What Faith Leaders Can Teach Entrepreneurs (And Vice Versa)

What does religion have to do with direct marketing? Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast. In today's episode, we have the pleasure of listening to Nelson Searcy, who is a pastor of many churches and a coach of pastors. Now, here in a minute, you'll hear from him how he discovered Dan Kennedy before and after his calling. But what I want you to pay attention to is how close or how dissimilar these things are, how many of these principles work beyond just the regular marketing curtain that we think of, and especially how can direct mail work in religion. This is a very interesting episode, and it really puts you in the room with a giant banner that says, "This doesn't work for me." Makes you question that, because if it can work for Pastor Searcy, maybe it can work for you. Let's listen in to what faith leaders can teach entrepreneurs and vice versa.

I don't think there's anybody that has had a bigger impact in the field of direct response than Dan Kennedy. The legend of Dan Kennedy should be ignored at your own peril. They're not really lessons, they're kind of laws that you live by. Dan opened my eyes to what what small business marketing looks like. Dan teaches strategic direct response that is timeless. His ripple effect touches people who don't even know his name.

The world as we know it was changed because Dan Kennedy became obsessed with marketing.

Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with your host, Dan Kennedy. Hello everybody, welcome to this month's Diamond Call.

We will hopefully get through the entire thing without me being struck by lightning. I have with us— what do you use anyway, pastor or reverend?

Just Nelson is fine, but at the church they call me Pastor Nelson, but on this call it's just Nelson.

There you go. Okay, so I have with us Nelson Searcy, who is in my Titanium group and is, as you probably know since you're on the call, both a pastor of a few churches and operates, I'm reasonably sure, the largest coaching program and training organization and support organization for pastors all across the country. And I'm going to let him fill in the blanks a little bit on his background in just a second. I invite him, A, because he's very, very smart and a great marketer, and B, because I think often a lot of people do not really think of churches as businesses and things that need marketed and as direct marketers and are sometimes surprised by methodology that works there is the same methodology that works other places. So it's always sort of a provocative example. I think sometimes people are sort of blissfully unaware. Perhaps they think that the Persianers are just materializing. So there's, I think, a lot to be learned. I think you'll find it an interesting call. And you may see your own business as well as the church you attend in a different light after we're all over with. Nelson, why don't you start by just giving them the thumbnail sketch of your background, where you came from and what the church looks like today and what the business looks like today.

