Podcast Episode 66: Episode 39: Special Edition Emily Forman

Description

In this profile special edition of the Rock Podcast, we will interview Emily Forman, learn how she joined the team, what she does (it's a lot!) and a "few of her favorite things".

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. So welcome to this special edition of the Rockcast podcast. In this episode, we're gonna be talking about a character from our organization. And the reason why I am doing the intro is because it's Emily. And we just didn't feel that was right for her to have to do her own intro, even though they're much better than mine. So welcome, Emily. Thank you. Thank And today we're here to talk about you. I noticed you referred to me as a character. Yeah. Was just trying to add a little pizzazz in the Yeah. Did it work? Oh, it did. Yeah. I'm questioning myself already. Alright. We did try to talk you into talking about yourself in third person for the whole podcast, but you politely denied that request. Right. That we'll save that for interviewing Gollum later Okay. This year. We're gonna do that. Nice. We are. Mhmm. Great. So tell us, how did you become part of this whole Rock experience? Okay. I will not tell the long version because that could take days. But it was it's actually kind of a surprise. If I go back to my past self and look forward, I would have been surprised. I met you, John, and you, Nick, when I came on staff at Christ Church of the Valley as a communication director many, many years ago. And I was part of the combined communications technology team. And at that point, Rock was something that was being done still under the separate nonprofit and under the blessing of CCV. But a lot of it was done nights and weekends, and then the parts that were really important to CCV internally were done at the office and during work time. And Nick, you would come up from Central Christian on Fridays and volunteer. So I was interacting all the time with people who were working on Rock, but I do not have a technology background. I have a communications background. So I kind of felt that was the other side of the team that really spoke some other language. So I do languages, but I did not speak tech. Yes, so you would say whatever you were saying in tech gobbledygoo and I would answer in Spanish and it worked really well. So we primarily stuck to English and communications. But as the team was growing and as really I think as you were getting ready for the one point zero beta, you needed some help with some communications things and and it just seemed the the need for that was probably going to pick up a little bit and I said, sure, I can help out with that. I think there was some documentation that may have needed to be edited too. And I said, okay, yeah, no problem. I can help with that. So I started doing a little bit of volunteer work on the side and it was fun. And you guys are all fun even if I didn't understand you much. And then John said, hey, , I am having I'm having trouble getting to once the documentation is edited and you have that in place, would you mind just popping it over here into HTML? And I said, oh I heard about that in college. Actually I think I did a little something on a website in HTML way back in the day for an insurance marketing company. But I remember paragraph tags and that's about it. But I do to learn things, and I'm an excellent trained monkey. That's what I referred myself as around here. So I I trained monkeyed myself into putting our documentation into HTML and then adding, , emergency code tags when I didn't know how to do something. Which isn't the easiest HTML just to put it out there. I mean, we have lots of custom attributes you have to decorate it in to get all the versions when you did it. And John likes to make people feel extra special and competent. So let's back up for a second and mention that you put all of the formulas for that right up above the block where you write the HTML. So the copy paste trained monkey wizard was really able to work that out. We use that same those same shortcuts. Right. Yeah. You're explaining to exactly what programming is. It's basically copy paste. Well, didn't I? And reading Stack Overflow. Between the two, you're pretty much 80% there. Yeah. Well, anyway, I guess that's my background. That's how we connected. And then at the point that Rock was really getting to be to be big to be anybody's side gig, there are a lot of things involved in running an organization that don't involve the same kind of trained monkey work. Think I probably have a cap there somewhere. We've probably about hit that ceiling. But there are other things that I do actually have a lot of background in involved in startup business type things and operational administrative. So I did have a lot of background in that as well. And and I could see a a value add in being a part of the team in that area and allowing those of you who are not trained monkeys and are really talented at technology to just focus on doing your thing. Right. And I think one of the crucial things you did for us early on is just help us with the messaging. That we had this vision for the product and and the the model, but we were not very good at articulating that. We kept using the word free too much, probably. , I think it was well articulated for people who are really familiar with open source and who are technologists. And it was really exciting. And so I think you had a great community rallying around you that had been inside the church tech space for a while and were also disappointed with the options or disappointed with the direction of the options that they were going. But if you want to get leadership involved in things that you do have to take a slightly different perspective. So it was kind of exciting to come in really with fresh eyes as I had no background in the technology angle of what churches need other than having used it myself and having seen how that works. And it was really exciting to come in and say, Okay, well what about this? Okay, well I kind of see things from this angle. Or, How would you talk to a leader about that? So it was a lot of asking questions. And I think we still do a lot of asking I think that's a really handy technique. Yeah. We're still trying to figure it all out, I think, I guess. Do you think we'll ever get there? I don't know. I think it'll just change as we get there. Probably. So then you moved into helping us with things the conference Right. The administration. I mean, I think people would be amazed at all the things that you do. Yeah. I was gonna ask, what do you do? But but then I realized the better question is to say, what don't you do? Because Well, I can't elaborate too heavily on that because it's in