The Carey Nieuwhof Leadership Podcast
CNLP 042 – The Enterpreneurial Church Leader–An Interview with Brady Shearer
(upbeat music) - Welcome to the Carrie Newhoff Leadership Podcast, a podcast all about leadership, change, and personal growth. The goal? To help you lead like never before, in your church or in your business. And now your host, Carrie Newhoff. - Well, hey everybody, and welcome to episode 42 of the podcast. My name is Carrie Newhoff. I hope our time together today helps you lead like never before. And I'm really, I always say super excited. You ever notice you get into like your pet phrases, communicators, that is my pet phrase for sure. So if you're really bored one day, just go back to all the episodes and listen to me say super excited. And then I'll come out with some new pet phrase in the future, but it's fun, you know, that's one of the advantages of having kids, by the way, is your kids just point out all your pet phrases and all your weird mannerisms. And if you're a communicator like I am, 'cause that's what I do, I'm a preacher most Sundays, they will point that out. So anyway, but I am super excited to have on episode 42 today, Brady Shearer. And Brady is somebody that I met probably online about a year ago, I guess, because he invited me to do his podcast. So I was a guest on the Pro Church Tools podcast. It's a great podcast with some really fascinating leaders more on the technical like video audio, sort of media side of church. So if you haven't discovered that, you should discover that. And I was just really fascinated with his story. I mean, here he is at the time I think he was 22 or 23, just out of the gate, leading a growing business, helping churches do communications better. And I was fascinated by it. It also turns out you'll hear this in the interview. His dad and I went to high school together. So that kind of dates me, you know, and a half of your staff could be your kids. That's almost where we are at CanX's church where I serve. But anyway, really neat. Brady's just one of those leaders. And church communication is changing, but I wanted to talk to Brady for a couple of reasons. Number one, about church communication, how to do it better. But secondly, I'm just always interested in things that scale. I'm interested in things that grow. And his business has grown massively. And he has done an incredible job as a young leader to do that. So I always think it's fun to learn from everybody. And just 'cause I'm probably old enough to be his dad, well, I'm definitely old enough to be his dad, doesn't mean you can't learn from somebody half your age. So anyway, Brady Shear, fantastic leader. I think you're really gonna enjoy that today. And hey, speaking of leadership, did you know that registration is now open for the Orange Tour? And we are gonna be in 15 cities in the United States this fall with the Orange Tour, Reggie Joyner, John Acuff, myself, and a host of other speakers. I'm gonna be in about half of those cities. And you can see all the details at orangetour.org. It's one of my favorite things to do all year. Basically, we just fly into cities. We set up camp for one day. Two days actually in California this year in Irvine, California in September. And part of the idea of going to your town is it makes it a lot easier than flying to a central city or airfare and hotel and all that. You can basically just come for the day trip or drive a few hours. And you can bring lots of people and it's very economical. And it's a lot of fun too. One of the things I really, really enjoy every year. So just go to orangetour.org. And you can register right there. And of course, everything will be in the show notes. So all you have to do is go to carrynewhoff.com/episode42. And you'll find everything right there. So really excited that you joined us today. And thank you everybody for leaving reviews and subscribing. The podcast continues to grow every single week. It gets into the hands of new leaders. That makes it very motivating to keep doing this. And we just really, really appreciate it. When you share, when you leave a review, when you leave a rating on iTunes, on Stitcher or TuneInRadio, thank you so much for doing that. And here is my interview with Brady Shearer. Well, hey everybody, this is exciting. I've got Brady Shearer as my guest today. Brady, welcome to the podcast. So great to be here, Carrie. Thrilled, thanks for having me on. Hey, this is fun because you do a podcast and we have exactly the same microphone, right? Like this big intimidating radio microphone. It's true. There's probably like one giant podcast business that informs all other new podcasts on how to start their podcast. And so we all have like the same gear because, you know, we're using their same affiliate links. Who did you learn? Like, I did all mine through affiliate links. So I feel like it was a combination of Pat Flynn and the podcast Answerman. Exactly, that's what I did. I know that's exactly what I did. We didn't rehearse this. It was like Pat Flynn's, by the way, if you want to start a podcast, just go to smartpassiveincome.com. Pat Flynn, I was listening to him earlier today when I was cutting the grass. And like, he's one of my favorite podcasts. And if you listen to his, you know, I completely ripped off his format. I did. I just really liked it and thought, nobody's really doing this in the church world, so I'm gonna do it. But you've got a podcast and you're 60 episodes into it? Yeah, yeah, we are. So our podcast is called The Pro Church Podcast. And we focus on digital media and the church. So videos, websites, graphic design, branding, social media, the sort of things that you, I went to Baba College. The sort of things you never get taught in seminary or Baba College. But then you get thrust into the world of church leadership. And suddenly it's like, oh, I'm a worship pastor, but I have to create a graphic for this. Or I have to start a new website for the youth ministry. And you don't know how to do those things, but they suddenly become pretty integral to the church life. So we try to bring on experts to talk about that sort of stuff. Yeah, so you went to seminary, but that wasn't like too long ago, was it? No, I'm like one year removed from graduation. And how old are you, Brady? 24, just turned 24. Just turned 24. Last time I talked to you, you were 23. Yeah, I was like, things have changed. That was like my amazing year. I turned 23 on the 23rd. So, you know, it was all downhill after that for me personally. Well, that's good to know. That's for those encouraging words. Yeah, you're welcome. You're welcome. That's what I do. I just encourage people all day long. So that's great. So you're brand new at this. And I want to talk a little bit about the world of digital media and how that's impacting church. But I think there's another really cool story. And it would be the kind of story that Pat Flynn would love, which is you actually started out trying to help churches. And all of a sudden, you know, the services you offer, the business quotes you run has exploded in what? The last two years or something? Yeah, it's been running for two years now. And yeah, it has been quite the journey. Wow. Wow. So tell us a little bit about that. What does pro-church tools do? Sure. Well, I mean, like I mentioned, I did go to Bible College to be a youth pastor. I have my degree in theology and youth ministry. And then somewhere along the line, probably around my second year, I started to, I was interning at a church. I was on staff at a church. And I was starting to see that church life and me being fully vocational in church