In this compelling conversation, Kate Donovan, founder and CEO of CAMP Digital, shares how she transformed from a dyslexic social worker into a tech-savvy entrepreneur who revolutionized marketing for the home services industry. After being told by Google to "get out of auto" and enter the home services space - which was a "technological desert" in 2018 - Kate built a capacity-aligned marketing platform that has scaled to serve trades businesses across multiple verticals.
The episode explores Kate's unique approach to scaling businesses through her four-pillar philosophy: people, process, data, and technology. She discusses the critical balance of leveraging AI without creating liability, the importance of slowing down to go faster, and why understanding your team's capacity is essential for sustainable growth. Kate's social work background shines through in her people-first leadership style and commitment to hiring diverse talent, including LGBTQIA+ individuals, veterans, and second-chance employees.
This conversation is perfect for service business owners, marketing leaders, and entrepreneurs looking to understand how technology can solve real business problems while maintaining a human-centered approach to growth.
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Kate Donovan | C.E.O. at CAMP Digital
Kate Donovan is the CEO of CAMP Digital, a two-time Inc. 5000 honoree and one of Minnesota’s fastest-growing private companies. With over 20 years of experience in marketing analytics and business intelligence, she specializes in data-driven growth for the home services sector. Kate is known for her people-first leadership philosophy, blending her social work background with technology to create solutions that amplify human potential. |
Kate Donovan: If you have to do it three times, how do we make it into a piece of technology? How can we automate it? So if you have to do it three times, let's automate it, because you're going to have to do it three more times and we can solve that time and probably do it better. We joke that AI doesn't have a bad day. AI's boyfriend didn't break up with it on its way into work. AI didn't get a speeding ticket. It can definitely help.
Brendon Dennewill: Kate Donovan, thank you so much for joining me today on the podcast. How are you doing?
Kate Donovan: I'm doing great. Thank you so much for having me. I've really appreciated you reaching out and getting to be on the podcast.
Brendon Dennewill: I guess you have Sam Anala to thank for that. We were just having lunch before I came in here, and the team was asking me. I said, oh, I have to get ready for my podcast recording with Kate Donovan. And Sam said, oh, that was me. Kate's awesome.
Kate Donovan: I love Sam. I've known Sam probably longer than she cares for me to tell you. Long enough to carry bail money. Sorry, Sam. But I'm a big fan. I love her to death.
Brendon Dennewill: Rewinding to 2018, which is when you started CAMP Digital, a company focused on home services marketing. What led to that?
Kate Donovan: I love the story. I was working with my brother, Sean Stapleton. He has a company called Dealer Teamwork, which is also how I met Sam. We had just won a couple of pretty prestigious prizes from Google. We had won their top five Innovator Cup for mobile innovation in the United States. Because of this, I was sitting in a room with some great people from Google.
Right before the meeting started, one of the guys leaned over to me. His name was Julio. And Julio said, "Katie, get out of auto." Then the meeting started. I sat there for about two hours, just sweating. Did I upset Julio? What does this mean? When everybody got up and left, I turned to Julio like not a minute had passed and said, "What do you mean, get out of auto?" He said the home services space needs something exactly like this. He introduced me to the home service head of agency for Google, and we launched CAMP Digital.
Brendon Dennewill: It is a fascinating space. I'd love to spend more time talking with you about it because I think we're at the beginning of the golden age of services businesses. I think a lot of services businesses listening would probably say it's been golden for a long time, but I think it's going to get even better. Part of your unique ability is the way you see the business world and how technology is going to continuously make it better. I know you've also created your own product, a dashboard called Capacity Pro, which speaks to that. You like creating solutions through technology that make businesses run better and more effectively.
Kate Donovan: Absolutely.
Brendon Dennewill: Tell us more about Capacity Pro.
Kate Donovan: I want to back up to something you just said because I wrote it down: the golden age of service businesses. I think you could not be more right, especially with where the markets are going with AI and everything happening in the world. This is something that can't be replaced. You're still going to need someone to come in and snake your drains. It's been really interesting to watch the evolution, which gets to your second question.
One of the reasons Google said to get in the space is because at the time it was a technological desert. In 2018, there weren't even real CRMs. I know you're big HubSpot folks. That technology wasn't necessarily in the space yet. Since then there's been huge innovation, but that was the opportunity we identified.