Okay. Slightly further just to talk about how I first encountered you, Dan. I always enjoy telling my Dan origin story. When I was a teenager in high school, I had the good fortune of discovering that I was good at computer programming, and so I started a computer programming business when I was 14 years old. Around that same time, living in North Carolina, your success tour came to town. I didn't have a driver's license, so I convinced my aunt to drive me to the Success event, which was overwhelming. I had never been to an event that big or that powerful, and neither had she. But we made it through the day and enjoyed all the speakers, and then you came on at the end. I tell the story that the only person I was motivated to buy from was you, and I wanted to buy what I now know as magnetic marketing. I couldn't remember the name until I got reacquainted with you later. I tried to buy it. Unfortunately, I didn't have the money. I tried to borrow it from my aunt and she didn't have the money. Later, I reencountered you through your books and involvement, but by that point, 6 years later, I had left the computer programming business. I had sold that and I had become a Christian at the time, a follower of Christ.. Then I felt called to ministry. So I was pursuing an entirely new vocation by the time I reencountered you 6 years later. I had the first thought that you made comment on, which is what's the intersection between me as a pastor and me as a church leader and this Dan Kennedy guy and marketing and all that. So for several years as a minister, I ignored you in the bookstore and ignored your material because I just didn't think it had any relevance. Then one day, call it an aha moment, I realized that there is not a battle between ministry and marketing. The very principles that you teach and the very principles that we study in Titanium, they can help in the church. In 2002, I got really serious about that. Because for the first time I found myself starting a church from scratch. That's really the story where you and I start to intersect in a big way that's relevant to today's call. In 2002, after having been in ministry for about 10 years and having served in various places around the country, including on staff with Pastor Rick Warren out at Saddleback Church in Southern California, I moved to New York City to start a church on the Upper West Side of New York City called the Journey Church. We started okay, but then we stumbled trying to get attention, trying to attract people, trying to reach people at the church. I kind of had a moment of crisis where I said, "Okay, God, I know there is nothing wrong with the church. I know there is nothing wrong with the Bible. I know there is nothing wrong with the message, but we are not getting it out.". We needed systems in our church. We needed a marketing process in our church. We needed to let this city of 8 million people know that we were there. I said, "I wonder about that Dan Kennedy guy." I tracked down your books. I tracked down your website. We began to use some of the very same principles that you still teach in magnetic marketing. We did direct mail and other things. Through a combination of that and getting some help in the church and getting some healthy systems in the church, the church began to grow. 4 years later, the church became very well known as we were selected as one of the fastest-growing churches in America. We started other churches across New York, other churches across the country. I wrote my first book called Launch, which you've quoted from in the newsletter from time to time. On how to start a church from scratch. That led to what we now consider a parallel ministry to the church. So I'm still pastoring the Journey Church, and the Journey Church is still growing. That's a great church, and I'm privileged to be a part of it. But in 2006, we officially started a second business, if you will, a ministry out of the church where we now train other pastors. To start churches, to grow healthy churches, to develop healthy systems, to market, things like that. In 2006, I went to my second event with you by this time called the Super Conference. So I went to the Super Conference that year, bought everything that you had. I bought the entire enchilada or however you called it. I bought everything that you had. A student, began to implement that in our church at an even deeper level, and then began to use that to help coach other pastors around the country. And today, The Journey Church is doing really, really well. And the side ministry that we have is also doing well. It's called Church Leader Insights, and that's the website, churchleaderinsights.com. And we engage on an average month around 50,000 pastors around the world. I have personally coached about 2,200 pastors through my 1-year coaching process. We have various levels and different things like that inside our ministry. 2 years ago I joined Titanium. I went basically from being a customer to being a conference junkie straight into Titanium. That's been a great experience for us, and it's allowed us to basically fix the holes and fix the gaps inside of our business. And Dan, you've been great, and I thank you for the opportunity to be on the call today. Well, thanks.

Before I go broad, I want to go micro for a second because again, I think it's instructive for people just to see even on a tight sort of nitty-gritty level how close we are in normal businesses and you are. So just take us through a handful of the resources that are in your catalog that serve very specific purposes, like for fundraising or for Christmas or what I would call seasonal promotions. You would not use that language, but just take us through a few of the specific resources.

Well, I'm not here to disagree with you because you know basically I hold the words of Jesus very dear, and then about 2 or 3 levels down from there, there's the words of Dan that I hold pretty dear too. So if you went to our website right now today, we actually are doing a seasonal promotion. So we do that, and churches have seasons. And our ministry at Church Leader Insights, we teach people how to develop systems in their church. And so we have a system that we call the Evangelism System, which is about attracting people to your church so they can hear the life-changing message of Jesus Christ. And that is in many ways partially a marketing system. And so if you looked at our evangelism system, it would parallel in some ways, say 20-25% of some of the same marketing systems that you teach, Dan. And that's been incorporated in there. We also have a retention system. We don't use the word retention, but we call it assimilation, which is biblical hospitality. We have a stewardship system, which is how we help churches manage their finances and grow people through the use of stewardship practices. This is the thing that of course the church is criticized for a lot of times, that the church is in the money business or is trying to get people to give. But money is at the heart of any operation. If there's no money in the church, there's no mission for the church, and the church cannot move forward. So I teach a system that's very basic. It's very biblical. It's not sensational or sexy, but it works, and it's very powerful. And then I have more need-driven resources that we have as well on how to staff your church. Because once a church starts growing, it moves from the single pastor or the single staff church to the single person with administrator, to then multi-staff church, than even maybe a multi-site church. So we've developed a catalog of, oh, I don't know, over 100 different resources over the years that meet those particular needs. You're right. People would probably be surprised at how they parallel just a regular business, whether it's a real estate business, or a dental practice, or a consulting business. We found that actually a lot of times when we go in to work with the church, The businessmen and women in the church, they like us because they see the parallels. Oftentimes that's an aha moment for them to say, "Hey, we can help our church be healthy administratively and organizationally and fulfill the church's purposes much like we help our regular businesses be healthy and fulfill that specific purpose." So now backing out broad, Well, let's tackle some business issues.