was it kind of felt like, you know, a square peg, me being the peg in a round hole. I mean, like I was trying to force myself into this traditional world of youth pastorship and what they wanted me to be. And I'm pretty fragile individual carry. Okay. What does that mean? What does that mean, Brady? It just means that like, I guess I knew that the specific skills that I had were very precise and I guess different than most of my peers within the youth pastor trek that we were on. And I knew that if I went in to be a full time youth pastor, I would not be filled and doing the things that I knew that God wanted me to do. Sure. And the best way that I can describe it is just like, it might have been like, it's like multiple choice. So sometimes there are a couple right answers in the multiple choice, but you have to choose the best answer. And the best answer in my multiple choice in this case was not being a youth pastor. Even if it was a really good answer, it wasn't the best one. So I had to kind of give up good to pursue great, if that makes sense. Yeah. And what you're doing though is really different, which is, I love the way you frame that in the context of a call too, because I mean, you run a business or you can call it a ministry. But I think one of the things that's still subject of a lot of debate in church world is like where entrepreneurs fit in. And I'm entrepreneurial in nature. That's sort of, that's always been close to my heart, but you know, probably one of the most hated blog posts I ever wrote is why the church needs more entrepreneurs, not more shepherds. And every couple of days I get hate mail on that, which is fun. It's not hate mail. But you know what I mean? People are like, no, no, no, no, the church needs more shepherds, not entrepreneurs. But you're, you know, I just disagree. And I just think we need that entrepreneurship. And that's what you're doing, but you're doing it parrot church beside the church, right? Right. So I was a media director at my church on staff, and I was kind of thrust into the role and I said, Hey, you know, you're young, you can learn video and websites and graphic design, right? Like you're in your 20s. I was like, okay, sure, that sounds fun. And I started learning these skills. And I was learning them by piecing together different tutorials and training, um, products online, learning how to, oh, this is how you use Photoshop. And this is how you create a video. And as I was doing these things, plenty of people in my city in my church were asking like, Hey, how can we learn these things? And I was like, man, all these talents and skills that I've learned, they weren't super difficult to learn, meaning that I don't think I'm anyone special who learned how to create a video that looks nice and a graphic that isn't terrible. I don't think I'm anyone special, but I wanted to create these, this training platform where where churches could, could come and learn these skills that they need. But again, are probably not being taught, uh, when they go through school and even, you know, when they're, when they're beyond that, there just isn't too many training resources out there, uh, for this. There's a lot of people that can do it for you, but I, I wanted to empower leaders within the church to do it themselves because I think that they can. So what do you do? Like tell it, tell us what your business offers. That's, that's good. For sure. For sure. Well, we release a new podcast every Tuesday, like we, like we talked before, we release a new video tutorial every Thursday. And those are kind of the three pieces of content that we put out every single week. So yeah, new, new podcasts every Tuesday, new video every Thursday, what's the video tutorial cover? Right. Well, uh, this week specifically recording this on a Friday, it came out yesterday. It was a behind the scenes look at us creating a sermon bumper for a church. So cool. They wanted, uh, they sent in a sermon, a bumper submission to us and they're like, Hey, uh, we had this new series coming up. It's called hook line and sinker. And we want to focus the, the bumper and the branding around fishing. So we took our team out to a local pond in our area with a completely, uh, non-functional fishing rod and that we filmed this sermon bumper. And so what we did was not only did we film the sermon bumper for the church, but we filmed ourselves filming it so that we could share that behind the scenes with our, with our audience. This is like a movie. Okay. We filmed the movie of the movie. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. It's sermon bumper inception. Exactly. That's what I was looking for. Thank you. You rescued me. That's good. So, um, okay. So you did that. And, and those are your free pieces, but the heart of your business is you produce media for churches, right? Digital media. Correct. You do have the side of the business where we will do it for you if you want. And that's over at provideoannouncements.com. We focus mostly on video announcements, um, but we also create sermon bumpers. But what I'm most excited about is this thing that we have coming up called Pro Church Academy. And it's the thing that we've been building towards for two years, uh, speaking business wise, you know, we had to kind of build an audience of people that, uh, thought that we knew what we were talking about and liked what we were producing and liked the way that we were coming, the direction that we were coming from. And now that we have that audience, we're finally ready to launch this. So the idea of Pro Church Academy is it's going to be, you know, hopefully the platform where leaders, pastors can come and learn these skills that their churches need to thrive in this digital age that we're living in. So we have a course, uh, called producing video announcements from scratch. We've of course called the 11 step blueprint to building a better website. And so we're building this platform where churches can come and learn these things. So it's not just like a one off video tutorial, but, you know, 18 lessons within an entire course takes you from beginning to end. Oh, so in other words, it's a train your staff train yourself kind of deal precisely because I think churches and pastors can do this. Like I, I'm not anyone special. I just learned how to do it piecing together different tutorials. So we're trying to create a all encompassing single platform where they can come and learn that stuff. Cool. Okay. So I know there are a lot of entrepreneurial church leaders who listen to this podcast. So give us some secrets before we dive into digital media and how that's changing the church landscape. Give us some secrets on how you figured out how to lead this at such a young age. I mean, just, you know, happy birthday, 24. I mean, you're figuring out scale because this is not a small business. How many churches are you helping now? Like two years into this, right? We have 65 churches that we create video announcements for every week. Uh, at the time of this report, did you hear that people 65 churches every single week? I mean, most people have trouble getting their church announcements done every week and you're doing it for 65 people. Okay. So you got that going and what else? Well, yeah. I mean, so when you look back at it, we were counting up all the numbers like, oh, we created, you know, uh, 500 sermon bumpers last year and 2,500 editions of video announcements. And when you look at it at this, over the scope of a full year, you're like, man, that's a lot of, that's a lot of media that we're producing. And truthfully, the way it works is it all comes