Corporations
My life has fallen into a few stages.
As a child, I lived in Box Hill when it was a Village. I then became Pastor to the Slums of Inner Melbourne for eight years. I was then a Country Parson and a Teacher at a One Teacher Bush School out at Jackson Creek in Western Victoria and then for thirteen years, I was a Suburban Minister in one of Australia’s largest suburban ministries.
And now, for more than 20 years I’ve been Superintendent in Sydney of Wesley Mission, Australia’s largest church ministry.
I’ve told you stories of people in each of these places.
Tonight I want you to come with me into the heart of the city.
Once I became Superintendent of Wesley Mission in the late 1970’s, the first thing that I realized was the serious financial problem facing the Mission. I immediately set up a top-level investigation into our financial position to reveal its true position. I didn’t care how bad it was so long as I knew exactly what it was. My belief is that if you know a situation you can take steps to remedy it. But if you don’t know your situation then you just drift on going from bad to worse.
I knew that a new building that had been commenced 18 months earlier had run into industrial strife and we now had a one and a quarter million debt on this new building. It was being built in Darlinghurst to house homeless people. There was no way in which we would be able to pay the bills on this new building. We also had a debt more than 10 years old of more than a quarter of a million dollars on the rebuilding of Wesley Centre in Pitt Street. I was absolutely staggered that the leadership of the Mission over the past 10 years had allowed that debt to accumulate. Dr. Alan Walker seemed to be unaware of it.
Then across the 23 children’s homes, hospitals, nursing homes and aged care centers maintenance had been allowed to run down for years and urgent heavy maintenance involving hundreds of thousands of dollars was immediately required. I also discovered in a letter of apology sent to me by Alan Walker that our rolls were dreadfully out of date. I soon found the truth of that matter when in my first letter to donors using the Mission’s existing rolls, I had hundreds of letters returned marked “deceased” or “left address, forwarding address unknown”.
I was also aware that my predecessor Rev. Dr. Alan Walker who had established an office in Sydney to support his new work of World Evangelism, had taken our donor lists to approach them for funds for his new work. I realized that people who had supported Alan in the past, would give to him in the new work. People give to a person not an institution. They give to a person they can trust, and Alan was certainly known by many people, whereas I was unknown to most donors in Sydney, having just arrived from Melbourne. I felt our donor’s lists were virtually useless.
I was also aware that we were facing an immediate cash crisis. We had enough cash in hand to pay the salaries of our staff in two weeks time, but not enough to pay them for the following pay.
I was also aware that we had management problems. I immediately saw senior management engaged unbelievably in carrying out detailed work. They were loyal and faithful but swamped in the detail and unable to delegate or to take the longer view of where we were going. They just worked hard and longer on work that was increasingly irrelevant.
I wrote down in my diary that Wesley Mission had some urgent needs, which had to be addressed within the next weeks. We needed cash to pay salaries, but how much cash I did not know. We needed to very quickly get some good management into place. I would try to influence and educate current management, but if not, would have to import some new management. We needed a continuous cash flow to allow us to pay the debts, to finish the new building, and undertake urgent maintenance. We needed a new image among the public in general. Alan Walker’s strong stand on issues of social justice emphasized the church’s concern for those who are hurt by society, but it did nothing to attract support financially to our welfare work. I realized we needed large numbers of people, good hearted generous members of the public, in their tens of thousands – to support us. They were our needs. The question was how were we going to achieve this.
In my diaries I wrote down solutions as they came to me. For example, I could immediately start visiting churches, preaching everywhere like a wild fire through Sydney. I knew there was not enough time to do this and even if I did it, it would generate little cash but much resentment from local ministers who would feel I was coming to take away either their members or their money which was due to their local parishes. I dismissed that solution. In fact for the next 20 years I basically accepted no invitations to preach this side of the Blue Mountains.
Another solution involved us in building a mailing list where I could write to people, state our needs, in the belief that the average Australians who saw an honest attempt to help a genuine need would respond. But how was I to get people to give me names and addresses?
I decided the only way that could be done with integrity was to become well known. I immediately accepted an invitation from Chris Brammall the Manager of Radio Station 2CH to start presenting radio spots. He invited me to do it for 13 weeks. When I asked him why such a limited time he indicated that he had never met a minister in his life who could sustain four spots a day for more than 13 weeks. I told Chris I had been preparing for years to do spots and had actually been writing spots every day for years before I had come to Sydney. I had more than 4000 scripts at hand. I commenced doing spots on 2CH the next day and continued for years.