You know, I called the call A Flock is a Flock is a Flock. And so I'd like you to talk a little bit about what you do, what you teach. People have seen me use a couple pages out of Rick Warren's book about this. About selection and even about discrimination, so about the— about target marketing, however you want to phrase it.

Well, thanks for dealing with the simple stuff and the less controversial stuff first. Let me just say a brief word about the phrasing, the flock is a flock is a flock. I find that to be very insightful. You used the word herd. You talked about building the iron cage around the herd and having the following and all that. Well, in churches there is a biblical word that the Bible uses for people who come to the church, and it is this idea of a flock. The Bible often refers to a congregation member as the sheep, and they refer to the pastor as a shepherd. In fact, my title, Pastor, that really is just a modern-day equivalent of the biblical word Shepherd. I'm called to shepherd the flock, the sheep that God entrusted me inside of this church. While I may be using somewhat hyper-spiritual language in describing that, if you take away some of the spiritualization of that language, Anybody who oversees an organization or oversees a business, if they have clients or they have customers or they have guests, they have a responsibility to them. And when I think of my responsibility as a pastor to my own church, and then I think of what I teach other pastors, I have the responsibility to feed my sheep, to feed the flock that God has entrusted to me. I use that word carefully because biblically speaking I do believe I operate under Jesus Christ who the Bible calls the Chief Shepherd. I just want to be clear about that. But I am called to feed that flock. I'm also called to lead that flock. And then there is a— I'm called to expand that flock which is what your specific question was about. And then something that I find interesting that crosses over in our worlds is that I'm also called to protect that flock. So I see all of that as being part of the role of the shepherd. Now the issue that you hit on is a controversial issue which is about who is going to be in that flock. In the marketing world we sometimes call that targeting, target marketing. In Pastor Rick Warren's book, The Purpose Driven Church,. He talked about having a very specific target for your church. And often you've used the diagram that he presents in that book where he shows a picture literally of a guy who he called Saddleback Sam. And the church is called Saddleback, and so he identified this particular person, Saddleback Sam, as the particular person that Saddleback Church was best equipped to reach.

Now I will admit— We sometimes call that an avatar client, an avatar customer. You know, we talk about building a profile of the ideal customer. And again, it's only a little controversial in business settings, but it is obviously more controversial in yours.

Yeah, and I deal with that in the— particularly in the church planning planting and the starting new churches seminars that I do. And I do avoid the T-word, not because I think it's a bad word. I just think I like to make my case before I introduce the word to the people in the seminars. But I will confess that perhaps as a bad student of Rick, I never have developed a Journey Jose or a Journey Jane or anything like that. But here's where I come down on that. When I moved to New York City in 2002 to start the journey, I would have been foolish to have moved there and not do some kind of demographic research about the area where we were starting our church. And I love to tell the story that when I moved there, I was debating on two areas. I was either going to start the church in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, which at that time there was a popular TV show, I guess it's still popular somewhat today, called Friends. And that group of people, they lived on the Lower East Side. And they set the television show there because it had the fastest growing population of young professionals. Or I was going to start the church, and I ended up starting the church on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, which had the largest concentration of young professionals. And I've always believed that you can best reach people who are like you. My wife and I, we kind of fall into in a broad way the young professional category. So I thought, well, let's move to the Upper West Side and let's try to reach people like Seinfeld. The Seinfeld television show was so popular in 2002, and so we set out trying to reach Jerry and trying to reach Elaine and trying to reach George. I often joke that 5 years later we've been very successful at reaching Kramer. To move to that area and not look at the demographics would have been foolish. But then also to look at what the other churches were doing. Because even though there's not as many churches in Manhattan as there are, say, in a Dallas or even where you live in a Cleveland, Dan, and I've got coaching alumni in both of those locations, there are still churches. There are good churches in Manhattan. But most of them were really good at ministering to the poor, which is what we often think of as inner city or urban ministry. Or they were really good at reaching the elderly, and they had become more senior center type churches. So what I noticed is this big gap in the middle, this gap of the Alaines and Jerries and the Wall Street types and the artist and the young professional crowd that had moved into New York in the post-Giuliani years, basically on the backs of the gentrification movement that came after the cleanup of New York and things of that nature. So intentionally or not, we did everything to try to attract that crowd. And every church does that in some way or another. If a church only conducts services services in Spanish, they are intentionally targeting only Spanish-speaking people. So every church is targeting somebody. Let's just be realistic about who it is, and let's make sure that there is a message to market and a media match inside of that church. Oftentimes I can help a church clarify that, which can lead to greater health and growth in that church.

