What If Elon Musk Audited Your Church Budget? Church Financial Stewardship Tips

The podcast explores how churches can identify and eliminate wasted spending, drawing inspiration from Elon Musk's efficiency strategies. We discuss practical tips for scrutinizing budgets, maximizing resources, and ensuring financial decisions align with the mission of reaching people for Jesus.

• Analyzing essential expenses 
• Identifying subscription fatigue 
• Optimizing church space usage 
• Evaluating production and technology costs 
• Rethinking food and hospitality expenses 
• Assessing staffing roles and needs 
• Steps to effectively audit church budgets 
• Engaging external perspectives for improvement 
• Emphasizing mission-focused budgeting 

We would love to hear what your next step is. What's one area in your church that you think you could cut expenses? Leave a comment wherever you're listening or watching. You can also email me anytime at podcast@chemistrystaffing.com. I read each and every email.

Have questions or comments? Send to podcast@chemistrystaffing.com

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Chapters

• 0:08 Church Budget
• 12:25 Church Spending Review and Feedback

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:08

Imagine this Elon Musk. Elon right, he's the Doge guy and he's also, I think, the world's richest man, who's known for slashing inefficiencies and leading the efforts at Tesla and SpaceX and Twitter, now called X. What if Elon one day walks into your church finance meeting? He flips through your budget and suddenly stops, his eyebrows rise up and they say you're spending what on coffee and donuts? We talk a lot about stewardship, but what if an outside expert, say a doge-level financial watchdog, took a look at your budget? Let's talk about it today here on the Healthy Church Staff Podcast. Thanks for joining me.

Speaker 1: 0:48

My name is Todd Rhodes, one of the co-founders over at chemistrystaffingcom. Now stick with me, because at the end of the video, you're going to know exactly where to look for some hidden financial waste and how to cut the fat within your church, if there is any. Okay, you might think this is ludicrous, todd. Elon Musk is never going to come into my church and do anything like this. You know what? There are people in your church that are Elon Musks that are looking at every dime that's spent and can be quite critical and can cause some problems. So Musk is absolutely famous and you might love elon, you might hate elon. I don't care for this purpose of this video. We're just using this as an example. Okay, but elon is famous for relentlessly cutting waste and it's really controversial. You know, when he took over twitter uh, now called x he absolutely demolished the place, slashing expenses. He got rid of all the unnecessary perks. People were not happy. They were focused only on what he focused on only what would move the company forward. So here's what I want to do today just because of fun exercise. Okay, you can play along at home if you'd like, or in your office, at your church or in your car. Let's do the same thing for your church.

Speaker 1: 2:12

Ask yourself this question. A couple of questions here. First question as you look at line items in your budget, does this expense directly help us reach people for Jesus, does it? If it doesn't, it's probably not really core right Now. Does buying custodial supplies does that directly help you reach people for Jesus? There are ways that you have to do a lot of different things, right, but seriously look at it and say are there things in our budget that are just a little bit of fluff, that maybe we probably really don't need, or it's a luxury, or we could be better spending. That's really what we're going at here. So does this expense directly reach people, help us reach people for Jesus? And then the second question is there a smarter way to accomplish the same thing for less? Yeah, we've got to do this, but are there other suppliers? Are there other things, other ways that we can accomplish the same thing for less? That's a good question to ask. And then here's another one Would a donor feel good about how this money is being spent?

Speaker 1: 3:24

Now, I realize you don't want to Everybody. I still remember we did a banquet, a fundraiser for a Christmas thing that we were doing at one of the churches that I served and we did a catered meal and it was a fundraiser. But I remember getting a nasty note from somebody in the church that said what are you thinking I could feed my family of three for two weeks for the amount of money it would cost me to go to this banquet? Okay, I get that every donor is, and maybe I needed to ask the questions does this directly help us reach people for Jesus and is there a way we could do this for less? But I realize that donors you can't cater to every donor and not every donor is going to be ecstatic about every line item in your budget. I totally get that. But the key thing to look at here is there any waste in your church's budget? The key thing to look at here is there any waste in your church's budget? Where might your church be wasting some of the tithe money that comes in? And I'm sure that every church has some of those things.

Speaker 1: 4:22

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that you're doing this on purpose. You're purposefully just being frivolous with money. Churches usually don't mean to waste money, but let's be honest, some of the expenses aren't as essential as they seem. So here I want to help you today, and maybe things are tight and you need to do this right. You need to look at your budget. You need to find some cuts. You need to do better in spending your money.

Speaker 1: 4:48

These five things, I think, will help. Maybe things are great. Maybe things are great, but you want to be able to do more with what God has provided. This also, these things, these five areas that you can take a look, can help the money that you do have. Maybe money's not the object right now, but take the money that you do have, even though you've got plenty, and make it go farther for ministry and make you be able to reach more people for Jesus. And make it go farther for ministry and make you be able to reach more people for Jesus. Five things, okay.

Speaker 1: 5:14

First is subscription fatigue, and I have to do this. I have to do this with my business, with chemistry staffing. I have to do this with my personal finances as well. Are you paying? I do it about twice a year. Are you paying? Is your church paying for multiple software platforms that you don't use? I call it subscription creep. Right. You start with something that you think is really valuable. You pay the, and sometimes it's $9 a month, right, or $25 a month. It's a software where you pay for it every month and then you use it really good for a month or two and then, slowly, or you just find a better solution you don't use it anymore. But, guess what? You totally forget that you're paying for it. You don't see the credit card statements, you don't really worry about it, but you still pay for it and you're not using it.

