The CEO Playbook Behind Avery Lane's 10-Year Growth | Camille Hildebrand

When Camille Hildebrand opened her first women's treatment program (Avery Lane), she was 23 years old, four years into her career in behavioral health, and surrounded by corporate-owned facilities run by men who had been in the field longer than she had been alive.

"I got treated like the cute little girl with the cute little program," she said. The subtext was rarely subtle. We won't see you in six months.

Avery Lane for Women is now approaching its 10-year anniversary.

In this episode of Recovery Reach, Camille talks through the founder story behind that milestone: how a receptionist job at a men's facility turned into a career, how she scaled from 14 beds to a multi-site continuum without losing the culture she built, and what she wishes someone had told her when the industry was busy underestimating her.

The moment in the treatment team meeting

Camille got sober at 17, the night she graduated high school. About a year into recovery she took a job at an all-men's facility that had only been open six months. She was the second woman they hired. She was 19, working as the office manager and receptionist, and she was not sure she wanted a career in treatment at all.

A month in, she was invited into a clinical and medical team meeting to take notes.

"It was like the clouds had separated, the light came in," she said. She sat and listened to physicians, therapists, case managers, and techs talk through each person in the program. "Realizing, like a bolt of lightning, this is what I'm supposed to do with my life."

She enrolled in her first psychology class at community college the next semester, which turned into six years of night classes to finish her bachelor's degree.

She also did something that ended up mattering more than the degree. Over five years, she worked nearly every role at the facility that did not require a clinical license. She learned how to bring insurance billing in house. She ran admissions. She served as executive assistant to the CEO. She helped the clinical director build a family program. She revised policies and procedures alongside the operations director.

"But without realizing it, I was learning how to run a facility."

Five years in, the owner came to her with a proposal. Marin County had lost its county women's program a few years earlier, and nothing had replaced it. He wanted to build one. He wanted her to run it.

Why being naive was an advantage

Camille is direct about what she did not know at 23. Days before her first employee started, she realized she needed workers' compensation insurance. Nobody had told her.

She also thinks the inexperience worked in her favor.

"Being young and being naive to the larger world of this insane industry was really helpful, because I got put through the wringer in my first couple of years."

Her advice for anyone opening a program is built around that: come in with open eyes, stay a little naive, ask questions, have conversations. What she carried out of her years on the floor was not a business framework. It was a clear sense of what she had wanted from her own leader, what she wanted to be brought into as a staff member, and what she did not.

Her original goal was smaller than the org chart she manages today. "If I could just help one woman, I would have set out my goal and completed the task."

What Avery Lane actually looks like now

Avery Lane treats women with substance use disorders and mental health conditions under what Camille describes as a trauma-specialized umbrella. The programs sit just north of San Francisco and include:

• A primary mental health facility treating women with psychiatric conditions
• Sub-primary substance use programs covering detox and residential care, including co-occurring mental health treatment
• Step-down PHP and IOP

The continuum is the point. Women stay anywhere from a seven-day detox to six or nine months across the full continuum, working with the same therapist at every level of care. Groups stay small and care stays individualized.

The clinical model reflects a deliberate bet on modalities that were not standard in treatment when Avery Lane opened. Camille brought in her founding clinical director, now the organization's chief clinical officer, in part because of her range: energy psychology, conscious recovery, brainspotting. When the team trained on brainspotting, they tracked what happened to outcomes afterward.

"People are still relapsing after treatment. I really wanted to make a difference in that."

The accessibility decision most luxury programs do not make

Marin County is beautiful and expensive. Avery Lane leans into the setting. Camille picks out the furniture and the sheets herself.

Then she made a choice that cuts against the standard playbook for that kind of real estate. Avery Lane is primarily in network.

"I want them to have that high-end experience with the best of the best clinical care, the best of the best medical care and psychiatric care, but still be accessible to the people that need their $100 copay waived to be able to come in."

The team continues adding contracts, and since COVID Camille has spent more time traveling to conferences and building partnerships with groups that have no women's program in their portfolio to offer members or employees. The result is a census drawn from across the country rather than only from Marin.

For operators, this is the interesting part of the model. High-acuity, trauma-specialized care in a premium market, structured so that a private-pay family and a family that needs financial help can both get through the door.

Scaling without losing the thing you built

Ask Camille about culture and she describes something she built partly for herself. She wanted a place she would love coming to every day, with people who felt like family.

The evidence shows up in the leadership team. Her executive director started as a recovery counselor. Her director of operations was her very first hire, an executive assistant, and is still there almost 10 years later.

"When a crisis ensues, you see a flock of people coming together to help that situation. You don't see anyone on the sidelines saying, 'I'm not doing that. That's not my job.'"

She is also clear that culture is an invitation rather than a guarantee. "We're not for everyone on the client side, we're not for everyone on the staff side. Working in treatment is really hard."

The hardest operational stretch was growth. In 2023, Avery Lane went from two residential houses totaling 14 beds to adding a third substance use house, bringing capacity to 20 beds, then opened its first primary mental health residential program at six beds.

"Going from a small program to a larger organization, I had never done that before, and just trying to figure out what our org chart should look like was so complicated."

What got her through it was the phone. She could call friends in the industry and say, plainly, that she was struggling and did not know what to do.

Loneliness at the top, and the list on her phone

Recovery Reach hears a version of this from almost every operator we talk to. Camille named the specific version of it that shows up for leaders who are themselves in recovery.

"When you need help, all of a sudden you're breaking that boundary of I'm a professional having this conversation, and now I'm a human being, when I'm supposed to show my community that I have everything together."

She has watched leaders in the field crumble under that weight. Some relapsed. So from the day Avery Lane opened, she built in a structure: five to 10 people on her speed dial she can call if anything happens, plus people in her life with standing permission to tell her it is time to make those calls, because she might miss the yellow flags herself.

Camille celebrated 15 years of recovery last year. Her rule has not moved.

"I cannot put Avery Lane, I cannot put my position before my recovery."

She also points at the gap that opens up in a field full of professionals in recovery. "It's easy for us to say to our clients, 'Just ask for help.' I think it's harder for people that work in treatment to say, 'Hey, I need help.'"

Overrated and underrated

Asked what the field undervalues, Camille did not hesitate: human connection.

She hated marketing when she started, specifically the conference-hallway version of it. The weather, the travel, how long are you staying, the questions you pull out of your back pocket. What she wanted was the meat and potatoes.

"When I connect with someone that's in recovery, I find my brother, I find my sister."

Her advice for behavioral health leaders

Camille's closing answer was about the thing that keeps her showing up on the unbearable days: reconnecting to her why, and remembering the 23-year-old who just wanted to help one person.

"It's common to lose that original why working in this space. We get distracted by a lot of shiny things, a lot of futures that could be promised."

"People just becoming disconnected to, we're treating humans, we're helping humans, we're helping people. Please don't forget that."

And the advice she wishes someone had given her at 23, while the men with 30 years in the field were quietly setting a timer on her program?

"Don't listen to those f***ers. Just keep going. If you have a dream, if you are sitting in that seat and you just know you're supposed to be doing what you're doing, just go for it."

Ten years later, the nameplate on her office door still surprises her.