Portable Church Success: Systems that Last and Leaders that Thrive with Jeff Beachum

unSeminary Podcast

Thanks for joining in the unSeminary podcast. I’m excited to have Jeff Beachum with us. He’s part of Portable Church Industries (PCI), which has helped thousands of churches launch and operate successfully in mobile settings. Jeff serves as the Multiplication Specialist and Director of Marketing.

Is your church running out of capacity, but looking for ways to keep momentum growing? Are you ready to establish a presence in a new community? Tune in as Jeff walks us through how to leverage our time, capacity and money to open up more seats and send out our congregations on mission.

• The advantage of rental. // There are only five ways a church can establish a presence in a new community: a new build, commercial buy, commercial lease, a rental, and a merge. PCI assists churches in utilizing rented spaces such as schools, community centers, and even unconventional venues like movie theaters and bars. The flexibility of a rental will allow you to reach your community more quickly and cost-effectively while you grow your congregation. By leveraging portable solutions, churches can also focus on building their capital for that next environment.
• Maintaining church culture. // Your church has a culture that has begun to shape the expectations of the attendees. Even if you want to open another location, congregants will still expect to be a part of the same kind of church. PCI’s designers go to great lengths to design a system that maintains the DNA, culture, branding, and expectations across a church’s locations so people feel at home in a new environment.
• Handling expansion. // When you’re stretching the limits of your current location—whether its parking, seating, kids’ space or service times—it’s time to explore the alternatives. Do you need to open another location, or move into a bigger one? Solutions can include going multisite or planting a segment of your congregation in a nearby community. Jeff recommends reaching out to PCI early on in the exploration process and getting answers to your questions sooner rather than later.
• Design process. // The Portable Church design process begins with an in-depth consultation with your church leadership to learn about your unique culture, vision, goals and environment. This process includes discussions with the children’s team and tech team to assess operational needs. Finally Portable Church explores the venue that you’re considering. After gathering this information, PCI’s team spends time designing a custom solution that meets your church’s requirements.
• Launch weekend. // When the product is delivered, a team from PCI travels to your church’s location, typically on a Saturday, to assist with the setup and training of your volunteers. The goal is to make the setup process as efficient as possible. Jeff notes that with the right number of volunteers, all equipment can be unloaded and set up in a remarkably short time—often in a little over an hour. After everything is torn down and put away, the team returns on Sunday morning, stepping back while your team leads the setup process. Afterwards they review what went well, what needs improvement and anything that was missing.

NEXT STEPS // Executive Church Leader Resource Bundle

Visit portablechurch.com/jeff for the Executive Church Leader Resource Bundle that will help you operationalize your vision, plus grab a $10 Starbucks eCard and a FREE zoom pre-consult opportunity with Jeff.

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Thank You to This Episode’s Sponsor: Risepointe

Do you feel like your church’s facility could be preventing growth, and are you frustrated or maybe even overwhelmed at the thought of a complicated or costly building project? Are the limitations of your church building becoming obstacles in the path of expanding your ministry? Have you ever felt that your church could reach more people if only the facility was better suited to the community’s needs?

Well, the team over at Risepointe has been there. As former ministry staff and church leaders, they understand how to prioritize and help lead your church to a place where the building is a ministry multiplier. Licensed all over North America, their team of architects, interior designers and project managers have the professional experience to help move YOUR mission forward.

Check them out at Risepointe.com/unseminary and while you’re there get their FREE resource “10 Things to Get Right Before You Build”.

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Episode Transcript

Rich Birch — Hey friends, welcome to the unSeminary podcast. So glad that you have decided to tune in. I’m really looking forward to today’s conversation. This person, if you haven’t had a chance to interact with them, ah you’re going to be blessed by leaning in and learning from this individual. You’re going to ah be encouraged and hopefully inspired to take some new steps. Excited to have Jeff Beachum with us. He is a part of an organization called Portable Church Industries. If you don’t know, Portable Church, these guys are amazing. For over 25 years they have helped literally thousands of churches, thousands and thousands of churches, launch strong in mobile settings. They designed custom solutions that are fit for every budget, every vision, and literally every venue. I’ve seen some crazy places that these kids have helped ah people launch into. They provide everything ah that really you need to launch for a mobile mobile church. This is really from an inviting worship space, kids ministry, welcome area, storage case, all the way from like sound systems to a place to put the diapers. Really is amazing. Jeff, so glad you’re here today. Thanks for being here.

