equip the Church

Rory Sutherland tells a story about a five-star hotel that hired consultants to find efficiencies. The consultants watched the doorman for a few days. His job was to open the door. So they replaced him with an automatic mechanism and saved $40,000 a year.

Two years later, the hotel was a catastrophe.

The doorman wasn’t just opening the door. That was just the part you could see. He was greeting regulars by name, hailing taxis before guests asked, signaling to everyone who walked up that this was a place that took care of you. He may have been responsible for what the hotel could charge per night.

Sutherland calls this the doorman fallacy: define a role by its most visible function, eliminate it in the name of efficiency, then discover too late what it was actually doing.

Christian publishers often do this with marketing.

We define marketing as selling books. So we measure clicks, conversions, sales. Anything that doesn’t connect directly to a transaction gets scrutinized. And when budgets tighten, the things that don’t show up cleanly on a spreadsheet are the first to go.

The newsletter that gives without asking their customer to buy a book. Gone. The relationship with a pastor who hasn’t bought anything yet. Deprioritized. The content that simply serves, with no call to action. Eliminated.

It looks like focus. What it actually is, is firing the doorman.

That newsletter that asks nothing in return is quietly building trust. That pastor you stopped calling is recommending your books in conversations you’ll never hear. That content that doesn’t convert is the reason someone opens your next email.

None of this shows up in the month it happens. The doorman’s value is invisible right up until he’s gone.

The real role of marketing is not to sell books. It is to build a world in which people want to buy your books, trust your judgment, and feel like they belong to something worth belonging to. Sales are what happens when that world exists.

When you cut everything that doesn’t directly produce a sale, you are not trimming fat. You are cutting the root system and wondering why the tree stops producing.

Sutherland’s insight goes one step further. The doorman may actually increase what you can charge per night. The relational marketing you cut was probably responsible for a portion of the sales you thought came from somewhere else. You just couldn’t see it in the data.

You never will.

So before you cut the thing that doesn’t look like it’s working, ask a harder question first.

Where else have you installed an automatic door?