Podcast Episode 80: Podcast Episode 53: Where We Are and What 2019 Will Look Like

Description

What's coming up next for Rock and for the Core Team in 2019? Listen to this episode for all the details!

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 back for another episode of Rockcast where we take you behind the scenes and share exactly what we're working on here with the core team. I'm Emily Forman. We have Jon Edmiston and Nick Airdo. The first thing we'd to talk with you about is how things are going with our core development. We have recently released version 8.5, and now we are on to working on new things. So let's talk about that. Yeah. So there's lots of updates when it comes to core. It seems we're back to our normal routine of obviously going down the road map, but also adding features that people have been wanting. So version nine is gonna have some really incredible new features when it comes to registrations, things that we'd always wanted but hadn't planned on for version nine, and super excited about that. So a couple of those registration things to look for, conditional fields on registrant. So if you have a a field on a registrant that's maybe , what's do you have a favorite color? And if you check that box, then a drop down will appear below that to pick the color. So you'll be able to do some really cool things with that, and it's it's pretty pretty magical. It's very powerful. , I would say, , the feature kinda came from features Informstack, but ours is actually much more powerful than that. You can have the conditions go on multiple fields, the conditions based on most multiple fields. So that's a really cool feature. There's also limits on fees. So if you have certain fees, it can only have a certain number of people who take them. That is actually feature now. And next week, we'll be starting a quick feature, which would be adding well, I say quick, but, , it's gonna take some amount of development time, but a feature to add attributes to the registration. So that's confusing. So today, we have attributes on registrants. So you have a set of attributes for each registrant. This one one will be attributes on the registration. And you'll be able to put those attributes on the beginning of the registration or at the end of the registration. And so those would be helpful to gather things about maybe childcare or things that are you just need one collection of of attributes for the whole registration. So we're starting that next week, and lots of great new features on registrations. We're also officially now making good progress on volunteer scheduling, which feels good. So that's a that's a huge one for version nine, and we have the the block that's basically gonna let you create the schedule almost done. So we hope to have most of that done, this week. And then there's a a couple other blocks to do some reporting and some sign ups and some toolbox type stuff with that. So still a ways to go on that, but making good, good progress. And after that, the really, the only other feature in the road map that we've promised that we still need to work on is the digital signatures. So we kinda have some thoughts on how that's supposed to work. There's some challenges with that and just being able to provide the all the functionality that we know that the community is gonna want. So still some challenges ahead on that. But really excited about where v version nine is. I think we're making great progress. But on top of that, we're adding great new features too. And it's not slowing us down a whole terrible amount. So I'm really excited about version nine. Mhmm. But I'm even more excited about getting started on version 10. That will be nice. It's really cool to hear what those features are when you describe them in more detail, because I can see how the things that we hear from the community about what their needs are, are being embedded into the features that we're creating. And I think that's really cool. And again, one of those unique things about Rock is that this community exists and and we love this community and we we get to share that by listening and taking in their feedback and then incorporating that into our feature sets as we build them. And that's just a really dynamic process that isn't very common. Yeah. And I think even going through some of these projects, as we talk about, for instance, registration attributes, hearing their use cases and the challenges of some of these nuanced use cases is really interesting. And I think it's gonna empower some even bigger feature features and registration coming up that we're gonna start probably sketching out in early January. So you'll hear more about that because we'll probably need some community help and funding on on some of that, but it's really gonna make registrations really shine. I have to circle back for just a second to the comment you made right before this when you said, I'm really excited about v nine, but I'm really excited about v 10. And that's just so funny because it reminds me, John, of the senior pastor of the church where we used to work at CCV. And he was always as soon as we would wrap up one big initiative, we would think that he'd be getting up at the next staff meeting to say, Hey, great job. That was really great. And he would get up every time and have to be reminded to say something about this great initiative we just completed and then say, But here's where we're going and I'm so excited that we're gonna get there. I thought that was funny because you just reminded me of that. Yeah. And he often, honestly, I mean, being on the leadership team, he often took a lot of flack for that, for not wanting to celebrate when things are done. And I sometimes get flack for that too. And I understand it's , Why would you wanna celebrate? It's already done. We're already moving on. , I think that's just a piece of wiring within people. And, , I think