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Successful entrepreneurs are typically great at pivoting. They may have started a company to sell a specific product or address a certain market need, and then one day — often by sheer happenstance — something seems to shift. Such was the case for Meghan Gardner, who thinks of herself as “the queen of pivot.”
Gardner is the founder of Guardian Adventures, which operates day and summer camps where kids act out stories filled with monsters, knights, wizards, and zombies while also learning about science, literature, and history. Twenty years ago, she was a stay-at-home mom who ran a martial arts and fencing company in the evenings. Then she attended a live action role-playing (LARP) event for adults.
“You'd dress up in costumes and act out a medieval fantasy,” she recalls. “You have these swords that are made out of PVC and foam and you battle monsters and you solve mysteries. It was a lot of fun and I thought, ‘why isn’t this being done for kids’’’?
Gardner explained her concept to a couple of teachers and hired them to create educational adventures. “And lo and behold, it just completely took off,” she says.
“It became so popular that I ended up giving up my martial arts program because I wanted to focus on these adventures.”
Her camp programs now serve more than 1,000 children who come from all over the world to attend. “We have an entire path that allows us to take a child from age four all the way up to the age of 20, when we will have the option to hire them,” says Gardner.
Since she started the company, her programs have evolved. For instance, Gardner now incorporates cultural stories and brings in consultants who represent cultures from around the world “so we don’t cross over into cultural appropriation or present stories in a way that’s inauthentic or insulting.” This year, the company has partnered with the Center for Arabic Culture in Boston to explore Syrian and Sumerian myths and legends. And Gardner has brought in teachers to help incorporate the STEM elements. “If you stop one of our seven-year-olds on the battlefield, they won’t just recite Newton’s laws of physics, but they can also demonstrate them because that’s what they need to do to power up, like in a video game.”
Gardner’s primary market: frustrated parents who want to get their video-gaming kids outside in the fresh air, unplugged, and making real face-to-face friends. “We draw in kids who are like us: self-described nerds and geeks — the comic book and Star Wars fans who love really rich stories.” She’s also starting a new program for adults, does some corporate work, and is partnering with organizations like The Princeton Review to create custom programs.
A committed networker, Gardner joined Forbes Business Council in March 2018 and has attended several events, “but one of them, in particular, was just amazing.” On a Boston rooftop, in the middle of winter, a dozen participants huddled in “igloos” with hot drinks and talked about the challenges they were facing in their businesses. For Gardner, hiring the right staff has always been a struggle. One of the attendees suggested she try the job search engine SimplyHired. “It was free, so I submitted a job and I got a ton of resumes,” she says. “My operations director was just thrilled.”
At the event, Gardner also met a woman who runs a speaking bureau who has encouraged her to pursue public speaking and possibly creating a TED talk. Gardner says she walked away from the event with pages of notes on “all kinds of creative solutions that everyone had. I also felt like I was helping the people in that space to find solutions to their own problems. Because each of us is local, we knew people in the area and were able to both give advice as well as suggest people who could solve the challenge at hand."
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