down to creating processes. And so the way that this works for us is that I started the business by myself. And, you know, until we got to 20 churches, I was memorizing 20 video announcements scripts every single week, uh, which I realized that, you know, Kerry, that's not sustainable. Like my brain could not keep up. Yeah. You're like, Hey, welcome to connect this, uh, liquid, uh, north point, uh, yeah, whatever. Okay. So you, you could scale it to 20. And this is, this is transferable stuff. This is why I'm so interested. A lot of leaders have growth challenges. So you could do it by yourself till it was 20 churches. And then why didn't you just decide, okay, it's 18 and I'm done, like, why didn't you just scale back? Why did you keep going? Sure. I mean, that is an option. I mean, you could argue for, Hey, why don't you just stay small? We wanted to take it, you know, bigger. That was the choice that we made. And so the challenge that I was presented with was, okay, I have to find a way to create these video announcements, uh, this process and, and, and script it out, write it out so that I can hand it off to someone who can fulfill what I'm doing. Um, even if they're not completely technically skilled at it yet. So the way we did this was I took the whole video announcements process from the script being sent in from a church to us. We prepare the script. We put it into the teleprompter. We film it. We edit it. We send it off. We do this all within 48 hours for every single church. And we took that and we boiled it down into like this, I don't know how many steps. Let's say 50 step process. In our first video editor, our first full-time employee that we ever hired, he's sitting to my left right now and editing as we speak coincidentally, he had literally never edited a video in his life. He had never created a graphic in his life. And I said, okay, Mitchell is his name. He just looked at you by the way, and he just looked over at you. He's talking about me, but okay. I gave him this process and I said, okay, follow each step. And this was kind of me putting it to the test. I was like, okay, is this something where we can take a complex process, which is creating a beautiful piece of high quality media for a church, artistry, creativity. Can we take that and boil it down into a process so that we can repeatedly produce it over and over again? Because you get to a certain point where, I mean, I can't edit a hundred video announcements in a day. I can't edit 65 video announcements in a day. It's just not possible. There's just not enough time in the day. So I had to find a way to create a process for it, to reproduce it over and over again. Wow. So you broke it down into 50 steps, gave it to a guy who's never edited video before, and did it just like, did it just work, or did you have to refine that process, or how did that work? Well, we're always continuing to refine our processes, of course. When it came to the graphics, because we also create graphics for churches in the pro video announcements, plans that we have, I gave him the processes for creating a graphic, and he had never opened up Photoshop. And within 24 hours, he was creating graphics for churches like churches are paying graphics. We'd had an open Photoshop ever, in 24 hours, he's setting stuff out to churches. That's crazy. And so did he have like, design ability, or that he had not unearthed, or is this just like, transferable skills? Well, that's what I mean. I think they're transferable skills. When it came to the graphics, we have about 400 to 500 different templates that we have. Sure. And so you open up a template, and you customize it based on a church's need. But the core quality of the template is already existing. So you just tweak this. You tweak this. It's a new color, add a new background. And suddenly it's a brand new graphic. But because you started with a beautiful template, you're still going to have a high quality piece at the end after the customization. Well, and what makes that so interesting is, I mean, we're talking about video and digital media, but what makes that so interesting is usually we come up with excuses in ministry. Well, you know, I have to do it myself, or, you know, and I'll take us a year to figure out. But I mean, you've done all this literally, you can measure it in months, which is cool. So you grew past 20 clients and you have, what, 65 churches that you do video announcements for per week now. Correct. Yeah. Right around 65. Okay. And what are some other principles, some keys to being able to grow as quickly and rapidly, which is really, it's not just growth. I mean, you've been responding, right? There's a need and the work comes in. And I mean, there's a lot of people in growing churches. This is the biggest struggle. And if you don't adapt, you're going to be that guy standing there doing 20 bumpers a week going, I'm exhausted. I've never seen my wife and ever seen my kids. Right. I think a huge part of it for us was specificity. And what I mean by that was we found a very unique need and we're like, we're just going to focus on this. So when it came to the kind of agency side of our business, it was like, we're going to just help churches with video announcements, that's it. We added extras as churches demanded them. But when we first started, it was video announcements only. And what I see a lot of businesses and churches doing is like, hey, we're going to do everything for everyone. So hey, if you hire us, we're going to make you videos and we're going to do your website and we're going to do, you know, title graphics for you and all these things. And I think what the biggest contributor to our scale was number one, the processes that we talked about. And secondly, we found a super highly targeted thing that we could help churches with. And we said, we're just going to focus on this. So if you type in video announcements, like five of the top 10 things that come up are our sites, blog posts we've written helping our actual site where, which is the number one listing as of today when I checked it, because there wasn't that much demand. So we're like, okay, let's fit this super hyper targeted niche, super hyper targeted need and just do that one thing really well. So specificity. Yeah. And then just curious, did you have to like work really hard to get like number one page rank on search rank on Google is huge. And did you have to work hard at that? Or did it just happen because you were in a niche ministry is probably a little bit of everything. What I will say is that we did search engine optimization SEO as much as we could. We followed all the best practices, but Kerry, I never told anyone this, but I have to share this dirty little secret exclusive. So yeah, this is an exclusive. It's so embarrassing. But we created the site using WordPress and we use the theme, the themes called Enfold. And when you purchase this theme, you can visit the theme creators support website and you can show off your specific website in a showcase. And so you can post it. And then other people who have the theme can say, oh, that's how they're making use of that theme in this way. Oh, I can do this as well. And so we were looking at other sites and we're like, Hey, we'll post our site. And it just happened to be like there was this new form thread that we posted this in. The showcase was brand new. And so we posted like second and we said, Hey, this is our site using Enfold. We've since changed themes, we don't even use that theme anymore, but this form thread has blown up and there's like hundreds of pages of people listing their sites. And when