We do a lot of enjoyable things in our role in church audio. We ply our trade by way of devising, building, deploying and optimizing audio systems — and then we put them into action and present sound in the best possible way. Hopefully, we’re as moved and inspired by the music as the congregation, and hopefully it truly is a “joyful noise” that we present. There are, however, some aspects of our pursuits that are not quite as pleasant. I would count among those things the budgeting process. Life is full of such things that are not necessarily fun, but are nevertheless necessary. So we suck it up and sit down and get it done.
Why is it less than delightful? Well, first thing is that it involves money — and unless we have an endless supply of cash, we have to steward this resource carefully. It can also involve debate over priorities, which can be contentious — and contentious isn’t fun. But if we go about it the right way, we can prevent it from becoming quarrelsome, and we can even leverage the process to arrive at a harmonious state of agreement and make everybody happy… at least until next year’s budgeting process starts!
In the Beginning, There Was a Plan…
As it is with most of life’s pursuits, it’s a good idea to formally create a plan. A plan helps us to clearly state all the facts and logical thinking that will guide our process going forward. Once it’s all there in black and white, we can all examine, discuss, and debate, and reach agreement. Without this formal statement, the likelihood for misunderstanding and disagreement increases precipitously. The plan should start with goals — we should state clearly what we hope to achieve and accomplish, and start out by agreeing on that. Seems obvious, but it doesn’t always happen this way. This process should take our history into consideration — what were our goals during the last budgeting cycle? Did we achieve them? If not, why not? This is the kind of information that can help to guide us. Once we have sorted out what our goals are, we should then move on to prioritizing them.
Budgeting is a bit like politics — the art of the possible — and since we have to work with limited resources, we need to concede that we may not be able to accomplish 100% of what we hope. If indeed it emerges that we’ll only be able to accomplish 75% of our goals, we will certainly want to be in control of which 75% will be accomplished. Budgeting may require the tech and worship teams to make assessments and then communicate a dollar amount request to people who are not savvy about the tech or worship process. If that is the case, avoid tech jargon — they don’t care about that — and give them a cost/benefit analysis, remembering that benefits might not be easy to quantify and present objectively. Show them how the expenditure actually benefits the long-term success of the church.
We should probably pay attention initially to equipment that is no longer functioning properly. Some careful examination of this gear may reveal that replacement is not necessary — we may have just been using the existing thing the wrong way (e.g., “Hey — these speakers sound distorted — we need to replace them!” … “You’re heavily overdriving the input stage — turn down that gain knob.”) Indeed, however, we may well discover that stuff has worn out or is otherwise beyond its “best if used by” date. Bottom line here: if something is mission-critical and it’s on its last legs, we’d better budget for a replacement. We should consider whether such replacements will be long-term, or just to tide us over until we raise the bar with a bigger, better unit in the not-so-distant future. Another scenario that may induce expenditures is if leadership implores us to “raise the bar.” They may approach us with a request to “make our worship look as good as that other church across town.” Hopefully, they’ll make that request with an understanding that they will probably need to open up the purse strings a bit. Unfortunately, they do sometimes expect champagne and caviar on a beer and pretzel budget, and it’s important for us to make sure they understand that while we can make some improvements by changing processes, some improvements will require new and / or additional hardware, which is not free.
Two other important considerations are in the domain of software and people. Over recent years, numerous software developers have shifted from a perpetual purchase model to a subscription model, and in some cases, the introduction of new and additional features in the latest software revision may cause the subscription price to go up. We need to be prepared to break that news to the purse holders. The other non-hardware expenditure that we need to think about is payroll. There’s a chance that we’ll just continue for a while without payroll increases, but once again, if additional razzle-dazzle is expected, additional people may be necessary, and additional people can cost us additional money.
Hopefully it goes without saying that budgeting should be based 100% on established facts and logical decision-making. Budgeting should not be based on emotion, speculation, or hopes. It’s fine to get excited about acquiring new stuff that will help us improve our work product, but only after a sober, logical process has shown that the acquisition is prudent and will yield a solid return on investment. To that end, requiring a panel of people to approve expenditures on a vote is a reasonable way to help make things go well. I’d respectfully submit that it’s probably never a good idea to let one individual have complete control over purchase decisions. To be sure, the panel members should ideally have a clear-eyed understanding of contemporary technology and a reasonable sense of expectations in terms of prevailing prices.
In my experience, there is a lot of “monkey see — monkey do” in modern worship (examine the pedal boards of worship guitarists if you don’t believe me). This phenomenon transcends to other domains — consoles, P.A.s, mics and other hardware — and justifies the notion of requiring a panel to approve expenditures. One other similar phenomenon is based on the notion that a disproportionately large focus is placed on hardware that is literally visible to the congregation and to on-line parishioners. In pursuit of “putting our best foot forward,” we’ll naturally gravitate toward making things look good. Unfortunately, pouring a bunch of money into this pursuit might cause us to spend less money on behind-the-scenes stuff that might be every bit as important (or even more so).
Once we’ve sorted out what hardware, software, and people we’ll need for the upcoming year, we need to do our best to steward the financial resources we’ve got. We definitely want to spend a substantial amount of time researching our purchases. In some cases, we already know specific brands and models and then it becomes an exercise in shopping for price. In other cases, we’ll want to determine which particular brand and model will prove the best value for the money, and then shop for price. Professional and user reviews are helpful, as is information available in online forums and via relationships with our pals who do house of worship audio elsewhere. Another key to stewarding our money well is to avoid purchasing gear that offers a lot more than what we actually need.
Another related thought: I have written more than a few times in these pages that future-proofing can be a good idea. For instance, acquiring a mixer with more input channels than we currently need, knowing that we’ll need more in the future. We should always shop for price by watching for sales and leveraging relationships with retailers and contractors. If we’re going to make a substantial pro audio purchase at any point, it makes sense to ask retailers for a volume discount, too. I generally advise the old maxim “buy nice — don’t buy twice,” and indeed, trying to save a buck by purchasing second-rate gear frequently goes poorly in the long run. But at the same time, don’t justify spending too much by claiming that we’re “buying nice.”
If we are aware that we’re going to have particularly large expenditures in the future, the practice of maintaining a “sinking fund” can be helpful. The trick is to predict (as best we can) the grand total of a large future expenditure, divide that amount by a number of financial periods (weeks, months or quarters, for example), and put that amount into an interest-bearing account. Once the giant expenditure comes around, we have the funds put aside to make it happen. Overall, we need to be methodical, careful, and diligent — sort out what we need to purchase, spend time and research deeply by way of shopping for price and value, and then ultimately leverage the new acquisitions to advance our agenda and impress the purse holders so they’ll trust us again next time.
John McJunkin is an adjunct professor at Grand Canyon University
