Multisite Missteps (Part 2)
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If you’ve ever tried to launch a second campus, you know the struggle is real. Turns out, most churches get their staffing and structure wrong from day one—but hey, we’re here to save you from those painful missteps.
In this episode, Sean and I dive into the math behind multisite staffing (hint: your ratios probably need to change), why rushing to build a massive central team is a recipe for disaster, and how to avoid turning your campus pastor into a lonely island. We’ll tackle the ever-present challenge of who actually gets to make decisions in this whole multisite dance. Whether you’re thinking about going multisite or feeling “multistuck” right now, we discuss practical guidance you may need to build a structure that actually works.
This Episode Is Brought to You By PlainJoe.
Are you considering adding a second or third campus to your growing church? Need help telling your church’s unique story across every location? PlainJoe, a Storyland Studio, has you covered. Their team of creative storytellers, talented designers and innovative architects are passionate about helping churches tell their stories through spatial, interactive and strategic storytelling.
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Transcript
Sean:
Before Amy and I start this week’s conversation, I wanna tell you about a great opportunity. If you’re a church that’s considering going multi-site or adding locations to your current church. You are going to need help as a multi-site church telling your church’s unique story across every location, and PlainJoe can help with just that. They have a creative team of storytellers, talented designers, and innovative architects who are passionate about helping churches tell their stories through spatial, interactive, and strategic storytelling. You can reach out to them today and learn more at plainjoe.net.
Well, welcome to the Unstuck Church podcast. I’m Sean, your host here with my teammate Amy Anderson. This is part two of our series called Multisite Missteps, where we’re exploring how churches that have a lot of momentum can kind of go off the rails by going multi-site, despite I think, their best intentions. And, Amy, last week we talked about this us versus them mentality that can develop. So if you missed it, go back and listen to episode 395. It’s a great starting point.
This week we’re gonna be talking about the missteps churches make in staffing and structure areas when they go multi-site. You know, Amy, the data from our most recent unstuck church report this past year says 40% of churches connected with The Unstuck Group are planning to launch a multi-site location in the next year. That’s a staggering number to me. So I think talking about missteps now will hopefully help these churches avoid some of the known missteps they can make in the staffing and structure areas.
Amy:
That’s right. Multi-ite is not new anymore, and the past 20 years of this movement, I think has revealed the best practices in so many areas, including staffing and structure. So today I think it’ll be good to talk about the different phases multi-site churches go through as they continue to add locations because there’s some predictable structure changes and role changes at different junctures. And it’s important because multi-site churches, I’m quoting Paul again from our team, we have to act our age as a multi-site church. So if you’re a two location church, don’t look to Life.Church for your cues. They have 45 locations across 12 states. They’re in a different season, so that’s what I wanna talk about in this week’s episode. Just staffing structure missteps and where we can relate them back to the phases of multi-site expansion.
Sean:
Well that’s a great launching point. Amy. We, you know this, we’ve served 200 multi-site churches over the years. And help them on the staffing and structure side of ministry. What are the missteps you see churches making early on in their multi-site model related to staffing and structure?
Amy:
Yeah. Early on. Well, first, because they don’t have clarity on their multi-site model, they can hire the wrong type of person in the campus pastor role. I touched on this at the end of episode 395, but instead of hiring someone who wants to be like a second chair leader, they hire this entrepreneurial mustang who wants to start creating new ministry, or they’ll hire a shepherd who isn’t strong in the leadership gifting. So they miss it on who they hire there. Second early on, they don’t staff the new location realistically, it is a very common misstep to overstaff a new location. Another misstep that I see all the time is there’s an overemphasis on a large central team right outta the gate. Many churches overinvest early on in those central roles when they really should be creating player coach roles like kind of part central part campus. And as we talked about some last week, they don’t bring clarity to decision making and authority. And now being a matrix organization, you know, with solid lines and dotted lines, there’s always gonna be a lot of confusion about who has decision rights and they don’t answer that question well enough about who has authority over what.
