Will this system work for my church?

Now, what it does is it takes what you know needs to be done out of your heart and out of your head, really takes the pressure, the stress, off your shoulders, and it puts it on the board, where your entire team, your ministry, can see exactly what you want them to do every day. So they know this is the playbook, this is what we’re doing. And then there’s laser-sharp accountability with a Business Coaching for Churches meeting afterwards, did it get done, or not? Tell you, it’s changed the way we execute as a church so fast, and it’s produced, really, an excitement, because people they want to get done, if they know what they’re supposed to do, a good person wants to get it done. It’s been massive for our team.

The systematic marketing has really been like this, in the past, we used to market, and we would try something. I’ve done everything, billboards, ads, and mailers, internet, Facebook, but we would run something for so long, and then we wouldn’t see that it was producing the results we want, and instead of staying consistent, we would jump to another horse, then we would jump to another horse. And what systematic marketing does is it makes you pick some things and stick with it.

And I’m already seeing, just after just a few months. I’ve been working with Clay since October, about six month ago. I can already see just the trajectory going up. People are finding out about us. Our number of visitors are going up. I can see the marketing working. And it’s just an approach that makes sense.

And then the coaching is massive. I think having a coach that looks and sees what you’re doing, and can come help you make small adjustments, I believe those small tweaks, once he gets everything set up, those small tweaks can make massive differences. And a great coach doesn’t even have to play your sport, right? Doesn’t even have to do what you do. A coach has an eye to see things that you can’t see, or to see it from a different angle. Just having that extra eye on what I do, and just, “Hey, have you thought about this?” It’s making all the difference in the world.

What Clay Clark and his team can provide for your church that you can’t do in house, and I can’t do in house. Well, what’s been massive for me is that 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, stuff that I don’t think about and I don’t 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 folk to see about, I have a team that has to do that. You know how it is, you got to marry people, you got to bury people. We’re never going to stay in a dark room with a keyboard optimizing our Google presence, and these guys do that kind of thing for you.

Also, if you’re at a couple hundred member church. I remember how hard it was, back in the day, to take care of the website needs. To come up with graphic design. And these guys are available to you for sermon slides, getting that kind of stuff done where you can have a sharp looking presentation of the gospel, and it takes it off 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. 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 and two different campuses now, a thousand apiece, and everywhere in between. I love churches at every level, I believe God wants them all to grow. And I think about the needs I had back in the day. The lack of direction I had. Man, 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 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. 

Well, I first heard about Thrive 15 from my wife. She was actually working with Clay and then some other people that I knew that had been working with him, and Clay reached out to me and I came in for an initial visit and thought this is really something that would benefit us as a church. I don’t have the money for staff members to run these kind of things. So having Clay as a mentor and as a coach was really something that I was interested in.

We’ve looked into hiring people to do our media stuff and consulting for us, but it would cost us, I don’t know, three or $4,000 a month to hire someone to do this full time, and then to be able to get the Business Coaching for Churches that Clay has, I couldn’t hire someone to do that for me. This is a great situation for us. We have a weekly meeting where I come in and we just collaborate.

Clay helps me with ideas and coaches me through processes that we’re doing with staffing and hiring and managing our ministry. They also take care of all of our graphics, our computer, our website, any ads that we do, any printed pieces that we do. They put those out in a very fast clip so that we have them and we can get them mailed out or get them on our website really quickly. So they do all that kind of stuff for us.

Now another thing, they also do training of our employees and of our media people. And if we ever have an issue here in the church, they come by and troubleshoot it for us. So it’s really a one stop shop for us. I would describe Thrive 15 business coaching, mentoring network. I’ve pastored small churches most of my life and have put out subpar material, websites, tried to bounce things off of my wife and anybody else who would listen. But being able to come in and have someone with this kind of experience in this kind of know how with this expertise in what they do in the product that they put out, it’s a great situation for us. And so I would just say to those of you who are pastors of smaller churches, and you’re trying to get people to do web stuff for you or trying to get people to produce stuff for you, if you’re like me, you do it all yourself. Investing in something like this for the fee that they charge really, truly is a win-win for them, it’s a win-win for me, and I think it would be a great thing for you guys to get involved with.