We don't really consider ourselves a digital marketing company. CAMP stands for Capacity Aligned Marketing Platform. We realized there's a better way to do this with technology that can augment the marketing. So we built Capacity Pro, which is our capacity system that sits between the CRM and the marketing tech stack. It says: if you're full, pull back on spend. Because unlike other industries where I can make more shoes or golf clubs, I cannot make more technicians to sit in the truck. If I'm full, I'm full. And most people aren't willing to wait.
If your drain is backing up and water is coming into your basement, you're not saying, "Thursday's fine, come out whenever." So we realized it's very capacity-driven. We put a piece of software in that helps manage that connection, and found a huge and unique opportunity. The growth in the home services space has been astronomical.
Brendon Dennewill: That reminds me of a concept I first learned through salons. I was in a peer advisory group with a guy who ran a very large franchise of salons. They have the same issue: whether it's a barber or a hairdresser, there's only so many that show up that day, only so many chairs, and then there's a clock. If that hour has passed, any appointment you could have had is gone.
But it sounds like Capacity Pro has other benefits beyond just being more efficient on ad spend.
Kate Donovan: Absolutely. The salon analogy is great, and most people can relate. Not all jobs are the same. I don't want to fill my boards with haircuts. I will if it keeps my people busy. But I love those perms, cut colors, and balayages. Those make me more money.
So in addition to just keeping it booked or not booked, we can focus on services that are higher revenue-generating. You can't always have those. You're not fixing an air conditioning unit in December in Minnesota.
We're also able to incorporate some logistics and dispatching. If I'm relatively full in City A, I can't go all the way to City B for one more job. So we also help with efficiencies around where we're marketing. Not just whether or not we're spending budget, but what we're spending it on and where. There are huge advantages in that component. And then of course we have the messaging, the matching websites. It's really about breaking down the silos between marketing and operations.
Brendon Dennewill: Really cool. So CAMP: C-A-M-P. It's a very intentional name. Just tell us again what it stands for.
Kate Donovan: Capacity Aligned Marketing Platform. It's intentional in that it describes what we do. We align the marketing to your capacity. But we're also really campy people. We have a nap room in the office, ping pong tables, and we just finished building a pickleball court outside. We have a pickleball partner sponsorship too. We like to have a lot of fun.
Brendon Dennewill: That's really cool. One of the things I've learned about you is that culture is essentially another unfair advantage. You have a background in social work. Do you want to tell us about that?
Kate Donovan: Sure. I was a social worker at a women's resource center and loved it, but I realized that the system, in my opinion, was not necessarily designed to solve the problem but to address the immediacy. That frustrated me a little. I then worked for a congressman and realized you were just on a bigger merry-go-round.
I had a great mentor, my father, and another gentleman named John Greening, who told me that maybe you can't fix the world, but you can create really good things for people, make really good places to work where people feel respected, and maybe improve their lives a little bit.
We actually reflect that in who we hire. We hire uniquely. We have a lot of LGBTQIA employees. We hire second-chance folks, people with more challenged backgrounds. We're really big into hiring people who wouldn't normally be in digital marketing: minorities, veterans. We focus on bringing those folks in, teaching them a trade, and creating an environment that makes people happy to work here.
Brendon Dennewill: Have you put that into a Venn diagram? I could picture it as you were speaking. You might be familiar with the Japanese concept called ikigai. But even if you just use the simple three-circle Venn with the sweet spot in the middle, it sounds like you've really nailed it. You've taken who you are and all your experience, married that to something people really need from the services you provide, and attracted people who are drawn to both. That creates the sweet spot in the middle.
Kate Donovan: I will be stealing that. I already wrote it down. If I don't write it down, it's gone. I'll pop into ChatGPT and say, "What did I say I was going to do again?"
Brendon Dennewill: On this show, we talk a lot about why some businesses scale better than others when they seemingly have access to the same people, capital, and technology. Yet some businesses in the same sector far outperform the others. From your personal experience or what you see working with clients, what are more scalable businesses doing differently?
Kate Donovan: That's an interesting question, and I feel like it's a bit of a trick question. Each of us has something that's allowed us to scale that becomes our superpower. For me, I'm a very good listener. So when Google said to get into home services, the next thing I did was figure out how. When I met with them, they laid out 19 verticals and we're only five deep into those 19. Why would I do anything different when it's been working?
One of the advantages I have is being female in a pretty male-dominated space. If you're a good listener and you're okay with not having to prove you're the smartest person in the room, you pick up a lot of great information. People are willing to tell you things. We've been really lucky finding a nice niche. Google said it was a technological desert, and technology is my background, so no problem.
