“Church Facility Stewardship” Presented by: Dude Solutions

H E L P I N G L E A D E R S B E C O M E B E T T E R S T E WA R D S .

Church Facility Stewardship Presented by: Dude Solutions

Table of Contents THE 4 PILLARS TO GOOD FACILITY STEWARDSHIP

3

Aside from staff, the buildings are your most expensive asset, and we should care for them accordingly. Often, we have to do more with less, making it mission-critical to effectively prioritize the things that can make the most impact for the long-term, utilize your resources wisely, and plan for the future.

From our work with church facility managers, we’ve found that the four pillars of the best facility stewardship are: 1) Preventive maintenance 2) Work order management 3) Asset management & capital planning 4) Safety

By Donovan Loomis

CASE STUDY: WAYNE UNITED METHODIST CHURCH GAINS 20 YEARS OF FORESIGHT INTO THEIR CAPITAL PLANNING

4

HOW THE NORMALIZATION OF DEVIANCE AFFECTS CHURCHES’ FACILITIES

7

PREVENTIVE MAINTENANCE AND CAPITAL PLANNING: WHAT’S THE COST OF NOT INVESTING NOW?

9

Thom Rainer recently shared a list of the top 10 questions pastors ask him, and No. 2 was, What do I do about our aging facilities?

Every church will inevitably have to ask this question.

Preventive maintenance (PM) and capital planning will help ensure that time doesn’t come prematurely — and when it does come, you have the funding to take the needed steps.

By Donovan Loomis

NORTHRIDGE CHURCH DOCUMENTS WORK AND INCREASES ACCOUNTABILITY WITH MAINTENANCEEDGE™

10

Being intentional in managing your facilities has very little impact on how effectively the church can carry out the mission, right? Wrong.

While the church’s primary mission is spreading the gospel, we have to take care of our most expensive assets if we want to have the resources, long term, to help fulfill the church’s mission. Although the physical building is not the “the church,” it is the launching pad for everything we do.

By Donovan Loomis

FELLOWSHIP BIBLE CHURCH TAKES OWNERSHIP OVER WORK ORDERS TO ENSURE A WELLMAINTAINED PLACE OF WORSHIP

2

CHURCH EXECUTIVE • C H U R C H F A C I L I T Y S T E W A R D S H I P

8

churchexecutive.com

CHURCH FACILITY STEWARDSHIP

The 4 pillars to good facility stewardship

By Donovan Loomis Between Sunday worship, youth activities, and all the groups that meet throughout the week, your church is a hub of activity. Your congregation relies on the facilities to not only be a place of worship, but also a launching pad for ministry. Church leaders are expected to be intentional in how they manage the church’s resources, as you care for your church with the same attentiveness that you would your own home.

Aside from staff, the buildings are your most expensive asset, and we should care for them accordingly. Often, we have to do more with less, making it mission-critical to effectively prioritize the things that can make the most impact for the long-term, utilize your resources wisely, and plan for the future. From our work with church facility managers, we’ve found that the four pillars of the best facility stewardship are: 1) Preventive maintenance 2) Work order management 3) Asset management & capital planning 4) Safety

Planning for the future starts with knowing what resources you currently have (and how you can make the most of them).

3) Asset Management & Capital Planning Once you know the status of your assets and what resources you have, you can truly begin to assess how to use them and plan for the future. Being able to see detailed information on each asset in your facility — particularly if it’s expensive or large — will help you know whether it’s better to repair or begin to budget for a replacement.

Joining asset management with capital planning will also enable you to forecast budgets years in advance based on what might fail in the future, ensuring that you’re using your church’s resources where it will make the most impact.

4) Safety Our facilities should be a safe and welcoming place, free of distractions.

Safety is a natural aspect of stewardship, and it can’t be emphasized enough. From ensuring that your facilities are up to date with codes and regulations to natural disasters or even acts of violence, there’s no such thing as being “too” prepared.

With a safety management solution, you can ensure that everyone in your congregation is prepared. Having plans and protocols available via a mobile app for staff and volunteers will reinforce safety training, equip everyone to be prepared in an emergency, and ensure that everyone has the most up-to-date information.

A preventive maintenance program can extend the life of your assets by 35% 1) Preventive Maintenance One of the best ways to fix a problem is to prevent it before it even starts.

Preventive maintenance (PM) is key to being a good steward of your facility, as it can help you plan better for the future. Instead of reactive maintenance, a PM program can help you ensure that everything is running as it should be with fewer surprises. In addition, this program will allow you to schedule routine maintenance that can extend the life of your assets by 35%, while reducing energy consumption by 10% to 15%.

