I run a church staff. I have worked with more than 20 people overseas.

Where this came from

The job posting I kept rewriting.

It always needs the same person. Someone who can build the bulletin, chase eleven volunteers, clean up the database, answer Instagram, write the weekly email, keep the giving records straight, and follow up with the family that visited three Sundays ago. Twenty-five hours. Part time, because full time is not in the budget.

Read it back and the problem is sitting right there. That is not one job. It is six. Nobody qualified takes it at that price, the one person who does say yes is gone inside a year, and then you are writing the posting again.

So the work gets split instead. The pastor takes a piece of it at 9pm. The office manager takes a piece on top of the job you actually hired them for. And the rest of it does not get done. Not badly, not late. Not at all. The guest who visited in March never hears from anyone. The thank-you letters go out in June for gifts given in February.

That is not a discipline problem, and no calendar app has ever fixed it. There is more work than there are people. I have been on the wrong side of that math in three different churches.

Ten years of practice

I already made the expensive mistakes. That is most of what you are buying.

The other company I run is not a staffing company and this page is not an ad for it, so I will leave the name off. The part that matters here is the headcount. I have personally worked with more than twenty people overseas. Fifteen of them are on my team today, and some have been with me for years.

None of them came to me through CoLabor. Different company, different work, and I want to be exact about that because it would be easy to blur. What that decade gave me is the unglamorous part: finding people on the other side of an ocean, working out which ones can actually do the job, training them, and keeping them. Including the times I got it wrong.

It almost never went wrong on skill.

• Hiring a title instead of a list. I would write a role, fill it, and then discover the actual work was six things I had never written down. Now the first call produces a scope document, and you read it before any money moves.
• Letting five people give direction. Everyone means well and the person ends up working on whatever was asked most recently. So one named point of contact directs the co-laborer, and everyone else routes through that person. This breaks more placements than skill does.
• A schedule that floated. "Overlap when you can" turns into no overlap by week three. Now the shift is fixed at onboarding with a minimum of five hours inside your business hours, and it is written into the scope attachment.
• Access as an afterthought. Somebody smart sitting idle for nine days waiting on a login. Now provisioning is week one, named accounts, least privilege, and it is on your side of the checklist because it has to be.
• Expecting week one to look like month three. It never does, and judging it that early costs you a good person. So the 90-day arc is published before you sign, including the honest line that week one buys you about three hours.
• Screening for skill and hoping about character. The expensive failures were never the ones who could not write. Now there is a faith and character interview run by people in ministry, a call to the candidate's own pastor, and a background check.

Every rule on this website is scar tissue. None of it is best-practice language I found somewhere and rewrote. It is a list of things that went wrong on my watch, written down so they do not go wrong on yours.

Here is what I have not done: run this model inside a hundred churches. CoLabor is new and I say so further down. But the work a church office needs done is the same work I have been handing to a remote team for a decade, and I have spent more than twenty years on the other side of it watching that work not get done.

One more thing, and it turned out to matter more than I expected. Recruiting this way, we get to say plainly what we are looking for. We ask about faith in the interview. We ask where they worship and who knows them there. We call their pastor. No candidate discovers halfway through that it mattered, and no client has to wonder. Every co-laborer is a Christian, and we can tell you exactly how we know. The standard is published.

Where we are today

CoLabor is new. I am not going to pretend otherwise.

There is no wall of client logos on this website, because there is no wall yet. I am not going to manufacture one, and you should be suspicious of any young company that has.

What does exist is every standard, boundary, and price, written down and published before a single paying customer could test them. That is the only point at which a standard means anything. Anybody can write a policy after the money is coming in.

• Faith and character interviewed by people who are themselves in ministry, plus a call to the candidate's own pastor. A candidate who cannot produce a pastor who knows them does not get placed. The whole process is published.
• A background check before any access to giving records, financial data, or member personal information. Not waivable, including when a placement is urgent.
• No banking credentials. Ever. Not at any tier, not if you ask, not if you insist. Bookkeeping specialists get read-only bank feeds and nothing more.
• Benevolence, counseling, member conflict, and anything confessional routes to a named person on your staff. Immediately. Your co-laborer handles the volume so your pastors have room for the weight.
• One person, one client. Never a shared pool, never a ticket queue, never a rotating name in a portal.
• Prices are on the website. Both of them. If you have to call to find out what something costs, the price depends on how you look.
• The person changes, the price does not. When a match is wrong we run a documented correction plan, then replace the co-laborer at no cost and hold your rate exactly where it is.

Hold me to every one of them. If we ever break one, I would rather hear it from you than read about it later.