Multi Site Journey- Patience
One of the toughest parts of starting a campus is having to wait on others when you’re ready to roll. We have been practicing a lot of patience lately as we’re starting the Beeville Campus. You would think after seven campuses we would get used to having to practice patience, but honestly the process always drives me and Pastor Bil nuts!!
As much as I wish I could speed up the process, the process simply takes time. Purchasing a building requires a bidding process that has to go back and forth usually multiple times, and each time either party makes a counter offer, paperwork has to be redone. I think, I should be able to just sit down with the owners of a property and hash it out and make a deal, but apparently no one really cares what I think about it, because thats not how it works.
Once you’re done with the purchase or have signed a lease, you have two more steps before you can start tear down. First you have to begin a bidding process so you can figure out how much this is going to cost. And by the way, when you get you very best estimate, add a minimum of 20%, that has played out in every campus we have started. Here’s one of the frustrating parts, until you have complete access to the building, it’s hard to get anyone to bid. No one really wants to begin the bidding process on building that isn’t purchased or has a lease signed on it. So getting bids has a number of steps that have to be completed before you start.
Then once you have all of that done, you have to get permits. All cities are different, some are easier than others to work with, but permitting takes time and they work at the pace they work at, and trust me, theres pretty much no way to speed it up, or at least not in my experience.
Once you have all these in place then you can get moving, but just be prepared to work into you plan that it takes a significant amount of time from the time you find a place to the time you begin your remodel. If you build that time into your plan it will frustrate you less. On the Beeville Campus we’re working on now, it has taken close to 6 wks. However, we had to do some things that aren’t always a part of a purchase. We had to re-negotiated the property lines because the water and sewage lines for the entire strip center would have been on our property which would have kept the owners from having access, something we did not want to do to them. That meant we had to do a new survey which had to measured, drawn up, and submitted, which cost us an extra couple of weeks. If you lease a building you will shorten the purchase side of it, but not the permitting side of the re-model. If you decide to go into a school you of course shorten the entire process because you’re mobil.
Bottom line, it takes the time it takes, so learn to be patient. I’m on number eight right now, and sadly I’m not really any more patient that I was on number one, but most people would tell you I’m still a bit of a work in progress 
John
