FaithLife Restructure Affects Verbum Staff?
I saw a note from Deacon Kevin that there has been some restructuring at FaithLife and he and others on the Verbum team are looking for new jobs. Sad news. 
Does anyone have additional insight?
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Where did you see the note? I know that Deacon Kevin is now with Bagley Ministries "As a Roman Catholic Deacon I herald the word. Bagley Ministry is an outgrowth of my desire to share my knowledge and education, bringing folks to a greater relationship with Christ. Presentations include Christocentric Customer Service for ecclesial ministers; Liturgical rubrics; homiletic training; and deacons role in the pastoral staff. Deacon retreats are a specialty."
Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."
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His Facebook page. Says he is moving to the Dallas/Ft. Worth area in the next month. It seems that this is impacting a number of Verbum staff.
I'm a little worried. [:S]
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Steve said:
It seems that this is impacting a number of Verbum staff.
When I was in Bellingham for the Open House, the space allotted to Verbum had expanded but there had been a turnover in staff. I'd take a wait and see approach to what happens to the employees who've been with Faithlife for a while. I would be concerned if they are not reassigned to new positions. However, I have never been a fan of the Verbum/Logos division because the user base does not split that way. If there must be a division a liturgical/non-liturgical would better fit the software usage. So I'll wait and see what any formal announcement implies and where certain employees end up.
Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."
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Thanks for the reply, MJ. Understood. I'll "wait and see" as well.
I feel that Catholic products have really gotten some traction at FaithLife over the past several years and it is disconcerting to have had the "department heads" leave the company, Andrew and now Deacon Kevin.
As a customer, stability weighs equally with growth ... i.e. "Who is my advocate within?"
Still worried ...
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After Rusty Davidson left, I switched to Mark Wheeler for my sales person... but he sent me an email last week saying that due to the restructuring of Verbum, it seemed a good time to pursue other interests.
So whatever is going on, affects the sales staff too.
L2 lvl4 (...) WORDsearch, all the way through L10,
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MJ. Smith said:
However, I have never been a fan of the Verbum/Logos division because the user base does not split that way. If there must be a division a liturgical/non-liturgical would better fit the software usage.
MJ. Smith has been saying that for some time now. And that would be the better way.
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Steve said:
As a customer, stability weighs equally with growth ... i.e. "Who is my advocate within?"
Without any inside knowledge, I'd say Louis St. Hilaire and Gabe Martini can do a good job of protecting our interests.
Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."
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Steve said:
Does anyone have additional insight?
Deacon Kevin Bagley stopped posting Advent reflections after the second week of Advent.
Other than that, no.
EDIT: According to LinkedIn, FL's "Catholic Educational Resources Product Manager" left this month too. I wonder how Lumen is doing.
“The trouble is that everyone talks about reforming others and no one thinks about reforming himself.” St. Peter of Alcántara
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The entire staff has been laid off and the sales team was given an opportunity to transfer to Logos sales. Many have decided to leave due to the continual degradation of work atmospehere at the company (though I suppose that's subjective).
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How do you come to know this, may I ask?
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I was affected by the "restructure."
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Can someone clarify what this implies for Verbum as a product? Will it disappear/be folded in to "regular" (Protestant?) Logos?
"The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected."- G.K. Chesterton
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Ben said:
Can someone clarify what this implies for Verbum as a product? Will it disappear/be folded in to "regular" (Protestant?) Logos?
I agree. It would be helpful to have some official word from Faithlife before rumors take on a life of their own.
I received an email from someone in Verbum sales, Brody, a few moments ago reminding me of the Jubilee Sale.
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Steve said:
Does anyone have additional insight?
Like every business, we are continually adjusting how we operate in order to stay healthy and to stay in business. We have to track revenue, expenses, individual and team performance, capital investment, cash flow, etc. and find a balance that works.
Verbum is doing fine as a product, and we plan to continue to support and develop it, but in the last year we dramatically increased our investment around it without seeing any significant change in sales, or return on that investment. So we are changing things.
