What I’ve seen from Clay and his group at Thrive is they’ll give you a simple system because it’s the simple systems that people can wrap their brain around. They’re the ones that people can work with on a day to day basis, and that simplicity brings our with it. So it shocked me how simple some of the stuff is, and at times I was like, why did not think about that? Workflow creation? Systematic Marketing and having a business coach has helped our church so much. Workflow creation is a process where they look and see every moving part of your church or your ministry. They ask, “What needs to be done?” And it’s going to go up on a massive board. What that does is takes what you know needs to be done out of your heart and out of your head really takes the pressure and the stress off your shoulders, and it puts it on the board in front of your entire team.
That way everyone in your ministry can see exactly what you want them to do every day, and they know this is the playbook. This is what we’re doing. Then there is laser-sharp accountability with a meeting afterward. Did it get done or not? I will tell you, it’s changed the way we execute as a church so fast and it’s produced really an excitement because quality people want to get their stuff done if they know what they’re supposed to do. It’s been massive for our team. Systematic marketing is a big deal for us. In the past, we have done everything, billboards, you know, add some mailers, the internet, Facebook, but we would run something for so long and then we wouldn’t see that it was producing the results that we wanted. Instead of staying consistent, we would jump to another horse, then we would jump to another horse.
What systematic marketing does is it makes you pick some things and stick with it. I’m already seeing, just after just a few months, you know, I’ve been working with Clay since October – about six months ago. I can already see the trajectory going up. People are finding out about us, our number of visitors are going up. I can see our marketing working. It’s just an approach that makes sense. Then the coaching is massive. Thanks to Thrive, we have a business coach who looked and saw what we were doing and helped us make small adjustments. I believe those small tweaks, once he gets everything set up, those small tweaks can make massive differences. A great coach doesn’t even have to play your sport, right? It doesn’t even have to do what you do. A business coach has an eye to see things that you can’t see, or see it from a different angle. Just having that extra eye on what I do to ask, “Have you thought about this?” is making all the difference in the world.
What Clay Clark and his team can provide for your church is all the stuff that you can’t do in house, and I can’t do in house. Well, what’s been massive for me is search engine optimization, how to get to the top of Google. Taking care of transcribing all of my sermons to drive me up the list on Google, that’s stuff that I don’t think about or have time to do. I’ve got all these things I have to do as a pastor, right? I have sermons to preach. I have a staff to manage. I have a budget to take care of. I got sick folks to see. I have a team that has to do that. You know how it is. You’ve got to marry people, you’ve got to bury people. We’re never going to stay in a dark room with the keyboard optimizing our Google presence, and these guys do that kind of thing for you.
Also, if you’re at a couple of hundred member church, I remember how hard it was back in the day to take care of the website needs. You have to come up with all the graphic design and these guys are available to you. They can do sermon slides, so you can have a sharp looking presentation of the Gospel. It takes it off of you and puts it on them at a very reasonable price. I really believe Clay Clark and his team can help a church with limited resources in a big way. I know what it’s like to be a church of limited resources. My wife and I, we walked into a town where we didn’t know anybody. We had a bible and we just had a few bucks in our pocket and somebody introduced us to a couple of families. We started going there, so I know what it’s like to be a church of two and I know what it’s like to be a church of 2000 on 2 different campuses.
I love churches at every level. I believe God wants you to grow. I think about the needs I had back in the day, the lack of direction. I was working 80 hours a week all the time, but a lot of times I was a shotgun instead of a rifle. I think when you start you can really hone in with the right coaching. You can get a lot of your different needs met in one place. Instead of having somebody on marketing, and somebody on showing you how to do systems, and somebody on graphic design, Thrive can do a lot of that for you at a very reasonable cost. I think it’s a great place to invest in for the life of your ministry. I’m telling you, I think you can get the results you want with the coaching here faster than any other way. It’s going to be powerful.