What I Do
A question that I enjoy answering is “so, what do you do?” The answer is usually not what people expect.
I run a printing and web development business dedicated to serving ministries and missionaries. At the moment, most of what I do involves running a prayer letter service for hundreds of missionaries in dozens of ministries around the world.
What’s a Prayer Letter Service?
In most missionary organizations, each staff person is responsible for bringing together a team of people who will pray for them, support them financially, or both. To keep them informed about what’s happening, missionaries send these supporters updates every so often (ideally monthly or bimonthly, though some also send quarterly). These updates are called prayer letters, because they usually include prayer requests.
A prayer letter service (like prayerletters.us, a division of my business) is a company that takes the letters that are written by the missionaries and sends them to their supporters. Rather than making the missionaries and their families do all the work of printing, folding, stuffing, sealing, and stamping the letters, these companies do the work for them. This lets them get their letters out more easily — there’s a great tendency to procrastinate sending letters when there’s a lot of manual work involved — and lets them focus more of their time on their mission field, rather than on administrative work.
One advantage that a prayer letter service has over individuals stuffing letters themselves is that they can invest in certain types of technology that automates most of the work. For instance, there are machines that will fold, stuff, and seal letters; that stamp envelopes; and that print envelopes much more quickly than a regular inkjet printer.
In my company’s case, nearly everything that can be automated is automated, which allows me to serve hundreds of missionaries with a very small staff. This helps keep costs down for missionaries, as long as the cost of the automation doesn’t outweigh the cost of employees.
What Can Be Automated?
This is a question that I’m constantly asking myself. I’m no longer doing most of the production work, so my time is roughly evenly divided between marketing, keeping things moving, and figuring out how to make things more efficient.
Because I have a background in programming, with a focus on usability, I’ve been able to write a lot of software that reduces the amount of work needed on both the missionary’s side and my side. And, since I’m very intimately involved in the day-to-day process of sending letters, it’s easy to find repetitive tasks that can be simplified or removed altogether.
As a result, I’m frequently adding snippets of code to the software that will shave off 10 seconds here, and 30 seconds there. Spending an hour to save 10 seconds isn’t a good investment for a one-time task, but when that task is being done a dozen times or more per day, it pays for itself quickly.
So What Do You Do All Day?
My weekdays are mostly divided into “Interrupt Time” and “Project Time.” Ideally, I’d be able to put these on a schedule to ensure they both happen every day, but I’m not there yet.
Interrupt Time
This is when I answer E-Mails, put out fires, do quality checks on letters that are otherwise ready to be printed, place service calls, send invoices, enter payments, and so on. All the day-to-day stuff of running the business goes here. At least half of the time is spent keeping up with E-Mails.
Ideally, this happens from 9:00-10:00am, 12:00-1:30pm, and 4:00-5:30pm. In reality, this can easily eat up the entire day if I’m not disciplined.
Project Time
This is when I work on marketing, programming, and business planning.
Marketing involves figuring out how to introduce more people to the company, and how to ensure that the missionaries who use it are doing so effectively. I’d like to keep the business growing so that we can afford to do fancier things for missionaries and ministries.
Programming is the fun part for me. It’s roughly divided into improving the code that runs the prayer letter service and working on new services. We’re always coming up with ways to add new features or handle mailings more efficiently. I’m also hoping to introduce other projects that will benefit missionaries and help my company diversify beyond having over 90% of its sales coming from one service.
Business planning is ensuring that the company is headed in a particular direction, and is doing so in a sustainable way. For the first six years of running the company, the challenge was keeping up with growth and ensuring that the business didn’t grow too quickly. Nowadays, that’s less of an issue, but I still have no shortage of projects geared around doing what I can to improve the robustness of the company and keep it focused on particular goals.
Evenings and Weekends
On days that I stay late, it’s usually to get caught up with everything in the “Interrupt Time” pile. I’ll also often in the office for at least part of the day on Saturday, since it’s a quiet, calm (closed) day, to clean up, think, and program.
