Is It Scalable?

One of the many mistakes I’ve made as a leader is implementing something at New Day that’s not scalable. For example, when we first started I chose a website that couldn’t grow with us as the church grew. This resulted in a lot of wasted time because once we grew and I needed more features than the current website could offer, I had to rebuild our site from scratch with a new company. After this happened two or three times, I realized, the hard way, that I don’t want to use anything that’s not scalable – anything can’t grow with us as we grow. We are now using a company called Site Organic. I chose them because they have a great basic package you can use to start, and then you can add on features as needed without moving to a new company and rebuilding your site from scratch. In other words, the site can grow with us as we grow – it’s scalable.

Here’s a handful of ways I try my best to live by “Is it scalable?”

• When staff present a new idea to me, one of the first things I ask myself (and the staff member) is this: Is it scalable? If it’s not then the answer is no, or we modify the original idea until it is scalable.
• I don’t personally do all the pastoral care. That’s not scalable. At a certain point I won’t be able to keep up with it unless I only want the church to be about a hundred people. A different system is required if the church is to grow beyond a hundred people. We’ve chosen a model that’s scalable – one that works at 50, 500 or 5,000.
• When we were less than a hundred people someone once asked me if I could give them a shoutout during the service because they were celebrating a certain number of years of marraige. I said no because that’s not scalable. If I set that standard then as we grew I’d be spending the whole service just giving people shout outs, instead of preaching the Word like I should.

I could give many more examples but hopefully by now you get my point. If it ain’t scalable, we don’t do it! I would encourage you to take a look at what you’re doing and ask, as I have, “Is it scalable?”