2) Work Order Management At times, all the things on your to-do list can feel overwhelming as you’re pulled in multiple directions. A work order management system can help prioritize and streamline incoming requests and keep things from falling through the cracks. Plus, with a work order solution in place, you’ll be able to start seeing trends that might arise in your facilities.

For example: If you see that a particular air handling unit is continually requiring maintenance, you can begin to justify a replacement over repairs … which brings us to our third pillar. churchexecutive.com

Doing more We use software for so many other facets of church operations, why not use software to properly plan and care for our most expensive assets?

Focusing our efforts on the four pillars that make the most impact is one of the best ways to do more with less, and having a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) is a powerful tool that can help you ensure that you’re staying on track with your church’s goals and keeping track of everything.

To be a good steward of your church, you don’t have to invest exorbitant amounts of money in order to achieve results. By being resourceful and focusing on the areas that will make the biggest impact, you will have more resources to devote to the mission of the church: equipping the ministry.

Donovan Loomis has more than three years of experience in church facility management and serves as Dude Solutions’ Industry Specialist focusing on religious organizations. He graduated with a BS degree in 2012 from East Carolina University.

C H U R C H F A C I L I T Y S T E W A R D S H I P • CHURCH EXECUTIVE

3

Wayne United Methodist Church gains 20 years of foresight into their capital planning

Maintenance Management

CLIENT

Wayne United Methodist Church – Scott Wilson, Trustee Chairman

GEOGRAPHY

Wayne, Pennsylvania

CHALLENGES

A 42,000 square foot church with a long history in its community needed renovations and better capital planning for its trustees and finance committees – but only had Excel to manage all of its operations. And, without a better capital asset system in place, they relied mainly on guesswork when it came to allocating funds for their assets beyond break / fix needs.

RESULTS

Introducing Dude Solutions has enabled the Trustee chairman to justify budget requests, establish better budgeting practices, curate facility knowledge and better plan preventive maintenance. Best of all, they were able to create a 20 year calendar that allows them to see which assets will need to be replaced to properly allocate funds at the right time.

Wayne United Methodist Church is located in Wayne, Pennsylvania. Between hosting Sunday services every week and offering facility usage for the community, the church has been a longtime benefactor for the town with families attending for multiple generations.

Established in 1890, the 42,000 square foot facility was in dire need of renovations.

As much as we needed

Scott Wilson was tapped to oversee the facility management, what $235,000 renovation of the church’s would really make the most Parsonage, and after the project’s completion, impact is being able to see he was selected to be Trustee chairman. When capital assets” he came on board to oversee the property, there was no formal system in place for operations. Work orders and information was still largely being stored on paper or in Excel, creating an obstacle for repairs outside of normal break / fix orders. In addition, the church didn’t have a set system for capital planning, and approval processes took longer than was realistically efficient for the congregation.

The church needed an operations management system in place, so Scott began to shop around. “We did a fairly extensive interview process and talked to about ten different companies [with a CMMS] in the same vertical,” Scott said.

4

CHURCH EXECUTIVE • C H U R C H F A C I L I T Y S T E W A R D S H I P

churchexecutive.com

The church desperately needed a facility management solution, but they knew that what would really make the most impact was the ability to understand their capital asset dates. In the end, the powerful capital planning capabilities and the unique pricing model (based on square footage) was the deciding factor for the church to choose Dude Solutions.

With a Dude Solutions team hard at work to get them up to speed, Scott and his team were able to quickly integrate the platform into their operations with multiple users, seamless license tracking and a requestor portal. The free training that was offered helped answer any of their questions and, thanks to the cloud technology backing the solutions, they didn’t have to worry about updates or maintenance.

“We’re not an IT organization, so Dude Solutions provides software as a service (SaaS) and that’s valuable particularly for a small church,” Scott said.

With their new financial software, Scott was able to create a 20 year calendar which allows them to see what assets will need to eventually be replaced so that they can properly allocate funds at the right time. Having the calendar With the CapitalForecast has greatly improved Scott’s ability to create piece of the software, it an annual budget and create justification for builds my 20 year outlook funding requests. And, the capital forecasting software works in tandem with their Facility and lets me know when Condition Assessment data.

things need to be replaced or repaired”

With the Facility Condition Assessments, Scott has not only gained insight into the condition of his assets but is also able to use the data when he presents requests and reports to the financial committee. With this data, the church has even more accurate information for their budgets, such as how much repairs cost, as well as justification for bigger projects and preventive planning. With powerful data from a licensed company, Scott has factual justification with an added layer of credibility. This means that approvals are given faster and the church is able to finance proactive instead of reactive maintenance.