there there's two sides of that. Right? So there's the side that says, well, we need to celebrate, and that's true. But at the same time, those who say that have to understand the other facets. some people are not wired to do that. And it's not a problem, it's not an issue, it's not something wrong with the person, it's just that's not the way that you're wired. And we need all types on Teams. But honestly, if you read much about high performing teams and how to build them, never being satisfied is one of the top things they mentioned. Right, exactly. I mean, it's nice to have things done, but I'm excited about the next thing. Well, I am too. We get to hear about all the the fun features coming up and and the great things. Speaking of fun features and and great things for the community, we are right now, at the recording of this podcast in the middle of an exciting time of year, Chip's twelve Days of Christmas. And John, you have been working really hard on that and and working with the team leading this, fun project up that's really delivering cool things for the community right now. Tell us a little bit about that. Yeah. It's really exciting, and and I'm gonna have to have a little talk with Chip because this twelve days of Christmas might have been a little ambitious. Twelve days of torture. Yeah. Maybe Chip should have had one day of Christmas or one Christmas present, but he really went all out this year. And so we have 12 gifts that we're giving out to the community ranging in sizes from super large, amazing, big things to some small things. But, yeah, it's just our way of just kinda giving back. A lot of the things, a lot of the big things are things that we've been wanting to do for a while. And honestly, we just never had time. And honestly, right now we still don't have time. But, , when Chip said 12, we had to start coming up with these things and we threw them on the board thinking, how hard could that be? We'll just do that. And then you get to it and you're , Oh my gosh. So things the new ideas feature, which is already really cool. People can now submit their ideas publicly and see it and they can get voted on. And then we'll take a percentage of our development time on each release to do those that are the highest voted. So the voting, each organization gets 20 votes every thirty days. So those who use their votes wisely will get the things they want. But it also brings parity that a small church and a large church get the same number of votes. So I love that too. And if your organization has 30 people attached to it, they all 30 people have to share those 20 votes. So that's kinda cool. We really put a lot of time into trying to make sure that we created a fair and balanced way of voting. Already, I'd to say, , great job to to to some of the community who've added their ideas. Some of them are putting an amazing amount of detail into them and putting screenshots and and I more than telling how, they tell why. And I just wanna encourage you, if you're gonna put an idea out there, do not put one or two sentences. I mean, go for it. , this is your time to really explain why the feature's needed. Show some screenshots. Those that do, I think, are gonna get a lot more votes. You're gonna do yourself a favor. But already, there's some people just doing incredible feature write ups, and it's allowing a good dialogue to happen down in the comments. So that was one idea. That's one just one of the the gifts. Don't give away any secrets. Right. Yeah, I won't. I'm only thinking of the ones that we've already done. You can now get a chip blanket, which is very soft, have to tell you. It is. It's passed the approval test with my teenagers who love soft blankets. Great. That's good to hear. There was a chip sticker, but that was the day only thing. So you could register and get a free Chip Santa sticker. Oh, let's give some attribution on that. Yeah. So Kate Hull did that for us. And so that's pretty cool. Very cool. And, , there are a lot of chip stickers. It's hard to keep them straight, but maybe there's something coming that will help you with that too. Oh. Yeah. So we're not going give that one out, but we'll That's interesting. Yeah. Today is a big day because we're announcing that we're getting rid of Slack and moving to Rocket Chat, which if you squint your eyes this a little bit, you'll swear to Slack because it's pretty much a clone. But it's something that we maintain. We have our own history now. And we've been running that history for several months. So if you get in there, you'll notice there's quite a bit of history. And for people who really love Slack, there's a reason why we wanted to get away. Yeah, we love Slack too. It's just, , the velocity of the community is basically only keeping up for a few days in Slack, the history. So, and that's so important. I am so continually frustrated that I had conversation with somebody about something and it's not there in literally a couple of days. Right. So that will be a thing of the past. Yeah, that's exciting because I know now when I have conversations with people, I'm immediately thinking, how do I capture this? Where do I put it for future reference? And that's a little bit irritating. So this will eliminate that. Yeah. And there's a lot more customization that we can do with Rocket Chat. So we've customized it to basically, you don't need to know your password. It's using your Rock password to authenticate you on the desktop and web. On mobile, you do need to know the special ROCKit chat password, and we show it to you in a little box, you can copy and paste it in. But it's gonna make onboarding into the chat community much easier. You don't have to create another profile. You basically hit that page. We see that you don't already have one in Rocket Chat. We automatically create one for you. It's just seamless. And for those casual community users, they don't even need