We will continue to adjust to find what level of investment we can make that will be supported by customers (present and future). It is our intention to continue with Verbum, even if it's with a different strategy than we had been using. (Again, this is quite normal in any business, it's just sometimes more visible externally when people that customers know by name leave the organization.)
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Faithlife tried to expand into other markets aggressively. But the expansion strategy seems to have been poorly executed. The way it behaved, revenue seems to be more important to them than providing serving its customers with the best products with the best pricing. In order to finance its expansion, the cost of its products kept increasing. It seemed to have lost its vision. Rather than focusing in growing the customer base by providing the most cost effective solution among different competitors, it has increasingly resorted to squeezing more revenue out of each customer. This gave an opportunity for its competitors to erode their customer base.
Because the attendance of mainline and non-evangelical denominations (e.g. Anglican) have been declining, effort devoted into expanding into these markets is unlikely to yield the revenue expected.
It would make more sense to solidify their customer base by making their price more competitive. They also need to provide a low cost solution to the young evangelicals: that's where the growth is.
What is the core value of Faithlife? Is it profit? or is it to provide the best service/product?
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To provide a bit more clarity: there are still a few folks representing the Verbum brand. I will continue with marketing, and Louis St. Hilaire will continue with product development.
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Bob Pritchett said:Steve said:
Does anyone have additional insight?
Like every business, we are continually adjusting how we operate in order to stay healthy and to stay in business. We have to track revenue, expenses, individual and team performance, capital investment, cash flow, etc. and find a balance that works.
Verbum is doing fine as a product, and we plan to continue to support and develop it, but in the last year we dramatically increased our investment around it without seeing any significant change in sales, or return on that investment. So we are changing things.
We will continue to adjust to find what level of investment we can make that will be supported by customers (present and future). It is our intention to continue with Verbum, even if it's with a different strategy than we had been using. (Again, this is quite normal in any business, it's just sometimes more visible externally when people that customers know by name leave the organization.)
Thanks for the info.... I had hoped you might get a larger share there but so many people I have run into just do not want to invest heavily into Bible software. You gave it a good shot offering the catechism study bundle. I am always shocked by how many people think there is no use going beyond the basic things you can find online for free.
-Dan
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Thanks for the response, Bob. It's not every day, or any day for that matter, that the CEO of company <insert company name here> responds directly to customer questions and comments. I truly appreciate that about you and FaithLife.
So ... I understand the need to flex based on a complex set of performance data .. got it. I know that coming to a decision on the shape of that change can be stressful and challenging when trying to envisage the impact.
In general I'm sorry our purchases apparently didn't pay the bills. Not sure how Verbum is "doing fine as a product" in that light.
That said, I've spoken to many <anyone who will listen> about Verbum and have been able to have some call in and purchase a Verbum base package. By the way, thank you for the referral credit ... very nice. [:)]
If you are able, I would like to hear more about how you "continue support and development" for Verbum.
Some things I think about ... thinking out loud ... When I want to grow a product line that is tightly coupled to specific content, I would want to ensure that I have very content aware resource(s) to help and guide decisions and make sure they are relevant and forward looking. I'm also thinking I would want those resource(s) to be able to listen attentively to my customer base as well as sources of that content to guide that business development and growth.
Can you share what that looks like going forward?
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I can't judge the reasoning behind the decisions faithlife makes when it comes to its pricing and business decisions. But like any other business they need to be able to make a profit so that they can continue to pay programmers to improve our logos software. Sometimes people forget that although they are a christian based business they are still a businesses that needs to pay salaries and taxes.
If they are not profitable then Faithlife will just continue to be like other bible software programs that do not innovate and create new tools that improve the software. I rather pay a bit more and be sure that FaithLife is profitable and is able to pay better programmers so that 10 years from now Logos will still exist, be supported and provide new tools for bible studying. I do not want Logos to look and feel in 2025 how it does in 2015. As an example just look at the competitors programs that look the same for the past 10 years and have not really added much when it comes to improving their programs in that time period.