And then it's always the team, right? A lot of the people here were with me at a previous company. They'll be with me at the next one. I'm a collector. That helps quite a bit.
Brendon Dennewill: If I were to summarize that: it starts with people and fortunately ends with technology, but there's some stuff that has to happen in between, which we call process and data.
A lot of entrepreneurs, and I always use myself as the first example because I suffer from shiny object syndrome, made the mistake back in 2013 of buying Salesforce thinking technology was going to solve all our data, process, and people issues. Of course, I couldn't have been further from the truth. A year later we found HubSpot, but we also knew we had to have our people, leadership, process, and data figured out before technology could make it go better and faster.
Going back to your technology background, how far back can you go to explain why you feel technology is so important?
Kate Donovan: I'd almost reverse something you said. You can't make a process into technology unless you can write it down. I've always found that if you have to do something three times, you could probably make a piece of technology to handle it. That's the revolution we're in right now with AI.
It probably comes from being learning disabled. One of my challenges as a kid was spelling and writing. I was lucky to have very supportive parents who got me a computer. There's always a way to augment something with technology. Google's famous for saying everything is their fault. If you can't spell, that's why they have suggested text. You couldn't remember the name of the restaurant, they invented Google My Business. You didn't have an address for something, Google Maps.
We used to have the rule from my brother's company: if you have to do it three times, how do we make it into a piece of technology? How can we automate it? If you have to do it three times, let's automate it, because you're going to have to do it three more times and we can probably do it better. AI doesn't have a bad day. AI's boyfriend didn't break up with it on its way into work. AI didn't get a speeding ticket. It can definitely help.
Brendon Dennewill: Let's dig into that. If you've done something three times, today you can absolutely build an agent to do it for you. But the question then comes back to scalability. You've built all these little things, we used to call them integrations, now we call them agents. But if you wake up one day and you have a hundred of those, how do you keep them all tied together so it stays scalable?
Kate Donovan: I wrote down your four pillars: people, process, data, and tech. When you ask that, I think of them like spinning plates. You can't spin one too fast because another one might fall. You've got to keep going back and touching all of them.
I can't write too many agents without making sure the people and processes understand how those agents are used. I'm going to use data as the output to help with some of those things. I'll go back and spin that plate a little bit, then find out where I need to add more agents, more process, or more tech. It's probably a terrible analogy, but it's what came to mind when you were talking about those four pillars.
Brendon Dennewill: I like that analogy. I'm also thinking about a fifth one. I was at a conference in Chicago a couple of weeks ago talking about something similar. What I think eventually works is: those four pillars are the four tires, and the people are the body of the car. You have to keep those four tires equally inflated, because if you spend too much time on one and it gets flat, you have to stop.
I'm also starting to realize you're a visual thinker like myself. If you figure out what the fifth thing is, I think we might have created something really cool.
Kate Donovan: An extra wheel. I love that.
Brendon Dennewill: Actually, when I had my reMarkable out in Chicago trying to do the same thing, the best analogy I could come up with was the Polaris Slingshot: two wheels in the front, one in the back. You only need four components. The body of the Slingshot is the people, in the front you have process and data, and in the back you have technology. Keep those tires equally inflated, and make sure the driver is always healthy, which is the team.
Kate Donovan: I love the Slingshot because to me it's like if you let a kid redesign a car. A kid would have designed exactly that, with no boundary to their creative mind.
Brendon Dennewill: We often run into a situation, and I'm sure you do too, especially because you see technology so clearly. We see it all the time with AI: you can actually have too much technology, the same way you can have too much data, where it goes from being an asset to being a liability. Can you think of any examples?
Kate Donovan: I can think of a thousand examples. We're so close to where AI is in marketing, and it's transformative to all the industries that touch our business. We actually sat down as a team and listed all the things, good and bad, about where we should be using it. Then we realized there's a lot to consider around regulation.
I write software as part of our process. If I use too much AI in my software, does it become unprotectable? We use a lot of content in what we write. If I use too much AI, that content may no longer be trademarkable. If you're not paying for an AI tool or a technology tool, then your data is the fee. Facebook is free, and what I give Facebook would have required a subpoena for a court to access: where I am, what I'm doing, who I was with. I give that to Facebook in exchange for a free platform.
So as you think about processes, technology, and AI, I think it's a tremendous mountain to figure out. How much do I use? Where do I draw the line? What do I allow my team to use that doesn't create accidental violations?