Sean:
Yeah. So those are the early missteps and we’ve seen those play out, haven’t we?
Amy:
Yes, we have, you know, I’ve said this before in the podcast, but years ago when we created our multi-site offering, we designed it for large single site churches that were planning to go multi-site. And while we’ve had many clients like that. Our most common client in this space, historically ,has been a church with three locations that feels multi-stuck. And these staffing and structure missteps are the most common missteps in their journey.
Sean:
Okay. Well, let’s talk about the missteps we see in churches with more than two locations. I’ve heard a lot of people talk about multi-site is like having kids. And it’s when you have that third kid that you know, you have to move from that man-to-man coverage to zone coverage. Likewise, right? There is something unique about when a church launches their third location, those cracks you mentioned earlier this is when they can become the gaps. And in other words, you kind of hold it together when there’s two locations, but when there’s a third new tension start to emerge. And so what are some of the missteps you see churches making later on in their multi-site journey, again related to staffing and structure?
Amy:
Yeah. Well, for the reasons you just kind of laid out, this is usually where staffing shows up. So the misstep here is that as they’re expanding, they just begin to hire too many people. And commonly it’s a lot of part-time people that are hired to plug holes, right? We need more help here. Can we, can we hire someone at least someone part-time? And every ministry at every campus is starting to ask that because we’ve spread out our people, right? We’re spreading out into different communities. And those little cracks, maybe in serving numbers, volunteer leaders create this gap that we need to plug a hole. And so the challenge here is, is that when you do that, when you plug the holes with a lot of part-time staff, we end up spending a lot of our staffing dollars on doers instead of those equipping leaders. And which I say all the time, those are key to a healthy multi-site church.
And here’s another one related; A common misstep is they hire a campus pastor for the sending or original location too soon. So if there are two, three locations and they think, oh, the other locations have a campus pastor, we need one here now. What that does, if you do it too soon in the journey, is it creates unnecessary confusion around reporting structures, authority, right? Decision rights. And again, that adds to the overstaffing. I would make the argument.
And yes, I think I’ve done staffing structure for 200 of the 200 churches we’ve done. It’s just that you’re put in a position that you don’t need to have yet. Which is taking money away from a position you probably do need. Things like a database manager, when you’re about a thousand people, you should probably have someone dedicated to your database. You should have a communications director. These are some of these key roles that get missed because we’re spending them erroneously.
And the last one I’ll mention, if, if they have embraced live teaching at every location, this is the phase where the strain on quality teaching enters in. And this is when they may start to realize that each location is starting to take on its own personality. And we’re gonna talk about that more next week. But this is where that early misstep is turning into a challenge, a gap at the stage of 2, 3, 4 locations.
Sean:
That’s a great tease for next week. I like that, Amy. Good job.
Amy:
Thank you.
Sean:
So what guidance do you have for churches just to avoid these common missteps?
Amy:
All right, well let’s get the math outta the way. Let’s start with some math.
Sean:
Oh, yes. I love math.
Amy:
Yes, me too. Especially right on the spot math, that’s my favorite. One of the ratios we look at in staffing is how many full-time equivalents you have related to your average weekend attendance. So if you add in the bodies in the auditorium and then in the kids area and divide that by your full-time equivalent, that’s gonna give you this ratio. So healthy churches staff at one full-time equivalent for every 75 people that attend on average. So in this scenario, if you’re a church of a thousand people, that means that you should have between 13 or 14 full-time equivalents on your staff team.
When you go to staff your first multi-site location, the mistake we often see is that churches are using that same ratio to determine the staffing level at the new campus. Meaning if you’re gonna launch your multi-site location with 200 people, the mistake would be dividing that by 75 and hiring two and a half to three full-time equivalents to lead that location. And I get it, it kind of makes sense at first glance.