to install software. They can just do it right online in a iframe experience right on our website, which looks very native. So I think the casual Rock community person is gonna love it because they can just jump in and contribute. But the power people aren't giving up anything. Chip has been integrated into that. He demanded that, of course. He's not usually so demanding. He's not. And then when he says it, how do you say no to that face? He just gives you those puppy eyes and you're , Okay, Chip, you can have it. So he asked for a lot. It's usually for good reasons though. Yeah. He's a good little lobster. I think what else did he have this week? Sticker. Oh. The blanket. The lava color filters Yes. Which to some of you probably isn't very exciting, but I was very excited about that. And that came from a community member's suggestion that they were creating some stuff and they wanted to be able to dynamically create complementary colors for some of the stuff that he was doing. And and so we kinda looked into it and created 12 different color filters that you can lighten colors, darken colors, change saturation, luminosity, mix two colors. So for you web devs, you'll love it. I think it's fun that you just said that that came from a suggestion from a community member. So do realize that Chip kinda channel stocks out there. And and a lot of the gifts that are coming for the twelve days of Christmas this year are inspired from from that stocking. Yeah. And there's a rumor that Chip doesn't sleep, that he just always is, , looking. That's not a rumor. I'm pretty certain of that. And I'm not surprised. Some of the ones coming up next week are actually directly from the community also. So Good job, Chip. Yeah. Well, let's talk a little bit about this end of year that we have going on. I know that it's really busy for our listeners, and it's really busy for us as well. Not just because of the twelve days of Christmas, which we're very excited about and the features that we're working on. There are a lot of big initiatives going on, and all of this is always possible because of the support and donations from our Rock community. So, of course, our model, most of our community knows, is one that is supported directly by donations from the churches that are using Rock. And at end of year, it's a time for us to evaluate what were the pledges that came in for this year and how are those reconciling? What do things look ? Because, of course, we've been working off of those those promises for the year. And so I just wanted to give a quick pledge update. And that is that right now, first of all, our pledge system we have discovered can be a little confusing to the community. So, a lot of times a church might come online with Rock maybe three quarters of the way through the year and say, oh, let's see. My pledge for the year is x dollar amount. And they're thinking in their head for twelve months, , from now. And we're thinking what's our budget for 2018. So that's a little confusing, and we find through end of year communication sometimes that churches will say, oh gosh, I'm sorry. I really meant that that's a a twelve month cycle. I didn't mean that that would all fit into this year, which is totally fine. Mhmm. We realize that's confusing. We've been working on a plan to fix that, which I'll get into here in a minute. But that does affect our pledges. So we do usually see our pledge balance, drop a little bit at the end of the year as we work out some of that confusion. We're kind of used to that. We anticipate that a little bit. But we also run into an occasional situation with a church where someone who loved Rock came on board or was on their staff, made a big pledge, and then for whatever reason transitioned off of their staff. And no one else has the same heart for Rock. And you get to the end of the year, you start talking with whomever the new contact is there at that church, and they don't really care to meet their pledge. And so we have that happen, and this year's no exception. We've had one church recently actually had a pledge for about $20,000. And once we could finally figure out who the new contact for Rock was there, they were not interested in making a donation this year. So that's pretty common. It's not usually common at that level of pledge. Usually, a church that pledges that amount has a different type of investment, in other ways beyond just a financial investment in the community, but that does happen. And that, , that really hurts the the momentum and the status of the whole team. So right now we're at about $34,000 of pledges that have been communicated back to us that will not be met this year. And we're still in the process of connecting with all of our pledge contacts to the rate of there's a outstanding currently still about $50,000 outstanding where we either haven't connected or they're , it just hasn't come through yet. So altogether, we're short by about $84,000 that we'd been planning on this year. A small percentage of that we assumed would be something where there had been maybe some minor confusion on how our pledge system works. But for the most part, that's still a pretty big number for our small team. It's a huge number. It's a it is. And so if you've received a communication from us about where your pledge status is and it's a little bit short, please let us know. You might be thinking, oh, that check is in the mail, and it'll get there next week. If you don't mind dropping us a line and just letting us know, this is one thing that we're having to clear other important things off of our plates to address just to make sure that we can fully support the team that we have here and and the plans that we've already been working on based off of those pledge numbers. So that's kind of an unfortunate situation. And if you have any ability to, one, if you have any extra budget money at the end of the year that hasn't been