Going from a dying market to the Inc 5000 list – Interview with Larry Witzel from SermonView

Hello, new friends and old ones. My name is Luke and this episode is the start of a fresh new series. See our podcast is all about exploring, building and investing in the Adventist digital ecosystem and a lot of people come together to make up that ecosystem. And in this particular series, we're going to be interviewing a number of the founders of those organizations who serve the Adventist mission in the digital space.

This episode is the first in that series. It is an interview with Larry Whittle. Larry Whittle leads Sermon View. My first experience with Larry was a number of months ago when I came across his story and I was really impressed by the amount of things he was able to achieve and especially the way he was able to adapt his company.

In this particular episode, I think you are going to get amazing value for a couple of reasons. Number one is if you are an Adventist ministry leader or administrator, there is a lot of insight that you'll be able to gain of the best ways to do marketing for evangelism in the society that we live in today. And the other aspect that I think will bring great value is Larry's perspective as an entrepreneur. If you are leading an organization that is trying to work with the church, then it will help you to be able to hear Larry's way of relating to the world, the way he approaches value creation and some of the experiences he's had.

He's a really interesting guy and I hope you do enjoy it. Once you have a listen, if you've enjoyed it, I just ask that you share it with a friend. I hope you guys have an awesome day and without further ado, here is the episode. Larry, welcome to the show.

Thank you. It's awesome to be here. So just so our listeners have a little bit of context, I was looking through the Adventist ecosystem and I was trying to find interesting people that I personally wanted to connect with for some of the projects that I'm working on. Larry's profile when I found it was one of the ones that just really stood out because one very few people have been in this space and it's sort of like one of the, I don't know what I want to say, like the godfathers of the Adventist marketing space.

And I was just so impressed by the amount of adaptation and things that you've done. And so I reached out to Larry and when we decided that we were going to do this podcast, Larry is one of the first people that I want to have on there. So I'm glad you're here. Well, I'm incredibly honored to be here.

So Larry, I want to take an interesting first stop. So before we get into the details and I want to get into a bit of your story and how you got to where you want to be, but maybe if we could start in the most recent timeframe and then maybe we'll go back and we'll do some jumping around chronologically. But I'll start with this question. What is an average day in the life of Larry look like at this point in your life?

Larry, there is no average day. That's my average day is it's different every day. Now there's three things that I focus on as the leader of this ministry. So to give some context, we're an evangelism marketing company.

There's 11 of us in the building, full-time employees, and I am removed from day-to-day operations. So I'll get an email from someone or a phone call or a text saying, hey, we want to be doing this marketing campaign. I'm like, awesome. Let me put you in touch with someone who can actually help you.

Let me have you talk with one of our campaign managers because they will make sure it gets done. If you ask me to do something, I make no promises. So I'm not involved in the day-to-day operation of the companies, but what that means is that it gives me space to work on three primary areas. My three priorities, the first is product effectiveness.

So we do event marketing for evangelistic events. So whether it's a prophecy seminar or financial seminar or a biblical archaeology center, if a church is doing an event in the community and inviting people from the community to come, then we offer marketing services to help get more people to that event. So when I think about product effectiveness, I think about what are the topics, what are the offers that churches are having? What's the marketing communication mix?

So we're doing direct mail, we're doing social media advertising, we're doing banners and road signs, we're starting to do more YouTube advertising. What can we do to improve the effectiveness so that we would get the maximum number of people for dollars spent? So I focus on product effectiveness. We're constantly working to improve the effectiveness of all of our marketing products and services.

The second thing that I work on is business scalability. So we don't want to do anything that requires a lot of labor, manual labor to do it. Obviously, when you launch a new product or service, you're kind of making it up as you go along, you're figuring out things as you go along. But our goal is to be able to scale 10x, 100x.

And so we're putting automation systems in place. We're looking at our sales process and how many steps does it take to go through to put together an estimate? Well, we want to reduce those steps. How long does it take to actually put the order into our production system?

Well, let's find ways to reduce that. If we're able to manage 200 social media campaigns with a full-time person, what can we do to improve the efficiency so that that person could handle 300 or 400 at once? So everything that we do, we don't want to do any one-off anything. Everything that we do, we want to do it scalably.

Is that a word? Scalably. Let's say that it is. Yes.

