Great Wolf Resorts CEO Kim Schaefer works all over the company on 'Undercover Boss'

Pulling off the production on the CBS hit "Undercover Boss" takes a lot of work, but even with extensive preparation, slipups happen.

"There was one employee who did recognize me," says Kim Schaefer, the chief executive officer of Great Wolf Resorts, which is featured Sunday at 9 on CBS.

"I know most of our management team, and they were either absent, had the day off or had an assignment outside the lodge," Schaefer told the Daily News.

Yet one staffer did spot her. That employee wasn't part of the group Schaefer worked with during the filming, however, so viewers won't see the encounter.

However, it does expose the difficulty of pulling off a show built around having a top executive go undercover within a company. Schaefer, it should be noted, is the first female boss in the show.

"What this show gave me is the opportunity to be somebody else and listen and learn and participate," she says.

If Schaefer had been there as the boss, she says she would have wanted to fix little problems. But with the cameras on, and in the guise of a regular employee, she was able to watch.

"The biggest challenge was keeping quiet," she says. "Definitely in the middle of a shift, or at the end of the shift, I wanted to do more with the information I had."

But she couldn't.

During the show, she worked in one of the day-care centers at a Great Wolf Lodge and also in the water park. At another site, she staffed the front desk, and in yet another she worked as a waitress.

Schaefer says the producers of the show had urged her to take part in it, and says there were not a lot of active discussions on whether to do it.

"I knew this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity," she says.

Indeed, one upside to the show has been a boon to the featured businesses. Schaefer says she expects some uptick after the program airs.

Locally, she says, the Great Wolf Lodge in Pennsylvania's Pocono Mountains, generates roughly 68% of its business from New Yorkers.

The season premiere last week averaged 11.54 million viewers, up against tough football competition on NBC. Last year, including a big night after the Super Bowl, "Undercover Boss" averaged more than 17 million viewers and became one of the hottest series on TV, and the rare show that families can watch together.

Schaefer says she didn't find anything terribly wrong with her operations, just some things to tweak along the way, like the length of time it takes to check in and how hot it is for employees at the water park.

"My expectations were that I was going to come in as a CEO and look at it through the eyes of the CEO," she says. "It ended up being about the people, and me as a working mom."

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