Speaker 1: 6:08

Maybe you've got some subscriptions and maybe $25 a month isn't much, but $25 a month could be used someplace different. What kind of softwares do you use? You use Planning Center, slack, zoom, canva, any of those that maybe you used to use and you don't need anymore. Maybe you've got a couple of different subscriptions from companies that do the same thing. There are some ways that maybe that you can cut in some of those subscription areas. So that's number one subscription fatigue. Some ways, maybe, that you can cut in some of those subscription areas. So that's number one subscription fatigue.

Speaker 1: 6:39

Number two is maybe you've got some unused or underutilized space. This is just simple stuff, right? Are you heating and cooling massive areas in your facility that sit empty 80% of the week? Maybe it's time you cut back on the heating and cooling expenses, since no one's in there for a large part of the time. Maybe it's time to consider renting out some space or consolidating some meetings so that you don't have whole wings of your facility opened and heated and cooled throughout the week. Maybe you isolate it down. Are there any unused or unutilized space that you can cut expenses in?

Speaker 1: 7:10

Okay, number three is production overkill and this one kind of I hate to say this because I love technology, I love production, but do you really need all the latest upgrades every year? Sometimes a church's obsession with the flashiest equipment drains resources when it could be used somewhere else. I had and maybe this goes with number two or number three about three years ago I had somebody come in and do the annual checkup on my furnace okay, for my home. And they came in and said you know your furnace, you've had it about 12 years and it's on its last leg and it could go out at any minute. So here's a quote for a brand new furnace. And I looked at the quote and I thought it's pretty warm in here. It seems to be working.

Speaker 1: 7:56

Okay, uh, I think I'm going to hold off on this for right now. That was three years ago and my furnace is still working great. Did I need the upgrade? No, would it have been great? So I didn't have to worry about it. Yeah, uh, could my furnace um quit right now? And I've got to call and say, hey, I need a. Yeah, that could happen at any moment. But you know what If it happens, if a light breaks, if your furnace breaks, if something happens, guess what? You can get it replaced. So maybe you don't have to do all of those upgrades every year. Maybe you don't have to have the latest version. That can save you a good amount of money.

Speaker 1: 8:37

Another way is just food and hospitality overload right. Fellowship is great. Do you need a catered meal? I just outed myself on doing a catered meal earlier for every meeting that you're doing. Maybe you need to consider just simpler, cost effective hospitality solutions. You can spend a lot of money on food and food's really important, but you can spend a lot of money. Can you do it cheaper? Can you make it simpler, those kinds of things?

Speaker 1: 9:05

And then and this is a big one and boy again, it hurts me to say this because I own a staffing company for churches but are there staff roles? Are you overstaffed? Are there staff roles that overlap over time? And I've seen this in many churches accumulate new roles but they never streamline them. Okay, elon would come in and he'd probably cut half your staff and he would streamline the other. I'm not asking you to do that to your staff. Please don't do that to your staff. But are there jobs that could be combined in the future without sacrificing effectiveness? Are there redeployments? Hey, john, we don't need you to spend all of your time here, but we'd love to keep you on staff but spend part of your time helping us start this new thing or something like that.

Speaker 1: 9:52

So those are five steps. But how do you do that? How do you do that If you're a senior pastor, if you're a staff member, you're not the finance person. How do you do that? I think you can work with your finance person. I think that's actually part of leadership is to make sure that you have the right people in place to help you do these things.

Speaker 1: 10:14

But how do you audit a church budget like a pro, because Elon's not going to come to your church not that you'd want him to, but how do you do it? First of all, list every expense. You don't know what you're spending until you know what you're spending. And as you make that list, start off no sacred cows, that's nobody saying, hey, that's just how we do it, you can't touch that, but you need to know what every expense is. And then, secondly, you just need to ask the hard questions, and the hard questions are really pretty simple Is it essential, can we do it differently and is there waste? Those are really hard questions, especially when you're talking about things that you've done forever or things that you really okay.

Speaker 1: 10:59

And then step three maybe you need to invite a fresh set of eyes. So maybe you need to bring in somebody different. That's not a part of your church and I realize you might not want to do this, but this could. A fresh set of eyes and ears is always a good thing. So maybe find somebody that's trusted right. Maybe a trusted business leader that's not on your staff, maybe a trusted church leader of a church that's about your size so you can compare and contrast. But find somebody that can give you some honest feedback.

Speaker 1: 11:29

And then the 30,000 foot level here. Why would you even try and do this in the first place? It's really simple you want to prioritize your mission. Really simple. You want to prioritize your mission. So you want to keep what matters and cut what doesn't. And you'll be amazed, I think, how much that you can find that you can change, how much extra that you can find If you need to cut costs, how much costs you can find actually to cut. That will make you leaner, but also maybe even make you a little bit more effective. So, at the end of the day, stewardship isn't, it's not about spending less. It's really more about spending wisely, I think. And if your budget is lean and focused, you can have more impact, you can have more outreach and ultimately, you can change more lives for less money or the same amount of money.

Speaker 1: 12:25

Okay, I hope this has helped you rethink some of your church's spending and if it did, I would love to hear what your next step is. What's one area in your church that you think you could cut expenses? Today you can leave a comment wherever you're listening or watching. You can also email me anytime podcast at chemistrystaffingcom. I read each and every email. Each and every email is private and confidential. I don't share it with anybody, it's just for my eyes. Okay, so thanks so much. This is the Healthy Church Staff Podcast. I'm Todd Rhodes. Talk to you again tomorrow.