“In the past, I would have to build my own project priority plan that didn’t include capital assets,” Scott said. “With the CapitalForecast piece of the software, it builds my 20 year outlook and lets me know when things need to be replaced or repaired. All of that we used to do with a ‘finger in the wind’ approach.”

churchexecutive.com

C H U R C H F A C I L I T Y S T E W A R D S H I P • CHURCH EXECUTIVE

5

One of the additional benefits of having a CMMS has been the ability to share knowledge. While they used to rely on the knowledge of a single facilities employee, they are now able to store information on the platform on things such as repair and replacement history, vendors previously used, the cost of prior repairs, and more.

“If I move on, I won’t be around to remember cost or the names of vendors,” Scott said.

“We’re able to capture all that. Down the road, if someone needs answers they can just look at the system. That intellectual capital is invaluable.”

Scott and the church have seen such improvements in their operations that he has also recommended other churches to use a CMMS at a recent conference.

“I would like to say that we made the right choice,” Scott said. “I deal with a lot of vendors…there are a lot of really not nice people or companies out there. You guys set a very high bar. I greatly appreciate that I don’t have to worry about you guys as a vendor.

We’re very pleased with the software.”

LEARN MORE

dudesolutions.com

866.455.3833 6

|

info@dudesolutions.com

|

dudesolutions.com

CHURCH EXECUTIVE • C H U R C H F A C I L I T Y S T E W A R D S H I P

churchexecutive.com

CHURCH FACILITY STEWARDSHIP

How running to failure affects churches’ facilities

By Donovan Loomis Being intentional in managing your facilities has very little impact on how effectively the church can carry out the mission, right? Wrong.

While the church’s primary mission is spreading the gospel, we have to take care of our most expensive assets if we want to have the resources, long term, to help fulfill the church’s mission. Although the physical building is not “the church,” it is the launching pad for everything we do.

Even if your facilities are new, you’re not off the hook.

In fact, this is the perfect time to begin this process. Relying on the board to make all the decisions eight years down the road, with minimal historical information, is dangerous. From my experience, undocumented maintenance is the most expensive form of maintenance.

I don’t doubt that good intentions are behind this behavior. Maybe giving is down, or the church needs to cut spending somewhere and, by default, it comes from the facilities. I’ve heard facility managers say, “I’m supposed to cut costs by ‘X’ percent this year” — but where does this number come from? Was there any strategic planning behind it? Do we know how much we can afford to cut without harming us in the long run? Do we have data to back up our case?

At our firm, we’ve coined a process we call APPEM to help ensure you remain diligent and make sound decisions when cutting (or investing in) your facilities: #1: Assess — The first step is to look at everything you own, the condition it’s in, and the remaining useful life. Sometimes a Facility Condition Assessment is necessary to help get the full story. The cycle normally breaks down here when you get the data but never put it to use. This is why Computerized Maintenance Management Systems (CMMS) solutions are popular, as they can put this data to use and help you manage it.

After all, “you can’t manage what you don’t measure.” #2: Prioritize — Next, prioritize what repairs are critical and what can wait based on the long-term effect and limited resources you might have. #3: Plan — Planning helps you decide what you’re going to do and how you need to align our resources to make it happen. #4: Execute — At this stage, it’s all about going out and doing the work to execute on the plan. Failure to execute here is often the result of not effectively communicating your story with data to back it up. #5: Maintain — The last step isn’t so much about ending as it is an ongoing cycle. Maintaining ensures that you stay on top of preventive maintenance and corrective work orders. It’s critically important to track labor and costs associated with this work.

When I ask church leaders how they plan for their facility maintenance, it surprises me how often they nervously chuckle and tell me they just “fly by the seat of their pants.” Many point out that they don’t have the staff or budget to do much more than “put out fires.” Or, they have so much deferred maintenance that they can’t get out from behind the eight-ball.

Churches don’t find themselves in a pit of deferred maintenance overnight Often, it’s the result of an action (or lack thereof) referred to as the normalization of deviance — defined as “the gradual process through which unacceptable practices or standards become acceptable. As the deviant behavior is repeated — without catastrophic results — it becomes the social norm for the organization.” Ultimately, this is what caused the Challenger Space Shuttle explosion and the BP oil spill.

While these are two extreme examples, the normalization of deviance can occur in any profession. There is rarely an immediate effect when we let things slide; therefore, a church might continue to cut more and more, without seeing noticeable results. churchexecutive.com

You’re NOT finished here!

