Podcast Episode 78: Episode 51: Minting New Talent

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Get the latest on version 9 and so many of our other initiatives in this episode of RockCast! We'll also look at some of the differences between our community and our core team, and talk about how we support each other.

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 to this edition of the Rockcast podcast. I'm Emily Forman. I have Jon Edmiston and Nick Airdo here, and we will tell you a little bit about what's going on in the Rock ecosystem and what we've been doing lately, which will be eventually impacting you. And we just love to open up these conversations for the community to have the transparency into what we're doing, especially as the community grows and our team grows, we find a lot of value in sharing. So I love to start with the development updates. Where are we? Sure. We just started a second round of alpha testing on version 8.5. So round one was really quick. We added some fixes that we found immediately, and then we started the alpha round two, which ends this Friday. So pretty much Monday would be beta. So eight five will go to beta on Monday, which who knows what that date is for you guys listening to this. But it's just a collection of, bug fixes, that people found in eight four. Okay. And how are the teams for alpha and beta testing? Do you have the number of people and participants that you need for that? I mean, we're still looking for more people to move from the beta team to the alpha team. We are trying to do more testing, full blown feature testing in the alpha phase. Whereas originally alpha was, Hey, did the installer work? Is everything Is your system still functioning? And now it's advantageous for us to do real, , serious solid feature testing in the alpha round, because then it makes beta more stable for people that wanna really use it in their production environments, which again, that's a smaller set of churches that wanna do that. But that's what we're looking for. So again, if you're wanting to do testing and you wanna move over from the beta team to the alpha team, just contact Nick. Okay, Contact me. There's a page for that, get involved. It's rockrms.com/getinvolved. Yeah. And I would say too, it's not really about quantities, it's about quality of testing. How much quality of testing are we doing? So I think we've seen in some of the previous releases that some things that should have been easy to test just didn't get tested. And so bugs got through. And so we really need to make sure that we're, , having good quality testing. We have a good checklist. And I know not everybody can do quality on every single release because, , there's different initiatives and activities going on within the church that take up time, but we need at least four or five different organizations doing quality testing on each release. And so I think it's a matter of putting enough time into it more than just enough people into it. That's a good point. And we have different needs for, as far as the environment goes, for the alpha testers and the beta testers, right? Yeah, bit. Although that's changing too. So we're now relaxing the alpha test requirements. So if you just bring up a system and put some data in it, that's really good enough for our tests because we do have other people that are doing alpha testing against copies of their real data, which is even more valuable. Okay. And as far as skill sets of someone who would be good at doing either alpha testing or beta testing, in case someone's listening and wondering how to get involved and wondering, am I a good fit for that program? What would you say if you could give a quick synopsis? Attention to detail. Yep. I mean, you don't absolutely don't need to be a developer. You absolutely don't need to be the most technically proficient. You just have to have a good eye for for detail. And I just want us, , go back to, , what makes Rock unique is is that we're a community driven development, and that it's all about community. And that that really shines too in this testing phase. We talk a lot about, , the what's on our plates in terms of work. There's there's steak and vegetables. Sometimes this testing is is very much vegetable . It doesn't feel fun. It doesn't feel productive, but it's probably one of the most important things. Completely. And I feel that's one of the things that's if we're looking at, , where do we need to focus more attention, I really feel this might be one of the biggest areas because I think our initial release quality would go up significantly. Because, , we use the product every day. Every day, we're in that product using it, but there's certain things we we don't use. , we we don't use check-in except once a year. ? So are we testing that? Yeah. But we don't test it the way everybody else is testing it because, , every church does check-in just a little bit differently. So, , we really need help with that. I mean, that's not something that's easy for us to test on. Right. And especially check-in, there's so many different ways to set it up. Even our alpha testers and beta testers really we'd love a wide variety of configurations and setups. for example, I just tested time zones for the first time. We never used time zones at Central Christian Church, but so I set up a, I forget how you do it now, a campus on a different time zone and you set up events in there. But make a long story short, yeah, we just need thorough detail oriented people that have a passion and for making the product better. And