There’s a moment I’ve watched happen dozens of times with working professionals in the church and nonprofit space.
Someone opens their laptop to do one simple thing, and a Bilbo Baggins-sized adventure commences.
The “plan your visit” forms are in one tool, the church calendar lives elsewhere, and content creation happens somewhere else.
The giving records, the project board, the newsletter platform, the volunteer scheduler — each one a separate login, a separate monthly charge, a separate little universe with its own logic and its own opinion about how your organization ought to work.
None of them talk to each other.
None of them feels like us.
And every month, the credit card statement reads like a roll call of tools you’re paying to tolerate and rarely actually use efficiently.
It’s the subscription treadmill. And most small organizations are running on it right now, not because they chose it, but because it was the only option.
Enterprise software is built for thousands of organizations at once, which means it’s built for none of them in particular. You don’t adapt the tool to your team; you bend your team to fit the tool. It’s like wearing clothes tailored for someone else’s body every single day. You can function. But you never quite feel at home.
Here’s what I believe is changing, quietly and quickly: the era of one-size-fits-none is ending.
The barriers to building custom websites and apps are tumbling. We’re cutting out thirty subscriptions doing thirty things awkwardly and building one app doing what you actually need, in-house, in the order you actually do it, using the words your team actually uses.
And this is the part I find genuinely exciting, because it isn’t really a technology story. It’s a communications and culture story.
Your tools are not neutral. They shape how your team talks, what gets measured, what gets remembered, and what falls through the cracks.
When Angie and I were planting Grace Hills Church in Bentonville, Arkansas, I built the website six months before we even relocated because the website’s organizational pathways (and my ability to style and shape them around the culture we wanted to create) helped me keep watch and organize ministry work. I still believe a church’s website is one of its front doors.
When your software is generic, a little bit of your organizational identity gets sanded off every day. But when the tool is built around your culture, it becomes an expression of your culture.
Small organizations, ironically, are positioned to win this shift. The big enterprise can’t move; it’s contractually married to its platforms. But a church, a nonprofit, a boutique brokerage? They’re agile enough to say: what if we had ONE place where the contact records, the workflows, the communications, and the website all lived in symmetry, designed to look and feel and think like us?
I’ve been building toward this vision with the leaders and organizations I serve. Pastors drowning in disconnected tools. Nonprofit directors paying enterprise prices for features they’ll never touch. Real estate professionals cobbling together systems that were never meant to meet.
My paternal grandfather was a tool-and-dye foreman for Holley Carburetor. When something broke in the factory, he’d create the tool to fix it from scratch. In the same way, I get to spend much of my day shaping tools to fit the people using them.
Let me ask you the coffee shop question: if you could sweep the subscription clutter off the table and have one tool built around how your team actually works, what would it do?
What would it feel like to open your laptop and find something that fits?
I don’t think that’s a fantasy anymore. I think it’s the next chapter.
And I think the organizations that thrive in it will be the ones brave enough to stop renting someone else’s idea of how they should work and start building their own. If you’d like to imagine what that could look like for your organization, let’s start a conversation.