Just my opinion.
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Bob's point about "doing well as a product" seems to suggest that Vernum is selling reasonably well, but those sales haven't/won't increase if you throw marketing dollars at it. If you get get 130% of sales at 200% of the cost, it's not worth pursuing that growth - at least until the market natures/expands naturally. (The figures are illustrative, not real).
This is my personal Faithlife account. On 1 March 2022, I started working for Faithlife, and have a new 'official' user account. Posts on this account shouldn't be taken as official Faithlife views!
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Paul Lee said:
It would make more sense to solidify their customer base by making their price more competitive. They also need to provide a low cost solution to the young evangelicals: that's where the growth is.
What is the core value of Faithlife? Is it profit? or is it to provide the best service/product?
Faithlife has never been about being the cheapest, they've always been about being the best. They offer premium products, often (but not always) at something of a premium price. A race to the bottom (in terms of margins) will help no-one. I'd much prefer Faithlife to continue to pursue innovation and product development. That will grow not only Faithlife's customer base, but the market as a whole.
This is my personal Faithlife account. On 1 March 2022, I started working for Faithlife, and have a new 'official' user account. Posts on this account shouldn't be taken as official Faithlife views!
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Steve said:
Not sure how Verbum is "doing fine as a product" in that light.
You spend $800k / yr to sell $1 million in widgets.
You decide to invest $800k more (people, ads, technology, etc.) to take widget sales to $5 million / year.
You sell the same $1 million in widgets.
Widget sales are fine -- still $1 million. But now you're losing $600k.
Maybe you needed that second $800k just to keep the $1 million in sales. (Alas! A terrible category...)
But maybe you go back to $800k / yr investment and sales stay at $1 million. Maybe you even drop to $500k expenses and sales stay at $1 million (Yay! Profit growth).
Why no growth?
Maybe the investment was poorly done: wrong people, bad ads, unneeded technology. Maybe you need to spend the next $800k differently.
Maybe the product is awesome, but there's only $1 million in widget demand out there and you're capturing it all.
Maybe you don't even know why.
(These are made up numbers and a made up situation.)
I know it's fun to play Monday-morning quarterback and analyze exactly what we did wrong. (I do it myself with companies where I'm the customer!)
But you don't have all the information.
What's amazing is, while I have more, I don't have all the information either. <smile>
Sometimes things don't go the way we planned, and sometimes we can figure out why, and sometimes we don't (and may never) know. There are a lot of variables.
I try to be as transparent as I can be without running an 'open books company', and while being respectful of the privacy and dignity of the people who work here (and who used to work here). So you're welcome to speculate, if you must, and I'll try to answer what questions I can, but I hope you'll remember that:
Not everything we do is a change of mission.
(In other words, sometimes we do or stop-doing something for reasons that have nothing to do with our mission / feelings / emotions / attitudes. We may not have the cash to subsidize it until it earns enough market share. We may have made a mistake. We may be busy working on another even cooler idea. The guy who knows how to do it could have quit to become a professional skier. Etc.)
My daily job is to make sure that "Revenue > Expenses".
I come to work to accomplish our mission ("We Use Technology to Equip the Church to Grow in the Light of the Bible") but on a daily basis I'm continually working on this deceptively simple, yet amazingly complicated, math problem.
Steve said:If you are able, I would like to hear more about how you "continue support and development" for Verbum.
We plan to keep licensing books, selling the product, etc. We're just making internal changes in staffing levels, organization, investment, etc.
Again, this is the daily business of business...
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I suspect that Verbum will thrive under a user-demand base of features and resources. There are so many sub-markets within Catholicism and so many overlaps with the Anglican-Eastern Orthodox-Lutheran markets that the synergy can ignite seemingly random market growth. For example, today the ACW is being released (I'm still waiting ... impatiently). [Ancient Christian Writers]. With the amount of Patristic material available now, Logos only needs some Orthodox Bibles (on the way) to be well situated for the Orthodox market. They are also positioned for slices of the Church History, Catholic, Anglican and Lutheran markets. They need to add Medieval materials to fit the reception criticism market.
