So, you’d like to learn the story behind MediaChurch?
Well, hopefully I can give you a glimpse into who we are and what we stand for!

As the CEO of MediaChurch/PriivaWeb, I quite literally took a “leap of faith” to develop the web-based MediaChurch service.  I’ll explain, but first, a little background:

In 1995, I put a college degree and ten years of business experience to the test, buying into the ComputerLand franchise where I’d been employed and becoming its general manager.  Soon after, we introduced west-central Missouri to the Internet, and quickly established ourselves as the area’s dominant ISP.  In five years, our staff tripled, as we provided nationally-recognized services to 15,000 customers in a semi-rural area of our state.  The desire to “get it right” kept us going during early years of 80-100 hour workweeks.

By 2002,the business had changed.  To play the game, you really needed to be a phone company or cable company.  The writing was on the wall.  So we chose to partner with a phone company, and eventually sold our business to an investment firm that owned several phone companies.  I remained to manage for two more years, choosing to leave in the summer of 2004.  It wasn’t an easy decision, but I knew it was the right one.

Why? For starters, I was excited by an area that I didn’t feel was being addressed.  Big organizations (and a select few well-financed small ones) had created websites that represented them well.  But I saw a whole group of organizations (such as churches and non-profits) that was just missing out, it seemed.  There was a huge gap between the websites of the “haves” and those of the “have nots” .

There were (and still are) probably two main reasons for that, in my opinion.  First, most organizations don’t have enough Internet knowledge to realize the potential ways that they could implement a website to help them.  Of those who do, only a small percentage can actually afford to have someone come in and build a high-quality custom solution.  Very few “good, effective websites” are developed from scratch on a low budget.  When it comes to websites, the typical rule has been:  “Good (site), (developed) fast, and cheap. Pick any two of these.”

I didn’t like that rule, because it says a church can’t obtain a quality website in a reasonable amount of time for an affordable price.  Finding a way to permanently break that rule was the sole driving factor in beginning the three year process of developing MediaChurch.

Now, I find myself working with customer service staff and programmers that I’ve worked with in the past, as well as graphic designers around the world, all working to provide churches with a way to get the Word out.

In 1995, My former company came up with a simple mission statement that guided everything we did.  I liked it then, and I like it now.  Updated for MediaChurch, it read, “We will provide services that consistently exceed our customer’s expectations, making MediaChurch a successful company by any measure.”  I feel you can measure a company’s true success in four ways.  The most obvious is that it is profitable, and sure, we want to be that.  But the other ways are equally important:  does our customer feel they received a good value for their money?  Can our company team take pride in what they’ve developed?  Are we providing something that’s important?

When we are able to answer “yes” to these questions, we will be a successful company “by any  measure”.  I think we’re on the right track.
Let me know what you think.