I also approached Barrie Unsworth, the General Manager of Radio Station 2KY, described how I could fit in with their country music format, and he granted me a one hour program on Sunday nights called “Country Gospel”. That proved so successful it was relayed to other stations throughout Australia and extended to three hours Sunday nights.
Following more than a thousand television presentations on BTV6 Ballarat and GTV9 Melbourne, I commenced a television program with the Christian Television Association for 13 weeks on Channel 10 in Sydney. At the end of 13 weeks I started the program “Turn ‘Round Australia” and eventually was asked to take that program because of its high ratings to TCN9 and the Nine Network across Australia. I have now been doing that program for 23 years without one weeks break! It is the longest running continuous television program in Australian history, and I have now become the longest running presenter of any program in Australian capital city television.
I did, however place on the radio and television programs a very important limitation. I would not use the media to ask for money for Wesley Mission. I did ask for support for all kinds of organisations that I promoted but never for ourselves. My belief was that Australians would not support television programs that were always asking for money but that if I could only earn people’s trust they would both support me with money and be willing to come on to our mailing lists.
We also needed a good magazine and I immediately went to work to upgrade the small broad sheet that Wesley Mission had produced “Impact” and later added a second magazine “Frontlines”. These have been powerful tools for letting people know what we were doing. When people know what you are doing they support it.
The negatives however were quite obvious. The things that I was suggesting would be slow to actually return money to us. It would take at least two or three years before we would see an upturn in our finances through any of those approaches. Further, a lot of people and organizations would be very suspicious of a clergyman who preached in his church several times a week asking for money. Thirdly, I was running a charity, which was in financial strife, and I don’t believe people give to sinking ships. The fourth negative was the work at Wesley Mission demanded all of my attention in order to turn it around.
I was opposed to selling any of the Mission’s assets. I did not want to sell any of our buildings which would have brought us in quick cash to get us over the crisis but as all of our buildings were occupied by people in real need such as children and children’s homes and aged people in hostels, we would need to put out people in dire need in order to sell the property. I wondered what other assets we had?
I decided that we had skills as an asset that could be sold. Whose skills? My skills.
What skills did I have that I thought were marketable? I believed I had three. The first was that I had a lot of experience on radio, television and in public speaking to communicate with ordinary people. Over the years my work on radio, television, in the press and speaking to large crowds of people, had given me a skill in communication that did not depend upon scripts, and meant I could speak freely without notes.
I had a second skill – the gift of motivating people. This was not only in motivating Christian people but also business people.
In Melbourne a senior manager of the AMP Society had prevailed upon me at a time of difficulty to motivate his sales force. I had addressed his sales force that year with extraordinary results. He wanted me to do the same every year. I was not paid for doing this but I did say I would motivate his sales persons if he would agree to me being allowed to sit in upon one of their management training courses, because I needed to improve my management skills. That was my third asset I could sell.
I had built up over the years good management skills. After all no other suburban church in Australia had undertaken such large building projects as we had at Cheltenham. We had spent in one year more than a million dollars on new buildings and over a period of years had built five retirement villages. I had built a strong staff and managed them well. I had gone along to management training courses at the Mount Eliza Administrative Staff College and undertaken courses with the Australian Institute of Management. I was to continue taking and learning management training programs until eventually I was elected by management peers through various levels until I became a Fellow of the Australian Institute of Management and a Fellow of the Australian Institute of Company Directors and was actually lecturing in management principles. I had been invited to look at a number of companies, examine their weaknesses and advise their Chief Executives. An idea was born.
If I could combine the skills of communication, motivation and management and put that into one package and offer corporations my skills in communication, motivation and management I was sure they would be willing to pay for my time. This was a unique thought at the time. There were some communications experts out of the radio and television industry who taught Chief Executives how to present annual reports at the Annual General Meeting of a company and to shareholders. There were motivational experts who addressed sales conferences but mostly they only addressed them once, because they had a single story to tell of how they sailed around the world, won a gold medal or played in a premiership team. Once they had told their story they wouldn’t be invited again. There were also management gurus who lectured managers on how to manage but I didn’t know of one who had excellence in communication, motivation skills and management insights.
