Podcast Episode 113: Episode 88: Special Edition with Laura Stephenson

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On this episode of Rock Cast, Jon and Emily are joined by Spark staff member, Laura Stephenson.

Transcribed Content

This episode of Rockcast is brought to you by Rock partner Triumph Tech, a full service specialist partner. Rock partners provide crucial support for Spark Development Network and important services for the Rock community. Connect with Triumph Tech today at rockrms.com/partners. Welcome to this special edition of Rockcast, where we get to go behind the scenes with our friends and our community as well as our staff members. Today, have a very special guest joining John and I, Laura Stevenson, who is a member of the SPARC staff. Welcome, Laura. Hi. Thank you. We're very excited to have you with us today on our podcast. Oh, I'm excited to be here. So Laura, how long have you been working with Spark? A little bit over four months now. Okay. And where did you come from before that? So I worked in Dallas for an entrepreneur. He owned a few different companies and I just helped manage them. Very interesting. So you have a lot of varied experience going backward. What brought you to Phoenix from Dallas? So my husband actually came out here to help plant a church here in Surprise, and I just followed. Fantastic. So you have work background and some church background. And now you're on the Spark team. Yes. That's pretty great. So you've been doing a few different things with our staff over time in those four months, but now you're in the role of project management on our consulting team for our professional services that we provide. Can you tell us a little bit about what that entails? What's day to day life looking ? I don't know if there's day to day life that's pretty regular right now. It's definitely a lot of new adventures. Right now we're working with getting the retainers all put together and me just learning each retainer and really getting to understand the churches from the inside out and learning how churches implement over to Rock and making sure the process is just help make sure that it's an easy transition for the churches and doing everything I can to know everyone in the community. It is interesting how for us project management is really, has a component of relationship management, isn't it? Yes. Yeah. Definitely. Well, having an adventurous, never the same day kind of day is kind of what we do around here, wouldn't you say, John? It's always something new, something exciting. Mhmm. It's so interesting to see how each church is uniquely wired from their ministry side and how that impacts the technology stack that they use. Even as we work on implementations, bringing them in from a different system, they might all come from the same two or three systems, but they use those systems so differently. It's always an adventure when you go out. The more you do, you think, well, the more you're going get used to that, and you won't see as many surprises, but it just seems everyone's a unique surprise. And and for good reason. It's it's not they're doing it wrong. It's just they've chosen to tailor it to their ministry in a different way, which is it's kinda neat. It is. Yeah. So the project management that we work on is really critical to everything we do because we're super process oriented. But it's kind of interesting when you're saying everybody does everything differently. You have to have standards you work from. So we have standard processes and standard documents and standard approaches. But as you're kind of onboarding in this project management role, how often are you seeing that we're following the exact standard, Laura? It's definitely not a cookie cutter answer. Right. I the way I've been trained though because it's trained from a mindset of, okay, how will this work and what can we do to make it work? So that's been my main standard is how can I make it work? Yes. I feel we've been doing it for a while now but we're still learning things. Mhmm. Then good questions to ask ahead of time. And and what I love though is that, I kinda use the analogy, I have to have these mental pictures in my head. I always use the analogy that it's kinda on Gold Rush, a TV show, they have these big sluice boxes boxes where the gold goes down, and they have to adjust those sluice boxes just right with the amount right pitch and amount of water. Otherwise, the nuggets fall out the back. And that's the worst thing is, , to put all this effort and then the gold just flies out the back. And that's what these these ideas and questions are. They're gold nuggets. And there's an intention in me when when you get the nugget and you don't have it on paper yet, you're not you haven't worked into the process yet. That's why I love our team is is very proactive about catching these nuggets and and keeping them because they are they really are gold. They are. And everybody's moving so fast and usually has more than one thing to do in a day around here that it's hard to remember to capture those sometimes. So we have to actually build process points to kind of collect and gather and remind