Yes. So we don't want to do – we love solving marketing problems, and we don't want to just solve marketing problems that one or two people have. We want to solve problems that lots and lots of people have and then solve them in a way so that we can actually serve lots and lots of people. So business scalability is huge for us.

And then the third thing that I spend time on, internally we call it market influence. We want to actively seek to grow our influence in the markets that we serve. And the flip side of that is we want to actively work to learn from the markets that we serve. So right now, we're kind of – we're in a burst of innovation right now, particularly related to YouTube advertising.

So I'm having lunch with a bunch of different pastors, with communication professionals, denominational leaders. I'm having Zoom calls. I'm having phone calls. I've probably talked with 20 different people in the last two months, in-depth conversations about YouTube advertising and also about the evangelism funnel and what the marketing funnel would look like.

So it's like I'm kind of the tip of the spear where I'm out talking with people and talking with denominational leaders and thought leaders in this space, integrating that, bringing that into the team. And then the team does a bunch of stuff. And then on the back end, I'm working on internal systems in order to be more efficient and effective at what we do. So I'm like at the very beginning and I'm at the very end of the process.

So personally, I'm an introvert, but I can do okay for a while by having conversations and engaging with people. I like this kind of conversation because I'm in my office all by myself and talking to a computer screen, you know? So getting out and talking with people, that's really important for me to do. But mostly, I'm sitting at my desk all day long working on some project.

I mean, right now we're working on our SMS messaging module for our interest tracker software product. And I'm actually doing some software development, working on porting that over to a new service. And last week, I was editing some podcasts. And the week before that, I was working on a video.

And the week before that, it's all over the place. So no, I don't have a typical day. That's actually a very, very good thing. It sounds like in a lot of ways that you're like me in that you like the variety.

That's an asset in the day, right? It's weird because I have this drive to optimize my life and to get really efficient. And then I don't like to live within the shackles that I created for myself. So I'm always pushing, looking for ways to improve.

And yeah, I love being that freelancer in the building where I'm like, okay, let me be clear. I hate it when I walk in somebody's office. It's like, I got an idea. They're like, oh my goodness, can we just keep working on what we're doing?

But over the last 18 months, my business partner of 16 years left about 18 months ago. And so we had about a year and a half of just solid, this is all that we do. This is all we're going to do. We have four lines of business that we focused on.

And we just like solidified our business processes, our production processes. And then now over the last couple of months, we've begun to look at what are some new ways, what are some ways that we can serve in more significant ways, those that we work with. Now that gives us the picture of the current Larry. To take a step back, have you always been an Adventist?

Is this like a lifelong thing for you? This is like the ecosystem that you were born into? Yes. Yes.

I was born into an Adventist family. Both my parents became Adventists when they were young. They both went to Adventist academies and college. Actually my dad was a physician.

He taught at Loma Linda University Medical School for many years. And then he ran some family practice residency programs in Chicagoland and in central Florida. When I was a teenager, I spent six years living in Singapore. My dad was the health director for the back then the Far Eastern Division, what would now be the Southern Asia Pacific Division and Northern Asia Pacific Division.

And so I lived for six years in Singapore. So I'm a third culture kid. But in all that time, I was part of the Adventist culture, part of the Adventist family through that whole time. How do you think that changed you?

What influence did that time in Singapore have on your experience and who you are? Oh, yeah. I don't want to spend a lot of time talking about it. I could talk for an hour about third culture kids and all the research about that.

What it does is it unhooks you from geographic temporality. My sense of home is relationships. So my best friend is a denominational leader in the Middle East and North Africa Union. He came and visited.

He's on home leave right now. He came and spent one evening, he and his wife with my family. And it was like, boom, we're just like reconnected because he's a third culture kid. There's no time between when we connected.

We check in with each other, you know, really maybe once or twice a year at best. But when we do, it's like no time is lost. We just dive straight into, you know, whatever the conversation, whatever it is that we're dealing with. So yeah, I don't want to spend a lot of time talking about third culture kids, but it's important enough to me that I actually talked to my wife.

Well, let me flip this around. So I married a local girl here in Vancouver, Washington, just across the river from Portland, Oregon. I was a global nomad. I lived in Hong Kong.

I lived, I spent time in Indonesia. I was in Southern California, in Seattle. And I'm just like moving around wherever I wanted to go. And then I met a local girl and I've been stuck here for 22 years.

