Annie Freeman joined CAMP in 2016 as Office Manager. Ten years later, she’s Chief Administration Officer. We talked with her about growing from 12 employees to nearly 50, what it actually takes to keep a company running, and why she will always pick up the phone when someone’s car breaks down.
Tell us about how your time with CAMP started out. How did you end up here?
My background was in HR. I did recruitment for a hospital system in Indianapolis right out of undergrad, went back and got my MBA, and during grad school transitioned into hiring for non-clinical staff across the whole network, including finance, accounting, HR, and environmental services. After we moved to Austin, TX for my husband’s grad school, I continued working in recruitment for a brain injury rehab facility and eventually got promoted to HR Director.
When we moved again in 2014, I was doing payroll and benefits remotely for that same company. When that company was sold, the new company already had HR staff, so I was in the market for a new role.
I learned that CAMP was about to hire a new Office Manager just before I was laid off from that previous role. The position was based in Colorado Springs, but they didn’t have an office, so it was technically a remote opportunity. I was in Pittsburgh with an HR background, an MBA, and experience scaling operations for a growing company, but I wasn’t sure they’d really want to consider someone that far away from Colorado, or someone who wanted to work part-time.
On the day of the actual interview, I was so sick I could barely talk. I sent an email to cancel because I felt it wouldn’t be a good professional representation. Kate called me anyway, since at the time CAMP email wasn’t enforced as the work communication method, so she hadn’t yet seen my cancellation email. I did the interview, coughing throughout, and late because I thought I had canceled it. I got off the call and told my husband there was zero chance they were going to offer me the job, because while I was confident I could do the job, I did not feel like I presented myself effectively. Well, they offered me the job!
One of the interview questions I still remember was when Greg (one of the original founders) asked how I’d handle five bosses. I had never had five bosses, but I was pretty confident I could handle it, so I think I said something like I’d figure out the priority and work from there, but in practice it took a lot more understanding the why behind asks and learning leadership’s preferences about how to present information.
What did CAMP look like operationally when you walked in?
There were 12 physicists on the team when I started. It was still small enough that they didn’t need to have a lot of standardization. There wasn’t really a central administrative hub. There was an Office Manager who handled some administrative pieces and a contracted bookkeeper who worked 2 days a month who handled invoices and things like that. Everybody was storing files on their own computers and using their own personal cell phone numbers. We were printing and mailing reports to some clients. Physicists were communicating from personal email addresses like Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL or for the physicists working in Rad Onc, they had client-supported emails. Time tracking was submitting an Excel sheet at the end of the month. I looked back through my notes before this interview and there is a note from my first day that says “set up Sharepoint trial.”
One of the first things I did was get everyone onto Microsoft 365 and a shared file system. Everybody was on CAMP emails for their main work communication. It was a transition, and it took some time, but it went well overall and helped streamline some processes right away.
Why does centralized admin matter?
Because now if a client calls and says they can’t find their 2024 inspection report, I can find it in 30 seconds without having to reach out to the physicists. We don’t have to know who did it or exactly what day it happened. If we know the client and the type of machine, we can pull that up without any trouble. If we get a call from an urgent care that has changed ownership, but they know what day their last report was – they don’t need to know what the old name was – I can search by the date completed and find every inspection done that day across all clients and find the one they need, because we’ve standardized how things are stored and saved.
When hospitals get audited or have a review for accreditation, those inspectors don’t want to wait to get additional documentation from a contractor. We’ve created credential packets for our physicists and we periodically send those out to clients and have them available online so our clients always have the most up-to-date information and don’t have to wait for us to answer the phone, call a physicist, have them pull up their continuing education, fax it to the facility, etc. That shows the auditors how prepared we and the client are for their review.
It helps staff fill in for each other too. If Brad goes to a facility one year and Nick goes the next, Nick knows where the previous files are stored and exactly how we do it, because we do it the same way every single time.
This isn’t just admin standardization either. The physics and dosimetry teams have done an amazing job over the last ten years of creating “the CAMP way” of doing inspections and working with clients. This allows them to step in and help each other out without having to learn a new process for every client facility. I’m not sure we could even begin to calculate the time saved by this standardization, which allows the team to focus on even more best practices for our clients.
CAMP has gone from 12 people to nearly 50 in the time you’ve been here. What does managing that growth actually look like?
A lot of it is trying to stay ahead of things so they don’t become a problem. Last year, when we were still in the mid-30s for headcount, we were in discussions about a potential new contract that would require a lot of new hires. I brought a list to the leadership team of everything that changes once you cross 50 employees. New HR forms, new regulations, new compliance requirements, there’s a lot of new regulations that apply when you cross that mark, which we are now set to do this summer.
Most of what was on the list we were already doing as general best practice. The rest we put in place before we hit that threshold.
We did the same thing with time tracking and payroll as a couple examples. We transitioned from spreadsheet time tracking and invoicing to an online system before the employee and client list got too big to manage that way. We switched from manual payroll in Quickbooks to a full HRIS Payroll system (when we had two states to manage, not seven!) to automate processes. That way we weren’t scrambling to backtrack and we stayed ahead of the curve.
You came in with five owners and bosses. How did you figure out who to prioritize and when?
In the interview, Greg asked me how I’d handle five bosses. I think I said I’d figure out who had the priority, and work from there. But then I actually had the job, and practice wasn’t as cut and dry.
Everyone’s request felt like the most important one and it took me some time to learn how that worked. First, I’d look at scope, like how many people does this affect, is it staff or clients, is this a real conflict or just a formatting preference? Most of the time it was a preference thing, simply two people who just hadn’t aligned on how something should look, not a genuine disagreement or it was two completely different requests and I just had to sort out which one needed to be completed first.
