What we cover / TL;DR
- Why this week is your most valuable planning window
- Five real lessons from a 35-year conference services director
- How planning and communication prevent the paint-or-profit tug-of-war
- Where this system fits if you’re ready to stop rebuilding
Every conference and events office knows the tension. Summer is when a campus makes real, non-tuition revenue, and it’s also the only window all year to get facilities work done. Paint the room, or book the group. Replace the flooring, or fill the beds. It can feel like a straight trade-off, every single time.
It doesn’t have to be. On a recent episode of our Humans of Campus Housing podcast, called fittingly “Paint or Profit,” I sat down with Dan Dykstra, Director of Conference Services at the University of Colorado Boulder, one of the most experienced operators in the field, with over 35 years running summer operations at three different universities. CU Boulder runs a genuinely large, well-run program: 8,500 beds, roughly 11,000 guests over the course of a typical summer, and a staff that grows from 13 full-time employees to more than 120 during peak season. Dan’s answer to the paint-or-profit question wasn’t a clever trick. It was a system, built years in advance and reinforced every two weeks, and one every conference and events team can learn something from.
With summer conferencing winding down and fall housing about to take over, right now is the moment to capture what actually worked this year before the details fade. Here are five things Dan’s approach can help your team lock in before next summer.
1. Plan your maintenance years out, not months out
Dan’s team doesn’t negotiate building closures season by season. CU Boulder maintains what he calls a five-year “HEMP” plan, short for Housing Maintenance Plan, built jointly with the housing facilities director. It currently maps out which buildings go offline for renovation all the way to 2041. Knowing that roughly 1,500 to 2,000 of the campus’s 8,500 beds will be offline in a given summer, well before the sales season for that summer even opens, turns a yearly argument into a known constraint everyone plans around.
2. Know your rollover-to-new-business ratio
At CU Boulder, about 60% of summer conference business is rollover, groups that book year after year, with the remaining 30 to 40% being new business that planners often commit to years in advance. Knowing that split matters for two reasons: it tells you how much of next summer’s calendar is already, functionally, spoken for, and it tells you how far ahead your new-business outreach actually needs to start. If you don’t know your own ratio, you’re planning maintenance windows and sales targets against a guess instead of a number.
Why This Matters:
Your rollover percentage turns two of your biggest planning questions, how much of next summer is already spoken for and how far ahead new-business outreach needs to start, from a guess into a number.
3. Build a standing cadence, not a one-off meeting
Dan Dykstra (back center) and members of his CU Boulder conference services team.
The mechanism that keeps CU Boulder’s plan honest isn’t a memo, it’s a recurring meeting. Dan’s team holds a biweekly “PIT crew” session, short for Performance Improvement Team, running from January through the end of summer. Project managers, environmental services leads, maintenance leads, security, and the director of housing facility services all show up. It’s where a zone manager can flag that a specific floor’s paint is deteriorating, and the group can decide in real time whether that floor can be worked into an existing gap in the schedule. A standing cadence catches these things while there’s still time to act. A single seasonal check-in doesn’t.
4. Look for the shoulder windows, not just the empty buildings
Not every maintenance win requires a fully offline building. Some of the best opportunities are the quieter gaps between groups, what Dan’s team treats as shoulder windows: a building that’s booked for the summer but has a three-to-four-week stretch between one group’s departure and the next group’s arrival. That’s enough time to carpet or paint part of a floor, then finish the rest at the tail end of the season. Reflecting on this year’s calendar with an eye for these windows, rather than only the buildings marked fully offline, often reveals capacity that was there all along.
5. Measure more than revenue
Dan’s guiding framework is what he calls the Three Rs: Reputation, Recruitment, and Revenue, in that order. A middle-school theater camper who falls in love with campus during a summer stay can become a future student. A visiting faculty member attending a summer conference can become a future hire. Revenue matters, and it’s real, per NACAS, the National Association of College Auxiliary Services, auxiliary operations like housing, conferencing, and dining generate more than $40 billion a year for higher education institutions. But a program that only tracks the dollar total misses the two returns that show up years later, in an application or a faculty roster instead of a summer invoice.
“
It’s all about telling our story and telling it the right way, and using data from Kx allows us to tell that story.”
— Dan Dykstra, Director of Conference Services, University of Colorado Boulder
The Future of Camps, Conference and Events
Is Already Here
None of this works without accurate, shared visibility into what’s actually available, booked, or offline at any given moment. It’s exactly the capability Dan highlighted on the podcast: because rooms and beds are updated in the same system his sales team quotes from, “my sales manager isn’t selling a room because it’s going to be offline, and she can see that.” That kind of real-time visibility is what keeps a maintenance plan and a sales calendar working together instead of against each other.
How Kx Makes This Possible
CU Boulder runs its conference operation on KxConferencing, alongside KxResidential and KxCatering, as part of Kinetic’s Kx Commercial suite. A few specific ways it supports the lessons above:
Real-time room and bed status, shared between operations and sales, so a space taken offline for maintenance can’t be quoted or booked by mistake
Unified resource management across meeting rooms, catering, and equipment, so a shoulder-window opportunity is visible in the same place bookings are managed
Centralized reporting across departments, replacing the manual reconciliation that comes from housing, catering, and facilities each keeping their own records
Copy Event and repeat-booking tools built for exactly the kind of rollover business that makes up the bulk of most summer programs
The result at CU Boulder speaks for itself: conference revenue grew 125% over eight years, from roughly $4 million to $9 million, while the same team scaled to coordinate 100 to 125 residential programs and thousands of overnight guests every summer. As Dan put it, “very few software solutions out there understood the robustness and complexity of operating a collegiate conference and event operation.”
Turn This Summer's Lessons Into
Next Summer's Plan
The best time to build next year’s maintenance plan, staffing model, and sales targets is right now, while this year’s version is still fresh. If you want to talk through what a shared, real-time view of your conferencing and housing operations could look like for your campus, book a free Software Health Check. We’ll help you find where paint and profit stop competing with each other.
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