But you’re not accounting for the additional central costs that are supporting this new location. So, you know, things like, you know, the finance side of things, the facilities, the executive pastor, the lead pastor, so the accurate math is to take whatever your ratio is, I’m using 75 right now. Multiply that times 1.5. And that’s the number you’re gonna divide into that 200. So in this case, if I were to multiply 75 times 1.5, we’re gonna get 112. So for a 200 person church, you would have less than two full-time equivalents on your staff.And so this is where I say it’s so easy early on to begin over staffing. Because I think we need some of those, the math metrics to kind of help us gauge not just what do we need over there, but what if we only launch with a hundred people, then we can’t even have a full-time leader at that campus. So maybe let’s wait till we’re 200 or 300 launch team.
And just an aside, this is why we encourage multi-site churches to get larger before they launch their first campus. Because most growing churches will have a tough time replicating that experience at the sending location at a new location with just two or three staff people. Those staffing FTEs would just get eaten up so quick. Because you need a campus pastor, you need worship, you need production, you need a kid’s pastor, and that’s just the bare minimum for the priority hires for a new location.
Sean:
Well, Amy, related to that, I mean, you mentioned earlier that sometimes early on in the multi-site church journey, they have a tendency to hire part-time people just to kind of plug some of those holes. And I know we just recently talked about this on the podcast, but I just didn’t wanna miss the opportunity to reinforce that you need to try to stay disciplined to engage volunteers in the ministry and save your hiring dollars for those multiplying equipping leaders, especially in your kids and student areas, as well as discipleship areas by the time you get toffour locations, you are primarily hiring, multiplying, equipping leaders. So if you’re struggling to find them now, this is something your church needs to figure out how to do, how to identify, raise up, multiplying leaders. And often the barrier in launching new locations is, the further you get into multi-site, it’s not a financial issue. It’s commonly a leadership issue. Or a lack of leader issue.
Amy:
That is so true. I see that with so many churches. They actually have the money to launch their fourth campus or their fifth, but they don’t have the leadership, they don’t have the bench to do that right now. And the next guidance I would provide, Sean, is just, again, don’t hire a campus pastor too soon for that original campus. The exact answer on when you add this role will depend on the size of your locations, but generally you wanna wait until you have your fourth or fifth location. Until then, the staff that execute ministry at the original location should report up to your central ministry strategist.
Sean:
Well, Amy, you mentioned that when going multi-site, many churches put two large of a central team together. Can you talk about how to avoid that misstep?
Amy:
Yeah. Well, you definitely need to identify who your central ministry strategists are. That is, identifying who the people are, who are going to create your ministry strategies that’s going to be used at all locations. You need to do that, you know, like someone who’s going to be the owner of how you do kids ministry. Or how you do student ministries, how you do the weekend service, how you do things like small groups, you need to identify them. But for most churches, these are player coach roles. In other words, they’re identifying and creating the strategy, but they’re also executing that strategy at the original location. So really only about 20% of their role is as a central person.
And it isn’t until around campus four or five, where you have people on your team that are purely just a central strategist without a campus to execute at. And the more you expand the central team always stays pretty small. And, and just to be clear, I’m not talking about central support services like finance, HR, IT, I’m talking truly about the strategists that are setting your ministry strategies.
Second, and I haven’t seen this for a while when I’m out at churches, Sean, but I know it still exists. One of the most important structure decisions when building a healthy multi-site church is actually building a campus team. We actually made this mistake at our church early on in our journey, thinking we could just send people over to a campus to run ministries and student ministries. In other words, there were no people reporting to the campus pastor to lead kids and students, rather, they stayed connected as kind of a central student and kids team. And then those staff members would kind of divide and conquer on the weekend. In fact, we actually rotated people through the platform space as the campus pastor as well.
