Podcast Episode 74: Episode 47: Special Edition Lee Peterson

Description

This episode introduces Lee Peterson more thoroughly to our community- getting to know the man behind the ZPL knowledge!

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 another special edition Rockcast podcast where we get to profile some of the people and organizations that we work with on a regular basis. And today, we are so lucky to have Lee Peterson with us. Welcome, Lee. Thank you. Lee has been joining our team very recently. And in fact, this week was just in town for a master class and to help out a local church here. So we wanted to snag him while he was in town because you're not really from Arizona, right? That's correct. I'm from Colorado, north of Denver. And how's the heat here? Hot. Yes. So fall has officially started, but here that just means that pumpkin spice flavor comes out. It doesn't actually mean that it cools off. But we're excited to have you in town and thought this would be a great time to talk with you and let the community know a little bit more about who you are and what you're doing and what you're doing with Spark. Well, thanks. Great. So you're kind of newly working with the Spark team. Correct. Can you tell us a little bit about how that came to be and what you were doing before that? Yeah, I volunteered, my wife and I volunteered at Flatirons Community Church north of Denver for a long time doing check-in. And I was contracted by my church to implement Rock Check-in. And that led to me being here. Yes, it did. That's a short story for a kind of long process, but you were working with the church there. And when you say you were contracted to implement check-in, that sounds it was a pretty easy, smooth, simple thing to do. But in reality, I think that probably was a pretty long road. It was a lot of long nights and a lot of puzzles, a lot of putting what we do together with Rock. But now you speak ZPL as a second language. Wraths the sickness. Yeah. Always amazed by how well every facet the And it's a complex one. Mean, it's pretty deep. Yeah, you look at that and it looks garbled gook and there's some pattern to it, but it is very complex. It's anything once you dig in, it starts to make sense. And your background was solving some problems anyway and working with a different type of technology, right? Right, I owned a car repair shop for twenty five years. I started it from scratch when I was 21, not ever having worked in the field. Wow. Built a business, decided I needed to change. And so I closed my shop and I started homeschooling my kids, homeschooled them for about ten years and they recently graduated. So I needed something to move on to. I see a theme in all of that. We did send you over a strengths profile assessment with StrengthsFinder, which we love to do. And I was so not surprised to see that learner was one of your top five strengths because everything you just said has a steep learning curve. And any one of those could have been a whole lifetime of learning, and you just kinda march right through. True. Yep. That's one skill I'd love to have is just the mechanical ability to fix things, especially cars. I mean, I just look under there, and it's just so complex and confusing. Mystery. I know nothing about it. Hard to know where to start. That's a gift I've had since I was really small and my dad in particular encouraged it. And just, I was always taking things apart and rarely putting them back together when I was little. Yeah, it's just a gift I have, I think. Yeah, that's great. I mean, it's really the same problem solving solution set is the same. Very much. That logical mind that can take something apart and put it back together and just kind of know how it kind of naturally fits. Yeah, see all the pieces together in your mind, I think. Yeah. And there's one other thing that you mentioned very lightly, but I thought we would want to point out and that is that you weren't actually on staff at Flatirons at the time, but you were contracted to help and they knew you really well because of your volunteer work there, right? Right, that's correct. I had sort of adopted our check-in system on our old management system. And I did that for a long time. So I guess I was the natural one to implement Rock. Makes a lot of sense. So when you started thinking about, gosh, I think I'll look for something to do. My kids are through homeschool. Did you have any idea what you were looking for at that time? Not at all. I said yesterday that I applied for a parts job at a dealership and that was not my passion, but it fit in my skillset and they never called me back, which was very fortunate. Yeah, I think. We're really grateful for that. Goodness. Thanks. Their loss. That's right. They don't know it, for sure. Yeah, we're very excited to have your insight into check-in and some of the improvements that we want to put together and just having you on the team is going to be a huge asset to the entire community. Thank you. Yeah. Already, I mean, I've you've helped