Jeffrey Beachum — Oh, I’m so glad to be here. I love talking about the church and expanding it.

Rich Birch — Nice. So your title is multiplication specialist and director of marketing. Tell us what you do at PCI; kind of fill in that picture. Tell us more about PCI in general.

Jeffrey Beachum — So I got ah a variety of things in my background that I am just amazed at the way God brings it brings it all together. I never thought that what I did in my past, he could figure out and use. And marvelously, I’ve done commercial real estate appraisal work a couple of times. I’ve been a pastor for 15 years, ah marketing and sales, organizational leadership, all kinds of things.

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Jeffrey Beachum — And God brings me to portable church industries and and sets me up really well…

Rich Birch — Love it.

Jeffrey Beachum — …to hopefully understand the church, understand the kind of decisions and how hard it is to be a church leader, whether it’s a lead pastor or ah an executive pastor or a campus pastor. And to come alongside of them and help them ah sometimes figure out their strategy and sometimes just be able to help them with their strategy and get to where they want to go. So that’s really the the nuts and bolts of what I get to do. And I love my job.
Rich Birch — So good.
Jeffrey Beachum — I’ve had ah opportunities to go somewhere else, but I just love what I get to do and who I get to do it with. And so my role at PCI has has changed a little bit. I used to strictly come alongside of pastors and work with them and and getting them to where they want to go. And now they’ve asked me to, for a little while, fill in on the marketing role, which is my skill and background. So I’m just having the time of my life.
Rich Birch — That’s so good. I love, ah you’re like such an encouraging leader to interact with. I know at the times we’ve had a chance to connect over the years, I’ve been you know encouraged by you and your and your leadership. So I’m i’m hoping that, I know, that’ll rub off with folks that are listening in today.

Rich Birch — So but the we want to kind of talk, for folks that don’t know Portable Church, don’t know your organization, um I yeah I remember the first time I heard about PCI and I hadn’t reached out to anybody. And they were like, I know there’s this organization out there that like helps churches do stuff portably. And I was like, man, that is so smart because the, where we meet is a critical piece of the puzzle. And you guys have really opened up a lot of different opportunities for churches when they’re thinking about. But kind of define, when you say portable church, what does that look like? Like who are the kind of churches you’re helping? What are they, why do they come to you? What does that look like?
Jeffrey Beachum — So um in an elevator, giving my five-story elevator pitch. From the first to the second story is we help churches that are are dealing with capacity issues. Now, it might be first time launches, it might be multi-site, it might be churches that love to plant and are good at it. And we help them get into portable facilities such as a high school, any any place that can be rented—a high school, middle school, um ah elementary school, YMCAs, movie theaters. And you were talking about some of the oddest places we’ve been in. We’ve helped churches launch in bars and we’ve helped them launch in a train station, right between train tracks that are working.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s crazy.

Jeffrey Beachum — So, we can go into all kinds of situations, but we help churches go into rented spaces that helps them leverage time, um capacity, and money. If you look at the, there’s only five ways that a church can put a new presence into that community, and it’s a new build with new grass, commercial, commercial buy, commercial lease, a merge, or a rental. Those are the only five ways. And we help them do that.

Rich Birch — Right.

Jeffrey Beachum — The rental is we can get you in quicker, we can get you, than any of the others. We can be cheaper than all of the others.

Rich Birch — Right.

Jeffrey Beachum — And we can be at least as effective or better than all of the others. And so if you’re trying to develop capital, it’s a really good idea to leverage the idea of portability, so that you can go in and while you’re already building your congregation, you can be developing your capital for that next environment, like the permanent building or the merge or the commercial build out.
Jeffrey Beachum — So that’s that’s generally what we do. We are all about capacity and giving churches a better opportunity to send. A growing church typically gets the woo and win phase down. They get the disciple and equip phase down. And they get the serve phase down. But it’s harder—and I just wrote an article about how the church needs to become uncomfortable—it’s harder to do the sending.
Rich Birch — Right, right.
Jeffrey Beachum — And so we help churches with the sending process. We make it financially feasible and leverage to whatever is next in that growth pattern.