on a regular basis so we can continually improve on those. Because it is tedious. , it's not what you want to stop what you're going to do right now and go write something. It's you want someone else to go do it, ? But for all of us who have to, all of us, that's our job is to stop what we're doing and go write that in the right place. It's it's not necessarily fun in the moment. But we're very thankful to have someone who helps catch all of those things and helps direct them into the right places. I don't know what we would do without project management. Right. And it is a team effort. I mean, there's a lot of other people on the team who I love the fact that I can see them writing things down and and and those people I know are gonna go back and put it in the right that is so it relieves so much stress because you just , you can't not one person in the whole organization can grab all the nuggets. This is too many. But to see that actually being done is is exciting. Right. And then the improvement collaboration that you see coming out of team meetings or into our Slack channels internally, into the documents, you said, noticing people writing things down, that mindset is really, really exciting one to work in. Mhmm. Yeah. There's a lot of, I think in terms of our internal Slack, there's a lot of good questions being asked in the last few weeks about performance and stuff. And it's not something that we're keeping locked in there, we're writing these down so that we can aggregate them into new things that we'll be talking about soon. So Laura, you don't just spend all your life here with Spark. I mean, we would love to have you for as much time as we can. You But you have a, yeah, you have an outside life too. So tell us a little bit about that. Okay. Most of my time, we do a lot of stuff with the community. Right now, we're really trying to dive in deep for this church plant. So we do a lot of community events, lot of cookouts, and then when we're not with the church, we do a lot of hiking. So we really enjoy hiking out here. It's definitely different than Dallas. There's a lot of hiking in the Phoenix area. Yes. Can you hike in Dallas? Is everything flat? No. There's not any hiking. I was gonna say You can go for a walk. Yeah. There's a lot of trails, flat trails. So when everyone comes onto the staff for the first time, they are given a very important task, and that is to choose a poster to put on a frame on our wall. So our walls are covered in unique individual posters, and each one represents a person. But it's it sounds it's not too difficult, but it's really hard It is. To pick a poster It's very is uniquely representative of you. And, also, that's the right size, the standard poster size. You would think. I don't know. It's much harder than it looks. It really is. So John's always threatening people that if they don't pick the right poster, he's gonna pick for them, whatever happens to be on sale at Walmart or something. Way home. Right? Yeah. Right. It's just gonna be Justin Bieber probably. Probably. So, Laura, you do not thankfully have a Justin Bieber poster on the wall. That means that you picked yours on time. Tell us about your poster. Okay. So I had a difficult time finding the right size. So I actually had, my husband make it, but it says, be the person your dachshund thinks you are. So I have a dachshund and I love him very much. And I think this just encompasses being someone that's good and having a good morale, but also just really cute. Really cute and trustworthy. That sounds good standard to shoot for. Well, that has been a very colorful, fun poster on our wall. I was wondering where you got it. I was , wow, that's quite defined when you dachshunds. Oh, yeah. He made it for me. I found one similar, but it was a little postcard size And so he just blew it up and made it my colors. Oh, nice. Oh, that's So what are some hobbies and some other things that you enjoy doing? So I actually recently gotten into baking. I watched the British baking show. And so I've been doing a lot of homemade bakes. I've gotten into making homemade cinnamon rolls and anything you can use yeast, really want to try to make. That sounds really fun. I don't notice that your practice efforts have been making it to the office though. They haven't been good yet. When they get good, I'll bring some. All right, perfect. Well, this office will be happy to help out test market, , provide feedback, yeah. I think mostly it would probably be more is what would happen. Yeah. More of that. More eating, yeah. Yeah. Well, eating's good. I think it's good for survival too, so. It's you really should do. Highly recommended by most doctors. That's right. Well, Laura, thank you so much for joining us today. Yes, thanks. We're thrilled to have you on staff and excited to introduce you to the community and thanks for all the work that you're doing with the project management here. Oh, thank you, guys. Do a church that loves the idea of using Rock but hasn't taken that leap yet? With managed hosting, churches of any size can get access to Rock's amazing technology, hassle free. 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