just a quick reminder, the Rock community only works because we work for you and you in turn figure out how to support us. So make sure as you're getting deeper involved into your organization implementing and moving on to Rock, you're looking for the ways that you can best help to keep that moving forward because that's where the stability and the synchronization comes from, is all of us putting our shoulder into it. Right. Right. And so moving on to other development work, we are, , working on Nine. I think we have the same good issue that we always have is that we get feature creep with these versions based on the needs of the community and and those that some people want to fund. So the the good news is we get great new features that people are been wanting. So actually, this one got kinda got snuck in the eight five is there's some additions to check-in that you can now have more of a if you have a volunteer there, they can add new families right in the check-in environment. They can add new people to families, and that's all in the documentation if you wanna take a a quick sneak peek. It's also on the pre alpha release site too. But coming in nine, you're gonna see some more features around registrations. There's gonna be a lot more, , capabilities there. We're working on conditional fields within registrations, which is something that, , has been a high interest, , with people. We were hoping that the conditional fields would be reusable across, , lots of different areas, but just looking at how registrations work, they're just very unique. And we weren't able to reuse that logic everywhere, but we do plan to add that in more places, , using the same concepts. So but that's pretty cool. We did get started with volunteer scheduling a bit. Spits on kind of pause right now because we have to finish up a few, , projects. But that is the last remaining big thing on the road map was was that. So, I mean, lots of good progress being made on on on the core side too. Lots of good stuff. Good. Well, as we move toward v nine, it's probably a good time to bring up, a tweak that we're making to our early access program. After the conference, when we kind of discussed our funding and where things were at, and the community became aware of the fact that there was a trend towards some organizations doing a really small one time donation just to get early access to Rock. The those organizations that have been really substantially supporting with the Rock development have come and asked us to please make some changes that would contribute toward the ongoing security and development of Rock. And one of those changes is that we change the v nine early access requirement from pretty much any donation to open that access up to making it the according to the minimum donation of a dollar 50 per average attendee per year. So starting with v nine, we will be moving into having that minimum donation, which is based on attendance size as the key to unlock early access. So, just to clarify, early access again is the program where you have access to the newest update the newest major version release in Rock three months before general release, and it has two, twofold purposes. One is to set a reminder of the funding needs of Rock and to help churches have the right tools to plug in early with their leadership and explain why the funding is important. And also because those who fund are typically more engaged have access to the the updated version ahead of time, will be messing around with it, playing with it in their development and production sites. And by the time everyone has general access, they're fully onboarded to the point that they can answer those community questions in the community forums, and really help out those who are still in an onboarding process or a little less engaged. So that change will be coming with the v nine release. If you do not know yet where your organization lines up on that, you can ping me and ask me, and I can check it out for you, or you can log in to your site, have the the admin for your organization in Rock, log into rockrms.com, review the attendance size and the donations there, and just make sure that everything's lined up that way. But that is a change that our leading supporters have asked us to make for the the sustainability of Rock. And that makes a lot of sense. It does. So other than, , core development, we there's a lot of other initiatives that we're working on. I mean, it's surprising how many things we have going on right now. But one of the ones, of course, is that we have been talking about at the conference and since then is is hosting. That one's been , what we thought was gonna be, , a project that was gonna be, , a lot of work but not very tricky has turned into be pretty tricky. We've run into lots of limitations around, creating an environment that's simple and keeps all the power of Rock for for the churches yet is easy to onboard has been difficult. , one limitation was a lack of IP v four addresses. That's really hard to get a whole bunch of those for a nice hosting environment. I think we've worked our way around that one, although that is really a global problem that, , I knew it was a problem, but I didn't really know how big of a problem it was. So we kinda got through that. We went through a lot of different hosting analysis of all the different providers. And then we ran into another one that which was a little weird is that we were always assuming that we would be able to use SQL Server Web Edition because it is a very cost effective license