allocated and that you're going to lose, would you please consider a donation to Spark to help offset some of this? And two, if you have an outstanding pledge balance, would you please just give us a call or an email and let us know what your plans are for fulfilling that for the end of the year? That would be, really huge. That would help us focus on the things we should be focusing on and and meet the needs of our team. So we we do ask if you have the ability to do either of those things that you that you please help out and do your part in that. Additionally, because we know this pledge system has been confusing, and we've heard that for the past two years, we've been working on a new feature to help make that something that's, more accessible and easier to use. So we are rolling out for 2019 instead of pledges that are based on an annual concept, and we come back to you every year and ask you to tell us your pledge for the next year. And you think, gosh, I've I've nothing's changing. This is confusing. We're gonna work off a system called commitments. And that is when you come online, you make your commitment to support. You are telling us how much you plan to donate and when you plan to start. We can do all the math from there. That helps out a lot. And you can change it, whenever you need to change it. We'll assume its status quo every year unless you make changes to it. So it should be much, much easier. It's also something you can access pretty easily. So if you're logged in at on the Rock site, you can either go to your profile and click on your organization to see it at any time that you want, or you can go online to our website at rockrms.com/commitments, and you can see that there as well. You'll just wanna log in to be able to see and have those options there if you are, the correct contact for that at an administrative login level for your organization. So, hopefully, that's very helpful. And then today, actually, at the recording time, we will be sending out an email to let that the commitments feature is ready for your information for next year. And if you had a pledge in with us, for 2018, we will automatically, put that into the commitments. So it's pretty easy, seamless process if nothing's changed. If it has, you can see it there. One other cool aspect of this feature is that we've built in a little slider that tells you whether or not you are at that dollar 50 per attendee, per year, which is our recommended minimum donation to support the team here. And, so it'll tell you quickly that, and you can adjust, to the correct levels on that. It also lets that for future, rollouts of major versions that that dollar 50 minimum per attendee per year is gonna be required for early access, which gives you the three month early access to new major releases. So you can see right there on your commitments page whether or not you will have access to the next major release, which will be v nine at this point. Yeah. I think that new commitment feature is gonna be nice. It's you said, very simple and hopefully kinda gets us more accurate idea of where we're going. And take some of those barriers to working with it away. You can see it, it's easy to adjust. It makes a lot of sense. So I appreciate the feedback from churches that have let us know, Oh, we intended to communicate this. I'm sorry if it came across a different way. We totally get that. Yeah. And thanks for giving us that feedback because that's how we have been able to to make this new feature. Definitely. Well, we have a lot of initiatives going on right now that are again pretty community driven. And so it's let's let's talk a little bit about one that, oh, our community has been asking for for a year more. I don't know. A very long time. And that's regarding a Rock mobile app. It looks we're gonna be kicking off some pretty big things right at the beginning of twenty nineteen. So, John, why don't you tell us a little bit about that? Yeah. So we're really excited to be working with the folks from Southeast to get a community supportable version of Avalanche that's, , closely tied and linked into Rock. So we're gonna be kicking that that project off, I think, in about mid to late January is our first meeting. They're flying out. We're gonna get in a room and just figure out, , what needs to be done to get this fully in core, to get this under a a spark umbrella. And I think that's gonna really help build a platform for everybody else to just, , start building their apps off of to, , make it really easy and supportable to do that and to extend it, , just Rock is, , so that it becomes just Rock. So really excited about that. We have a a new developer starting next week who will be helping us on our side of that development piece and so excited about getting him engaged. We just know that there's a huge buzz and a huge amount of interest in this, and it's nice to finally have it in a project that gets attention. Our intention has always been to start working on this tomorrow, but sometimes your intentions need a little Attention. Attention. Right. Yeah. And so I think by putting a project around this and Southeast is gonna be a huge partner in that and helping push this forward. That's really exciting news. And I think it's one of the community's been interested in. And you said, we have been too. It's just hard to focus on something when you don't have the bandwidth for it. And so I think that we've got that cleared now and it's an approved project, it's on the schedule, and we're gonna see that come to fruition in 2019, which is exciting. Right. I mean, I think it's just hard to think of all the things that initiatives that we have. The word initiative is it's what seems a straight line from point A to point B to us, to the outside a straight line. To us, it's crazy all over the place. We talked about that commitment feature. You look at it and you're just , well, duh, that's