I had a great story from a friend who was using ChatGPT to think through something for his company. A couple of days later he was back in ChatGPT, asked it a question, and it recommended something he had put in the original data set. He realized: it's learning from my inputs. So how do you protect proprietary information? Maybe I want to draft a response to an employee, but how do I think through a private matter without potentially exposing that employee's personal information? That is going to be the real challenge with technology, and I'm lumping AI and tech together because it's in everything. It's in Salesforce, it's in HubSpot, it's in video recordings, it's in web conferencing tools.
If you're using a free Gmail, Google is reading the email contents for marketing purposes. They don't tell me the contents, but I can tell whether or not your wife is upset that you forgot to pick up Drano on the way home. So for us, one of the big challenges is: how do you balance technology without creating liability?
Brendon Dennewill: That really supports what we were talking about with the Slingshot. If that single back wheel is the technology, and I completely agree that AI is technology, even though it's going to do more than a lot of other technology because it will start helping with process and data and supporting people. But if that wheel gets overly inflated and explodes, the whole thing comes to a screeching halt.
Every business leader has to be strategic. When you're in your weekly L10 and you have an issue on the table, it typically starts: is it a process issue? And if so, is it caused by technology or AI, or can it be improved by it? If not, don't build technology that won't fix that particular process, because until that process is fixed, the business won't move ahead.
Kate Donovan: AI right now reminds me of Icarus. I don't want to fly too close to the sun. I don't want to fly too close to the ocean. Finding that sweet spot is a constant challenge. Even down to a well-meaning team member who grabbed a free tool to transcribe a client call and take notes: who owns that data? Did you just violate something with your clients?
We have clients who've come to us and said, we require you to acknowledge that none of our calls can be recorded: no video, no audio. I think pretty strongly that most businesses are going to need someone whose primary job is the AI component, whether that's a CTO or a CPO. How much data do you put into what platform? It's a daily challenge.
And the speed of change right now: I was at a Google event where they showed the adoption curves for radio, TV, the cell phone, and then AI. And AI's curve is like this. It was wild to see how fast it's changing. I went back through all my vendor agreements the last two months and made sure that where data ownership wasn't specifically called out, it is now. We own our own data set. You cannot use it even for aggregated purposes without express written permission.
Brendon Dennewill: Of course, the stuff going on at the highest levels of Google right now is fascinating, but I won't get into that.
Kate Donovan: Their chief data scientist is also a magician. I always think that's so funny. The guy doing this work that's almost like modern magic is also an actual magician.
Brendon Dennewill: Wow, that is a super cool fun fact.
Brendon Dennewill: While we're on the topic of things evolving and shifting, what is one shift in how you lead and operate today that would have surprised the 2018 version of you?
Kate Donovan: What I've discovered over the last five, six, seven years is that sometimes you go slower to go fast. The 2018 me would not have realized that. The 2025 me knows that sometimes you go just a teeny bit slower, and that actually makes you go faster. It was a hard concept for me to grasp. I'm a very instinctual person, and I operate heavily on instinct, which is not always the best way to operate.
It took people around me saying, just wait one second, for me to internalize that. I'm not an analysis paralysis person. I'm not a let's-rethink-every-decision person. But someone said that line to me: sometimes you go slower to go fast. And I take that to heart.
Brendon Dennewill: That feels almost weekly with our team too. One of our core values is "be better together," which is about teamwork and the fact that we all bring our unique abilities to the table. There's an African proverb: if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. If you're in this for the long run, you have to slow down and make sure you're bringing everybody along. Otherwise you'll get way ahead and alone, and eventually you'll hit a wall you can't get past on your own.
Kate Donovan: I've heard that proverb and I like it. One of our core values is similar but said a little differently: we're dedicated to each other's success. It's about thinking: does what I do contribute to the person I'm handing something off to? Did I put enough information in that ticket so the person receiving it can be successful? That's our version of being in it together.
A lot of it also came from implementing EOS. When you're small, you can do a lot with just willpower. You open the door, tell everyone what you're doing, and get to it. When you get bigger, processes become an absolute requirement for success.
Brendon Dennewill: Which comes back to something else we were discussing: the customer isn't always right. The reason they pay people like us for our services is because they need guidance from people who know what we know that they don't. If they were always right, why would they need us? Which means the people providing that guidance are ultimately our teams. It's no surprise that most businesses with core values have something around teamwork. What are yours?
