PART II
Chris asks (and also wins the award for run on sentence of the week):
“What does Dressing for the Wedding look like when you are 300-400 people and the offerings are low and you are the only paid staff even though I have 10 committed staff people that work a min. of 20 hours a week not including Sunday????”
Whew… breathe, man.
First off, good question. Secondly, a little review:
Dress for the Wedding, Not the Gas Station is our little analogy to illustrate the importance of structuring for where you want to go, not for where you are.
If you’re not familiar with the concept, I’ve blogged about it here and we recorded an audio blog about it as well. Since we’ve already devoted so much time to explaining the general principle, I’ll use this opportunity to address Chris’ specific scenario.
Chris, situations like yours are not the exception to the Dress for the Wedding principle, they are the very reason behind it. And according to your details, it sounds like you’re already a pretty good dresser. 10 staff is a good start.
Dress for the Wedding is the most important when you’re the smallest. That’s also the time when it’s the hardest. But that’s not a valid excuse.
For example, I had 6 staff members that I treated like full time staff members before we ever launched. None of them were paid. But we still had weekly staff meetings. Now, the meetings had to happen at night, and were very inconvenient because half of my staff lived an hour and fifteen minutes outside of Charlotte. But we made it happen.
Sometimes I had to adjust my short term expectations to match our reality, but I always tried to keep our long term vision pure and uncompromised.
There will always be a logistical limitation on how much you can over-structure.
(You can’t go to the bank for a loan on a 100,000 square feet facility with a $100,000 a year budget. They don’t care how big your vision is.)
But start where you can. Create a skeleton of the structure you want to see, and as more resources begin to flow, God will cover the skeleton with flesh and blood.
Another metaphor: Go ahead and draw up the blueprint, whether or not you can afford to start construction right away.
Your greatest innovation is usually born out of your greatest limitation.