I set a fee of $2,000 for a corporation to invite me to examine its problems, to prepare a presentation to its staff and to present to the widest number of people in the company possible. The income from these talks would all go to Wesley Mission not to myself personally. I didn’t want to have any additional tax problems. Apart from that I need the Mission’s accounts office to keep a good account of the income and be able to chase up any slow payers. I even thought that these talks would pay for my own salary as well as providing needy income to support our work among the poor and the disabled. In years to come, my business addresses paid my salary and that of my secretary as well.
I had no sooner outlined what I proposed to do when the phone rang with the General Manager of AMP Australia asking me if I would speak at a business conference of his senior managers to be held at Wentworth in the Blue Mountains to be repeated to another group at Surfers Paradise, to a wider group which would fill the Sydney Opera House and to all their New Zealand staff in Rotorua. I accepted that and received wonderful responses wherever I went. Over the next 12 years I was to speak at more than 40 AMP conferences covering every State, New Zealand and overseas and every talk was completely different.
I had just started on this series of talks when Ron Tacki and Associates asked me if I would be a keynote speaker to be attended by two and a half thousand businessmen in the Sydney Opera House. He had previously brought out Norman Vincent Peale and he believed that I could take the famous Dr. Peale’s place in a new series being held in the largest auditoriums in Australia. I would accompany the other keynote speaker Commander Neil Armstrong the first man to walk upon the moon! I spoke in each of these gatherings and developed a warm friendship with the famous Astronaut.
The phone rang again; it was John Nevin asking me to speak in a series of conferences for World Book Encyclopedia, an Encyclopedia that I had purchased and updated many times. This was shortly followed by Encyclopedia Britannica who wanted me to meet with all of their managers in Australia and then later to take my wife and four children to Hawaii to address a World Conference of Encyclopedia Britannica managers. Constan Industries asked me to go to the Philippines. The phone rang again with Keith Walkerden, a former Officer of Wesley Mission Sydney, asking me to address the Olivetti managers of Australia and New Zealand. That was successful and it was followed by two invitations to address all the managers of Olivetti through the United Kingdom and Europe. Shortly, after that Australia Post was undertaking vast changes and I gave about 10 major addresses to Australia Post employees in every state of Australia. I was to also make for them a film explaining what was happening in society and how they had to cope with the changes within Australia Post. This film was screened hundreds of times in every little outpost of the nation, wherever there was an Australian Post Office.
This was the time when there were a large number of computer companies just expanding and I became known within the industry and addressed companies like Compaq, Wang, IBM, Hewlett Packard and so on.
It wasn’t long before I had spoken to more than 200 of the top 500 companies in Australia and all told over a period of about 10 years spoke to more than 400 top corporations.
The impact of this was instant. Wesley Mission had additional cash flow. The knowledge of Wesley Mission among people in the business community and among people who were likely to help fund our work spread across the nation.
Everywhere I went I carried heavy parcels of our magazines and gave them out freely indicating that those who returned filed in subscription before the day was over I would send that magazine free for the next year. I would come back to Wesley Mission with the side pockets of my suit coat bulging with new subscriptions.
The people who heard me in person also seemed to want to now watch me on television. Many letters were received from people who now said they had discovered our television programs. Others became regular attenders at the Sunday evening church services held in the Lyceum Theatre. But the greatest thrill I had was the unique opportunity to speak to tens of thousands of Australians every couple of months who would not otherwise have gone to church. In all of my presentations I was not only true to the Christian Gospel but I used the remarkable insights of Jesus to illustrate good management practices much to the amazement of my listeners. Many a secret Christian came out and told other people with pride afterwards, that was why he followed the way of Jesus.
Three or four years earlier the Central Methodist Mission had depended almost entirely upon good hearted Christians within the Methodist denomination to support its work. I saw nothing wrong with that except they were not enough of them and they did not have enough money for what I wanted to do.
Today Wesley Mission receives less than 1% of its income from the three denominations that make up the Uniting Church. We had set out a pattern of receiving funding from the community and from corporations at large.
