I'm with Richard Hong, a Presbyterian Church USA pastor active on Facebook: watching shows like "Restaurant Impossible" or "Kitchen Nightmares" can be a remarkable oblique insight into congregational governance and thriving. The issues are SO comparable -- not in every way, but in enough to really make one think. The key parallel: people have to choose to come to your place and lay down some money on the table for a meal. There are many choices in any given community. The parallel that always grabs me: owners of restaurants who have to admit they have zero idea of what their baselines are, in terms of the actual costs of keeping the doors open, and what drives the income they have. Simple fixes often are transformative, like realizing what your food costs are, or bringing your prices more in line with comparable dining experiences in the area.
In the same way, I am amazed at how many church leaders seem to almost WORK at not knowing what their baseline income and expense lines are, and cultivate a militant ignorance of where their income flows from. Just the exercise of peeling back standard report materials to getting at the hard floor of what it costs to operate a week, a month, and what your average week or month in giving is, can be searing (as it often is on the restaurant shows for owners and managers) but gets everyone to where they can make some hard decisions.
In my forthcoming book, I have a story about a nonprofit that produced a bottle of salad dressing for an assumed price of about $3 a bottle. When a third-party evaluated their actual costs, the cost-per-bottle ballooned to something like $90!!!!!!!!!
I'm with Richard Hong, a Presbyterian Church USA pastor active on Facebook: watching shows like "Restaurant Impossible" or "Kitchen Nightmares" can be a remarkable oblique insight into congregational governance and thriving. The issues are SO comparable -- not in every way, but in enough to really make one think. The key parallel: people have to choose to come to your place and lay down some money on the table for a meal. There are many choices in any given community. The parallel that always grabs me: owners of restaurants who have to admit they have zero idea of what their baselines are, in terms of the actual costs of keeping the doors open, and what drives the income they have. Simple fixes often are transformative, like realizing what your food costs are, or bringing your prices more in line with comparable dining experiences in the area.
In the same way, I am amazed at how many church leaders seem to almost WORK at not knowing what their baseline income and expense lines are, and cultivate a militant ignorance of where their income flows from. Just the exercise of peeling back standard report materials to getting at the hard floor of what it costs to operate a week, a month, and what your average week or month in giving is, can be searing (as it often is on the restaurant shows for owners and managers) but gets everyone to where they can make some hard decisions.
In my forthcoming book, I have a story about a nonprofit that produced a bottle of salad dressing for an assumed price of about $3 a bottle. When a third-party evaluated their actual costs, the cost-per-bottle ballooned to something like $90!!!!!!!!!