Bill CanadyCEO & Founder, The 80/20 Institute · Be a Great CEO: Learn how to Fix it, Grow it, & Sell it.

Don't Build The Church For Easter Sunday

18 Jun 2024 · 1 min

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In this short leadership talk, Bill Canady uses the metaphor of not building a church just for Easter Sunday to warn against launching a large‑scale initiative with a massive upfront investment. He argues that leaders should "slow‑play" investment by running small‑scale beta or alpha pilots, ideally with a partner customer, and committing only a minimum viable amount of resources. This approach lets the team validate the idea, gather real results, and retain flexibility to expand the effort if the pilot succeeds. Canady emphasizes the importance of giving the team time to prove the concept before scaling, while maintaining optimism that the incremental method will lead to sustainable success.

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Another one of my favorite sayings is, don't build the church for Easter Sunday. You know, it's so amazing. People come and I know that their vision they believe truly is huge and perfect, but the reality is, in order to hit that vision, in order to hit it all at once, they need massive investment. As the leader, you're gonna— I'm gonna encourage you to slow play that investment. You want to find a way to do what we call beta tests or alpha tests, which is basically you take a small subset of it, do a little pilot program. Even better if you can find a customer who will do it with you, and you start playing it out. Because if you take and you build your church on Easter Sunday, think about it, that's when a lot of people around the world actually go and see other folks, and that's when the most people are showing up, is under a holiday that's very important to them. So while it can seem like it's the best way to go do it, I would count on not always being right. Allow yourself and your team time to prove it out, and take and put the minimum viable investment in there that you can to go get a real result. And make sure you allow yourself the wiggle room to continue adding if it does work, and I hope it does work.