Kate Donovan: We have a lot of overlap with yours. "Action oriented" is like your "make things happen." "Dedicated to the success of others," I told you about that one. We have a unique one we call GAS, which stands for Give a Shit. There are a lot of people suffering from lack of GAS in the world right now. You have to care about what you're doing, care about the people you work with, care about the people you work for. We also have Grace, which comes from the history of a lot of our team members, sobriety, be who you are, and "humbly confident." Those are our core values.
Brendon Dennewill: We have four currently, and they've evolved using EOS. You kind of revisit them once a year, and you learn from experience and the unintended consequences of where a core value needed to be reframed.
Our first is "lead the change," because we believe change is the only constant. Technology continuously makes the world better. We moved from the Stone Age to the Iron Age not because we ran out of stones, but because we realized you could do more with iron. AI is kind of the latest version of that. The world is already the best it's ever been today, and in two, five, or twenty years it's going to be even better because of the progress we make through technology.
The second is "make things happen." Without action, nothing happens. I got plenty of ideas, but I realized very late in life that until you do something, nothing changes. And the third is "learn with purpose": continuous learning, because if you're not learning about how technology is going to make your life and your clients' lives better, you're going to get left behind.
Kate Donovan: Every time I hear people's core values, I think, I should steal that one. I like "lead the change" a lot. Is it on your website?
Brendon Dennewill: Yes, it's on the site.
Brendon Dennewill: As we wrap up, thinking about your next 60 to 90 days, what advice do you have for business leaders about what they could or should be doing to be better prepared for the future and the growth of their businesses?
Kate Donovan: We're having this conversation on the very last day of July 2025, and I think we are in for a lot of change: market conditions, a lot of change on the AI front. It's just a matter of leaning into your people, your processes, your data, and your technology, and not getting complacent.
The challenge is that what works today, including the right person in the right seat, might shift. Something happens and it changes. So constantly reevaluating those. Going back to the spinning plates: constantly looking at where you need to keep the air in the tires.
Especially with where we are in the world right now, be okay with changing and pivoting. A lot of people don't love change. I love change. Take a deep dive and look, then revisit and look again and look again. That's the biggest thing for me for the next 60 to 90 days. We're going to be spending a lot of time laying the groundwork for going into Q4 and into 2026.
Brendon Dennewill: Really good advice. I couldn't help noticing, as you reminded us about the spinning plates analogy and then going back to what you said earlier about the magician at Google, there are some interesting sound bites going to come out of this recording.
Kate Donovan: Branding never hurts. When I found out he was a magician, I had CAMP-branded decks of cards made. The next time I met him at an event, I ran up and said, "Would you like some cards so you can do your magic tricks?" He was heading to India for the holidays right after that event. He said, "Oh, this will be great." In my head, he was playing with my cards on all his family trips over the holidays. He gets to see my brand over and over and over. Shameless promotion never hurts.
Brendon Dennewill: And hopefully he was happy with the cards. Magicians are very particular about the cards they use.
Kate Donovan: I hadn't thought about that. Now I have to stress about it. Thanks so much.
Brendon Dennewill: I need to ask one more question related to CAMP. The M stands for marketing, and that's where you started and where a lot of your expertise is. But I think you're touching a lot more than just marketing. We started in 2014 as a HubSpot partner when it was a marketing platform. Then they added the CRM, then Service Hub, and now it's a complete customer platform. We went from marketing to business technology focused on the revenue side. Is that kind of evolution something you're thinking about?
Kate Donovan: Yes, because I was literally just with a very large group client yesterday, and we were talking about how marketing and operations are slowly merging. There isn't going to be a clean separation. Marketing and operations are too tied together. It's very easy for marketing to blame operations: "I brought you leads." And operations to say, "They were bad leads." But they're really coming together because of technology.
Because of AI, I can now tell you how many calls we brought in that were bookable, how many forms came in, what we actually produced, right down to whether it came from the side of a bus. For us, it's about meeting our clients where they are. Most of our clients are tradespeople, and most tradespeople still think of it as a single thing. But it's definitely evolving.
Brendon Dennewill: And to your point, you also don't want to complicate things. You want to stick to what you know and solve for the customer. If what they think about when they need you is marketing or leads, that makes total sense. But I do feel like that's going to evolve.
Kate Donovan: We're seeing it, and we're seeing it down at the plumber-who-comes-to-your-house level. I 100% agree with you.
Brendon Dennewill: Excellent. Well, Kate, thanks so much for joining me today. I look forward to another conversation soon.
Kate Donovan: Thank you so very much. I really appreciate your time.