The newest category for my Blog is B2C, which stands for Business to Church. I've worked for corporate America, been on staff at 3 mega churches and now I work for myself. During that time, I've found that my time and training in each has allowed me experience I couldn't have gained any other way. So I wanted to talk about principles that transfer from the Business world to the Church world, and B2C was born.

I'm fairly certain that some reading this post are thinking about how church doesn't need to be a corporation, or that profits in the business world have nothing to do with the church, or even that the corporate scandals and mismanagement should keep us from trying to adopt business practices into our church culture. Get over yourselves. Gaining wisdom from others - even those outside of the church structure - is just a good idea.

Here's my stance on this: "Principles are principles regardless if you're talking about the Pastor or the CEO."

Here's a Biblical stance on this: Proverbs 3:13-15 "Blessed is the man who finds wisdom, the man who gains understanding, for she is more profitable than silver and yields better returns than gold. She is more precious than rubies; nothing you desire can compare with her."

That's why I'm adding this new category. Now on today's topic!

I was reading how Bloglines, my RSS feed aggregator, was planning for some scheduled maintenance and upgrades. They communicated this to me through a short statement on my Bloglines page:

Bloglines will have a planned outage on Monday, December 19, 2005 in order to relocate to a new data center. Here's our planned schedule for tomorrow:

* 2:00pm Pacific Daylight Time (10:00pm UTC): Your subscriptions will stop updating with new items.

* 4:00pm PDT (12:00am UTC December 20th): The Bloglines site will be completely offline. During this time you will not be able to access your account.

* 8:00pm PDT (4:00am UTC December 20th): The Bloglines site will be back online by this time. New articles posted during the outage will appear in your account.

We look forward to vastly improved hardware capacity and tons of elbow room for growth. Thank you for your patience during this outage.

- The Bloglines Team

In this short statement, they communicated a lot of information that will affect me and let me know why Bloglines will be down. But more than that, they also gave me a time frame and a positive outcome for the outage.

So why am I sharing this with you?

Because I thought the example was a great illustration of how Bloglines took their planning seriously: it costs them money to be down. Just think about moving an entire data center - not just a few routers and computers - and going from offline to back online in only four hours! That's amazing! There is no way they could make the transition that quickly without some serious planning and coordination to ensure the move goes smoothly.

In church, we will often make changes that are massive, but we don't plan like it is going to cost us money. After all, we're just a church and no one is losing money by us changing our website or upgrading our sound system or adding a new poster printer. This is flawed thinking and it is usually justified by a "cost savings" in the name of good stewardship.

"We can do it ourselves!"

"We don't need help."

"We'll figure it out."

Here's a mantra I repeat often: "Good stewardship has a whole lot less to do with how much money is saved and a whole lot more to do with how much money isn't wasted."

If you have a person in the church administrating your website for free, pay them to make the transition smooth and quick! In this culture, having an outdated website - or worse, one that isn't available - speaks volumes to your potential visitors. People don't look in the Yellow Pages to find a church - they look at Google.

If you have a Radio Shack friend who is an engineer-wannabe, thank them for their offer to upgrade the sound system, but then find a qualified firm that will do it during a one week period and train your staff so that it's ready for the next service.

When you buy that new poster printer, get the service option that brings in an expert to set it up and train your staff on how to use it.

Look, in the corporate world time is money. In the church world time is not always money, but it is still someones time and the result still matters. Plan like it would cost you customers, cost you time and cost you money.

A sense of urgency forces us to work smarter. And it means we can continue to improve our systems and processes for better service to the people.