people visit this form thread, we're like the second post in there. And so we got all this traffic from an established site and that really helped our SEO because if you know anything about search engine optimization, you need backlinks from sites that already have an authority. So we had this brand new site. We knew who we were, but this other site Enfold support site already had a huge database of existing clients and huge traffic. And so that was kind of like our first high quality backlink, not to discount all the SEO that we did, but that was definitely a huge help in the accident. That's so true though. I mean, I write a blog and you know, I'd been blogging for maybe six months, just three times a week and traffic had been growing, but then churchleaders.com picked up a piece I wrote. And I mean, after that, that was like, that was a major turning point for the blog. And I mean, they run a lot of my content these days and I've gotten to know those guys. But like, that was like, are you kidding me church leaders ran something? How did that happen? And you know, at the end of the day, you're never going to get there unless you produce content, you're never going to get there unless you jump in on the forum. And I think one of the things that has made you so effective is what you do at such a young age is, you know, you just like, well, why wouldn't we do this? Why can't we try it? Why you're experimenting, you've got to can do attitude, which I think is fun. Any other things that really helped you scale in, you know, these first two years of doing this? Well, I love what you just said about churchleaders.com picking up your post because you're like, man, I'm posting three posts a week and they just picked up one. And from a cynical view, someone could look at that and be like, you know, Carrie Brady, they just got really lucky because they posted something and someone huge picked it up. And that is the case, but what happened is you're producing three pieces of content a week. We were doing three when we first started and now we're doing two. And what happens is we're giving ourselves so many different opportunities. Only one of the things I've ever done has produced that much traffic. But because I'm producing so many different things, I'm giving myself that many different chances to be lucky. And eventually, you know, that's not just luck. That's just odd. Someone's going to pick up something if we keep producing. So we created all this free content. The first thing we did when we launched the business was we created this 40 part video series called the church video series on YouTube. And it walked through every single thing I knew about video production and we gave it away entirely for free because we believe that churches needed this and, you know, that wasn't our revenue model. We're like, we don't need to make money off everything. Almost everything we give away in our business that we produce in our business is giving away for free. So free is huge. That was a huge part of it. Well, like your podcast, like this podcast, right? It doesn't cost anybody anything except an hour of their time, which I take very seriously. Like, I don't want to waste your hour. I don't want you to get to the end of a podcast, even though it was free and go, yeah, that was a waste of my life. It's good point. Good point. High quality content. We've had to hire people that just focus on helping us produce all the free stuff that we give away. And from a business model, that's kind of counterintuitive in some ways. So the videos that we produce every Wednesday or Thursday, pardon me, and the podcast that we produce every Tuesday, we have different employees that make it happen because producing videos every single week and podcasts every single week is difficult and it takes a ton of resources and we have to invest the business's funds into giving away all this stuff for free, which again, it seems counterintuitive, but in the permission, free giving away culture that we live in now, that's the best way to gain authority and gain trust from people. We're like, hey, we're not asking for your money or anything. We just think this is going to be really helpful for your church and we want to give it to you. It goes back to like a theory that I've got that if you just help people, if you're just helpful, if the stuff you're doing is helpful, even if it's free, people are going to go, oh, I like that. And then if you ever have a product, they'll go, that's interesting, I might buy it. Now I think that has translation to the church world too because if you're really there to honor God and you're really there to help your neighbor and you're really there for the community and to help the people that you have the opportunity and influence and you sort of just give your life away, you have a way of finding it. But if you try to keep your life, you lose it. I think someone quite influential once said something like that. So okay, that's really good. What's been the best thing you've done in terms of best practices as you've seen this business grow? Well, when I launched the business, I was full-time in Bible college. I was newly married and I was on staff at my church. It was pretty busy. And I was like, okay, I don't really have much time to do this business thing. And so I started going through the discipline of waking up at 5am every single day. And from 5 to 8am, I worked on the business. This is the only time I had because at 8am, wife and I, Brittany and I, we had to leave for work. I had to drop her off at work, drive across the city to school, go to school all day, come back, pick her up. By the time we got home, I had to drive her to her second job because I was in school. And so I had this kind of sacred time of 5am to 8am where I was building the business because it was the only time I had. I could have just said, oh, I don't have time, I'm too busy right now, but it was really important to me. And so I created this discipline of getting up at 5am every single morning. My dad is a firefighter in the city of Toronto, and he used to wake up when he has to go off to shift. He wakes up at 5.30am. And I always thought he was crazy growing up. I was like, Dad, how do you wake up that early? It's like, I couldn't fathom the possibility. But then when I became an adult and something became important for me and my family, you know, I just, I made it happen. And that is a key to success I've seen among so many leaders is that early wake up call. That's what Mark Batterson said, episode 32 of this podcast, you know, that you got to be ready to let the alarm ring at 5am. And I know that's how I've done all this. I build a lot of, well, we're doing this on my day off, so to speak, and, you know, a lot of 5am writing sessions, and that's good. I mean, I think that's great. And, you know, there is, as John Acuff says, there's hustle, right? You've got a hustle. And if you just expect it to come to you, and this is true in ministry, I mean, if you want to reach more people, accomplish your mission, it just doesn't happen. If you sit back waiting for it to happen. What is the biggest challenge as you've grown? What's been the hardest part of it all? Well, I don't want to romanticize the processes too much because at some point you actually have to hand off the work that you're so passionate about, and you've worked so hard on you have to give it to somebody and say, Oh, I'm now putting you in charge of this. Because what happens is, as much as I love Mitchell, sometimes we send out video announcements with a mistake in them. And because when you're working with people, people