Rich Birch — Yeah, I know in in um you know the times we’ve interacted over the years, there’s like there’s a lot of churches, if they are thinking about either church planting or maybe they’re thinking about going multi-site, they start to see some signs internally. And one of the sticking points can be like, but there’s like just some of the like logistic problems. Like, gosh, like it it is, you know, sure, we want to go into this community. um We’re sensing that we should go there. But if we dig a piece of dirt, it’s going to be X number of years to before we can make anything happen there. And I’ve got people now that I want to you know get into that location.

Rich Birch — When you think about the the helping a church go portable, what is it that you think PCI kind of brings to the table to make um that that move into, say, a school or into a movie theater. How how do you guys actually do that? Like, what does that look like? When if someone calls you up, what does that look like?

Jeffrey Beachum — Well, um, and that’s a great question because there, I’m I’m just amazed within the church, how many people don’t understand the portability concept. Um, for us, we, we have the capacity to take a, uh, a group of people, and I like to call them a momentum of people. So if a church wants to go into that community, they can heat map their congregation and, and determine what that momentum is and grow that. And that at some point they have to launch. And we can launch them into a portable facility, again, that is cheaper and faster and um really, really effective. And it’s a street to seat mentality. So we’re not just thinking that you can go there and worship in the up auditorium.

Rich Birch — Right.

Jeffrey Beachum — We’re thinking that it’s a balanced system. And it cuts out the chaos that could be involved.

Rich Birch — That’s good.

Jeffrey Beachum — It creates an opportunity for people to flow through that and leaders and volunteers to flow through that nice and evenly. The wayfinding from out on the street all the way through the building, the first impressions and having a good impression is important. And and when we talk about street to seat design and thinking, even in a school or a theater or in a YMCA, we think about the children’s area. And no family is going to come into any environment and put their child in an iffy children’s environment. They’re just not.

Rich Birch — That’s true. That is so true.

Jeffrey Beachum — And if they do, they’re going to put them in there and you won’t have their minds in the worship setting.

Rich Birch — Right.

Jeffrey Beachum — Because they’re going to be thinking about what they just did to their child.

Rich Birch — Right.

Jeffrey Beachum — So we we think of the holistic environment…

Rich Birch — Right. That’s good.

Jeffrey Beachum — …paying attention to all of it, and then doing it with a level of expertise that your church requires. Your church has a culture. It has DNA. It has already begun to shape the expectations of its attenders. Now, if you take them and you want to move them over there and say, you’re still a part of us, you’re just going to be away from us. They still expect you to be that kind of a church. And so our designers go to great lengths to design something that is keeping the DNA culture, branding, ah expectations. The children could go from the sending facility to the new facility and see all the same branding…

Rich Birch — Right.

Jeffrey Beachum — …and feel very comfortable with what’s there. So it’s really important that we ah design a system so your people can feel very comfortable going into those settings. And yet, usually they’re going closer to home…

Rich Birch — Right.

Jeffrey Beachum — …which is another aspect of that.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s great.

Jeffrey Beachum — So we that’s what we do is we help churches who may be surprised by their growth be an alternative until they can figure out next.

Rich Birch — Right.

Jeffrey Beachum — In fact, we’ve got a… surprisingly enough, we’ve got a couple of um churches now that are trying to figure a few things out. And and proposing they leave their environment, their permanent facility, and using portability as a leverage to whatever is next for them…

Rich Birch — Right.

Jeffrey Beachum — …because their building became too expensive.

Rich Birch — Right.

Jeffrey Beachum — So we we kind of come alongside the church, determine where they are, where they want to go, and what we can do to help.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s cool. I love that. You know, I know, um you know, when when a a church is maybe thinking about this, when really do they reach out to you, typically? I’m I’m sure there’s like a there’s kind of a ah ah number of points along the way. They’ve either they’re they’re in like the hunch phase. They’re like, we’re thinking about either launching something or we’re wrestling with that. Is that when they should call? Or is it like they should call once we get the actual location, or should they call the week before they want to open?

Jeffrey Beachum — You know, um one of the painful things that I’ve discovered is that pastors, like all of us, we don’t know what we don’t know.

Rich Birch — Yeah. Good.

Jeffrey Beachum — And oftentimes, it will surprise us what we need to know. And so I would I would encourage you that if you are in a growth phase, and you’re at the level of growth where your, man, our our auditorium is getting filled. Our children’s space is getting filled. We need to add chairs. We need to add services. We have two services. We need to add a third. Or you could be at at a place where you’re, how about if we turn the cafe into a worship space? You know? You’re stretching the limits of what you already have. If you’re already there and God is just blessing you, then that is the time when you begin to figure out what are the alternatives.