what it should do. But just how do you communicate that? How do you track it? What's the variable on that screen? What adjusts? Is it the amount or the dollar per average weekend attender? It just takes so much effort, and then to code it, and then to get it out on the page with the right communication. And then how do you link it if a person has multiple organizations? It's just so hard. And each of these, twelve Days of Christmas projects are hard. I mean, even the easiest one, mean, the blankets. We're having to look and source and get samples. And it's not you just go to the Internet and pick the first thing you Google. I mean, we were on the probably the tenth or twentieth page going to the industrial blanket maker to get the right pricing, the right- And get samples in and look at some and go, Oh, this is not going to work. We can't put this quality out there. To wash the samples and make sure that they It looks an easy straight line that, Oh, that's great. But behind the scenes really the twelve days, all that stuff was done after hours, I mean, for the most part. That's what I was just about to say. Least you worry and fear, it didn't impact any developers during their workday, especially the blankets. Right. But the other thing I wanna say is that we use the word project for all those things. It doesn't mean they were officially projects. Right. Means that they just kind of fit into the cracks. So Night and weekends mainly Right. For 12. And mostly John. Well, I mean, there's yeah. There's So, I think sometimes it's , Why hasn't more attention been put on Avalanche? It's just been a crazy year. I mean, we're going to talk about it in another podcast about all the cool things that been going on this And there's a lot of stuff that we're preparing for next year that are gonna be amazing too. So But I think it's not fair to something Avalanche to fit it into the cracks. Correct. And so we have been intentionally not fitting it into the cracks for the last probably twelve to fifteen months looking at it and saying, yes, it needs full attention. It needs a project. But if you fit something that into the cracks, you cannot, you cannot deliver the quality and the, the pre thinking that's necessary for the right architecture for something that. So we've been intentionally waiting until we could wrap our project around it so that we could do it right. So that is the difference between what's the initiative that is avalanche and some of the other things that we've been working on. Yeah. Well said, that's a good lead into the next topic. Yes. That is. Good point, Nick. The next topic is hosting, which is another I mean, honestly, we've been talking about those two things at the same time for a very long time, and it's also something that you can't fit into the cracks. We've tried on that one. And it's a very, very big, very complicated project. I know as far as it touches me, all that I'm really involved with on that one is just trying to figure out sales tax. And that one tiny, tiny piece of that project is ridiculously complicated Yeah. To the point that we have to have ongoing meetings with, other organizations that do this, with accountants, with I mean, it's it's just ridiculous. And that's a tiny, tiny portion of what's involved. Right. And there's just a really a lot of talk right now in the in the in our country about how hard it is to start a small business and all the regulation and all the and then it's so true. I mean, can't cough without having to fill out a form, but to stay But wait, could I get you a form for that? No, I haven't coughed yet though. I've been stifling it for three days. I mean, it's ridiculous. And I think the sales tax too is another one. It's just if you look at how ridiculously hard it is to do what's right, and we are gonna do what's right, it's just If you could see the spreadsheet that I received this week that breaks down tax codes and percentages for all the municipalities that have to be involved from states to cities to counties, and then some that opt in and some that opt out and some that have a threshold involved. And then the lawsuits that have triggered some to change their regulations, and then the other states that follow suit. I mean, it is I don't even have an adjective. Right. And of course, there are services that help simplify it, but those services are complex in terms of APIs and reporting. I mean, So we're doing all the due diligence. Of course. That's just one of them, right? Because then we have to decide, well, part of the hosting will be the hosting charge, but we also want to bake in the donation part two, but those may have to go to two separate entities. Entities, the nonprofit part of what we do and the for profit that's owned by the nonprofit. So, that means two different financial gateways. I mean, you're starting to see the code that has to be written to make that experience simple. And that's just one facet of it. Right? That's just the provisioning and tax payment. Right. We have to worry about the architecture of the hardware, the SQL Server licensing, SSL support, how do we maximize so that person who goes on Rock Cloud feels it's on their own server and has all the power of that. And we're trying to overprovision those environments so that there's a lot , that speed will will be great, and we don't wanna underprovision and have these, , really slow, Rock instances. So, I mean, lots of progress has been made, but as we move every Rock, you're , Oh, that's under that Rock too. We have to figure that out too. Right. I mean, the signup experience, what does that look ? How does it function? Things , okay, so now we have churches on this service. What happens if they need to contact someone? And what happens if that's on a weekend? And what kind of, if a church is the type of church that wants to use our hosting service, what else do they need to be successful on Rock? Do