make mistakes. I make just as many mistakes as they do, but so the hardest part for me was handing off my baby, could say, I'd worked so hard, I created this from scratch, and then giving that control over to someone else, knowing that not only could they make mistakes, but they will make mistakes. But having to, you know, sacrifice all that for the greater good, knowing, Hey, if I don't hand this off to other people and don't allow other people to be a part of this grander vision, it's never going to be able, we're never going to be able to accomplish that grander vision at all. So it was just that discipline of handing it off. That's a tough one for a lot of leaders. I mean, even at my stage, and, you know, I knew your dad growing up, which is kind of fun. So I literally could be your dad, you know, in terms of age and stage, but I find that's really hard. What do you know when to step back and how do you know when to jump in? And I think that's a real challenge. That's a real challenge for a lot of us. So, okay, so, so that was a real challenge growing, you know, anything else? Hmm, challenges, you know, I feel like I've been tremendously blessed in some ways. It feels like every time we crew something new, it just works. And like we've definitely had our flops, for sure. But I, okay, I do remember this huge challenge. So when we launched the business, what I had was, I had, I was commissioned by the City of Edmonton in Alberta, Canada, a city of a million people where I was living during Bible college. I was commissioned by the city to create this film during the summer about the sex trafficking within the city. It was the most, you know, prestigious project I'd ever been a part of. I was meeting with government officials, putting it all together budget wise. It was the biggest amount of money I'd ever earned from creating a video before. And at the same time, I was like, okay, I have this amount of money to get me through the summer where we had this opportunity to launch this business. And I was going to give it the four months of the summer. And if the business took off in some way where it was able to replace my very meager part time media director, church plant salary, then we'd say, hey, that's, that's a success. We'll keep the business going. And by the time August came around, it was three and a half months into the summer, we had one church who was working with us. Okay. Just one. And I remember sitting five a.m. in the morning at my desk, just praying. And I was like, God, I have worked so hard on this business. I poured in everything. We've created hours of free content and given away and given away. And I really think like this is something that's you've called me to do. And yet there are zero fruits. There's a single fruit. I have one apple right now. And I don't need much. I just need like four or five apples, a small bushel, not very much. Just to replace, you know, this meager income and do what I think you call me to do. If not, I'll just go work at Starbucks and finish off my fourth year. I'll become a youth pastor. We'll go down that trek. That's fine. And I remember that prayer and that was a real huge test for me because I had put in hundreds upon hundreds of hours of work and there was nothing to show for it. And then within those next two weeks of the business, I think six new churches signed up and it took off and suddenly I was like, Oh my goodness, this is becoming a thing. And from there, it's just been steady growth, that steady upward stream of impact and revenue. That's amazing. Yeah. And there has been significant growth in that area. So let's talk about digital media, shifting gears a bit. How important is communication like announcements, media in terms of accomplishing a church's mission? Well, you know, it used to be the case where when someone would first interact with your church for the very first time, you know, they'd step foot into your building and at first contact point is going to be the greeter. And that's why, you know, the greeter ministry evolved into what it is today. Someone's there saying, Hey, good morning. Welcome to church. Nowadays, there's not exactly how it works. Most people are going to check you out online, check out your website before they ever step foot in your church. And this is not an encouraging stat, Kerry, but in 2012, it came out, Hey, we actually have a shorter attention span than goldfish, goldfish have an attention span of 10 seconds. These in 2012, as three years later, who knows what it is now, 2012, we had an attention span of eight seconds. And so what we have is this truth and understanding, okay, people are going to check us out digitally see our recorded services or visit our website before they ever check us out in real life at our church. And we also know that we have about eight seconds before we lose their attention span, lose that visitor, first time visitor to our website and never see them again. So I think digital media is incredibly important for churches. And that's not to say and put this huge pressure on churches that say, Hey, if you don't do it, you know, no one's ever going to visit your church ever again, because that's not the case. But I also think that it is overlooked more often than not. We pour in tremendous amount of resources into the four songs we sing on Sunday morning and the message each week. But if we're not focusing on the way that our culture communicates in 2015, the way that we engage information currently, we're missing out on so many potential first contact with people in our community. We're just looking past it. Yeah. I think that's good. I've heard a lot of church leaders say over the last decade, you know, the sermon begins in the parking lot, but I think it actually begins with your social media or it begins on your website or begins on your app or it begins, you know, far beyond that frontier now. So if you're a church with very limited resources, because I can imagine some church leaders are going, great. I'm going to hire these guys. Amazing. And others are like, I'd love to hire them. We don't have budget. And then some are like, well, that's just impossible. I mean, we not only don't have budget, I barely have a phone. So I mean, if you're in that position where you're not very skilled, like what can you do to sort of make a favorable impression? Should you try to be everywhere? Should you focus? Like where is digital media going and how does that work for? Let's talk about the under resource church for a moment. Sure, well, let me say, first of all, that when it comes to the under resource church, as you put it, I am in that boat, just like everybody else. So when I was on staff as the media director at my church, we were a church plant of about 50 people. The church plant I served at after that was a church plant off of the church plant of about 25 people. I moved across the country back to my home province where my wife and I grew up. And now we're at another church plant. We're at 150 people. So church planning and small church is my life. That's Canada anyway, you know, it's not from you, Kerry. We're both Canadians. We're both Canadians. Yeah. So I totally understand the small church mindset. The best place to start, we think, is with your church's graphics. And the reason for that is that if you can upgrade your church's graphics, you can upgrade every other type of church media. So we did this experiment where we took an existing website of a church and all we did was replace the graphics that were already on the church, church's website, pardon me. And it was like giving the website an entirely new look. It