Jeffrey Beachum — And, um, you know, then you then, and with my real estate background, it’s real easy for me to to reach back in and help pastors think through, uh, so what does it take look like for us to make this facility bigger? And do you really want to do that?

Rich Birch — Right.

Jeffrey Beachum — And what does that do to the maintenance costs, the upkeep? And, uh, then you, you know, you have a Willow Creek on your hand where things change and all of a sudden you’ve got massive buildings.

Rich Birch — Right, right, right.

Jeffrey Beachum — And a lot of churches have been surprised by that.

Jeffrey Beachum — Or an option could be to begin either multisiting, or planting a piece of your congregation in a nearby ah community. And we’ve got churches now that are building a family of churches. And they all have the same DNA, culture, branding and everything except they have a different name. But so they they react differently in a community. And yet they work together because of who they are, their family.

Rich Birch — That’s cool. Yeah, that’s cool.

Jeffrey Beachum — So there’s a variety of ways to handle it. The idea is get get your answers sooner rather than later.

Jeffrey Beachum — We had, in fact, the whole reason I was hired on a PCI back in 2015, ’16 was to help lengthen the runway in which churches that were growing would engage us.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good.

Jeffrey Beachum — And so the longer the runway, the better.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good. So I love that. Like if you’re, if you’re in even that early hunch stage, it’s a good time to reach out. I know I’ve said that behind your back, I’ve been like, you should call the friends of PCI. They’ll jump on the phone, have a call with you. Even if it’s early stage, there’s a couple of signs I know I’ve said to churches before.

Jeffrey Beachum — Yeah.

Rich Birch — These are like super tactical. So if you are launching a third service, you should be talking to PCI. Because the third service is not going to do what you did when you went from one to two services. You’re, you know, you, you go from, and we’ve talked about this before, you have 50% of your services. When you have two services, you have 50% of the services that are in a non-optimal service time.

Rich Birch — When you go to three, two thirds of your services in a non-optimal time. You’re not going to get the bump that you need. If you’re having to add a third service, it’s going to be just a stopgap measure. You’re going to have to think about something beyond that. That’s the first one. The second one, when I’ve heard people say, we’re having to buy extra chairs to like pile them into the back of our rooms, like to figure out how to get, you know… I’m like, you need to call PCI. Like you’re going to spend a bunch of money on chairs.

Jeffrey Beachum — Yeah.

Rich Birch — Well, like why not think about a system? Why not think about maybe we should plant? Or the other one that I’ve said before is if you’re more, if you’re big days, Christmas, Easter, Mother’s Day, if they’re more than 2X your normal attendance. So if you have more than two times your normal attendance on those days, which some churches do…

Jeffrey Beachum — Yeah.

Rich Birch — …um that’s an indicator of like, oh, we’re not, we’re not, ah we’re not reaching every week the normal, ah the the people we could be reaching. You’ve got like an assimilation issue and you could assimilate those people into a new location. And the more than 2X is a telltale sign that like, okay, we should we should find new ways to try to potentially launch or launch a campus or church plant or something like that.

Jeffrey Beachum — Absolutely, absolutely.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s cool.

Jeffrey Beachum — Those are all the scenarios…

Rich Birch — Yes.

Jeffrey Beachum — …that we love to come alongside. And and I mean, those are exciting problems.

Rich Birch — Yeah, they’re good problems to have, for sure. Yeah.

Jeffrey Beachum — Yes, it’s it’s it’s difficult and you got to figure it out. You have to be innovative, you have to be creative. But that’s who God made us to be.

Rich Birch — Yep.

Jeffrey Beachum — And so it’s exciting to work in that environment and help churches and and really good leaders say, oh, this is great, let’s do this. And you were one of those leaders back in the day.

Rich Birch — Yeah, early on. Yeah, it’s true.

Jeffrey Beachum — Yeah.

Rich Birch — It’s true. Yeah, like we’re kind of playing coy. Like, I don’t know about PCI, but yeah, I’ve we’ve bought a lot of systems over the years from PCI and and love what they do. In fact, I was I was joking ah earlier before we got recording, we one of our campuses, we just moved um from a movie theater, into a permanent location, like literally just open the last month. And ah that location was open for seventeen years. And in fact on the last day we had like a clean out day at the theater. I was getting like a little choked up. Because there’s these cases that were, and I’m literally taking pictures of ’em, that seventeen years later, they’re like still on the road. And yeah, they’re vacuum them out and they look brand new.