And I'm going to get to media last. I want to spend some time there because you are aggressive with it and successful with it. But so let's talk message next and talk a little bit about how for yourself and then for different churches with different markets you you make adjustments to the message?

Yeah, one of my core beliefs is it takes all different kinds of churches to reach all different kinds of people. And once we have agreement on that, and I imagine on the call today we have some folks who attend church and there is a certain type of person that goes to a Lutheran church, a certain type that goes to an Episcopalian church. Sometimes a person that goes to like a Journey Church, which is a nondenominational, rather energetic kind of church. Everybody likes everything different. My middle brother who is a doctor, I mean he would never go to a church like the Journey. He loves his very structured Lutheran church. It just takes all different kinds of churches to reach all different kinds of people. So the way we do church can be somewhat different in the way that it's expressed. Some people like a very enthusiastic service. Some people like one that's more quiet. But the message that every Christian church presents, and I found there to be great identity across various denominations, that at the core we really do believe the same thing, and it comes down to Jesus Christ. We believe that Jesus will save you and he will give you eternal life and it is the best way to live and it is purpose and all of that. So the way I think about this is that Jesus is the water. And Jesus used those terms when he was here. He used a lot of terms to describe himself, even as the water of life. So every church is trying to offer this water of life, but the container in which we offer it can be very different. So one church offers it in a coffee cup. Another church offers it in a very eco-friendly bottle of water. Another church offers it in this type of container. So in other words, the water never changes, but the container through which that water is delivered can be as various as the different churches that we have. And I hope that's not too esoteric as part of it.

Well, so I see you putting and teaching others to put, but we'll just talk about yours for the journey. I see you putting out what I would call different products, marketing very much like we would market in the public seminar industry at times, um, a get out of debt kind of thing, a have a better relationship kind of thing. I see you running an Easter promotion that looks very much like the way you promote a new movie. I see you will talk about media, but, you know, mailing giant oversized postcards with detachable tickets that again very much mimic the way you might market a seminar. And I would also, in many of these cases, again, it appears to me that you are intentionally I don't know if this is the right word, but downplaying the very fact that it is church and making it less churchy to invite the unchurched.