they need to see Rock in a different way? Do they need to have different options? I mean, these are, it's just a complicated project. Right. But it is a project now. It is. And progress is being made every week, but new challenges are discovered every week too. Right. And we've been verbalizing that we're working on this for a little bit longer. So I think it's a good idea to just kind of share some of the actual complexity that's behind it. It's not that it's getting a lack of attention. It's really just as John said, every time we turn over a Rock or we figure out how to remove an obstacle, it it's there are 10 more behind it. So we'll get there, but it's gonna be a long time to dig out and figure it out. Yeah. And I think the thing that slows us down, which sounds , well, course you have to do this is the integrity of it. we could have just blazed through and used the web edition of SQL Server. And not worried about taxes. Yikes. But that's just not an option. We're going through every single thing and making sure that everything is just lined up right. You can bet there are plenty of organizations that do cut all those corners. True. But we're just not gonna do that. Right. Right. So, John, you mentioned that we have a new senior developer starting, next Monday from the recording of this podcast. We're really excited about that. We've kind of shared a little bit about some of our recruiting efforts and and some of how those efforts have been for us and some for the community, and we've been trying to move all of that forward for quite a while. And it seems God's really bringing us a a wealth of candidates that have a heart for the mission, and that have great skill set and that would be a good fit with our team. And that's really exciting because it's something that's feels a big breakthrough after months of of trying to find people. So we are working on what that looks and and really trying to plan. So in a previous podcast, I talked about kind of blitzscaling and what that looks and how the community is just scaling so much faster than our organization can because we intentionally set it up as a nonprofit. So we'll never be able to blitzscale, which is good because blitzscaling requires that you abandon efficiency and craftsmanship in order to reach a scale, and we don't wanna do that. It's great if the community does that. We don't want to do that with the actual product, or the way we steward that community. So we don't wanna blitzscale, but we do have to keep up with the community that is. And so that means that we need to to continue building our team. And so we are we're going to function as a basically kind of startup forever probably in order to do that. And that's good. And that's okay. But we do have to then figure out what should, for instance, our org chart look and how does that seems we've been reinventing that every Yeah, know how it works. It changes every month. Exactly, it almost does. But as we're finding good candidates, we're constantly reevaluating our internal workflow going the way it should. How should we add this? Where do we need to add a little more maturity than the typical startup? Where is it time to add some of those things? Not so that we lean our organization toward the big, slow, heavy plotting kind of organization. But this so that we can add a few things related to maybe as an a larger organization has to communicate differently. And so how do we make sure that things aren't all going through the same person or all getting stuck in the same place? So some of the hires that we're making soon are related to quality and project management and some things that we haven't had in an individual person before. We're really excited about the way that's gonna open up our team to be able to expand capacity. Yeah. 2019 is gonna be an awesome year. I think we're gonna, you said, change some of our internal processes and be able to scale the team. And I think when we talk about the recruiting, everything you said is an exact example of what looks a straight line. Behind the scenes, it's been probably eight months that you've been really investing in recruiting. I mean, the level of the process of how we recruit is is is is amazing that you've put together with the questions that we're asking, the assessments that we have, the the tests that we've , we give out to people, the projects, I guess is a better term for that to to do so we can evaluate that. I think when we see the net results that are going to come in, it's because of all of that, that's the harvest, right? But we've been planting and watering and pruning and weeding. A lot of hard knock lessons along the way. Right. You try something and it just doesn't work at all. So then you have to figure out a better way. And eventually it's a, , you can get a pretty refined process out of that, but there have been a lot of skinned knees and stubbed toes along the way for sure. Yeah. But I think if you look at the caliber of the people that are about to come and join the team, they're top caliber and amazing. , it's what that really that we get to work with these people? Right. And so in that recruiting process, which obviously is situated inside an HR type of function, we've been thinking , so what should as we grow, what should HR look in our organization? And, , we're not here to be a human resources team. We're not here to outsource that kind of capability or functionality to other organizations to help them. So do we have to have it? Yes, we have to meet regulations. Even more importantly, I think for our organization is that HR needs to be something that provides stability and a great working environment for the people who are here. So should our focus be on more forms, more paperwork, more regulation, slower, deeper, larger, or should it be on something where we're investing in helping people grow individually and as a team? And I think that's really