Multi Site Pitfall #5: Adding sites will stretch your churches finances.
As I do with each pitfall, let me say again that we don't have all the Multi Site answers. As we unpack each of these pitfalls please understand that these posts comes from our own experiences starting the BAF Multi Site Ministry. Many churches are doing it bigger and better, and we learn from them all the time, this series of posts is just us sharing our journey with you in hopes it will help you get started on your Multi Site journey.
Multi Site pitfall #5 is a no brainer. Anyone who is thinking about going multi site obviously is thinking out the financial burden associated with it. But here's the kicker, we thought it out too, and it still overwhelmed us in ways we could never have imagined.
I have been a part of starting three and soon to be four campuses. Three of the four as the Multi Site Pastor, and one in a support role as a management staff pastor, and I have under estimated the cost of each campus, each time. You'd think I would learn wouldn't you. The problem is, and take notes here, you can't predict everything that will happen when you start a church. For example; we did a fairly good job of staying within a budget I had set for our 5 Points Campus last summer. However, we had never had a full house before because we hadn't had any services yet. That was until we had our first service and filled the room completely up and realized we were about 5000 tons AC short of what we needed. We're not all that smart, but even a couple of rocket scientists like us know that a couple of hundred people in a room that is 91 degrees is not a good thing. The mistake was made when someone we mistakenly assumed knew said, "you've got plenty of AC," and we believed them. So we had to add and AC which most of you know isn't cheap. But that's not the end of it, when we went to the AC guy he told us we didn't have enough electricity available to add another AC, so we had to add another electrical box outside to boot. The owner of the building agreed to split the cost, something he didn't have to do, and it still cost us another $5000, that we of course had not budgeted for. Talk about your swing and a miss! So going into a multi site start up just remember this, your start up will cost more, and take longer than your best estimate.
Past start up is where the real fun begins. In most cases, there are some exceptions even in our system, a campus will take probably six months to as long as a year to become financially healthy. It takes time to build a core group of people who are sold out to the vision and are ready to step up and start supporting it financially. Sure we all know a tithe is for God and should be given from day one, but sadly that's not reality. In the meantime the supporting church must be willing to float the campus until it gets healthy. Our first campus took a long time to get completely healthy, and other ministry leaders paid a price as they heard no a lot. I can't tell you how many tough discussions we had about our first campuses finances. There's a lesson in our mistakes, prepare your staff ahead of time so the impending financial struggles don't catch them off guard.
Adding sites will not only drain your finances, it will also drain your financial people. Adding sites will add a lot of work to your financial team. When you add sites you add budgets, bills, insurances, repairs, and staff, and someone has to manage all of it. In our case not only was our team trying to manage all the extra work created by adding a site, they were also trying to keep afloat a campus that was sucking the financial life out of every ministry in the church. I'm thankful they hung in there with us at that campus, because now it's completely self sufficient and close to 300 people a weekend now call it their church home. Just preparing our staff ahead of time for these struggles would have made a huge difference.
I'm not trying to talk anyone out of going multi site, in fact I hope every church in America does it, I'm just trying to help you be better prepared for what it takes to do it. If your financial team knows ahead of time that these kinds of things may happen, they will be better prepared when they do. I don't know about your financial people, but ours hate surprises!
John
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