So and I'm quite happy to be stuck here with her. But at one point in a moment of weakness, she said yes. When I asked her, hey, let's move overseas for a year so that we our kids can become third culture kids as well. So we looked at a lot of places.

We ended up moving down to Guadalajara, just south of Guadalajara. We spent a year there because I wanted my kids to experience another culture and as children to live in that environment. It breaks you. It breaks your brain and it makes it so that you just think differently.

So I take it as a blessing. I think my daughter might look at it more as a curse that I put on her. But yeah, third culture kid, the research on that is pretty crazy. Yeah, that's interesting.

That'll give a thread for people to pull on if they're interested. So just one more question before I'd like to start talking about some of your marketing experience. But one more question in this area, and that is who would you say are the main people who have shaped your thinking over the years? That could be teachers, family, preachers, authors, whoever that might be.

That is a great question. Well, OK, so one person who's had a huge amount of influence on me is Mark Finley. I worked for It Is Written when he was at the end of his time there before Sean Boonstre came to It Is Written. I worked for him for two years and just being in committee meetings, hearing how he thinks, the questions that he would ask, but at the same time, I would go to events like West Point of Evangelism or different training events and sit in his classes.

I still have a notebook from 20 years ago where I've got notes of everything that he was talking about with how to get a crowd for evangelistic meetings and all this stuff. The way that I think about a lot of this was driven by the few years that I spent consistently with Mark Finley. Another person that impacted me significantly was John Dibdahl. He was a professor at Walla Walla University and at Andrews University and later he was president of Walla Walla University for several years.

I took a class from him, Christian Spirituality in undergrad, and Richard Foster, A Celebration of Discipline was the textbook and just the experience of spirituality and engaging in a spiritual life and a prayer life and meditating on God's Word and practicing the biblical practice of fasting. That was a huge influence on me as well. Someone else that has had a huge impact on me is a guy by the name of Earl Nightingale. Back in the day, he recorded it as a record series called Lead the Field.

There's 12 programs, about 12 ideas that can help you succeed in life. I listened to this for the first time 30 years ago. I've had it on cassette, I've had it on CD, I now have it on Audible, and I listen to it every year. I listen to this series.

I'm actually, every July, coming out of our Independence Day for the July activities, I come back to Earl Nightingale and I listen to that. I just have so much wisdom about how to live a successful life. It's not a Christian perspective per se. I think he was a Christian, but it's not a Christian perspective, but just the things that he talks about, the way that he talks about using your brain.

He talks about how your brain is like acres of diamonds and you own one, free and clear. You own it, so use it. Then my dad obviously was a big influence on me. I have a couple of other mentors that I interact with on a regular basis.

It's really important that I listen to other people and that I find people who are smarter than me, have more experience than me, and spend time with them and just glean from them whatever they have to offer. As I've gotten older and literally as my mentors have begun to die off, Dr. Dibdahl just passed away in the last year. As I'm losing touch with some of these older mentors, I'm finding that I need to be engaging with peer relationships more than I have been.

More than that, I've been consistently looking for ways to be able to learn from younger people as well. I don't know that I'm the kind of person that would be offering the same kind of wisdom that I received from some of these people, but I enjoy interacting with especially younger entrepreneurs, younger communication professionals, just hearing their perspective, learning from them. Yeah, it's just so important that I be hearing from others because we have a small team here. It's easy to get stuck inside my head.

I don't work that hard. I work enough, but I don't put in 60, 70, 80 hours a week. I'm smart enough. I work hard enough, but I need the influence of people around me, which is why I'm out talking to pastors, talking to denominational leaders and whatnot, learning from wherever I can.

It's interesting. I just want to tap on that idea of your mind being acres of diamond waiting to be discovered. In your experience, what would you say as you have developed, you've got a lot of experience behind you that you can look back to as, I guess, source material for this question, but what would you say is the superpower that you have been endowed with that has enabled you to do well in entrepreneurship and the path that you've taken? Man, this is going to sound weird.

My superpower is forgiveness. Every magazine just came out and there was an article on leadership and it said that forgiveness is the fundamental requirement for innovation. The thing with innovation is you're going to get it wrong and you're going to get it wrong repeatedly. This idea of being able to look forward and leave the past behind, learn from it, get better from it, and then keep moving forward.