Jeffrey Beachum — Yep.

Rich Birch — Like they they, you know, all these years later continued to be ah you know well used and really helped, empowered our church to literally reach thousands of people. We wouldn’t have been able to do that. And and we’re in that location for all of those years because ah the system was designed with volunteers in mind, designed to make it easy for those people. Yeah, incredible. And and you were saying, tell me the thing you were saying about your competition, because I thought that was funny.
Jeffrey Beachum — Well, so our our um our second ah our second piece of competition against us is ourselves.

Rich Birch — Yes, yes.

Jeffrey Beachum — Our cases have been so durable over the years.

Rich Birch — Yes.

Jeffrey Beachum — The shelf life of our cases is long.

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Jeffrey Beachum — And um what so what that tells me is that churches, even when they get out of portability, I’m guessing that you guys didn’t drop your cases or leave them…

Rich Birch — No, no.

Jeffrey Beachum — …but you took them into your building.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s true.

Jeffrey Beachum — Yeah. And i I go into a lot of permanent facilities and I see a lot of our cases because they are just functional, and they’re very helpful. And so they just renew what’s in the case and keep it updated and they utilize the case into perpetuity.

Jeffrey Beachum — And then there are some churches that they know the cases and the system, and I don’t want to go too lightly on that thing, a system helps create continuity and clarity and gets rid of chaos.

Rich Birch — Yes. Yeah.

Jeffrey Beachum — And that’s really important when you’re offsite. Um, but, um, those, those cases, um, can, um, because a lot of churches say, so if we’re in this three to five years, what do we do with the stuff when we’re done? Well, you can keep it and use it in your permanent facility, or you can, uh, bless it and move it on to a planter.

Rich Birch — 100 percent. Yeah.

Jeffrey Beachum — And again, that kills our business, but it builds the Kingdom.
Rich Birch — Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I’ve said similar things to other churches that, you know, it’s the same thing. Like I’ve, like another thing is to think, OK, well, we could we could be in this location – maybe we’re there three to five years. But our hope is that we’ll keep opening locations and you could, again not great for PCI, but great for the church.
Jeffrey Beachum — Yeah.
Rich Birch — So we’re going to take that system. We’re going to pull it back in. We’re going to change a few things, maybe change some signage and stuff like that. But then we’re going to go into a whole new community because, PS, it’s portable. We can roll it somewhere else and reuse that stuff. It’s amazing.

Jeffrey Beachum — So, you know, to that point, I was going to share in a little bit, um the the Outreach Top 100 came out, and for whatever it’s worth, we did a little bit of an examination of what it was there.

Rich Birch — Yeah.
Jeffrey Beachum — And 60% of the fastest growing churches and 85% of the largest churches are multi-site.

Rich Birch — Yep.

Jeffrey Beachum — And over 40% of them have utilized Portable Church.

Rich Birch — Yep.

Jeffrey Beachum — Because it is a a good, solid system that they can leverage to get to their next.
Jeffrey Beachum — And another piece of that was, so we were curious about the longevity of our cases. How do the churches do? And so we went back to some of our previous years, 2019, and just finished this. 95.6% of the churches with Portable Church that launched in 2019 through COVID are still up and running.
Rich Birch — What? Wow, that that’s incredible. That’s amazing.
Jeffrey Beachum — 95.6, yes.
Rich Birch — Wow, that’s amazing. That well and so, friends, I think the thing that that speaks to, and this it’s like hard to articulate, but a part of what I have found, like front row seat with with a Portable Church system, is it’s designed with longevity in mind. It’s designed, at the core, one of the reasons why portable doesn’t work is you burn out your volunteers. Like it they just are not excited to show up. They’re not excited to, um, you know, to do this thing. And the thing about PCI systems is they are, they’re built for simplicity. They’re built for how do we make this easy? How do we, um, you know, not have people carry things?

Rich Birch — Like the telltale sign of your portable system is bad is you have people you know walking around with items around your spot. Well, no, like there’s put everything on wheels, figure out how to get it into a box that, you know, that rolls. And, and that…

Jeffrey Beachum — Everything’s on wheels.