for SQL Server. Come to find out, if you really read the terms and conditions, , Rock does not meet the terms and conditions for Web Edition. So it might be something you guys wanna know too because if you're out there doing self hosting and you're using Web Edition, you might be in a fairly dark gray zone. Nothing in licensing has ever seems to be black and white. Mm-mm. But if you read the terms and conditions, it basically says a line of business application a CRM or an ERP is is not supposed to use the web edition. We reached out to Microsoft who wouldn't comment on it. They said we had to go through a partner to get their decisions. It's really the partners who make the decisions, and the partners that we talked to said, yeah. Based on what you're telling us and based on what this says, you you should not use it. So, again, that's it's a gray zone, but I would really kinda read that as a dark gray zone. If you really openly read the license without any kind of bias, it does seem that it's not there. So that's adjusted our pricing models. Of course, we, , we we still need SQL Server, and there's so it's a standard edition, which is quite a bit more expensive. So we've been really trying to figure out how do we architect to keep the cost down but yet the the the speed up and the power up. And I think we're there, but we still have a lot of other stuff we have to do. There's a lot of scripting that we have to do. There's a lot of monitoring that we want to do, so we wanna have a good monitoring solution for the what we're doing. And just trying to give everybody the same power that they would have if they were hosting themselves. So lot of effort, and I think we turned the corner on some things, and we're and we're now getting some traction again. For a while there, it feels we spun our wheels, got traction, spun our wheels again. I think we have traction again. So quick update on hosting. We're also , there's a lot of interest out there for Avalanche, so we've been talking with Southeast and and have some plans. So the goal is to really hit that as a project first thing in January. Right now, we're doing some of the prework. We're kinda deciding what kind of feature should go into it. We're kinda coordinating some schedules to get in the same location to for a big, , meeting to go over, , strategy. ? And and real right now, Avalanche is a great project. It's well thought out. There's some things that , minor things we probably wanna tweak a little bit architecturally to fit into a new direction that we're going even with some of the block development that we're doing. I think it'll tie in perfectly, but we just need to kind of get that a little bit on course with that direction. So right now, it probably would be I'd be a little more than a little hesitant just to say, get started on your own because things will change, and you probably will need to, , correct some of those changes if you were to get started now. But we are actively making that a big deal in January. A lot of that has to do with resources. And I know, Emily, you've been spending a ton of your time trying to get some new hires in, some talented new hires in, and that's just a really tough process. But you have a great process. I mean, you have great questions. You've been going through I hate to think how many people you've been I have a lot of new friends. Right. A lot. And it's all organized in asana. Mean, it's amazing to see all the people that are coming through. But we have a difficult set of criteria that to meet, , we want highly technical, share the same vision and mission. And we just as a team, we move pretty fast. So we gotta make sure we keep that momentum up. Right. And if we want to adhere to our core values of things craftsmanship and innovation, we have to be getting exactly the right technical people in to do that. And then at the same time, we wanna uphold that community both inside of our staff and in the Rock ecosystem. So there are, as you said, a lot of requirements to make sure we find exactly the right fit, which means I get to make a lot of friends along the way. But some of the reading that I've been doing lately says that you have to go through 150 to 200 resumes to find someone who's a great fit for both DNA and whatever your skill set is. That's a lot of resumes. And I would I would venture to say based on experience this year that we probably have to go through at least twice that many, because we have a lot of high, expectations regarding character and conduct that are potentially even beyond the things that I've been reading about. Right. And when you say you have go through those resumes, mean, that that sounds difficult, but not overwhelming. But when you think about what's what that really means, that means prescreen interviews for a lot of those. That means, , a lot of assessments that we do. I mean, it's a lot more than just scanning through some resumes. It's Right. You've got a serious process and then eventually they get into an actual interview on-site. We try to keep those on-site interviews to ones that are fairly likely to be exactly what we're looking for or to have just a few things we wanna work through in that regard because it is a huge time commitment. So there's a lot of behind the scenes work before someone comes on-site to meet with our team. Yeah. So that's just another initiative is hiring. And then related to that, but somewhat different, is the university program that we're working on, and that's taking a ton of time. We're getting a lot of resumes and lot of positions. We're