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, Florida. 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 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.
"[Bayside Community Church was] still a mobile church meeting in a school. And I got this great opportunity to help them move into their first building and [launch] their first campus and building up to a mega building, so I cut my teeth that way." <Garrett Walker
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 [launch] 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 Garrett.
"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." <Ben Graham
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: [During] COVID, there [were] 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 been pure broadcast streaming ever since the coronavirus hit.
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 ... 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 suddenly began doing around 2020, what sorts of challenges did that create?
Walker: I think our biggest challenge [was] 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 [was] a challenge to get people up to speed that had no inkling on how to do this.
"People needed to understand that you can’t just flip a switch and have it look like something on ESPN." <Ben Graham
Graham: 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 [weren'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 [the pandemic] 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.
[Editor's note: This interview was originally published in August 2020.]