me out so many times on just my new finessing of ZPL that makes a big difference. Yeah. But just I I don't have the time to get in and figure that out, and and you send over pull requests and, , ideas, , of how we can improve that. And that's really what , our core value of craftsmanship is not necessarily getting it perfect the first time out, but I always pictured it as a guy working on a wooden boat in his shed. And he's constantly going out there every night after dinner and he's just polishing it and he's sanding down the rough edges and that's really what this is. I mean, you've been very helpful in doing that pieces of There were a couple of times we were sort of working on the same thing at the same time. And it just came together just this whole story for me. And so many God moments, just amazing. Right, and that's how God's involved is when things just don't make sense anymore. They just line up too. It wasn't my plan. Right, no one's that smart. Right, I think we should also point out that right before the conference was really when all of this started coming together. And, Lee, know we were talking and we suddenly had this opening on our schedule for another speaker. And your name was the first one that came to mind. We said, have got to get Lee in there. He needs to the community needs to hear what he has to say. And you really stepped up and and, not only did a fabulous job, but as someone who has to organize speakers and their content for the conference, you were so quick on your turnaround on that. I think we ended up getting things back from you same week we requested them, which was pretty incredible, because sometimes we have to chase that for months. So it was already a really great start. Well, thanks. So tell us what you do in your free time. What are some of your hobbies? I target shooting, I to reload. I to fly airplanes, although I haven't done that for quite a while because it's horrendously expensive. It is. I read a lot, I started gardening. We bought a greenhouse a couple of years ago and I am not a green thumb, but I decided I wanted to be able to grow things from seed. And so I started doing that. And there's also, there's kind of a process to that too. It's one of those things, if you do everything right, most of the time things work out and very little plants are very finicky. So I kind of move from thing to thing. I do something really heavily for a long time and then I'll switch and do something else. So is that a vegetable fruit garden or a flower garden? Some of both. We grew a lot of flowers this year. In the past, it was more oriented toward vegetables, tomatoes and that kind of thing. But flowers are actually kind of amazing. They're harder to grow than. Really? But yeah, it's quite interesting. That's really cool. Tell us about your family. My wife, Karen and I have been married for twenty years. She's from Santa Maria, California. We met on AOL, if anybody knows what that That's pretty impressive. That's one of the Yeah, it happened because we were both interested in Max. We both liked Max and that's how she found me was she searched for people in the Denver area that liked Max. So that's kind of a funny thing. So we have two kids. I have an older daughter who's 28 from a previous marriage. Her name is Mary. Eric and Laura Laura is 19 looking for life, figuring out what she wants to do in life. She's an artist. My son Eric is almost 18 and he found his current life at Walmart. It's been just an amazingly good thing for him. He needed a purpose and needed some recognition. Once your kids are a certain age, you don't give them what they need necessarily. And so, yeah, not sure what the future holds for them. Might take a little while for them to decide, but that's okay. So, yeah. That's great. So you're not planning on relocating to the Phoenix area. I imagine that's one of the questions that people will have listening to this. Yeah, no. Although I do find it find being here weak, do get a little less sensitive to it. But yeah, it's I mountains. I thin air and cool nights. So I'd have a hard time moving here. Yeah, it'd be very different. But the community will still run into you in Slack. And we're also available through Sparkability Group to do some consulting and things that when churches are setting up Rock for the first time or they're troubleshooting check-in issues. It's such a public way to get something right or wrong that it has a lot of weight to it. Very much. Well, we really appreciate you joining us today. Yeah, it's been great having you down here for this week. Well, you. I'm just so thankful for the opportunity and love the community. It's an amazing community and I'm really looking forward to working with you. Yeah, as we are we. Definitely. Yep. Alright. Thanks for joining us today for another special edition of RockTest. Today's show is 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. And our amazing show notes, which 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 Rock r m s dot com slash hosting today.