Rich Birch — Yeah, and and put it into a spot that that your volunteers will actually enjoy ah you know serving. How do you guys balance in kind of your process a system where you can leverage all the good things from the thousands of churches, like the kind of shared learnings with the customization piece? How how do you how do you actually functionally do that? Because I’ve seen you do that. What does that look like?

Jeffrey Beachum — Well, it is actually a cornerstone of what we do. And churches love this piece, and that is the custom design piece, as well as the custom launch and training weekend that we have with the church where we’re actually face to face with them.
Jeffrey Beachum — But in the custom design piece, we’ve learned a lot in the last almost 30 years now. We’ve learned a ton of things. And we learn it from what the church is telling us they want to do.

Rich Birch — Right.

Jeffrey Beachum — And and so if they say, yeah, we’re a little odd, so you might not be able to do that. To our guys, that’s a challenge. And they come back. And and that actually…

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Jeffrey Beachum — …was one of the catalysts for us working with a um ah TV screen, LED wall.

Rich Birch — Oh, LED walls. Yeah, yeah, yeah. For sure.

Jeffrey Beachum — So we worked with ah a company that produces LED walls. And we they helped us design a portable LED wall.

Rich Birch — Love it.

Jeffrey Beachum — And so we are able to go into many environments that are light rich, which is fine, but we’re able to help them instead of throwing a video, we can actually use LED walls and that’s helpful. Many times we’ll say, ah you don’t want the expense of an LED wall, but then there are churches that that’s who they are. And that’s the quality that they want to have.

Jeffrey Beachum — So our design process is we we come in, and we we spend a day with you in your sending church. And that gives us the idea to visually see what your church is like. We talk to the the lead team and say, why on earth do you think God wants you to create another church? You know? What is your vision? What are you trying to do?
Jeffrey Beachum — And then we talked to the kids environment, the directors and ask them, so what are you trying to do, so we see what it looks like, so we can see the branding and the process. The tech team, you know, what’s the environment like when people come into worship? What do you want them to feel?

Rich Birch — Right. Love it.

Jeffrey Beachum — What do they see? Who do they touch? All of those kind of things. And we take all of that information. And then they show us the venue that they’re looking at.

Rich Birch — Right.

Jeffrey Beachum — And we apply all of that together with them in the venue. And we say, here’s here’s what we see this becoming you by utilizing these pieces and this function and flow and these different pieces of who you are.
Jeffrey Beachum — So our guide will take all that on the first day, spend a whole day ah up in a hotel room, and he designs. And then on the third day, we present back to them what we think we heard them say.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s cool.

Jeffrey Beachum — And we say, you told us that you would like your environments to look like this, that your price point is this, that your goals are these, and this facility gives you A, B, and C, and we can put that together.

Jeffrey Beachum — And then from there, it’s just a matter of them fine tuning what they told us and us what we heard. And then when they pull the trigger, it’s usually, well, back in the day when supply chains were friendly, it could have been 10 weeks. But now it’s 12-ish weeks.

Rich Birch — Right.

Jeffrey Beachum — 12 weeks later, we’re building a custom product to deliver to them in the weekend.

Rich Birch — Wow. Yep. Yeah, it’s amazing.

Jeffrey Beachum — So that’s our process.

Rich Birch — Yeah, it’s incredible. And again, having seen that up front, I love the work that PCI does to really try to understand. It’s funny, I’ve had telling a little secret behind your back. I’ve sometimes had people say like, you know, they they’re like, oh, I’m so nervous. Like, I don’t know. It’s so it’s like they feel like they’re in this relationship. Like sometimes with vendors, you’re like, you don’t want to tell them everything. I’m like, tell them everything. Like, be super clear the more clear you can be up front that you’ll you’ll end up with a system that’s closer to. And that that gets back to like scale of like how much money do you want to spend. And like you know what what kind of restrictions do you have. Like we do not want, we want this system to be able to set up in x amount of time with x number of people, all that kind of stuff so that you know that that our our friends at PCI can ultimately figure out how to get all that and make that happen. And they’re they like the constraint. They like the like help us understand the way to do that.

Jeffrey Beachum — Yeah.

Rich Birch — Talk to me about Launch Weekend because it’s not just that you build stuff and then you FedEx it to our house um or to our you know office. What what happens on the kind of Launch Weekend training weekends?