One of the biggest issues with denominational culture right now among denominational employees is that there's this fear of failure. The thing that I get asked to talk about the most are these ideas of innovation. This is a quote, I can't think of the guy's name. This is a quote from somebody.

Listen to the difference between when somebody says, I'm a failure and when somebody says, I have failed three times. Those are totally different statements. If somebody fails once, a lot of times they feel labeled. They take on this persona of failure.

Thomas Edison, he tried 10,000 different filaments when he invented the light bulb before he finally found something. Someone asked him once and he's like, I haven't failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that it doesn't work. There's an article that I just ran across in Entrepreneur Magazine.

These researchers were talking about the equal odds rule. The equal odds rule are that every idea has an equal chance of being a good idea. If you want to write a good symphony or a great symphony, the way that you write a great symphony is you write lots of symphonies. If you want to have a great idea, then you need to have lots of ideas.

These researchers developed the idea of the idea ratio and in their experience, they said that the answer is something on the order of 2,000. One out of 2,000 ideas are going to be great ideas. That order of magnitude is correct. In some spaces, it might be one in 500 and others, it might be one in 5,000, but about one in 2,000 ideas are really great ideas.

In order to have great ideas, you have to have lots and lots and lots and lots of ideas. That's my superpower is that I'm able to creatively explore and try and iterate really, really fast. When I realize that something's not going to work, walk away from it. It's a sunk cost.

It doesn't matter how much I've invested in it. If it's not going to work in the future, walk away from it, move on and just iterate really, really fast. Is that something you had to cultivate? Because I know for most people, the natural thing to do is to swallow the sunk cost fallacy and say, oh no, I've already put X amount into this.

It needs to work. I'm just going to keep holding on. You drop those things very quickly. Is that something that you had to learn or is that something that's innate in your character?

No, that's personality. I mean, look, I have ADD. I'll just come right out. I was 24 years old when I was diagnosed, so I didn't know about it as a kid.

I have ADD. I take medication for ADD. I'll admit it and it's what allows me to focus, but it doesn't take away the creativity. As I've gotten older, the sprints are getting longer, but when I get captured by an idea, I have a limited runway before I run out of inspiration and I have to turn my attention to something else.

So while I'm on this inspiration sprint, I'm going to be trying lots and lots of different things to try to make this thing work, but I have to tie it off. I have to wrap it up and tie it off. It depended on the scope of the project, but really I don't have more than four months at the most before I have to have something tied off and hand it off to somebody else or completed, be able to set it aside because my brain is just going too fast and I can't stay with one thing. My mom is shocked that I've been at a company, that I've had this company for 18 years.

The only way that that worked is I'm on my 67th job in 18 years because I'll make up a new job and then hand it off to somebody else and then go make something else up and then hand it off to somebody else. I haven't done anything for more than three or four, maybe six months at the most, but I've been at the same company the whole time. Yeah. So that's a great thread to pull on.

So you mentioned how long you've been at Sermonview. This is one of the things that attracted me to speak with you originally and that is your ability to adapt across the course of that time. Can you give a bit of a snapshot of those adaptations and the phases of development of Sermonview? Yeah.

And I'll talk about this in terms of entrepreneurship. If you want to be an entrepreneur, how do you become successful? Well, the first thing is burn the ships. When Vince and I started this company, we borrowed some money and then ended up going in a little bit more deeply in debt and a little bit more.

We reached the point where we had no choice but for this thing to work. And that gives you a level of creativity that is impossible to explain outside of if we don't do this, we're going to be saddled with a debt that's going to take us a long, long time to pay off. Now I wouldn't recommend this to anybody. If I were telling somebody that they were thinking of starting a company, I would start it on the side.

I would bootstrap it. I would work until I was able to generate enough revenue from that to be able to quit my full-time job or cut back to half-time or something like that. That's what I would recommend. But if you're like, I really need to do this, then go in with both feet and make it so you can't go back.

Make it a one-way door and then you have no choice but to make it work. So that was the first thing for us. And when we started the company, we were fortunate that Vince and I both worked for It Is Written Television and we had started a product line called Oxygen Church Media. And when new management came in after Mark Finley left, after a couple of years, they were in some financial straits because of donors leaving and stuff like that.

And so they shut my department down and were like, well, we already have a going concern here. So we signed a deal with It Is Written where we kept making this product that they owned, but then we developed it, we sold it, and then we paid them a royalty on it. The very first year, we were profitable, but that business was already in decline when we started the company. And so we had to scramble for several years.