For the harder calls, I’d go to a third leader who wasn’t part of either request and get some outside context on what each person was actually trying to solve. Once I had gained enough trust and context, I could often make the decision.
You started in 2016 as Office Manager and now your title is Chief Administration Officer. How did that change and what did that look like in practice?
My title changed in mid-2019 to CFO (Chief Financial Officer). The five partners had been owners for about five years at that point and each of them had an area of the business that they oversaw (Finance, HR, Marketing, etc.). The leadership team met that summer (2019) to review what the company had been doing over those five years and where they wanted the company to be in three, five, and ten years. That was when official “titles” were updated and I became part of the Leadership Team, but as far as role changes, I think it was a transition over time. Because of my HR background, I was able to make recommendations regarding HR policies and practices from the beginning and started taking on some of that work from the current ownership team. I was able to help take some of the finance responsibilities from the owner handling that piece and I started taking on some tasks that our bookkeeper had handled previously like processing payroll and Accounts Receivable/Accounts Payable work so we could get invoices out more often than just once a month as we began increasing in staff and client size. I recommended a new benefits broker that I had worked with previously and began managing the benefits piece, so it was a lot of little things adding on throughout the first couple of years. We recently completed a review of our Admin team responsibilities and decided to update my title from CFO to CAO: Chief Administration Officer since some of the things I manage don’t necessarily fall under the Finance umbrella.
What does your actual day-to-day look like now?
It’s different every day, which is great. Benefit questions, new hire paperwork, vacation requests, finance reports, invoices, contracts, client questions, etc. I don’t spend all day, every day looking at the same spreadsheet or finance reports like a lot of CFOs. Don’t get me wrong though, I do love spreadsheets and have been known to make spreadsheets for decisions that probably didn’t require a spreadsheet. This way I get a little bit of everything each week and some days I get nothing on my to-do list done because of things that come up throughout the day, but that’s ok.
You seem passionate about benefits and how they impact everyone.
It’s one of my favorite parts, honestly and I don’t think I would have said that about benefits 10 years ago. Not because problems are fun, but because I like being the person who knows what’s available when someone else doesn’t and with a small company, I get to experience that more than I had previously at larger companies.
Most people know that things like paid family leave or short-term disability exist. They just don’t think about the details until they’re in the middle of something hard. So I can say to someone ‘you don’t have to use all your sick time for this. That’s what paid family leave is for.’ Or, ‘take the time you need after surgery, that’s why we have a short-term disability plan.’
I’ve sent 17 follow-up emails to get someone to finish their benefits enrollment. I’d rather chase someone down than have them end up without coverage.
What surprised you most about working with a team of physicists?
Stereotypically, and in a lot of other places, a lot of physicists are not ‘people people’. They want to knock out their work, not talk to anyone, and be done at the end of the day.
CAMP has somehow found a whole bunch who actually like talking to people, and that has made a huge difference! Not just for me, but for our clients and the whole admin team. Each of us on the admin team has had the chance to shadow physicists on inspections, and they explain what they’re doing.
On a shadow opportunity I once asked a physicist to ‘explain this to me like I’m a college student thinking about becoming a physicist. I know what a mammo machine is. Walk me through what you’re doing with it. I don’t need the calculations, just the general picture.’ She did it in a way I understood the general principles, why it mattered, and how it worked.
That baseline understanding of the process really matters. For example, when I’m on a call with a hospital administrator who doesn’t have a physics background either, I can answer a lot of questions without pulling a physicist in. I can walk someone through a contract and explain what they’re actually signing up for.
CAMP has always talked about being a different kind of company. What does that look like from where you sit?
The founders started CAMP to be the company that they wanted to work for. It’s a completely different company now than in the 80s, but there’s that same underlying principle of ‘if this isn’t what we want to work for, we’re not going to do that.’ If covering 100% of health insurance premiums for employees and their families is an important thing, then we’re going to keep that. By implementing that mentality, it’s another stressor we can take off people’s lives.
There are other things like that: the camping trip every year, the hiking challenge we’re doing this summer, the annual events that get people together. At almost 50 people it’s hard to say everyone’s close. But that instinct to show up for each other, that’s stayed.
A lot of companies use the ‘we’re a family’ kind of slogan. There’s almost 50 of us now and we are spread across multiple states, so it’s really hard to say we’re a family and we’re all friends because people don’t know each other the way they did when there were 12 people. But, we still have that baseline in our thought processes as we’re making decisions for the company because we want it to be a company that people want to work for long-term and we want people to enjoy the work they do and the people they do it with so we’ll continue to have those company-wide gatherings throughout the year, both in-person and virtually to keep those connections growing.
Even for things that aren’t technically work-related, like your car breaks down, if something’s going on, call me. Tell me what’s going on. I’ll see if there’s a way we can help. I really want to make sure we hold on to that as we keep growing.
What do the next ten years look like?
I think technology will be really different. AI is already part of the conversation, and there are probably a lot of things that will be more automated in ten years than they are now.
Technology can help us in a lot of ways, but there are still many things that need a personal touch. Benefits enrollment could be a portal, but the portal won’t call you when you missed the sign-up deadline. Paid family leave could be just a form, but people don’t think about paid family leave until they’re in the middle of something hard and they have questions. Those moments needs a person and I think CAMP is set up to keep those personal connections even as we grow and technology changes the field of medical physics and dosimetry.
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Last updated: April 2026