trying to match people. So far, it looks there's gonna be some matches, which is really, really neat. We are also other things that people never really think about is we do have a lot of other tasks we have to do to be a nonprofit. So we're working on our board right now. Right. And so we are in a rotation kind of year. So we have some people leaving the board, and we have a couple people joining the board. And we'll be announcing those people as we get confirmation later this year or early next year. There's just a lot that goes on behind the scenes that just takes a ton of effort and trying to put on some new, , some new training maybe in next year, some additional training options, looking at that, just just a ton of We do always try to keep our ear to the ground with what the community says it needs and related to that training. We know that we've heard a lot of asks for some deeper training in certain areas, we tuck that away, and as opportunities arise, we try and figure out how to incorporate those. And then, , as things related to our board, for instance, that's a community need, but the community doesn't necessarily see it. But we know that the strength of the foundation either will limit or provide opportunities for the strength of the whole organization and therefore for the strength of Rock and the whole community. So we try to give a weighted focus each of the really important things. And so sometimes that means we can't move everything forward at once and we'll have to work on something that has less visibility just because we know that we don't want foundational shifts. We want to make sure that that's all solid. And if you're growing quickly, you have to pay attention to that kind of thing on a regular basis. Yeah. And I think you mentioned too that you said that we hear these things and we are talking and thinking behind the scenes, but sometimes we can't talk publicly because as soon as we speak it publicly, it's all of a sudden it goes into existence and it's thing. Right. And now we have an expectation that we have to meet. And so sometimes that might be why we're quiet when the community's talking about a topic is , we're on it, we're thinking about it, but we have so limited resources that we can't Commit to it yet. Right. And sometimes we don't even commit, but if we say something, it's a commitment. It it does. And it's even if it's something that's a light opinion or a concept that just says, hey, we're working on this. We're working on it doesn't always mean we have a developer who's been allocated to that full time. It might just mean we realize that's important and it's staying on our top important things list. And as we go through our pretty much weekly reallocation of what is top priority and who do we need to put on it, , those things are constantly staying in front of us. And when the time is right, we will do what we need to do. Yeah. And well, I think one thing that's been a huge change in difference is that we do plan more time to talk about our strategy than we used to. And I think that's helping a lot to be more organized in in that area. Definitely right. But another thing we're we're considering and putting out is an advisory council. Do wanna talk a little bit about that? Yes. So we I guess the the reason we're looking at this is maybe twofold. One is that we know we could really use the, input and advice of the churches that are our biggest supporters and that, they have needs and connections and, just some great insights that would benefit the SPARC community if they were organized and synthesized and put together into a group. And the other is that we need to, be able to communicate things succinctly to them as well. So in order to have that kind of flowing both ways, we're looking at putting together an advisory council of sorts of those organizations that are, fundamentally supporting the core work that Rock does at a major level and giving them the opportunity to be a part of speaking words of wisdom into what we're doing and providing guidance and support to the leaders of the organization and really coordinating what that looks providing unique perspectives of several different churches, and having an outlet for that information to come to the core team, and then also having an outlet for the core team perspectives and information to flow to those churches as well. So we are looking at how to put something that together, and and we'll be connecting with some of those organizations in probably the next month or so. Yeah, that was a really cool idea that actually came from our former senior pastor, Don Wilson, that when we're talking at the conference, he highly recommended this kind of strategy and this kind of organization, which I thought was really a good Yeah. Yeah. So we're really looking forward to that. Any organization can always use more coordinated leadership and the support of leaders who understand the trenches and have lots of great life experience to share. So we're looking forward to seeing how we can strengthen that, and and are really excited that Don gave us that idea. Yeah. So not to put you on the spot, we were talking the other day, and you were reading a fascinating book that seemed to have some real ties with what we do. I think it was called Blitz Glitzscaling. Scaling. Okay. Yes. Blitzscaling. So the concept of it is and I'm just a couple chapters in, but it's kind of blowing my mind right now. It's the concept of blitz, which is lightning. Right? It's super, super fast. And then scaling, of course, is growth. And so