We're trying one thing and another thing and another thing and nothing was working, but it was just kind of holding on and we were doing all right. At one point, we started with nine people at the company. Within five years, we were down to four people. But at that point, we had already recognized that we were going to be doing evangelism marketing.

And so we had a future and we were beginning to figure out what our value proposition was, how we were. But at the time, we were calling ourselves like evangelism printers. And we don't even do printing. We outsource all of our production.

And we were calling ourselves evangelism printers. One of the seminal moments for us was back in 2013. Man, that was 10 years ago. Vince comes into my office and we were having another rough month.

And he's like, Larry, we have got to figure out how to get more revenue out of every customer. And I had been listening to Earl Nightingale. So it was July. And I was like, hold up.

We have this backwards. We're not thinking about this right. It's not about how do we get more revenue from customers. How do we add more value to our customers?

How do we serve our customers better? How do we do what we do better and give them more value? Because when we do that, then the revenue will naturally follow. And that was a pivot point for us because it changed both of our thinking.

And up to that point, anytime someone would said, well, we want to do this campaign. And we're like, okay, what do you want to do? And we would just do what they said. And the next day he gets a phone call from an evangelist who was ready to get out of evangelism.

He just wasn't seeing the results that he had seen. And somebody said, hey, you should call the Survey View crew and see if they can help you. And Vince took a different approach with him and said, no, this is what you need to do. You need to do this and this and this and this.

And the evangelist pushed back and Vince was like, no, this is the correct answer. You need to do this. And this was the value that we were bringing. We had already done hundreds of campaigns up to this point.

We knew what we were doing, but we were not allowing ourselves to have the confidence to actually say, no, this is what you need to do. So with this evangelist, he let us develop a campaign that was exactly what we thought was going to be most effective in his context. And I remember that Friday afternoon, opening night is a Friday night in January or February, I don't remember. And Vince and I meet at the end of the week and we're praying and it's like, man, if this doesn't work, then I don't know, we have to get out of the business.

If we're giving our best shot and it just doesn't work, then we have to find something else to do. We get an email from the evangelist that night. He's like, this is the fifth time that I've been to this church. I've never seen a crowd like this.

We had over 200 guests. We only had 50 members there. There were four guests for every member that we had there. It was standing room only.

And we had changed the title of his series to prophecies of hope. And we created a new backdrop for him. He's like, as I'm preaching, I see my backdrop and my preaching shifted where it was more Jesus and more hope and less prophecy. And he's like, people responded to it.

And we're like, oh my goodness, thank you, Jesus. I guess we have marching orders. We know what we're doing now. And that was the corner of the hockey stick graph where we shot up over the next five years where by 2018, we were listed in the Inc 5000 list of the fastest growing privately held companies in the United States where we quadrupled revenue in a four year period.

And we were getting less pushback from customers on our pricing because we were adding so much value to what they were doing. We were delivering so much value that people quit arguing about price and they were happy to pay it because of the value that they were getting. So this idea, we think about how can we serve better? How can we add value to this customer and then price it accordingly, make sure that we deliver and then price it accordingly.

And that's been huge for us. That was really the big inflection point for us. So if you started out overtly calling yourself a printer, obviously digital is now a large part of what you do. When did that happen?

When did the shift come or has it always been there? It's just more digital now or how did that happen? We always used websites as like our capture methodology. So we would send people to a website to be able to pre-register for seats or whatever.

But we never really did a social media advertising. We experiment with like Google search ads, but that doesn't work. If you have a three or four week window for an event, you need to be getting in front of people. You can't be waiting for them to be searching.

And for a long time after Facebook came out, pastors would ask, and we ran some experiments, but we could never find a way to make it valuable. And people would ask us, hey, what would you do with social media? And we're like nothing. I mean, it just, it doesn't work.

And it must have been seven years ago, six years ago, seven years ago, when one of our pastors was really insistent and he said, I want to try it this way. And so we took that, we honed it a little bit and we actually saw results from that. And then we started running some more tests and we found a consistent formula that actually worked for Facebook and Instagram advertising. So at this point, you know, there's three legs to our marketing strategy.

Direct mail in the United States is still significant. It's the only way that you can guarantee that someone in every home in your community has an opportunity to respond to your message. So direct mail. What's the approximate response rate to direct mail these days?