Jeffrey Beachum — So let me make one distinction, then I go to launch weekend.
Rich Birch — Yep.
Jeffrey Beachum — You said something, and you keep doing that. So um I I personally don’t like “vendor”…

Rich Birch — Sure.

Jeffrey Beachum — Because, and it’s not not anything I have to do with you.

Rich Birch — Yep.

Jeffrey Beachum — But i for my whole career, I’ve occasionally been a vendor. And I know what that is.
Rich Birch — Yes.

Jeffrey Beachum — But at PCI…

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Jeffrey Beachum — …everybody at our facility, it has the heart to be with every church that we work with…

Rich Birch — That’s 100% true.

Jeffrey Beachum — …and what they’re trying to do. We we our main metric is how many open seats how many seats can we open up for the hearing of the gospel?
Rich Birch — Yeah, so good.

Jeffrey Beachum — You know? So we open up seats at the sending campus and the new campus.

Rich Birch — Yep.

Jeffrey Beachum — So anyway, we love to be a partner, not necessarily a vendor, but I get ya.

Rich Birch — Love it. Yeah, definitely.

Jeffrey Beachum — So now launch weekend is very exciting because it’s like a vision becoming a reality. And we, on launch weekend, we fly in to wherever you are. And there’s a team of usually two to four of us, depending on the size and what we need to do. And then our, before we fly in, your system has been shipped, either by trailer or by freight to the site.
Jeffrey Beachum — And it’s in trailers. Everything is in trailers. And I could talk to you offline about that. But your trailer or trailers show up. And we spend all day Saturday morning with all of your volunteers introducing your system. And the key part of a system is that we got to get everybody to understand how it works, the process, the orderliness, what goes first. And in in the system that we build, every volunteer ah can make it happen because…

Rich Birch — Right.

Jeffrey Beachum — …everything has a place.

Rich Birch — Right.

Jeffrey Beachum — Everything has a place in the case. And every case has a place in the trailer. And we’re very meticulous about weighing all of that out because we can’t have cases falling on any kids. And we can’t have trailers breaking the axle of trucks. We just, it doesn’t work. So we’re very meticulous about that.

Jeffrey Beachum — And so we spend an hour or so orienting the the volunteer team to what is going to happen and the products themselves. And then and they divide up by teams and they run the cases in. And usually, um no matter how many trailers you have, if you have the right number of volunteers, all of your gear can be in the building within nine minutes.
Rich Birch — Love it.
Jeffrey Beachum — So everything is out of trailers in place in nine minutes. And then you spend maybe an hour setting everything up. That LED wall I told you about, 9 by 16 LED wall – it takes two guys 45 minutes to set up in its entirety…

Rich Birch — Wow. That’s amazing.

Jeffrey Beachum — …if you if you have the right stuff. So it’s within an hour.

Rich Birch — Right.

Jeffrey Beachum — And that’s one of the things we sell the best is time.

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Jeffrey Beachum — If you are having your volunteers spend three hours in the morning setting up and four hours tearing down, you’re killing them.

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Jeffrey Beachum — And a system can help save you money because you’re not paying rent. And it can save your volunteers.

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Jeffrey Beachum — So anyway, we go through it and we put it all up in the facility once and then we take it all back down. That’s typically a Saturday, and it’s all back in the cases. The next day we designed so that it is a real life service. Now it might be just a practice, or it could be real service. But our team then is a little more hands off and your team is a little more hands on. And we actually go through everything like you would on a Sunday morning.

Rich Birch — Right.

Jeffrey Beachum — And it’s it’s very exciting because on Sunday morning we get to, um if they do a video venue, we get to have the video come in and the pastor at the sending church says, Hey, to our new site…

Rich Birch — Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Right.

Jeffrey Beachum — You know, and everybody says, Hey, and, and it really happens. And then we, after the service or services, we crash it all down back into the trailer. And then we kind of gather up and we pray with the, uh, the volunteer team, and we we say, all right, so what worked, what didn’t work? What do we need to fix? Because it it is a a pretty big system. And so there are typically you know little things that we have to fix and, oops, we forgot to add this piece and and we’ll go and do that.

Jeffrey Beachum — So if you’re in a venue where you think, man, what you just described is not what we have. We really aren’t doing portability very well. We have a thing called efficiency upgrade and we’ll come in to your venue and we’ll help you figure out how to put it into a system…

Rich Birch — Love it.

