equip the Church

Your board brings in a consultant. He has worked with tons of big companies. He knows the language of strategy. He is confident and knows how to fix all your problems. He carries a framework for everything and a spreadsheet for everyone.

One of his first activities is to benchmark the competition. He researches your top three competitors. He studies their catalogs, their social media, their pricing, their cover design. He measures what is measurable. He comes back with a report: here is what the leaders are doing, here is the gap between them and you, here are the steps to close it.

What he cannot put in the report is why someone cried reading one of your books. What he cannot measure is the pastor in Nairobi who built his entire preaching ministry around a single title you published eight years ago. What he cannot quantify is the loyalty of a reader who has bought everything you have ever released because you once answered her email personally. None of that fits in a spreadsheet, so none of that makes it into the strategy.

You follow the steps. You close the gap. You become more like your competitors.

Congratulations. You are now slightly better at being average.

This is benchmarking. And it is quietly killing your distinctiveness.

To be fair, benchmarking has its place. If your printing costs are forty percent higher than the industry average, you need to know that. If your website takes twelve clicks to complete a purchase, someone should have caught that by now. If your warehouse is inefficient or your royalty accounting is a mess, looking at how better-run organizations handle those things is not just useful, it is necessary. Benchmarking fixes the plumbing. There is no shame in that and no reason to avoid it.

The problem is not benchmarking itself. The problem is what happens when you take a tool designed to fix the floor and start using it to build the ceiling. Operational efficiency is a baseline. It is the minimum required to stay in the game. No reader ever fell in love with a publisher because their checkout process was seamless. No pastor ever built his ministry around a book because the warehouse fulfilled the order in two days. Those things matter, but they won’t change lives.

The consultant knows how to fix the floor. That is genuinely useful. What he cannot do is tell you what to put on the ceiling. That requires something benchmarking is structurally incapable of providing: a clear sense of who you are, who you are for, and what only you can give them.

The DoubleTree Cookie

DoubleTree Hotels have small ovens at their check-in desks. Not for efficiency. Not because their competitors do it. Because when you arrive tired and stressed, someone hands you a warm chocolate chip cookie, and you never forget it.

No one asked for the warm cookie. No research study said guests needed it. Finance almost certainly questioned the ovens and most certainly would get rid of them if they could. But DoubleTree did it anyway, and people remember their stay seven years later not for the thread count, the conference room, or the complimentary shampoo. They remember the cookie.

Benchmarking would have killed the cookie. It is not on anyone’s best practices list. You cannot model its ROI in a spreadsheet. It does not close a gap. It opens one.

What Will Guidara Noticed

When the team from Eleven Madison Park in New York visited the best restaurant in the world, their founder Will Guidara gave them an unusual assignment. Don’t study what they do brilliantly. Find what they neglect. Find where the experience quietly disappoints.

They came back with an answer: beer and coffee. At the finest restaurant on earth, the wine list was extraordinary. The sommelier was world class. Every detail of the wine experience had been obsessed over. But if you ordered a beer, you got whatever was on tap. If you ordered a coffee, it arrived as an afterthought. In a restaurant that had perfected almost everything, these two things had simply never received the same love.

Most consultants would have missed this entirely. They were studying what the best restaurant did brilliantly, not where it quietly let people down. Disappointment is hard to measure. Delight is easy to see.

Guidara went the other direction. He hired a dedicated beer sommelier. He built a craft beer program with guided pairings designed to astonish the guest who simply wanted a cold beer with dinner. He treated coffee with the same seriousness the restaurant gave to wine.

He didn’t copy his competitors’ strengths. He found their blind spots and moved in.

The guest who ordered beer at Eleven Madison Park didn’t expect much. That is exactly why what they received was so memorable. You cannot manufacture that kind of surprise by studying what everyone else is already doing well.

This is the question benchmarking never asks: what is everyone else ignoring?

What Christian Publishers Are Actually Benchmarking

Look around Christian publishing and you will see the same patterns repeated everywhere. The same endorsement formats, five names on the back cover, all of them well-known, none of them the reader’s pastor or the seminary professor who actually assigned the book. The same website structure, organized by topic, designed to look like every other website on the internet. The same social media cadence, a quote graphic on Monday, a buy link on Friday, silence in between. The same conference presence, a booth, a banner, a stack of books, a bowl of candy. The same back cover copy promising transformation without telling you for whom or from what.

Nobody decided this was the best way. It just became the way because enough successful publishers did it and everyone else benchmarked them and followed along.

But here is what benchmarking does that no one talks about. It does not just make you look like your competitors. It makes you think like them. It trains your editorial instincts toward whatever the market has already rewarded. It points your catalog toward the center, toward the books that will sell to the widest possible audience, toward the safe, accessible, broadly appealing title that no one will object to.

And in Christian publishing, the center has a name. It is called the lowest common denominator, and it is the enemy of everything prophetic, theologically serious, and world-changing that the Church actually needs. Luther was not benchmarking when he wrote the ninety-five theses. He was not checking what the other theologians were producing and closing the gap. He was saying something that needed to be said, for an audience that needed to hear it, regardless of whether the numbers would ever work.

When you benchmark your way to the middle, you do not just lose your distinctiveness as a publisher. You lose your voice as a ministry. A Hebrew lexicon will never benchmark well. A book on church discipline will not win a popularity contest. A systematic theology aimed at pastors in a minority context will look like a poor investment next to a devotional that sells ten times as many copies. But viability is a commercial category. Usefulness to the Church is a different measure entirely. The consultant does not know the difference, and his spreadsheet cannot tell him.

This is the spiritual cost of benchmarking that nobody names in the board meeting. You are not just copying a business model. You are homogenizing the voice of the Church. Every publisher that migrates toward the center because the numbers looked better there is a publisher no longer doing the thing only they could do. The Church does not need another publisher producing what everyone else is already producing.

And here is the uncomfortable truth. Most of these patterns are not even working well for the publishers who invented them. Endorsements from well-known leaders are becoming a liability as moral failures multiply across our industry. Conference booths are expensive and exhausting. Social media posts announcing new titles get almost no engagement. Everyone is copying a playbook that is already losing its power.

Check out the websites from five different Christian publishers and read the mission statements. You will struggle to tell them apart.

Benchmarking told them to do all of this. And they did it. And it made them harder to notice.

The Real Question

Here is the question your next strategy conversation should start with. Not: what are the best publishers doing? But: what is everyone doing badly? What is the warm cookie no one is making? What is the beer or coffee program no one has bothered to build?

Maybe it is the way you follow up with readers after purchase. Maybe it is the depth of your study guides. Maybe it is a level of theological seriousness that everyone else has drifted away from. Maybe it is something so simple that your finance team would laugh at it.

The things that create loyalty are hard to measure. That is why no one benchmarks them. That is also exactly why they work.

Stop closing the gap between you and your competitors. Start opening the gap between you and everyone else.