Oh, it's, it's abysmal. It's one per thousand. And if you, So it's the same in Australia. That's what I was just curious about.

Yeah. And if you think about the 999, it's really depressing, but that's not how it works. About one per thousand at this point, you know, and we, we hear stories from back in the old days when it was five and six and eight per thousand or whatever, but that's not the world that we live in. Interesting.

We did some research with a national panel here in the United States a couple of months ago. In 2004, 98% of people checked their mailbox every single day. And we wanted to find out what the current number was. And it turns out that 40% of people don't check their mailbox every day now.

And of those half of them only check it once a week. And so once bill pay went online, then there was less motivation to go get your mail consistently. Well, what that means is now you need to be sending your flyer out a week earlier than you did because people are picking up their mail at random times. So you don't know when they're actually going to see it.

So that has reduced the effectiveness. I think that the human brain is getting rewired with mobile devices, with the dopamine addiction and all this stuff. I think that people are just less likely to respond to it because we're inviting people to come in person and stuff like that. Anyway.

Yeah. So direct mail, banners and road signs. Of course we, the church should put up a banner with the same, you know, look and feel as the flyer and any posters or whatever. You know, she'd have a core art and that banner needs to show up because if somebody does get a mailer, they bring the postcard with them with the address on it.

And as they're driving up, it's like, oh, yep, that's the banner that I'm at the right spot. So it reduces uncertainty. But then also using like little yard signs, like I don't know what it is in metric, 24 inch by 18 inch yard signs that you just put out up all over the community and people have responded from that. And then the third leg of the stool is social media advertising.

And I'm actually working on a research project right now. I'm in a PhD program because I don't have enough to do. My research project for this class is determining what is the media concurrency between those three marketing channels. Is there a magnifying effect?

Because our intuition says that there is. If you only do two of them, you don't do as well as if you do all three. If you take the same budget and you spread across the three, you're going to do better. That's our intuition.

We have some anecdotal evidence of that, but I'm actually going to do the analysis across about 4,000 campaigns that we've run in the last five years and actually see what that number is. So those three things together. And then in the mix now, we're actually talking about adding YouTube and seeing what can we do there. The top of that stool is personal invitation.

So personal invitation is going to be the most effective way to get people out there. But personal invitation, your members are going to be more enthusiastic and more brave knowing that there's direct mail and social media advertising and these banners and road signs that are out there. They're more likely to go up to a neighbor and say, hey, I got this in the mail. This is actually my church.

You want to come? So those three things together increase your personal invitation response rate. Okay. Well, just I'll use this as a bit of a point of leverage.

I mentioned to you before we started recording that in my local area that we're starting to do some evangelism. So let's use that as a model for just a minute. And let's just imagine that, okay, so there's a city, like my scenario here, I live in a place called Bundaberg where there's roughly a hundred thousand people. It's a regional place and we're having an evangelistic series in like 11 months time.

If you were going to give high level advice to us creating this, and this is obviously for the people out there that are thinking about their own evangelism, what would you say would be the top three to five things that you would say if you want to have a successful campaign, these are the main things that you absolutely have to do? So absolutely. The first thing that you need to do is whatever medium you're using for communication, for advertising, whatever you're doing, there has to be a call to action. It has to be an immediate call to action.

And we have found that reserving a seat is really effective. So it increases the perception of scarcity. So it increases the value of the event by saying, you know, you need to reserve a seat. It gives someone an opportunity to immediately respond when they see something that they want to do.

It's a lot harder to say, yeah, I'm going to go to this and then put it in your calendar as opposed to I have reserved a seat. So now I've actually done something and that increases the value in my mind. It increases the likelihood that I'll actually come. Plus, you've now received information from somebody that you can then follow up with later on, whether they showed up or not, you now have the contact information.

And in terms of permission based marketing, you now have permission to talk with them because they reserved a seat for your event. So your call to action needs to be reserved seats for this event. If it's an in-person event, you need to, that's your call to action because you need to give people something to immediately respond. So that's the big thing.

Other than that, I mean, the thing with, I already mentioned direct mail, that it's the only way to make sure that someone in every home gets your message. The way that people sort their mail, you know, they're standing at the kitchen counter and they're going through the mail and there's a tactile form to it. They're using a different part of their brain than when they're driving past the church and they see the banner and that's a different part of the brain than when they're on their phone scrolling through Facebook and they see the ad. So you're actually hitting different parts of the brain, which if somebody sees all three of them, that's a unifying experience.