was a 100% facelift. And what we didn't do was we didn't hire a new developer and we didn't pay thousands upon thousands of dollars to start a new website and fix the back end and find a new theme. And all we did was change the graphics. It took 30 minutes for us to do it. And it was like going from old to new immediately. Another example of how graphics can affect everything, you've had John Acuff I believe on this podcast before. Yeah. John's been a guest. And I spoke at a conference a couple of years ago, it was an online conference. And John Acuff was kind of the keynote speaker of this online conference. It was the first conference I'd ever spoken at. Wow. And I was like, oh my goodness, I'm just a small business. And I have like a couple followers on Twitter. And then John Acuff is the one I have to like, I had to raise my game carry. I had to like, stop my game up. So what I did was we filmed our 20 minute session and we filmed it the way we do, you know, we use high quality cameras and, but what we did was we included graphics throughout the presentation. So we had overlay graphics of all the stats we had. We had graphs and, you know, explanations using images and stuff like that. And the response that we got from the conference was I had dozens of tweets coming and saying, Oh my goodness, Brady, your production quality was so high, I was actually able to engage with your session of the conference because it wasn't just recorded on iPhone. The graphics, they brought home the message so well. And so what we were able to do was, look, John Acuff is going to school me in a speaking and teaching realm every single day of the week for at least the next decade. But what I was able to do was level the playing field, sort of speak. And not that it was a competition, but it was just that I wanted my teaching session to be elevated in such a way that we could communicate extremely well to the attenders of the conference. And so we used graphics and that really changed the game for us. So if you can upgrade your graphics, you can upgrade your website, you can upgrade your videos, your graphic, your branding is going to improve. And also you can use those graphics on social media. And if you know anything about social media using graphics on social changes the game when it comes to engagement and interaction, likes, shares, retweets, comments, whatever it is, right. So fix is the best place to start because it doesn't cost much money, but it can have a huge impact. And that's what we're all about, low cost, but huge impact. Yeah. And I think that's true. I mean, we just did a massive rebranding for our church and it cost us more than a few dollars at this stage. But I mean, I think that's really important to stay current, to have a recognizable look and icon and so on. And you probably got somebody in your church, you know, who can do it or who can learn how to do it and do it reasonably well. Design has become a big part of our culture. I think another great place to start is with your website. And I mentioned this briefly, there's a service called Squarespace.com. And when we launched our websites, all of them run on WordPress, WordPress accounts for about one in every four websites on the web right now, a little bit more than that, which is crazy. And so what Squarespace does is you can get started $8 a month. You can get a domain name, you can get hosting. So if you don't know too much about websites, there's a lot of different factors. You've got to find hosting to kind of keep your website on the internet alive, and that's like a monthly fee you have to pay. You've got to pay for a domain name and that's a yearly fee. And then you actually have to pay for the design, the development of the site or the theme. So what Squarespace has done is it puts all of that together in one package, extremely inexpensive $8 a month. And what's most exciting is that they have a series of incredibly high quality templates that are quite impossible to ruin. I mean, look, churches aren't always the best of this stuff. We have this compulsion that we want to stick as much as possible and cram everything, every ounce of information onto every page and every graphic. But what Squarespace does is you can create a website, you can launch a whole new website. It's going to be beautiful. It's going to be stunning. It's going to get engagement. It's going to drive traffic. It's going to accomplish the goals that you want to accomplish. It's going to be super cheap and super easy. You don't need to be a developer to do this sort of thing. So those are good tools and you said something, a lot of people feel they need to say everything. What is the most important thing to be saying in digital media and your online platform? Like what should you be saying? What's kind of superfluous? Like, yeah, we just don't need to talk about that. Right. We try to boil it down to, and this is going to be a tough exercise, a discipline that you have to go through, we try to boil it down to a single sentence. So we take everything that our church wants to do, everything our business wants to do. There are so many different aspects of that. But again, you only have 10 seconds online if we're talking websites specifically. You only have about 10 seconds to influence and interact with a visitor, first time visitor to your site. And so what we do is we take everything that we're all about and we boil it down to a single sentence. So when someone lands on one of our sites, whether it's our church's website, centralcc.ca or the business website, prochurchtools.com, what you're presenting with is a single sentence. And the discipline that we went through to get to this point is we said to ourselves, "Okay, if all we could put on our website was one headline, you get a single sentence. That's all you get. You're not allowed a second page. You're not allowed to scroll down. If that's all we were allowed, you know, back in the day 1990, that's all you could put on a website, let's say. Yeah. If that's all you could do, what would be the most important thing that you say to these visitors on your site? And when you get in that mindset, it's really easy to start getting rid of all the fluff, get rid of all the excess, all that stuff that isn't necessary and you can boil it down to that single thing. So when people visit prochurchtools.com, the first sentence they see is essential media training for every church. And that's what we believe in. We think every church can do this and we teach the essentials. So we don't just say, like, you know, learn how to be good at media. We try to differentiate and we try to make ourselves unique on what we focus on. And every church is this way too. You know, we're all part of the grander redemption story of Christ, but every church has its own personality and own uniqueness and own story. And I think that it's very important and necessary and helpful if we can kind of double down on what makes connects us unique, what makes central unique, what makes your church unique and focus on those things. So if you are really into kids ministry, you've really into young families, make that central and obvious to everyone that visits your site, everyone that finds you on Facebook, every time you make a video, and that doesn't mean you have to throw at everything. But what we don't want is to focus on everything. Yeah. Does that have to be true though too? Like you're kind of making a promise. So I can say, hey, we're totally into young families and somebody comes to our church and the average ages 75, like it's got to have some, some, I don't know what they call aspirational