they're talking about in today's economy to some degree and definitely in tomorrow's economy, the organizations that are going to have success will choose fast growth and market inundation over efficiency. And that's a really interesting concept because it's in polar opposite to the concept of take something, work it out, perfect it, replace yourself with someone else who can do it as a technician and move on to the next thing. And so one is very sustained, very controlled growth. One is absolutely fast inundation growth, knowing that you're going to have risk and and potentially errors. And those two are in in polar opposite. Right? So it's hard to hold both ideas in your head and think about them at the same time. And I kind of had a realization as I was starting to read this, and again, I have a lot more to read there, but our community is blitzscaling. So they're growing so fast that from one community encounter to another, sometimes we almost don't recognize the form of the community because it's it's getting legs and it's really exciting. Because it means that Rock as an ecosystem is meeting needs of churches. It's doing it well. It's doing it quickly. It's scaling in organizations that are very small to to those that are very large. So it's meeting needs because it's not focused on just one organization or just one pocketbook. It's really set to be a community tool and that's succeeding. But at the same time, our organization can't blitz scale. So Spark Development Network is a nonprofit. We're not going to be able to go out and get venture capital and hire all the big names who've come in and put together all the big ecommerce sites and things for a couple of reasons. One, that's not in the cards. Blitzscaling is a method that organizations use to make a huge profit. So venture capitalists want at least three times their investment back, and that's a a bare minimum. A lot of times they're looking for something more 78% return. And as a nonprofit, we can't deliver that, but it's also a protection. Mhmm. Because an organization that scales that quickly is going to make mistakes. It's not going to be able to uphold our values of accessibility, community, craftsmanship, and innovation. Those would be things that would be sacrificed when you blitz scale by definition. So we don't want to sacrifice those. At the same time, we want to cut the ties, , for the community that would anchor it and hold it down and hold it back the way other industry areas have in church management. But I just feel if you hold those two concepts in your hand and say, we have to scale slowly, carefully and with great craftsmanship because we care, but our organization can blitz scale. And if you see the difference between those two, it's a great illustration of why and how our team feels many times we're being absolutely overwhelmed with what needs to be done, how quickly it needs to be done, whose needs need to be met. And we see the needs, we feel them, we empathize with them, we want nothing more than to meet them immediately, but we can't scale as quickly as the community has the capacity to. Yeah. I think that's the interesting tension is that we have blitzscaling on one side, but controlled conservative growth on the other side, which I think is healthy. And I think you're right. , most of those investors are looking for, , an IPO that Right. That's how they're gonna cash out. We we don't have that. Right. It's not that we've not looked for those types of gifts, but it just doesn't seem that that's what's, you said, in the cards, and that's not what God's plan is for that. Well, even if someone did put a donation that on the table today, would we be willing to sacrifice the limitations that we've put in say our hiring process on who's the perfect fit for our culture and DNA? And I think the answer to that is no. Because I think everybody says, and we were just at liberty and there's a lot of the employers are saying, we care about character, character, character, but it's hyper a need for us, in what our industry is why what we do matters, that character is off the chart important. It is. One bad character could just ruin the whole thing. But on the flip side, you can only do so much with someone who has great intentions and great character, but doesn't have the unique skillset we also need. Yeah, definitely. So the positions that would be mostly character based and you can learn your skill on the job, we can fill those pretty easily. But the ones where we require the top highly skilled technicians and technologists and to have that character, I mean, need those one in a million people. And we really rely on our community not to vacate your jobs with your churches and come to us. That's not what we want because if this whole community becomes a vacuum to our organization, then that would be absolutely the worst thing that could happen. It would kill it. It would be eating your young. So we don't want that. But we rely on our community to reach out to the people that working in secular industries who are inside your churches, sometimes inside your volunteer teams, who have that heart and who say, right now they're hitting a stride in their career where they're , I wish I could make more impact. Those are the right people. So reach out to them, let them know the need that we have at Spark and help connect them to us. But you stay right where you are because you're doing things that need to be done and we need you where you are. So we don't want to create that kind of a vacuum, but we also need your help in your