You need to reach people where they're at. And back in the old days, we used to have swap sheets here in the United States, what we call swaps. It was basically a little newspaper that came out once or twice a week that all that it had were personal ads. Hey, I'm selling a dresser.

Hey, I have a car. And it's just like pages and pages on newsprint. In some communities, swap sheets were a huge way to advertise events. Newspapers back in the day were a huge way.

Well, nobody's reading newspapers on newsprint anymore. They're on Facebook. They're on Instagram. They're on TikTok.

They're on YouTube. So you need to go where they're at and advertise where they're at. So for us moving forward, I'm expecting that there's going to be a four-legged stool. It's going to be direct mail.

It's going to be banners and road signs. It's going to be social media advertising and there's going to be YouTube ads in there as well. What do you think? I'm just thinking about the way the trajectory is going in the Adventists, the evangelism in the ecosystem as a whole.

If you had the opportunity to look at the ecosystem as a whole, as you're an entrepreneur that's working within that system, you're serving the church as a whole, where do you think are the gaps in the ecosystem? Where do you think are the gaps that need to be filled? Well, the biggest issue that the denomination is facing right now is evangelism. We're still using an evangelistic method that we've used for 150 years that's inviting people to come out to a series of meetings.

Here's the thing, I've done research on this. Public evangelistic meetings for Anglo churches are still the most effective way of helping people make decisions to join the church. I've talked to pastors that have done really innovative community engagement and they get a bunch of people in the orbit of the church. They can't help them get across the finish line.

They can't help them actually, that last little bit where they actually make a decision to identify as a Seventh-day Adventist through membership. I've talked to a number of pastors where they're like out of desperation, I decided I'm just going to do an evangelistic series and boom, they get baptisms. It's what is needed in order to help people get that final step to make a decision to actually identify as a Seventh-day Adventist. But here's the problem.

What I'm seeing, even though it is still the most effective way to do that, there are a large number of churches. There's 6,000 some churches in the North American division and there may be half of them, certainly a quarter of them, maybe a third of them, maybe half. There are hundreds if not thousands of Seventh-day Adventist churches where the church leadership says you know, evangelistic meetings don't work. We will never do an evangelistic meeting ever again.

We would rather die than do an evangelistic series. The problem is that they haven't found an alternative to evangelistic series and so they're doing nothing and so they are going to die. We did a training event called the Propel Conference. Here's a plug for the Propel Podcast.

If you go to podcast.propellconference.org, you can subscribe to the Propel Podcast which is all the presentations, 30 presentations over the course of three days from 20 different presenters. We're dropping one of those every week or two over the next year for the Propel Podcast. But we had this training event. There were some great things about it but I felt like it was a bust.

We didn't have that many people actually come and it was definitely an older demographic. I had one of my speakers come up to me a couple weeks later, a guy here locally, and he's like Larry, what are you doing for all the young pastors like me that don't believe in evangelism? And he says it with a twinkle in his eye because of course we believe in evangelism but we're not going to do public evangelism. We're not going to do evangelistic events.

What are we going to do for them? And that has kept me up at night for the last two months. I've really been struggling with that, grappling with that. And the question that I'm asking, if public evangelistic meetings are the most effective way for a church to grow but a church says we're not going to do that, great.

Well then what's second best? And how can we define a new evangelism funnel? The evangelism funnel that we use as Seventh-day Adventists, the entry point requires you to have a biblical worldview and a fairly deep understanding of the Bible. And 150 years ago that was 90% of the population and today that's what, maybe 10% of the population.

So how do we extend that funnel, help people enter that earlier in the funnel and walk with them through a process to get them ready to enter the traditional funnel? That's the question that I've been grappling with and asking and I think that using online marketing funnel strategies and tactics with autoresponders and sequenced emails, I know a couple of pastors that have experimented with that. One quite effectively that were adopting some of his practices. There's two things that we're moving forward with at Sermon View Evangelism Marketing.

One is YouTube advertising and the other longer term. So the YouTube advertising we're talking weeks, the funnel marketing, the online funnel type of thing, that's going to be months long innovation in order to get that ready. So YouTube we're talking about for fall evangelism season up here in North America. In the next few weeks we're going to be offering a service related to that.