marketing versus actual marketing, right, where no, no, no, this is actually who we are to. Yeah, that's absolutely true. You don't want to be promoting any falsehood with your advertising. Yeah. What's interesting about that though, is I was talking recently on our podcast with Don Nicole Baldwin, she's the former communications director at Willow Creek, and she was telling, she now works with branding one on one of, one with churches and she was working with the church in central Florida, I believe it was, and the community that this church was in was extremely diverse ethnically, but the church itself was not extremely diverse. So what I'm saying is church was very white. The community wasn't at all and this church wanted to reflect their community more. They're like, look, like we want to be a church that's for our community, which is really important right now, very popular, you know, we want to be a church for the city. And yet the demographics of our church do not reflect the demographics of our community. So what do we do? Yeah. And so this was kind of the inflection point between aspirational branding and what was actually true branding and what Don said is that, you know, they worked with this church and through the branding that they put forth and through intentional practices as well, you can't just put up say, you know, we're a very racially diverse, ethnically diverse church, if you're not, you can't, but it was a both and sort of thing. And within a year, they had seen, I think it was from 3% ethnic diversity to 30% ethnic diversity in just a year. And like, that's crazy to think in a year, they could change that much, but they were intentional about it and they focused on what was important to them and the changes were transformative. Oh, that's really good. So they kind of, they didn't go too far to the point where people who showed up on day one kind of went, whoa, this is not what I was expecting, but they sort of cast a vision for the future as well. Okay, that makes that makes a lot of sense. And I think the other thing you can find too, like our website is going to undergo a massive, like a complete do over from later this year, we're going to redo it. And I know when we set it up five years ago now, like we thought we had to say everything on it. And Google Analytics will tell you a very interesting story. There's like three things people go to our website for. And one is a homepage. The other is messages. And the third, believe it or not, this shocks me, but it's consistent over the last two years. Staff bios. That's what they want. Am I really, really? So guess what's going to be more prominent? I mean, we've got stuff on every environment. We can summarize that. We don't have to go into a lot of detail. And then where do you find like, if you can only be in one or two places, these days, where's the most strategic place to be? Is it to have a website, an app, on Facebook, on Twitter, where's the best place for a church to be if you want that digital imprint to get noticed? That's a great, great question. I wish there when it came to social media was an easy answer for this. But if you're under 25, apparently 75% of us are using Snapchat every day. I am not one of them. I clearly am an old 24 year old, but you know, 25 and under, almost everybody's on Snapchat. 30 and up, almost everyone's on Facebook. So depending on your demographic, there's not going to be a super consistent answer for that. But what I can say is if you can go through that website exercise that I just mentioned, if you can create a super concise website with that single headline with a couple call to action buttons. So, I mean, if I was redesigning the Connects site based on that information that you just gave, and I knew that staff bios were super important, I would make sure that we bring in a photographer, get some great photos of everybody on staff. I'd put together, you know, a bio for every single staff member, and you could use the data and culture of the church to dictate how that staff bio goes. You know, maybe it's a little bit fun. Maybe it's a little serious, you know, it has some personality in there. And then I would make their, you know, the big homepage would have this single sentence that best describes Connects and then there would be two call to actions. And it would be listen to messages, because we know that's a huge thing that people visit the site for already. The data is proving that. And then also plan a visit or something like that. So that there's two call to action buttons, but it's super simple. So if there was that one place that you had to focus on, it'd be the website. I'd have to go with that. Okay, good. And that's a really good point. I don't want people to miss that too. When you say call to action, I mean, that's a business entrepreneurial term that basically means you want somebody to do something. And I think in church world, we often end up, no, I just want them to know about us. No, no, no, you want them to do something. Do you want them to plan a visit? Do you want them to, you know, listen to a message? What do you want them to do? And when people take action, you tend to get traction to quote my friend, Casey Graham. So it's one of those things where I think you have to think about what do I want to have happen as a result of someone seeing this post visiting our website, listening to this message. Even when preaching now, I'm like, okay, what's going to happen when they drive off in the parking lot, when they drive out of here? What do I want to have happen? And you can't control that. But if you don't think about it, chances are nothing will happen. Absolutely. And I used to think this was only a business thing, but I did this case study, this experiment recently, and I looked at all these different church websites. I looked at Elevation's website. I looked at Hillsong's website. And I began to see that these call to action buttons are becoming very prominent amongst other websites. So you land on Elevation site, and it's start here, and it's listen to a message, something like that. Same with Hillsong. It's these two things. So you're giving, it's like that there's this old study where they took people into ice cream shops, and they gave them 30 choices, and they gave them five choices. And when you have five choices, it's more people were making decisions. Then if you had 30 choices, you have too many choices. The human nature is to just refuse to make a decision because we were not confident. Yeah, we're not confident we can make a decision and be happy with it. How am I supposed to choose between all these different things? Whatever I choose isn't going to be what I really need. And remember, we only have 10 seconds to make an impression on our visitors. So if they land on your site and it's like social media widget, and this is the new sermon series, and you got to follow us here and like us here, and this is where you can give, and the youth groups going to Guatemala, and we've got this and this and this. Okay, you know what? I'm bouncing. I'm leaving. But if you present two options, or even one option, if you can simplify that much, you're going to get a lot more decisions. You're going to get a lot more action being taken. But you need to be clear as a leader to know what action then is going to actually produce the greatest results or the greatest impact, the thing that you're hoping to accomplish. This is super helpful, Brady. What are some bad practices churches have? Like what are what are what are some you kind of look at it go? Right. Well, I mean, we've talked about this a lot, and that is