It was back in 2012 when Ben Graham and Garrett Walker partnered to form Crown Design Group, an audio-video-lighting (AVL) integration company dedicated to helping churches with their AVL needs.
The friends were a natural fit as business partners, having served on the production staff together at Bayside Community Church in Bradenton, Fla. In the trenches as church techs, they quickly realized a common interest: they wanted to help others in the world of church production.
Church.Design caught up with Graham and Walker, virtually, to glean some wisdom from the former-church-techs-turned-integrators.
Church Design: How did you first get involved with AVL production?
Graham: I kind of grew up in the live production world. My dad owned a company that did a very large outdoor theater, where tens of thousands of people would come every year to this play he did around Easter time. I started a band and toured the world for years professionally. So, I have been around a stage and production for most of my life.
Walker: I’ve always been a part of music and production—first as a musician then kind of putting on shows for my friend’s band and stuff like that when I was in high school. I got a degree in recording arts and from there, got a job at a large church. They were still a mobile church meeting in a school. And I got this great opportunity to help them move into their first building and launching their first campus and building up to a mega building, so I cut my teeth that way. I was the 'lead' lead tech director overseeing all these projects.
Church Design: So how did you decide to start your own business?
Graham: We were both working at Bayside Community Church, and I was helping oversee the creative and production side of things along with Garret.
Walker: Other churches would call up the church and ask, ‘Who does your stuff?’ and so we just had this opportunity to make some side money at first. Eventually, we saw a lot of people needed an integration company that they could trust.
Graham: We started with this little job just to make some extra money and about a week later, another church called and asked us to help them. We stayed on staff at the church for the first two years, but we got a lot bigger than we expected in a short amount of time, and made the decision to explore the business full-time.
Church Design: How has the pandemic changed the role of a church tech?
Walker: With COVID, there are very few churches doing large gatherings in person. So the whole focus has turned to having an online presence and online experience for people that are too afraid to go to service or just can’t. So, we’ve seen a complete shift in the church model where online is their audience. We’ve just been selling and building systems for camera systems and online audio broadcast systems. It’s really just been pure broadcast streaming ever since the coronavirus hit.
"It’s really just been pure broadcast streaming ever since the coronavirus hit." <Garrett Walker
Graham: I think the churches that did point to point, where they have basically a main broadcast campus and they’re pushing content out live to their other locations, they were ready for this. However, there were a ton of churches whose web presence was pretty small before COVID, and [they] didn’t do much with streaming, so they came to us asking what they could do. You need to offer a level of excellence because people are used to watching a video on TV and they want the high-quality look. Streaming is so important right now and I think will only continue to be.
"There were a ton of churches whose web presence was pretty small before COVID, and [they] didn’t do much with streaming, so they came to us asking what they could do." <Ben Graham
Church Design: With all of the streaming churches are doing now, what sort of challenges does that create?
Walker: I think our biggest challenge is educating the churches we partner with on how to do a relevant and dynamic video product for their streaming, teaching what the different cameras are. There’s a big difference between the lower-end cameras and the higher-end cameras. And there’s about 1,000 third-party components in between. It’s been a challenge to get people up to speed that had no inkling on how to do this.
Graham: I’m not a big fan of network stuff. I know it’s extremely important, but we were just inundated with calls from people who wanted to obviously stream video. We’d ask, ‘How do you want to do it?’ and ‘What’s your budget?’ and a lot of these smaller churches aren’t set up for this. You have to talk lighting, cameras, multiple cameras in some cases. People needed to understand that you can’t just flip a switch and have it look like something on ESPN. The hardest thing for us during this was trying to figure out ways of doing this without churches having to drop a quarter of a million dollars and still doing a full broadcast rig.
"People needed to understand that you can’t just flip a switch and have it look like something on ESPN." <Ben Graham
Church Design: How has it impacted what you do as integrators? Are you going in and physically helping with gear and making changes or is everything done virtually?
Walker: We have done both. We have gone in person to help set up these items and [gone] by the safety rules they had in place, but we’ve also been doing a lot of FaceTiming and Zooming. We’ve had a couple of projects where we’ve set up cameras in shop. We fully put them together, tested them, configured them and then put them in.
"We have gone in person to help set up these items and [gone] by the safety rules they had in place, but we’ve also been doing a lot of FaceTiming and Zooming." <Garrett Walker
Church Design: What's the current read out there? What are you hearing from churches you work with?
Graham: What we’re finding with churches is that they are optimistic. Everyone is really excited to get back and be gathering again. It’s hard to just be watching online. I also see a big benefit where these churches are realizing that they can have an online presence and potentially reach even more people than they could ever fit in the building.
Church Design: What do you expect to see for your business in the months ahead?
Walker: We’re abiding by whatever state regulations are set up. We’ll be meeting with our clients, doing installs, and being as safe as possible. I don’t see us spec'ing any huge PA systems for a little while. I see us kind of upgrading, upgrading systems for broadcast and upgrading video systems for online streaming.
"We’re abiding by whatever state regulations are set up. We’ll be meeting with our clients, doing installs, and being as safe as possible." <Garrett Walker