Jeffrey Beachum — …where you can get control and time back.

Rich Birch — Yeah. Yeah, that’s so good. Like I know there’s a lot of churches out there, surprising number, who like rent space on a Saturday to set up because it takes like four or five hours to set up. And then, um, and you know, and I’ve said to those folks over the years, I’m like, you know, you can do this and actually should do this all on Sunday morning. Like it’ll save you resources. It’s actually easier for your volunteers. It’s easier on your team. I know it sounds crazy, but you should be able to get this all done in…

Jeffrey Beachum — Yeah.

Rich Birch — …you know, on Sunday morning.

Jeffrey Beachum — Yep.

Rich Birch — So yeah, that’s, that’s amazing. Well, I know there’s a ton we could talk about here…

Jeffrey Beachum — All day.

Rich Birch — …but this has been a great, ah yeah, really great kind of primer introduction. Now we want to send people to portablechurch.com/Jeff and tell me what this…Well, first of all, I think this is great. What what are they going to get when they would drop by portablechurch.com/Jeff?

Jeffrey Beachum — So we put together a landing page that will give you four resources having to do mostly with multi-siting. In the operational, operationalizing the vision resource bundle, we have mapping your multi-site journey. And so that gives a timeline of that process that we were talking about. How soon should a church engage? So that’s just a map on how long it takes.

Jeffrey Beachum — A facility comparison, cost comparison, building out mistakes to avoid, some recommendations that we’ve heard from design, build firms, and then 10 bonus benefits of portability. 10 reasons why, and to be honest with you, I consult to the church’s needs. And if the church really believes they need to be in a different kind of facility, that’s fine. And I’m glad to defer and say that commercial environment is awesome. That’s what you should do.

Rich Birch — That’s good.

Jeffrey Beachum — However, in probably 80% or more of the cases, I think they could benefit by leveraging portability. It would make them stronger. It would give them time to raise more funds so that they can go into that new environment stronger. They could grow their congregation. They could develop their volunteer team. They could develop new leaders. But there’s 10 bonus benefits of portability there. And the best thing is if you land on that page and pick a date, just have a conversation with me. I will buy you a cup of coffee.

Rich Birch — Love it.

Jeffrey Beachum —And you can get your cup of coffee and then come on and we’ll do a Zoom together. And we’ll just have a good old time.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good. Yeah, I would encourage you to to to to do that. So that’s again, just portablechurch.com/Jeff. Even if you’re early, like maybe you’re an executive pastor, a couple thousand person church and you’ve you guys have kind of kicked around, maybe we were thinking about this down the road. You really should start early in the conversation that, you know, I would do that. Or if you’re like a church planter and you’re like, you know, even you’re like thinking it’s going to be maybe 2025 before we do that. You know, reach out now. it It would be great to kind of get in the pipeline, have a conversation. Uh, that would be fantastic.

Rich Birch — Anything else you’d like to say, Jeff, just as we, as we kind of land today’s episode.

Jeffrey Beachum — No, the only the only stat that I don’t think I was able to share is one that kills me. Warren Bird and Ed Stetzer did ah a study a little while ago, and probably the stat needs to be updated. But they determined, on the positive side, 68% of all new location launches are still viable after four years. So of course, me being me, I looked at, that means 32%…

Rich Birch — Right.

Jeffrey Beachum — …of all churches that are launching were not successful. And that that kills me. And so I don’t want any church that I ever have to work with or get to work with to be in that 32%. I want to put them in a system that they may not realize it upfront, but is really good for them, and will give them everything they want in their wish list for launching a new location.

Rich Birch — Nice. That’s great. So good. So again, friends, drop by portablechurch.com/Jeff. Is there anywhere else we want to send people online if they want to track with PCI, kind of track with your story, that sort of thing?

Jeffrey Beachum — Our website, we’re in the process of redoing it.

Rich Birch — Nice.

Jeffrey Beachum — We’ve got a ton of resources. And actually that is a place you could catch on to our newsletter, which is kind of rich – we’re sending out once a month. And so ah portablechurch.com is is our our website. That would be a good place.

Rich Birch — That’s great. Thanks so much, Jeff. Really appreciate you being on the show. Look forward to having you back in the future.

Jeffrey Beachum — Thanks, Rich.