So have I like got it about right? Yeah, I mean, I like some of the language there. I try not to downplay the church. I don't believe anybody just wakes up on Sunday morning and says, "Boy, there's nothing else to do in this town. Let's just go to church." That's just not the way it works. So I believe when somebody is open to church, and one of the things that we've learned is that, and I teach this in coaching, is that people tend to come to church when they are under tension, in trouble, or in transition. The 3 Ts, I call that. So most people, and I lived my life this way for a long time, most people church is not necessarily part of their everyday life. So they don't just say, "Well, I'm bored, so I'll go to church." Usually somebody starts thinking about spiritual things. They start considering an option that they haven't considered heretofore. When they have some kind of trouble in their life, when they have some kind of tension in their life, or when they feel like there's something they want to fix in their life. I think from a big picture theological perspective, God often shows up in someone's life in that crisis and then points them to a church. So what I'm doing when I offer a service about how to better manage your finances, We just did a teaching series at the church called Family Vacation, and about discovering God's roadmap for your family. I'm teaching that to the people that are in my church, but I'm also presenting that to those who don't attend, because I know everybody wants to have a better family. Everybody wants to better manage their finances. Then there is even something about the average unchurched person says, "Well, if I'm going to go to church any time, It's going to be Christmas or Easter. So let's make that the best possible experience that we can. So there is an attempt to be comfortable and to bridge that gap between the way someone who doesn't attend church thinks and what we have to offer at church. A lot of times it's not the water that is bad. I don't believe that Jesus— or let me flip that to be positive. I believe that Jesus can help with any problem somebody is dealing with. But oftentimes they reject Jesus not because Jesus is bad, but because of the way that we have presented it. You say it all the time that a confused customer doesn't buy. So if I am confusing them with my language, if I am not meeting them halfway, with my presentation or promotion, then I think that creates a problem that I don't think is a biblical problem. I think it's sort of a, "This is how church should be," kind of idea that's crept into society, that church has to be spooky, that church has to be hyper-spiritual, and that all of our language has to be presented in a certain way. But if you look at Jesus, he said the most profound things in very simple ways.

All right, so let's move on to media.

I thought we were going to pray.

Tell me again for your own churches and for everybody you coach what your range of media looks like.

What are you using? It might be easier to talk about what we're not using. Okay. I mean, we use everything. I mean, online is huge for us. We don't move into a ton of social media circles. We've not cracked the code on that or figured that out as much as perhaps some seem to have figured that out better than us. But I mean, we don't do a lot with Twitter. We don't do a lot with Instagram or Facebook. But perhaps beyond that, Any other kind of media that you could think of from direct mail of oversized postcards. Like you mentioned, we drop hundreds of thousands of oversized postcards a year at the Journey Church. And by that I mean 9 inches by 12 inches, perforated tickets, free giveaways, things of that nature. We use door hangers. The Journey Church now is a multi-site location, so we still have the original campus I started on the Upper West Side, which is a rather impractical place to do door hangers. But then we also have campuses like in South Florida, in Boca Raton, where it's very practical to do door hangers. And so once again, instead of doing small door hangers, we do giant door hangers that are probably 5 inches wide by 14 inches tall. Along. We have an outreach coming up in a couple of weeks where we're going to be at high school football games that are opening in all of our locations. We'll be handing out little cards that have the high school football schedule and on the back information about our church, an invitation to our church. We do water bottles in the park on a hot day. We do email, SMS, Google AdWords. I mean across the board we do it. We believe that we have the greatest message in the world. I'll die by that, that we have the greatest message in the world. So I should use every means short of sin to get that out there. That's actually not a quote from me. That's actually a quote that's about a 250-year-old quote from a very prominent Great Awakening revivalist that is kind of irrelevant for this talk. But I have just taken that and said that is what we are going to do. From a biblical standpoint, giving out these promotions, sending out these invites, doing these events, that is called planting seed. So part of my job is to plant all of these seeds. Sometimes it takes years for them to come to fruition, but sometimes God waters that seed and it may lead to somebody coming to church for the first time over the next week. But I know this, if we don't plant the seed and plant it well, there will not be a harvest in our church over the next season. So I'm willing to try anything. I've been foolish in the past to say, "Well, that won't work. That will work for 2 weeks." the pizza business down the street, but that won't work for me. Well, let's try Valpak. In fact, I just followed up with a prayer request right before I got on the call with a lady who was just baptized in our church. Her 10-year-old son goes to our church, and she came through our first Valpak ad. Who would have thought of advertising a church inside of a Valpak? When you do—

I don't think I've ever asked you this. This is just a side curiosity question.