Next year is going to be the funnel. But I think that this idea of using the online marketing funnel where you're teasing people with something of value that they find valuable and inviting them to request more information about it and giving them something more of value but then continuing to engage with them and draw them along. I think that that's going to be the future of Adventist evangelism. Yeah, that's very interesting.

Well before we wrap up I just would like to ask basically this is a placeholder question. I'd just love for you to share any particular things like any particular people that you want to connect with, the kinds of people that are the most well suited to you working with, anything that you would like to ask from the audience and hopefully there will be plenty of people who will be reaching out and saying, yes Larry I want to talk to you. Who would I want to hear from? You know Luke when you reached out to me I was really excited because I have a special place in my heart for Adventist ministry entrepreneurs.

And our denominational structure, the employment structure weeds out the entrepreneurs. I have been fired from a denominational job. My brother was fired from a denominational job. My dad was fired from a denominational job.

So on the one hand I come from a family of failures, right? But it's because we were too innovative. We were too forward thinking. We were pushing the envelope and the brethren couldn't handle it.

So I would love to hear from men and women that have a dream, that have a vision, that have an inspiration to pursue something that the denomination is not ready to embrace yet. I would love to be able to be a sounding board, to be able to support and cheer you on as you're experimenting, as you're learning, as you're trying to find a way to make this work. I love ministry entrepreneurs and that's a book I want to write someday, Ministry Entrepreneurship. And I want to talk about people like Bill Fagel.

Bill Fagel was the founder of Faith for Today and in the 1950s he was experimenting with television which was this new medium. It was black and white TV and he was doing dramatic vignettes on TV in the early 1950s. You think about HMS Richard Senior back in the 1930s and what he was experimenting with radio and how he created this correspondence Bible school which is a really innovative idea back then. They were using the tools that God had given them in their era to spread the gospel and it is written.

George Vandeman, when he started that, he was actually an evangelist working in the GC ministerial department and saw what Bill Fagel was doing, saw what a couple other forward thinking people were doing with TV. He was like, I wonder if I could do something that would help me increase my evangelism attendance at my evangelistic meetings. So he actually created 30 different half an hour TV shows and then before he would go into a city to do an evangelistic series he spent four months, he would buy airtime and he would just play these programs over and over and over and over again. And the first time he tested it the crowds were so big that it was this amazing response and the brethren were like, well we need to take this national, which kind of missed the point because it was the TV personality showing up in that town that was the big draw.

But that's how it is written became a national TV program because they're like, well man, television is basically tilling the ground for evangelism so evangelists all across the country can take advantage of this. I think that they kind of missed the part of the power of that. Okay I want to give a shout out to Hiram Rester. Dr.

Hiram Rester just completed his doctor of ministry from Andrews University. His dissertation is on video advertising on social media to reach a younger audience for evangelistic meetings. And he basically did what George Vandeman did 65 years ago and he did that in his local community and through YouTube by buying pre-roll ads and ended up with like this huge crowd of much younger people than he'd ever seen at an event. And I've had multiple conversations with him since I first heard about his dissertation.

I've read his dissertation twice just pulling nuggets out of it and our YouTube practice is based on his dissertation. That the organization has a really hard time embracing innovators because at the foundation of innovation is failure. And when you put money into something and it fails you look like a failure in our system. And so the only way that innovation in the Adventist ecosystem is going to work is by entrepreneurs outside the system actually embracing the practice of innovation and experimenting and pushing things forward.

So those are the people that I want to support. Those are the people I want to connect with. I would love to hear from people if they've got a crazy idea for how they think evangelism could be revolutionized. Those are the type of people that I would love to talk with.

That's great. And where's the best place for them to reach out to you? Yeah, evangelismmarketing.com. And under the About Us there's a link that actually has my bio and it's got links on my social media.

If you look for me on LinkedIn, I think that that's how you found me. Luke was through LinkedIn. Shoot me an email. Larry at servingview.com.

I'm happy to put that out there. That's excellent. Larry, I want to thank you so much for being generous with your time and your experience. I think there's a lot of great value in there that a lot of people are going to be able to utilize in their own experience.

So thank you for that. Awesome. Thank you. All right.

That is the end of this episode. Hope you guys enjoyed it. Thanks for watching and I'll see you next time.