a language I don't speak. You do a lot around here. Well, I have never yet had a day where I said, I'm done. Early, I have nothing to do. I better go home. Right. It's usually quite the opposite. Right. So all the so I'll I'll give you a short list because I Emily will never talk about all these things. All the finances, which is amazingly hard because we have this delicate balance of nonprofit profit, , for consulting, and there's a it's such a delicate balance because we are also wanna be at the highest level of integrity with that. Mhmm. So there's a million transactions that have go back and forth and and talking with our accountant to make sure that we got everything just right. Also, to throw this in because Emily would never mention this, but our accountant I mean, our books are getting pretty complex. They are. Our accountant at the end of the year, when they're doing our tax forms, said we have never had a customer have every transaction just right to the penny and everything's right. They I mean, in You did their job. Are you uncovering my OCD for the world to see? Right. But it and this is Just rip the band aid right over there. This is accountant who works with a lot of nonprofits and who has been doing that for a lot of years. And she says it's the first time that's ever happened. So that's amazing. So our books are not easy. They're not they're complex. Being a nonprofit and also having a for profit owned by a nonprofit It's a little complicated. Is tricky. And then, , tracking all the time allocations for each of the employees so that it gets all in the right places. We have the HR stuff. Emily's our chief hiring person. She's meets and talks with all the people before they get to us, kinda weeding all that out, finding them. I mean, gosh, it's amazingly hard to find people. And if you're listening, and you're a talented developer, and you're not currently employed at one of our Rock churches, give me a call. Right. Always looking to fill the bench. What else? Pledges, donations, you you help track those down. Yeah. You interface with a lot of customers, whether it's partners or churches or new and upcoming churches or customer churches. Yeah, partnerships are all I mean, you're talking with partners at least once a day. Constantly. But that's fun. Mean, this stuff you're talking about, this is all well, the bookkeeping, not so fun, but necessary. But talking with all the people, that's my that's my thing. Right? Right. The conference, which is it sounds a once a year thing. It's not. It's an all year. We I mean, we started planning this one the day after the last one. Yes. , probably even before on location and and stuff. Helping us with our release process. So That's true. Right now, you there's some interesting project management components of of a few things that I'm involved in. Right. And and even from the the consulting, you work with the customer to to try to figure out what they need and try to find a hole in our development cycle to get that in. So it's it's amazing. I I'd say if Rock is a movie, Emily's the producer. Oh, yeah. She's the one trying to make sure everything's funded, organized, everything is ready for the directors and everybody else to get their stuff done. Can I share my secret? Mhmm. It's smile and irritate. Am the smiling irritant inside the team, outside the team. Because people don't really realize that it's irritating when you're smiling. Eventually, you're gonna scratch that itch that I just created. So that's what you do here. What do you do on the outside? What your hobbies? What do you love to do? , I have fewer hobbies now than I used to. I have an awesome family that I do a lot of stuff with. I have one kid in elementary school, one in junior high, and one in high school. And as of last week, I have two teenage daughters, so you can imagine that keeps me very busy. So I love doing stuff with my family. My husband has his own business. I do some things with that as well, not in the hobby range, but I do the bookkeeping and things for that as well. So I stay fairly busy with all of that between sports and kids activities and things. But when I have free time, I love traveling. I love people. I love places, experiences. I have really been bitten by the travel bug hard. So I try to indulge that as much as I can. I find that that makes life rich and fun and that kind of extends into other things. I love languages. So I spent years from high school all the way through college studying Spanish and don't quiz me on that. I live in Arizona and never use Spanish. It's very tragic. But at one point I was to the point where I was conversationally fluent in Spanish. I lived in Costa Rica for a summer and went to Guatemala for a winter. So I loved that, I still do. And as an adult, for a few years, I picked up some Italian lessons from a native Italian speaker and still love that, but I'm kind of in a space of life right now where I don't really have time to invest in that as much as I would to. Someday you need to tell the story about the dog where you were in South America. It'd be perfect for a podcast with a little sound effect. My gosh, isn't As we were talking, I was thinking about that story. It's hard to not laugh. Okay, that's a throwback to the conference too. Can I just say this? The conference is kind of my baby, right? We feed it and coddle it all year and then it gets there and it's this incredible event and it does, it grows every year it doubles. And by the time it's over, I know I talk to all of you all the time. I talk to the team all the time. I'm just chatty, chatty, chatty. I'm the most chatty person on our team. Probably maybe not with Robin, but at the end of the conference I literally have no words left. the day after the conference I can't talk. I have put so much into this for a full year. So the story that Nick is referring to was on a late night drive back from one of the conferences a couple years ago. I think John was driving and getting really tired and we were all trying to stay awake. So I started telling these ridiculous stories about my experiences in other countries. Yeah. And we someday we should do a podcast on that drive back because it was the most weird drive ever. We have funny stories. We have a biker gang. That's right. And a dead body all in one. That's all we're gonna go for because we gotta there has to be a podcast. It sure does. And what? That's It's a weird dream. We had Aaron France involved in that too. Remember that? We need to talk about the drive over too because that was pretty funny. What's the music and Drange spark tales or something that. Or hocus pocus. Oh. That'll kinda lead into mystery. Sure would. Yeah. So maybe we're we're a little more than you think that we are. We might