Are you doing radio? We do some limited radio. Our churches are local and radio is pretty broad. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, gotcha. I will tell you a quick story. We did an ad one time. We were doing a sex series. Do you know my joke about teaching on sex? No. I coach and I teach that February is always a good time to do a family series because people are coming back in the new year and it's got Valentine's Day. And so for a church oftentimes it's a great season in February to do a family series. And then I tell in coaching, I say, "Now if you're really aggressive, you can do a sex series in February." And doing a sex series in February has two benefits. One is it attracts a lot of people to your church around Valentine's Day. Number two is you can expand your children's ministry that fall. So it kind of works both ways when it comes to the growth of your church. But I was doing a sex series in Manhattan and I think it was called Desperate Sex Lives. That's when the show Desperate Housewives or whatever it was was so popular. We bought an ad on the Howard Stern Show. No. I had to sign. It was like a $5,000 contract, which at that time was just— I couldn't imagine. Now it's a little different story. They only guaranteed that one ad would run during Howard Stern. The other ads were going to be placed throughout the week. We finally found out that that was going to run at 8:38 on a particular day of the week. I can't remember, but let's say Wednesday. I don't know if we got anybody from that ad.. But the people in our church had a blast calling their coworkers over to their desk saying, "Wait for it. Wait for it. Wait for it." And it just goes to show that sometimes you do something in media and it excites your people, your current customers if you will, just as much as it is effective at reaching those who don't attend. But I was praying that Howard would pick on us and maybe make us the opposition for the next half hour, but he just ignored it and went on about his day.

When you do direct mail, and you do a lot of it, outreach, not to your current flock, but how are you picking? Are you doing pure neighborhood drops, or are you doing something cleverer?

Well, in the coaching, it's probably easier to answer that when I talk about the churches that I coach because the journey is so large we can do just massive saturation. And you know, in our Boca Raton campus which is 2.5 years old in South Florida, I mean we can do the 10-mile radius and pretty much saturate the area, but that's a rather advanced tactic. And you have to be of a certain size and have a certain economic engine, if you will, to be able to do that. I tell people in coaching that promotion, evangelism, outreach is not an expense. It's an investment. And if it's done right, you invest all of these financial resources in planting these seeds, but then God tends to give it back to you. And if it's done right, and it's done strategically, and it's done crafty, and that's a good biblical word by the way, to be as wise as serpents and harmless as doves is how the rest of that verse goes. But a lot of times we get the harmless as doves part right in the church. We don't get the wise as serpents. So when a church is smaller, you have to be more strategic. So I've done everything. Buying mailing lists and targeting areas. My favorite mailing list are new movers. That's easier to get in some areas than others. It was pretty difficult in Manhattan because of the density, but it's been easier in our locations that are in Queens or different parts of the country. Then for my coaching participants, most of them can get a new movers list pretty easily because people have just moved. Recently moved, and so they're more open to adding something new to their life, like a church. I like to get newly married or new parent lists. Those can be really interesting lists to get as well. Now again, oftentimes, especially in a smaller area, the quantity is not what you want. So this is a list of 10 people a month or 30 people a month, whereas I want to mail 30,000 a month. But it's a starter part. And then there are trends that people engage in. There are activities that people do that correlate with church attendance. And I'm not going to mention any specifically because I think this is being recorded and will be transcribed. It will be widely distributed, yes. The wise pastor can figure that out. There are certain magazines that more religiously-minded people read. There are certain memberships that more religiously-minded people have. I don't make a judgment on that, but if you can't mail to everybody, try to figure out who those are and mail to those specific people. We do that all the time. We still seed our saturation list with these additional mailing lists that target these particular groups that we think would be more open to what we do.

How do you assess results? So it's not as simple as— or if it is, I doubt you'd cheerfully admit it, but I doubt it's as simple as raw first transaction or first 90 days dollars and cents ROI. So I spend $10,000 on a mailing and it brings in X number of new folks and their average first 30 days donations are Y and therefore my ROI is Z. I'm going to best guess you're not doing that. So how do you assess success or failure, do it again, don't do it again, etc.?