There were three significant developments in this work. The first came when I was invited to speak in North Sydney at a rather unique convention. It would be attended by 700 people who organized conferences for their companies. They were told they would hear the six best speakers in the nation. I was the last speaker. Everybody ran over their time and the presentations were an extraordinarily high level. As the evening wore away every half hour I decided to shorten my address. At long last I got up at ten minutes past eleven to give the final address of the night. It was billed the keystone to the whole evening. I wasn’t feeling like giving a top line address. Late that afternoon I had a wisdom tooth extracted which I had not expected. The dentist had trouble and eventually the tooth was out. It left me with a numb face and a lot of pain in my jaw. I did not feel like giving a significant public address.
With the other speakers going too long, I kept shortening my address until when the time came at ten minutes past eleven I delivered a very brief, very punchy and very funny address and wrapped up the evening. The impact was electric. I got the longest standing ovation I had ever received in my life. As people crowded around afterwards there was a very dignified blonde lady who kept looking at me. Her name was Christine Maher. She introduced herself as being the Chief Executive of Celebrity Speakers and on the basis of my performance that night she invited me to join the very exclusive band of Australia’s best speakers. They would arrange my speaking engagements. They would charge more to cover their expenses but I would have no worries because they would handle all travel, accommodation and other details. For the next 15 years I enjoyed being part of a group of Australia’s “celebrity speakers”.
The second thing that really helped develop our work was that I needed to expand our staff to handle the mail that was generated from television and from radio. I found a wonderful young woman Christine Johnson who had been working with the American Television Evangelist Rex Humbard, who took over the responsibility of organising hundreds of replies every week to those who wrote to me following presentations on television and radio. Before long I was receiving a thousand letters per week from those who heard me.
The third development was the establishment of Wesley Film Corporation in 1984. Backed by a number of Rotarians and business people who put up more than a million dollars, we were able to produce films throughout the middle-east and the Mediterranean on the life of Jesus, the life and teachings of the Apostle Paul, the growth and development of the early Church, the history and development of the country of Israel and many others. These were produced in different languages and sold world wide and screened on television in prime time.
The development of our written material on the internet opened up another amazing market and this year we would anticipate about ten million of downloads of material or hits on our website.
The result of all of this was that Wesley Mission became one of those places that came to mind first whenever people thought of an effective and efficient charity. We became the largest provider of community services in New South Wales and number three in the whole of Australia, although our work is primarily in 450 suburbs regional and rural centers and we are now known internationally. People constantly come from overseas to study our church and its ministry to people in need.
The result was that our debts were paid. Our income rose over the years, I remember it reaching $5 million in one year. Last year it was $125 million. And many of those corporations with whom I had made contact became long-term partners of Wesley Mission. Great corporations like the Commonwealth Bank and National Australia Bank, Ansett, Qantas, BBC Hardware House and the Housing Industry of Australia, Blue Haven Pools, Ford Motor Company, Sydney Water, the Copper Industry, the Payroll Association, CSR, HomeWorld, Telstra, Daily Telegraph, Westpac, LendLease, TCN9, 2UE, St. George, LG Electronics, AM Corporation, Darling Harbour Authority and so on joined with us as partners in helping meet human need.
Over that time the number of staff increased dramatically and today we have more than 2,600 full-time staff.
With the growth of the work there was no longer the same need for me to speak at so many large public meetings in corporations. I had already been voted by Rostrum and Toastmasters, the public speaking organizations as the Australian Public Speaker of the Year. I slowly withdrew from addressing companies and rarely do it these days. Instead I invite the Chief Executives of major corporations to come to a Board Room lunch in Wesley Centre to hear about the work that we are doing and of course we added staff in the whole area of fundraising and corporate relations. The work today is led by three great General Managers and a team of Senior Managers. Many of these people have been with me for 15 to 20 years and we have an incredible personal relationship and an effective ministry to the community.
The problems I faced back in the 1970’s with Wesley Mission were the same problems that are faced by many small businesses today. We had a cash flow crisis; we had management, which got bogged down in too much detail. We had steadily rising costs, which were escalating, beyond our income; we had communication problems and lack of clients to support us in our work.
Churches also, like small businesses face these same problems and they have these problems because the Theological Colleges of various denominations do not train ministers to make churches grow. I have never known of one lecturer in any Theological College of any denomination who was competent in the fields of communication, motivation and management expertise. In fact many of them despise these competencies and continue as if the local church will forever fund them in their training program.
Leaders are called to lead. They are called to skill themselves and to give total commitment to build a team to multiply their own effectiveness. I also had one other watchword, I believed I had to work as if everything depended upon me and I had to believe and trust in God as if everything depended upon Him.