067: Pro Church Tools, From Bible Student to a Seven Figure Business Helping the Church Niche Attract and Retain their Target Audience (w/ Brady Shearer)
Summary: Brady Shearer is the founder of Pro Church Tools and the host of a popular podcast on iTunes called Pro Church Tools. Pro Church Tools is an organization Brady founded to help small, medium and big churches go professional with their media, communications, and videos. The organization was built on his passion for church media and announcements, and has grown exponentially over time to become sizeable. <br> <br> Listen in to get all the juicy details from Brady Shearer in this episode. <br> <br> Remember to click subscribe on your podcast player so you don’t miss an episode. Access this show highlight reel for all the links and resources mentioned in the episode at www.businessgenerals.com/bradys <br> <br> Type of business <br> <br> His business is entirely online, they don’t do anything in-person. When he started the business it was entirely laptop-based (laptop lifestyle) for a long time. The business now has 8 full-time employees plus Brady, and has room for about 3 or 4 more people. It has at least 6 to 12 freelancers, contractors and remote employees. <br> <br> Period in full-time business and core revenue streams <br> <br> Brady says he has been 3 or 4 years in full-time business and their main product since the beginning is producing video announcements (Pro Video Announcements) for churches. They currently work with about 150 churches each week producing their video announcements. He says what drives the entire business is their brand “Pro Church Tools”. <br> <br> Since the very beginning he has been releasing videos, articles and podcasts every week to teach people everything he knows. That has enabled them to build an audience called the “Pro Church Nation” which has in turn allowed them to experiment with new products including Nucleus (A boutique church website builder) and Story Tape (An unlimited stock footage site). They are a fully bootstrapped business. Pro Video Announcements has been funding everything. <br> <br> Starting out in business <br> <br> Brady started out as the media director in his church while also attending bible college. He didn’t have any video, social, web or design skills at the time but he had a knack for going into something he had never done before, and learning it very quickly. He did that with recording software and learnt everything he could. The more he learnt, the more he did for his church and his work was eventually noticed by other churches, that kept asking him to do freelance work for them. <br> <br> The more he did the work, the more he started to focus mainly on doing church specific stuff and that’s when he decided to launch Pro Church Tools. The business brought together his interest in online business and the audience he was passionate about serving including churches, ministries, pastors and church leaders. He started <a href="http://www.prochurchtools.com/">www.prochurchtools.com</a> and just began teaching everything that he had learnt about producing church-specific video announcements. <br> <br> Knowing he could succeed with it <br> <br> He was full-time in school and also worked 20 hours a week at his church so he didn’t really have time to work on the business. To make time, he started waking up very early every day to work on the business. From 5am to 8am, he would work on the business before going to school. To date, he does his best work in the early mornings. <br> <br> He didn’t know the business would work but he had money saved up from his freelance work to put into starting Pro Church Tools. He then gave himself 4 months to work on the business but nothing happened in the first 3 months. He was starting to lose hope when in the following next 2 weeks he had 6 churches sign up. It turned out that churches go into hibernation especially with big purchase decisions throughout the summer and that’s why he was not getting any sign ups in the first 3 months. With the first clients,