And both of those were the wrong calls. And that campus, it did not take off until it had a dedicated campus pastor and a dedicated ministry team reporting to that campus pastor, that came together to really reach that community. So if a campus pastor doesn’t have a real team to help him or her lead and grow the campus, it results in a lonely campus pastor and most likely a stuck campus.
Sean:
Yeah. And Amy, I think it’s worth mentioning again, you talked about on last week’s podcast, you need to bring clarity to who has decision rights and who has authority over what as well. At Unstuck, we recommend you identify who your central ministry strategists are and then determine how decisions are made within that ministry. In addition to decision rights on strategies, you have to be clear about what the solid and dotted line reporting relationships are. Solid line reporting structure defines authority. That’s the employee’s boss. A dotted line relationship means that that person likely has decision rights as a strategist, but only influence with the employee. So a kid’s pastor at a campus would report to the campus pastor, but likely would have a dotted line back to the central kids ministry strategist.
Amy:
Yeah. And just to flesh that out a little bit more, if a campus pastor needs to hire a leader for their kids’ ministry, it would be the responsibility of the campus pastor to like champion that hiring process. And the central person’s role would be to support the campus pastor. So what does that look like? I could see the central person in kids reviewing all the candidates from a competency perspective, and the campus pastor would be reviewing the candidates on their character chemistry and culture fit at the campus. And it’s kind of this partnership, right? To help identify the best candidate. But yes, Sean, I’m glad you brought up clarity and decision rights. Again, it’s probably one of the most important missteps to avoid. Every multi-site church you need to make these decision-right decisions in advance. That clarity is what helps those campus and central teams partner well and work in unity.
Sean:
Yeah. Well, Amy, we’ve covered a lot of ground here. Clearly we could talk about this all day.
Amy:
I know.
Sean:
But we like to give pastors some practical next steps. So before we wrap up today, for the churches who identify with some of these missteps, what are what are some of those practical steps they can start to take?
Amy:
Yeah, so the practical next step would really depend on what your misstep is. So if you find yourself overstaffed right now, you probably need to do an audit on how you’re spending your full-time equivalents and then see what the data tells you. You’ll probably have to compare that with an audit of how many leaders you actually have on the team versus how many people are really doing tasks. I think facts are your friends. So an analysis like that might give you some clarity on what you need to do next as a result of that.
If your misstep is that your decision rights aren’t clear, you just need to schedule a few days of your leadership team’s time and do an extensive exercise walking through who makes what decisions. Sean, this is actually what we did at our church. We were at about four locations when our leaders pulled away for a few days and slogged through to get the first draft done. And we started by identifying where was all the tension coming from. Where did we have breakdowns in relationships or expectations? And we would just, we just dove in there and we moved from tension to tension until we determined how we would lead through that in the future.
And I would just say for our listeners, if you identified with a lot of the things that we talked about today, consider bringing the Unstuck Group in to help you clarify your multi-site model. We do this all the time and we help teams bring clarity to their multi-site strategy and how to staff and structure around that in a healthy way.
Sean:
Well, week two has been a great conversation, Amy. We’ve got one more week left in this series, but before we wrap up today, any final thoughts from you?
Amy:
When it comes to your staffing and structure approach for multi-site, I hope I’ve convinced you that there’s just some predictable challenges and proven solutions to get this part of your multi-site model unstuck and healthy. You don’t have to make the mistakes the big C Church has already learned. If you’re a large church who is considering going multi-site or a church that feels multi-stuck right now, again, we’d love to help. Our multi-site process will help you define not only your model, but also create a structure that will bring clarity to roles, decision rights, and to be financially sustainable. So you can find out more about that at theunstuckgroup.com/multisite.
Sean:
Absolutely. And don’t forget to come back next week for the third and final part of our multi-site misstep series conversations. Amy, next week we’re gonna talk about, probably the hottest topic on this list: the teaching model. So we’re looking forward to that conversation and for you all to be back and join us again. Until then, we’re cheering for you as you lead your church towards sustained health. Have a great week.
