As I sit to write this post, I really had to think, what are the principles we live by? Haha. But it didn’t take long. My business partner and I don’t have these things written down somewhere, but we do talk about these things frequently. There are many more I’m sure that have shaped who we are, but here are 3 things we live by and hopefully will help you.
Excellence
I think this has become somewhat of a buzzword in the church world. And depending on who you talk to, it can mean a myriad of different things. To some, it means spending money, to others it’s meeting one person’s expectations. In reality, excellence is simply doing the best with what you have. That’s what we strive for. We don’t have unlimited budgets or time. Our objective is to put out the best products we can with what we have!
Reflection
The past can help us predict the future. We have a document on Google Drive called, “A Look Back.” In this document we track the numbers from years past. We track what it cost to make a certain piece, what advertisements we purchased, as well as how many it sold and the dollars associated with it. This helps us in a couple ways.
It helps us know the impact we’re having for the kingdom of God. This is something we try to keep in front of our team so it doesn’t just become cranking out videos or design pieces. We have the honor of making an eternal impact on people’s lives!
It helps us predict the future. We notice trends. We notice what types of marketing/advertising work well for us and what doesn’t. We’re able to forecast better because of this document. We know you can never truly predict what will happen in the future, but this spreadsheet has helped us a ton in where we’re heading!
Generosity
This one may come across as a little bit bragadocious, and I certainly don’t mean it that way. We just believe in people. Scripture is very clear that when you give, it’s given back to you with the same measure you use. Southwest Airlines believes strongly in Employee Satisfaction, not customer satisfaction. They believe if they take great care of their employees, their employees, in turn, will take care of the customer. We have a similar mindset. We don’t have a huge staff. In fact, it’s just me and Roman. However, we work with a bunch of contractors. We look for ways to give bonuses (yes to contractors), we’ve thrown big Christmas parties for our contractors! Our objective is to take great care of them so they want to work with us and turn out great work for our customers!
This is by no means an exhaustive list of how we run our company, this is a few brief thoughts. We’ve made a lot of mistakes and got a few things right. We’d love to hear from you.
How are you leading your team? Or if you’d like more info on any of the above or if we can help you in any way, don’t hesitate to shoot me an email, jared@creativesheep.org, I would love to hear from you!
Jared Hogue is a co-owner of Creative Sheep. Creative Sheep exists to communicate God’s love through excellent content. Check out Creative Sheep’s media for churches.