just have all our our weird sides over here too. Right. Yeah. So okay. We'll put that down for a podcast someday. That was amazing. Oh, and I used to do fine art way way back in the day. I struggle with carpal tunnel a little bit now, so I try to save my hands for the things I have to do on a daily basis, but I'd to get back to that sometime. So tell us about your love of Star Wars. Where'd that come from? Oh, I'm all done with that subject. Throw her under the bus that. It started, it finished, There was a small silence in between. And that is my complete vocabulary for my love of Star She knows that it's a movie. Barely. What? Just kidding. I'm kidding. Do not send me hate mail. I I do know that it's a movie. I'm much more conversant in Star Wars than I would ever to be or think was necessary to live. I don't I frankly just don't understand how it is the stuff of life to everyone else I work with. Did a new movie just came out this week? I do, yes. She knows Star Wars. It still gives me a blank stare. But it comes up at pretty much every team lunch, most meetings, every event that I'm at. Insert Wookiee sound effect here. I have to tell you, I am the odd man out in a lot of things. I represent all the other people of the world to our team. We would never know that. Would be kind enough not to say it, Nick. You're a good support. We would not be here without you, so we are very, very thankful for everything that you do and can't imagine trying to do this without you. Well, thank you. It's not very It just needs to be done. I really consider my role to be to take the things that don't need to be done by a technologist and make sure they don't have to see it as much as possible. Love it. Yeah. I mean, that's a big piece of what we do. I mean, it's it is. when you Nick, you say we wouldn't be here without what you've brought to the table, it's completely true. A % accurate. I have trained monkey learned to speak a little tech since back in the day Mhmm. Or at least to understand it, which I think is the first step in learning a new language. So if I changed your title in our Rock to train monkey, would that be offensive? No. I'm the one who made that up. Okay. Was gonna say, you said it, not me. Yeah. No. That's okay. So what do you think about from the future perspective? , what do you look forward to most? Wow. I look forward to I look forward to the growth. It's painful and challenging and good, and it means a lot of great things. It means people are being helped. I love helping people. I love helping people reach people. And there's so much of that ahead of us that it looks there's none behind. I mean, that's the perspective you use, it's all ahead of us on that. And I look forward to a few things. So I look forward to our challenge moving. I look forward to our funding being a little bit easier in the future. Our growth curve is so steep right now, it's hard to keep up with. And I have to spend a lot of time trying to explain our model to people, and that's changing a little bit. And I think it will continue to change. And I look forward to the joyful giving that churches are learning how to do that keeps us moving because we really are joyful creators of something that benefits people. And the more that model is understood, then the more time I'll get to be able to put into building relationships and strengthening community and partnerships and doing things that strengthen our team internally to help keep everybody in that non burnout really positive creator space. And it's kind of hard to do that in in upswing growth that's as heavy as ours. It's not impossible. It's just it's just a little bit of a challenge. And so when the challenge shifts, I look forward to that because I think it'll be more of an investment in in all the things that we all want to have happen. And not to put you on the spot, but what is one thing that the community could do to help make your job a little easier? , the community's awesome. I love hearing from the community. It makes my job a little bit easier if people consider the fact that one small thing in their life could be a kind of big impact here. So when the community is flexible, then that makes everything easier. Whether it's timelines or whether it's donations or whether anything that's needs based. If there's some flexibility there, we'll totally incorporate and work with that. It's when there's inflexible need that makes it a little bit of a challenge. So just understand we're doing our best, but we have a huge scale of people to please and things to do. Right. 500 plus churches and a team of less than 10. I always think it would be really interesting to take a slice of our day and just open it up and show it to people, what we do. Because we come in with a plan about the things that we need to do to move CORE forward, to move our partnerships forward, to improve our communications. And then by the end of the day, we got to none of that because there were a lot of needs that came in that maybe could have been batched up a little bit differently or maybe could have been a little more flexible on timeline. And and not all of that is adjustable, but I think it is interesting because until you're inside and see it from the inside, , you can't even imagine. It's it's pretty weighty. Yeah. It's a good point. I always worry though when when you when you say that, I think of that too sometimes. I'm , but that'll be the the one day where it was an easy day. Then those days never happened. Wait a minute. When was that day? I know. But that would be the one day. The one day when the camera crew's following you around trying to see how hard the day is, and then it's That's really true. crickets are chirping. I don't think we're in danger of that day for a good ten years. Right. Not even then. Well, Emily, thank you for everything you do. I think if people realized all the stuff you do, we outlined some of it, but as I'm going through my head, thinking of all the other things property management and helping us get into our facility offices and there's just so much that you do, and we we couldn't be here. We wouldn't be doing what we're doing without you. So thank you so much. Well, you. I consider this team full of my friends and the community full of my friends and our partners full of our friends. And and I just think it's great that we all get to work together on this. Yep. Well, thanks again. And today's show was produced by Emily Forman. And Nick was our audio engineer and does all the post processing of putting out a social media. And Jim Michael does all the editing of the audio. And our amazing show notes are typed up and put together 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 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.