If you have read my blogs for just about any time at all, you know that I am a big Seth Godin fan. A few years ago he posted a blog entitled “Cheap Shower Curtains” that really caught my attention. Here is an excerpt:
The unskilled cost accountant might suggest you outfit your new hotel with cheap shower curtains. After all, if you save $50 a room and have 200 rooms, pretty soon, we’re talking real money.
On the other hand, experience will demonstrate that cheap shower curtains let the water out, causing a minor flood, every day, room after room. And they wear out faster. Cheap shower curtains aren’t actually cheap.
This is very much in line with something I like to say, “Cheap is no bargain.”
Let’s take the shower curtain analogy above a little further:
PERCEIVED SAVINGS: – $50 x 200 rooms = $10,000
AFTERMATH COSTS:
- Damage to the floor and substrate of 200 rooms
- Ceiling damage from water leaking from rooms above – about 75% of the 200 rooms requiring patch and repaint
- Potential unseen issues such as mold, wet insulation, water migration to electrical fixtures, etc.
- Increased humidity issues due to moisture causing HVAC to work “harder” to obtain comfortable levels
- Replacement of floor covering to all 200 rooms
- Loss of revenue due to repairs being made
- Truncated life cycle of 200 shower curtains (this will be at least the cost of the original savings but at inflated dollars)
I am not going to venture a cost for the above…but I would say it is fair that it will be at least 10 times (and I actually believe it is 25-50 times) the perceived savings. So, unless your intent was to sell the hotel within the first few months of completion, you have just made an incredibly unwise decision. BY THE WAY: If you did plan to sell, you just sold a money pit to your buyer, damaging the one thing that really counts…your integrity and reputation. Another unwise decision.
“But Tim…we are not building hotels…we are a church.”
Right…all the more reason to not make such unwise decisions as you are utilizing Kingdom dollars entrusted to you and your church. You have been asked to steward them…not just on the “spending” of the initial costs/purchases, but of the long term value. The principle is the same whether you are building hotels, shopping centers or investing monies into the construction, renovation or sustaining your ministry facilities.
Sounds a lot like Facility Stewardship.
Tim Cool is the founder of Smart Church Solutions.