Where we often see the breakdown here is the communication between the leadership team and the operations team, or the ones doing the work.

To help bridge this communication gap and ensure your capital plan reflects the current state of your equipment, you should have a system in place that will constantly be reassessing the information you receive as a result of this process and provide insight behind these numbers to help you make informative decisions.

We shouldn’t be passive in our faith, and we shouldn’t be passive in how we manage the physical assets entrusted to us, when so much depends on how effectively we manage them.

Donovan Loomis has more than three years of experience in church facility management and serves as Dude Solutions’ [https://www.dudesolutions.com] Industry Specialist focusing on religious organizations. He graduated with a BS degree in 2012 from East Carolina University.

C H U R C H F A C I L I T Y S T E W A R D S H I P • CHURCH EXECUTIVE

7

Fellowship Bible Church Takes Ownership over Work Orders to Ensure a Well-Maintained Place of Worship

Maintenance Management

CLIENT

John Marquette, Director of Buildings and Grounds

GEOGRAPHY

Northwest Arkansas region

VITALS

About 7,000 attendees for weekend services on two campuses; 126 acres of grounds space; approximately 300,000 square feet of facility space

CHALLENGES

Without a user-friendly solution in place, it was difficult to get visibility into open work orders, prioritize tasks, customize items to their internal naming conventions, and ensure that everyone on the team had ownership over their work.

RESULTS

After implementing Dude Solutions, the team is able to quickly respond to problem areas, address tasks in order of priority and feel empowered to take stewardship over the grounds and buildings in which they worship for both campuses.

Fellowship Bible Church of Northwest Arkansas’ first meeting was held in 1983 by seven families in the home of one of the founding members. Over the following year, the church grew rapidly, and after renting facilities for a few years, they constructed their own first campus in 1991. Since then, they host approximately 7,000 members of the congregation each Sunday at both of its locations in Rogers and Fayetteville. With sprawling acreage and thousands of square feet of facility space at both locations, the church needed a strong system in place to manage their facilities and operations.

Dude Solutions has been a game changer for us.”

Need for Change John Marquette joined the church 19 years ago, working on the ministry side before becoming the Director of Buildings and Grounds. With a background in real estate and construction, John took the lead on building Fellowship’s second campus in Fayetteville. In addition to the 100 acres and 240,000 square feet of the original campus, the new facility, completed in 2016, added another 26 acres and 63,000 square feet of facility space to the facilities and maintenance teams’ workload.

8

CHURCH EXECUTIVE • C H U R C H F A C I L I T Y S T E W A R D S H I P

churchexecutive.com

CHURCH FACILITY STEWARDSHIP

Preventive maintenance and capital planning What’s the cost of not investing now?

By Donovan Loomis

Thom Rainer recently shared a list of the top 10 questions pastors ask him, and No. 2 was, What do I do about our aging facilities?

Every church will inevitably have to ask this question. Preventive maintenance (PM) and capital planning will help ensure that time doesn’t come prematurely — and when it does come, you have the funding to take the needed steps.

As I pointed out in a recent article, a well-managed PM program and capital plan can have one of the biggest effects on good facility stewardship.

Unfortunately, with so many responsibilities to juggle, church facility managers often have little time to do preventive maintenance, and even less time to provide thorough documentation to assist with decisionmaking. This forces them to rely on guesswork and breakdowns for allocating funds.

Patrick Scriven, in his article on after.church, says it perfectly: “The problem with deferred maintenance is that it is borrowing upon the promise of the future for the sake of the present. A broken physical plant is a terrible thing to gift upon the next generation.”

If we truly believe God has entrusted these gifts to us, shouldn’t we take great care over them? Passive leadership has no place in the secular world, and certainly no place in stewarding God-given gifts.

A weak preventive maintenance program typically coincides with a weak capital plan. If we don’t have a healthy reserve fund, how do we plan for big expenses? This is a dangerous way to operate, which is why we need a two-pronged approach with both PM and capital planning at the forefront.

Preventive maintenance The goal of a PM plan is to ensure equipment is operating at maximum efficiency, preserving your assets while eliminating potential safety hazards. As you become more proactive, your day-to-day becomes less chaotic with less disruptions, and you become future-focused and can effectively prioritize your time and resources.

The return on investment long-term is remarkable. A facility without preventive maintenance deteriorates about twice as quickly as one that gets regular PM. For deferred maintenance, a repair that is put off until next year will cost on average twice what it costs to fix today.