there's this inclination in this compulsion to to think to yourself. I mean, if I don't share everything, we're going to miss something. If I don't put the next men's ministry breakfast that's happening on Saturday morning available, no one's going to come. If I don't put everything on, like we're going to leave something out and no one's going to, you know, interact the way we want them to. And it's a lot harder. I think it was Mark Twain that said, I sat down to write a short letter. And I wrote a long letter instead because it was it was much easier or something like that. I'm blotching this paraphrase. No, you're right. That's close. But the truth behind that statement is that it's much harder to simplify and write concise statements. It's much easier to write everything and throw everything down at once. And the problem with that is not only is it easier, but it kind of gives you this sense of accomplishment. You're like, look at all the stuff I put down here. Look at all the buttons we've added to our website. Look at this. This, these video announcements are 11 minutes long. We've added so much good content in here. Well, yeah, you have, but no one was listening past 120 seconds. So even though it's all there, it was completely ineffective. Right. So you have to do that hard work. Find the data and you have to do that hard work to simplify as much as possible. We're launching Pro Church Academy, I mentioned, and the biggest challenge we've had so far is, you know, we want it to be this amazing training platform. And so when we launch it, I wanted it to be so good, have all these courses in it. And I've had to at least on three separate occasions, look at our plan, our launch plan, and say, okay, we need to remove this. We need to remove this. We wanted to launch with 10 courses. Okay. Now we're launching with six, but we wanted to launch with this feature. No, that's going to be iteration 2.0. Because, you know, for focusing on all these things, none of them are going to get the affection and treatment that they need, whereas if we focus on a smaller amount, they can get exactly what they need and be the best they can be. Where'd you learn all this stuff? It was all from you, Kerry. Okay, well played, well played. No, seriously, where do you pick up all this stuff? Well, I think podcasts, seriously, are one of the most untapped, amazing resources ever. I like to consider myself a reader, but I'm more a reader in my mind than I am in practice. And one of those people that are like, oh, yeah, instant buy now on amazon.ca every single day, you know, just one click buy, one click buy. And then I look in my Kindle and I didn't even read half of those books. But I almost never stopped listening to podcasts because you can multitask. So I can mow the lawn, like you mentioned earlier, listen to a podcast. I can cook and listen to a podcast, I can work out and listen to a podcast. And so I try to have a wide ranging diet, a podcast, so that I have this steady stream of a lot smarter people than me that are sharing their best thoughts. Well, we must listen to some of the same podcast because, I mean, it sounds like we operate out of a very similar wheelhouse. What are two or three of your favorite podcasts that you listen to on a regular basis? Well, there's a podcast called the Bad Christian podcast that I listen to. Okay, which is by a band named Emory, which was a hardcore band that I listened to growing up. And it's about pushing back on certain Christian boundaries and before warned, it is intense. Okay, I also listened to a ton of business podcasts like the smart passive income podcast. I listened to The Fizzle Show, which is a great weekly podcast, again, about business. A lot of business stuff. And that's true. I mean, a lot of this stuff is available for free. And I listen to Lewis Howes sometimes and the School of Greatness and Tim Ferris Show. Again, that's not always the cleaner show in the world, but it's just fascinating from a leadership standpoint what that guy is exploring. I'm a huge Pat Flynn fan too, smart passing. Pat Flynn's just such a nice dude. You can't dislike that guy. I feel like we're buddies. I feel like we hang out and I've never met him. So although we did interview someone I knew, I listened earlier today. He had Dale Partridge on his show. So it's like, wow, I know one of his guests. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I just listened to that yesterday. Cool, cool. Okay, so anything, listen, this is super, super helpful. Brady, people are going to want to find out more. Where can they find out more about you? Yeah, the best place is prochurchtools.com. We've talked a lot about that single headline and the two buttons on the website. We have that exact same setup. And one of those buttons is, it says get the free toolkit. And we talked about graphics being the best place for your church to start because if you upgrade your graphics, you can upgrade everything. We have this ebook and free video that we put together. It's called how to design seven beautiful church graphics in 11 minutes. So you don't have to be a designer to do this. And the idea behind it is that you can create great graphics for your church quickly and repeatedly. So you can find that on prochurchtools.com again. We were always putting out free stuff on that site. The best place is there. Cool. Hey Brady, thanks so much, man. It's been a great time, Carrie. Isn't that just inspiring? When you hear from somebody who at such a young age has figured so much out and learned how to scale a business, not only how to have a business or start a business, but to scale it and to be able to serve so many churches so effectively. So I just love being able to share that. Make sure you check out his website prochurchtools.com. And if you want, give a listen to the pro church tools podcast. I was on there a while ago, but he's got lots of fascinating guests. So it's just just a great podcast. So anyway, you can get everything that you heard on this podcast. If you want more, you can find it in the show notes at karaenuhoff.com/episode42. And next week I'll be back and we're going to talk multi-site. So multi-site is a growing and morphing and changing phenomena where churches show up in multiple locations, as you know. And I'm going to be talking to the guy who probably knows more about multi-site than anyone else possibly on the planet. His name is Jim Tombrelin. And he is a multi-site guy, also a church merger and acquisition expert. We talk all about the trends in multi-site. So if you've ever wondered, is multi-site for us or maybe you are a multi-site church and you're like, how many campuses can we really scale to? Jim's got a lot of very practical insight, really excited about that episode. We got a lot of great stuff coming up this summer. And we are looking forward to the first anniversary of this podcast in September. So there's going to be some cool treats coming out. As well as my new buck coming up soon too. It's called lasting impact and release dates will be coming up in the next few months. So stay tuned for that. And again, we talked about the very beginning, orangetour.org. Registration is open. We're coming to a city near you. Make sure you go check that out. And we will be back next Tuesday with Jim Tombrelin and another episode of this podcast. Thanks so much for listening. And I really do hope that this helps you lead like never before. You've been listening to the Carrie Newhoff Leadership Podcast. Join us next time for more insights on leadership, change and personal growth to help you lead like never before. [BLANK_AUDIO]