connections. And that's the cool thing about a community that blitz scales, the connections and the networking, it's this exponential amount of people that can be connected. So the best way that a community with that type of growth can help a core team that can't grow that is to leverage your connections and help connect us with those that that fit that need. And then just look for ways that you can pick up some of the work that lands on the lap of the core team. Because having a few people that can do many things is a recipe for staying small or, , it I mean, it's just not it's not great. And so we work on that really hard, but we're not gonna keep pace with the community. Right. And even though we might have some hires here soon, think we have some in the pipeline, they're close. We'll never be able to scale as quickly Exactly. Or as large as as a community. Which is funny because we are at least double what we were this time last year. So if you look at, , percent growth of what we have inside, it's really high. It's it's good, but it's still not exponential, which is what this community is. Right. And a lot of the key positions we need are in the areas that we need to ramp up with, was developers and stuff that we haven't been able to scale as fast. Yep. But I would also put out that encouragement that you just said too to everyone, don't be looking internal to the community when you need to fill these slots. Right. I mean, obviously, if someone's not happy in their position, then that's that's one thing. But we need to be a community that's multiplying ourselves, not not pulling people from one organization to another. Whether you're a partner or whether you're a church, I know that's the tempting thing to do, but, , mint a new one. , bring in someone else from the outside. We need to increase the size of the community, not just trade resources. Right. So think about when you're putting a job posting out, don't think about who do I know that knows Rock? Right? Think about who do I know that's great with data? Who do I know that has a really logical perspective? Who do I know that's a learner? Pull those people in and let's train them up together. Right. And I think, , going back to the Liberty thing, there's some really talented students there. We've been talking with a couple ourselves. And I mean, there's one in particular that we've talked to a couple of times, just so sharp and so articulate and such good follow-up. I mean, I'm always surprised by how many people interview and then they don't send a thank you letter afterwards. It's 98%, I'd My mom told me better and the university I went to was , No, this is what you do. You just always send a thank you, whether it's an email or a letter. Back when my day it was in a letter, but , now an email's great. But these students get it. , they've been coached on it or something because they and it's not just the one. There's a great talent pool there. And so what what if you do have a position you wanna get it to be matched, how do you do that again? Well, can reach out to us directly. Okay. Exactly. And then we have a couple of workflows that we're collecting that information in. So I'd say right now, because our program is small and starting up and we're doing a lot of matching by hand, I would say connect with me personally right on Slack, and that's the fastest way in right now. We'll create some processes that are a little bit bigger once we have this growing a little bit. Yeah. So the encouragement is if you need a new position, mint it. Partner, church, whatever, mint it. There are people out there looking for great opportunities. And so if we take the easy route and take the people that already know what's going on, guess who you're gonna lose? You're gonna lose those they came to you because they are , they're hopping around for Rock jobs. So you're gonna lose them to someone else. And there won't be a deficit of positions where people need to know Rock. So make sure that you're growing people from within. It's a great way, I mean, just if you're building an organization, build that loyalty into people. So if you invest in your people and you help train and teach them and you really invest in how they grow, you connect them in the community, you're buying that loyalty that will keep them there. You're processing your DNA and growing it into a new person. And then they can help pass that on to someone as well. So if you think about it purely from a business building perspective, you want to invest in new talent, you want to train them and bring them in. Yeah, definitely. So interesting book. Mean, we don't get to split scale internally, but I think it has a lot of, still a lot of good wisdom in our whole Oh, it does. And I think it's healthy to know why we shouldn't blitzscale. And I think we put a lot of those protective measures in place because typically in that kind of a situation, the people who are first in as customers might be the losers in that. If they end up with a product that isn't well crafted, if it gets sold to someone else and it completely changes directions. And we have built in all sorts of securities against that into our model. It's a hard model. It's not a comfortable model. It's one you churches are working through daily as well. And we want to let we're arm in arm with you and we've built those protections in your best interest. Right. Sounds good. All right. Thanks for joining us for another RODcast. 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 rockrms.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.