How do you become more proactive with limited resources?

First, leadership and operations must understand the long-term consequences of staying the same. You will need to document the amount of deferred maintenance, and time spent on reactive maintenance. From there, the data might tell you that, for example, you don’t currently have the human resources to catch up. You can then ask for volunteers or contract more out during the catch-up period. churchexecutive.com

When you’re taking on a PM plan, start by prioritizing items that relate to safety and security (i.e., keep bushes trimmed back from gradelevel and basement windows, check windows and exit doors daily, etc.).

This includes items such as ensuring that you’re within code. (i.e., Are emergency exits unobstructed? When was the last time you tested or serviced emergency lighting and fire extinguishers?)

Next, you can execute on items that will help extend the life of your facilities (i.e., investigate any leaks or unusual noises, keep roof drains free of debris, periodically inspect energy efficiency settings, etc.).

Now that you have a PM plan in place, it’s important to ensure your budget and assets align for the future with capital planning.

There are three parts to a capital plan: 1) Component List — Outlining your assets and a schedule of all major predictable repair and replacement projects. To make an informed decision on when it will need to be replaced, you should have visibility into all work orders and how many of them were breakdowns versus PM. 2) Reserve Fund Strength — Compares how much money has already been set aside in reserve to how much deterioration has occurred 3) A Funding Plan — Identifies how much money needs to be put into your reserve fund each year to prepare for the replacement of the asset. The goal is to be more than 80-percent funded.

For an older asset with deferred maintenance, you can use the Facility Condition Index (FCI) to decide if it makes sense to repair or replace. Take the needed repair costs, divided by the replacement cost, to get a percentage form. From there, refer to the table below:

How do we tie our PM program into our capital plan?

If you don’t have good documentation of asset history, getting a facility condition assessment (FCA) will provide you with a capital plan.

Implementing a computerized maintenance management program (CMMS) will help you track your maintenance after the assessment and turn the assessment information into a living, breathing document.

A CMMS will also help integrate your PM and capital planning program by giving you full insight into your asset’s work order history and providing a snapshot that tells the asset’s full story around how much it is worth, and how much it is costing you to maintain.

When you begin to have a healthy and cohesive preventive maintenance and capital planning program, you create a controlled and manageable process that will help you plan ahead so you can minimize surprises and run the facilities instead of letting them run you.

Most importantly, you are choosing to intentionally care for the gifts God has entrusted to you.

Donovan Loomis has more than three years of experience in church facility management, collaborating with more than 200 churches. He serves as Dude Solutions’ [ https://www.dudesolutions.com ] Industry Specialist focusing on religious organizations. He graduated with a BS degree in 2012 from East Carolina University.

C H U R C H F A C I L I T Y S T E W A R D S H I P • CHURCH EXECUTIVE

9

Northridge Church documents work and increases accountability with MaintenanceEdge™

Maintenance Management

CLIENT

Northridge Church – Craig Miller, Director of Buildings, Grounds and Facilities

GEOGRAPHY

Plymouth, Michigan

VITALS

Three buildings, 20,000 person congregation, 20 facility services staff

CHALLENGES

Needed a system to keep track of all work and become more proactive

RESULTS

Accountability is easily kept up with, everyone has eyes on what is going on and where

ADDITIONAL BENEFITS

Reporting allows for data driven decision making

At Northridge Church in Plymouth, Michigan, Craig Miller, Director of Buildings, Grounds and Facilities made the decision to implement Dude Solutions to help manage the church’s maintenance. Northridge Church has three buildings, a congregation of 20,000 people, and a facility services staff of 20.

Miller recognized that a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) Dude Solutions was needed to keep all of the details of running the church organized in one place, customer service is “Everyone is busy and we’re open seven days what sets them apart; a week. Nobody can possibly remember all it’s like no one else’s.” of the day-to-day tasks that go in to running our church. We cover 90 acres of ground, from the top of the roofs to the bottom of the underground areas, and that is just the main campus itself. We host weddings, funerals, conferences, so we are always on the go and we need to be able to resolve issues quickly.”

After trying multiple other systems throughout the years, Miller decided to choose MaintenanceEdge by Dude Solutions which includes Work Order and Planned Maintenance.

(Northridge Church also uses InventoryEdge and Facility Schedule by Dude Solutions.) “In my career I have used twelve different systems and I knew we couldn’t run this organization without one, plain and simple. The other systems I looked at were high cost and the degree 10

CHURCH EXECUTIVE • C H U R C H F A C I L I T Y S T E W A R D S H I P

churchexecutive.com