Practice Management for Churches

Successful businesses usually have a superior front desk. After all, the front desk is who your clientele sees first and who they see last so it’s important to make a good impression at the front desk. At the front desk you hire for personality and not for skills… you can train skills but you can’t train personality.

I recently had to join a new gym because my old gym closed down. I was in there one day and a very personable young man who happened (as I found out later) to be the director of trainers for this corporate owned gym walked up to me and introduced himself. He showed interest in me and invited me to join his Kettlebell class. He had personality and advanced social skills.

After several weeks in his class he turned the class over to a young woman trainer. I had noticed this trainer before and found her to be quiet and aloof and had already made the judgment that she wasn’t very “good”, but I loved the Kettlebell class and continued on.

I found this woman to be very skilled and once I got to know her came to like her and found her class to be better than the other guys.

In congregations, it is very important to greet visitors in such a way that they want to continue “the class”… so to speak.

Congregations should identify those (men and women) who have winning personalities (so important in businesses and gyms) and place them in a position to greet visitors. That means they probably need to sit in the back or make their way to the back during the announcements at the close of services because visitors tend to leave early. This way the greeters can hold the visitors up so the rest of the congregation can interact with them.

It takes a team in congregations and everyone needs to understand their own strengths and weaknesses.

We have an employee who works back in out kennel and it takes a special person to work back there with all the barking, etc. When Ethel (not her real name) brings boarding dogs up she interacts with the owners and they just love her. Ethel could never work at our front desk (and she knows that) but she is one of our most valuable employees and makes our business better.

Let’s work on making our congregations better too.