Well, this is a constant argument with my coaching clients. They do a direct mail, they usually do it poorly, and then they come back to coaching the next week and say, "I'm done with direct mail. Direct mail doesn't work in my area." So we'll just do direct mail because it's It's the easiest one sometimes to measure. I often tell them it's not that direct mail doesn't work, it's that the way you did it didn't work. Maybe you have to have a longer-term perspective for it to work, because if you go back to the seed planting idea, sometimes you plant in February, you don't reap until October. Sometimes you plant at Easter this year, you don't reap until Easter next year. I always hope, and we normally do, see some rather immediate results. So we found that driving people toward a particular day around a particular topic, like you mentioned in some of the samples that you've seen from our church, we find that works better than general advertising. So we do some general advertising, and I love Yellow Pages and billboards that are general, but I also love things that are specific. Easter is next Sunday. Here's why you should be at our church on this Easter day for one of these 5 or 6 services. That works very well. So one way to measure it is— You can judge by head count. Yeah, one way is the immediate head count, the increase in attendance. That can be motivating, especially when you're trying to build commitment in the church to do certain things. I'm not a I'm not a business owner in the church. I have to work through my board. I have to work through my people. I'm one under authority. So I convince them to do direct mail and we spend $10,000 on it. Well, if that leads to 20 first-time families on that Sunday that we were promoting, even if the finances don't add up just yet, then wow, let's try that again. That was pretty cool. So there is some immediate momentum. The old definition of momentum is it's a series of wins, a series of little wins. So a lot of times in coaching churches I say, "Okay, try this. It's relatively safe, but you'll see some results, and then you'll get addicted to those results, and you'll want to try it again and again and again." One of my very well-known alumni in Tampa that has grown to over 3,000 people, I mean, literally started that way, mailing 1,000 a month to this particular demographic, seeing the results, and now they're up to where they mail almost 100,000 pieces a month to their surrounding areas. So that is part of it. But I'm realist enough and realistic enough to say let's not ignore the numbers either, because the church has to stay in the black. And this is where church is different than a business. Banks don't extend credit lines to churches. It's very rare if they do. Even in doing so, you have to put property on the line and things that most churches would never do. So we have to stay in the black. We have to always evaluate the value of a person with the dollars that are being spent. I have seen it, Dan, and I will admit this cheerfully, that I have seen it where we invest $20,000 in something, and from all immediate evaluation it looks like a dud. And we reach, gosh, 1 or 2 families. Now people matter. You're very valuable. These 1 or 2 families really matter. But $20,000 to reach a couple of people, we probably want to tweak that next time. But then you will find out a year later that those people have become followers of Jesus. They've been baptized. They've been assimilated into the church. They're giving. And lo and behold, their combined giving over the next year is greater than the $20,000 you invested in reaching them. So I don't want to ignore that because the Bible says God gives seed to the sower. And so I sow, and then if I sow properly and sow intelligently, that's given back to me. Well, then I should then reinvest that next time in something perhaps a little more fruitful, a little more effective, but I just keep doing that. That's what I say about our direct marketing. I've been spending the same $10,000 that was assigned to me back in 2004 to spend. I just keep spending it over and over. I spent $10,000 in a year, then I got it back, and then I spent $10,000 every 6 months and I got it back. Now I'm just spending that same amount, but it's over a shorter return. I would also say that your refrain over and over, Dan, about how my business is different, that is so true. I could have said that. I could have said, "But church is different." Do I have to filter things? Yeah, any business has to filter what we learn from somebody else. I have to take it and I have to think about it. Pray about it, but I take your ideas and more times than not I found that your ideas are something that we can apply. And then I would applaud you. I've taken a few hits from a few people that say, "How can you get involved with that Dan character?" You and I have had some healthy fun and poking fun at some of that from time to time, but I found you to be a person of great integrity. When you teach something, it's thought through. It's based on realism. Sometimes the professor of harsh reality comes out, but I've appreciated that integrity that you've brought to this and that you're willing to put your energy and effort behind things that work and are effective. You've done that with us. And it's made our organization better. I've seen you do that with others in Titanium and the coaching networks that you're involved in. I would say, I would plug that people should stay connected with you.

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