what HR is gonna look for us here. Right. Because I mean, I worked many, many, many years at Honeywell and American Express. And I mean, to your blitzscaling analogy, those are police states. , they're and they're not not the regular police state. They're a complete police state. We don't want to build that. No. We're not looking to give out traffic citations to people for minor infractions. What what we're really looking to do is say, hey, don't worry about your family's taken care of. You just come in and focus on what's going on. And guess what? By this time next year, we'll have invested in you personally, in our organization to the point where you realize you've had a lot of internal growth and you, your family and our organization will all have received benefit from that. And it'll be a great team sport of what we have going on here. So that's different. And even project management can be taken too far and become a police And we wanna have more of a Marine Army project management. And picking the person to do that, we're looking for we've picked the person who's not gonna who's gonna take us to the next level without slowing down what we do. And it's almost an art form now because it's so easy to follow, you said, that straight line path that's already been laid out. As you grow, as you mature, you should take these steps toward being more complex, toward being slower, toward adding more people to get the same job done, and that's not what we wanna do. And as we're reinventing this whole model of how Spark works and and how Rock works, we want to also reinvent how can you grow in maturity without, , growing long in the tooth? Mhmm. I mean, we don't want to function a an old slow organization ever in those areas. Yeah. That make me vomit. We don't want that. Yeah. I don't either want it either. But yet the person that we're hiring, I mean, has experience that is amazing. I mean, certifications and I mean, black belt in Six Sigma, I mean, that is a serious certification with serious experience with that yet can come in and and help us be agile and move fast. That's it's gonna be amazing 2019. It will be. And you mentioned that police state concept, John, but if someone didn't listen to the previous podcast, kind of the just a really quick outline of how it works according to this split scaling book is that startup organizations function a lot the marines, and they have one goal and that's take the beach. And so, , you you don't draw out a lot of plays for it. You don't have a lot of you have rank and structure and you how to work together really well, but you have chaos, you have smoke and blood, and you have to pick a different route because this one didn't work. And then you have to pick another route and then someone else might be in charge of something. And you have to be flexible. You have to be hardworking generalists to really get things done in that capacity. And then kind of as you grow past that, once you've taken the beach, you bring in the army and the army can go inland a bit and can set up communication centers, supply routes, all of those kind of things that help, have recurring function rather than just the the initiatives. And those are good things, and they can and the marines and the army work really well together, and they they both do really good things. But you can take that army state too far to the point that you get into a police state, which is where you're getting into all the nitpicky regulations and minutiae that you end up having departments to do things that one person used to do. And we're not going to go there. Right. And that we know we mentioned the project manager, but that's I mean, there's many more different roles coming in in January. So Right. We're still working all of that out. One more of those things that we have to have a lot of strategy communications about as candidates come in with different types of capacity and in different ways. And and, , we really see God delivering people that would be a perfect fit here. How do we structure this? So how does that change our processes? How does that change our communication structure? And it's takes a lot of attention, but it's gonna be so good for us in the next year. Yep. Looking forward to it. Yes. And the one thing that does make me wanna remind everybody of, let's circle back to topic number three. We rely on your commitments and pledges to know that we can afford this. So we we operate very conservatively here and we always will, but we do rely on the word of the organizations that support us, and we are very thankful for that. We have a lot of great supporters, but please do try and keep that accurate and, and do try to get to that minimum donation. If you're using Rock and and receiving value from that, remember that comes because of the support of organizations that are using Rock. So if you're running your church on Rock, you wanna make sure Rock is stable, you need to be supporting the organization as well. It's a really great environment. It's a great ecosystem where we support each other equally. So on that note, a big thanks to our community for supporting us in 2018, and we're looking forward to really taking some beaches with you in 2019. Today's show was produced by Emily Forman. Nick was our recording engineer who turned the dials and pushed the buttons. Jim Michael handled all the audio post production mixing. There are amazing show notes, you can find at brockrms.com/connect, were transcribed and written up by Michael Garrison. 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. With just one click, Rock's managed hosting removes the roadblocks that might stop a church from switching to Rock by making the process simple. Churches get the ease of a SaaS church management system without losing any of Rock's powerful features. Are you ready to take the next step or share with another local church? Visit rockrms.com/hosting today.