momentum.
Cash gives a new business room to breathe
One of the things we talked about was how important that early cash injection was.
Hector knew that a holiday camp with seven or eight children wouldn’t create the atmosphere he wanted. He needed enough children through the door for it to feel vibrant, social and genuinely exciting.
As he explained:
“I knew that if I didn’t get about fifteen, twenty through the door, I can’t create this environment where the children feel as though this is actually somewhere they would love to be.”
The offer solved two problems at once. It gave parents a compelling reason to try Kamparoo, and it gave Hector the numbers needed to deliver the experience he wanted from day one.
That’s why launch strategy isn’t only about hitting a flashy sales number. For a new business, strong early sales can give you:
- cash to reinvest
- customers to learn from
- testimonials and content
- word of mouth
- enough participants to create the right experience
- confidence that the model has genuine demand
It can change the energy of the whole first year.
Year two proved it wasn’t a fluke
The best bit is that Hector didn’t stop at one strong launch.
The following summer, he ran the campaign again with a smaller discount and generated around £17,500 in seven days. That represented roughly 40% of the summer’s total revenue and almost 80% of what Kamparoo had taken during its entire first summer.
Growth also showed up in the booking numbers.
Kamparoo went from 750 bookings across five weeks in its first summer to 1,150 bookings across five weeks in its second. Daily averages rose too, from around 30 children in the first summer to 46 the next, with the biggest day reaching 68 children.
That’s the point where a launch story starts becoming a business story.
One successful campaign can be luck, timing or curiosity.
Repeated growth tells you something stronger.
The product has to live up to the marketing
Of course, strong marketing only gets people through the door once.
The reason Kamparoo has continued growing is that Hector is obsessed with the experience once children arrive.
The camp combines sport, creativity, performance and outdoor activity. Some children live on the football pitch, others spend most of their day in the art room, and there’s even Dash’s Daily Mile, led by Hector’s puppy, who has somehow managed to steal the spotlight from the official kangaroo mascot.
But underneath all the fun is a very deliberate staffing decision.
Hector currently employs experienced teachers or people training to become teachers.
That costs more.
He’s happy with that trade-off.
“I want somewhere where trust is non-negotiable.”
For Hector, parents need to know they can leave their child for a full day and trust not only that they’ll be safe, but that the staff will recognise when they’re nervous, spot problems early and know how to bring them into the group.
That’s an important lesson in growth.
There will always be ways to make the spreadsheet look better by cutting costs. But if the thing you’re cutting is also the reason customers trust you, you may end up weakening the very product you’re trying to grow.
Know what you won’t compromise on
Hector openly acknowledges that hiring experienced educators reduces his margins, but he sees that expertise as fundamental to what makes Kamparoo different.
“These are people who are passionate about what they do.”
Experienced staff can spot a child who is hanging back, intervene before a situation becomes a problem and create a much more confident environment for families.
That’s a useful question for any new business owner.
What are the things you are prepared to be flexible on, and what are the things you absolutely will not dilute?
You don’t need to compete by being cheapest.
You need to know what you want to be known for.
The next challenge is building beyond one camp
Hector’s goals for year two are already bigger.
He wants to reach six figures in revenue, open a second Kamparoo location and potentially launch Joey’s by Kamparoo, a term-time programme for younger children focused on movement, agility, balance and coordination.
What I particularly like about the Joey’s idea is that it isn’t just an extra class bolted onto the business.
There’s a customer journey behind it.
Families could discover Kamparoo when their children are very young, build a relationship with the brand and then naturally move into holiday camps once they reach school age. It would also give the business a term-time revenue stream rather than relying exclusively on school holidays.
That’s the kind of thinking Hector now has the space to do because he’s stepped away from teaching and can focus fully on what comes next.
New doesn’t have to mean inexperienced
Hector is a brilliant example of why we need to be careful with the phrase “new business”.
Kamparoo may only be a year old, but Hector has spent most of his career building the skills, experience and industry understanding behind it.
The first year wasn’t about learning everything from scratch. It was about taking everything he already knew and finally putting his own name, model and ideas around it.
And once he saw that customers wanted it, he moved.
That’s probably the strongest lesson from this conversation.
Sometimes the fastest-growing new businesses are built on years of invisible preparation.
Watch the full interview
In our full conversation, Hector shares how sixteen years in teaching and children’s activity camps led him to launch Kamparoo, the strategy that generated almost £12,000 in its first seven-day campaign, why experienced teachers sit at the heart of the model and what he’s planning next.
👉 Watch Hector’s full finalist interview here.
Hector Bevitt-Smith is a finalist for New Business of the Year, sponsored by Popolo Ceramico, at The Class Business Awards 2026.
And if Hector’s story has got that part of your brain firing that’s already thinking, “Right, what could I do next?”, then you absolutely need to be in the room with us on Saturday 10 October 2026 at the National Conference Centre in Solihull.
The Class Business Live runs from 9:00am to 3:00pm, and we are bringing together the people building, growing and reshaping this sector for a day packed with proper business conversations. We’ll have guest speakers, mastermind discussions, fresh ideas, brilliant connections and plenty of those moments where somebody says one thing and suddenly you’ve got a whole new page of notes for your business.
So if you want a day that gives you new thinking, new people in your world, a proper boost for your business AND a huge celebration at the end of it, come and join us.
👉 Book your ticket for The Class Business Live and The Class Business Awards and be part of what is going to be one very special day for our sector.