Similarly the ecclesial documents of Verbum - which I keep hoping will get a Guide section like Confessional documents - set a precedent that I wish the Lutherans would clamor for ... they have many interesting and valuable position papers. A number of other denominations with central offices also provide solid position papers.
From my perspective, Verbum offerings are currently strong in Patristics, Ecclesial documents and "professional convert" writings (Hahn, Ray, Newman ...). It needs to grow in Bible studies, Medieval writings and contemporary theology. With the reorganization it will be interesting to watch where Faithlife and user-demand takes it.
And, yes, there are several people leaving that I am sorry to see go but for personal reasons rather than concern for the long-term growth of the product.
Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."
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Thanks, Bob. [:)]
I had no idea that Verbum was initiating more than $1M in widget differences in comparison to Logos versus projected sales. Wow!
I understand the change of mission part. I also understand the "Revenue > Expenses" part.
Thanks for the explanation!
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abondservant said:
After Rusty Davidson left, I switched to Mark Wheeler for my sales person... but he sent me an email last week saying that due to the restructuring of Verbum, it seemed a good time to pursue other interests.
So whatever is going on, affects the sales staff too.
No wonder I called today and asked for Mark and they said they didn't have anyone by that name working there...wow!
DAL
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I will have some more comments later, but I hope that Faithlife does not forget that the Catholic market needs dedicated specialists in Catholic theology and practise as salespeople.
“The trouble is that everyone talks about reforming others and no one thinks about reforming himself.” St. Peter of Alcántara
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What's a Catholic sales practice...??
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Jan Krohn said:
What's a Catholic sales practice...??
That is not quite what I meant. Let me rephrase: Faithlife needs to continue to have salespeople who are dedicated specialists in Catholic theology and practise in order for Faithlife to effectively serve (and sell to) large parts of the Catholic market.
“The trouble is that everyone talks about reforming others and no one thinks about reforming himself.” St. Peter of Alcántara
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One last thing ... The change was a surprise for sure, but ...
I'm very happy with my Verbum software and all the books I have. I plan to buy more in the future. I also plan to keep talking it up to friends and acquaintances. I'm looking forward to more titles being made available in the Verbum catalog. I'm also happy that Luis and Brody are able to make contributions to FaithLife and the Catholic community.
... maybe we can all pitch in and help with content for the Verbum Blog. I would like to see that keep going.
[:)]
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Just my two cents (for what they’re worth). I am very new to Verbum, having purchased my first library about a month ago. In months prior to that, I went back and forth, ruminating as to whether or not I should invest in a library given the cost and the fact that I had no professional need for the software. What ultimately sold me on the library were the specific titles in the collection and the ability to cross-references texts without having to manually search in specific resources. In addition, the ability to read the bible and other books with a commentary in split-screen mode is spectacular. I absolutely love Verbum and have since purchased additional resources and bundles. I see myself using the software (especially via the mobile apps) for a lifetime of spiritual enrichment. All that being said, I must admit that I had to conduct a lot of research on my own in order to discover the benefits of Verbum/Logos for a non-pro user such as myself. I hate to see resources being pulled from the Verbum brand because I think that, with a different marketing strategy, an investment in marketing dollars could (and still can) lead to a growth in “widget” sales.
Catholics have a reputation of being somewhat ignorant of scripture and Church doctrine and, as a Catholic, I can affirm that this reputation is somewhat deserved, at least in my experience dealing with my fellow Catholics over the past 30 or so years. Most Catholics raised from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s received abysmal catechesis. Despite that, I’ve noticed that young Catholic adults are much more fervent in their faith than the generation that came before them. These people would be ripe for a marketing strategy tailored to the layperson. I know a lot of young, tech-savvy and committed Catholic adults who are hungry for the faith and I’ve spoken to many of them about Verbum. Almost none of them have heard of it. Some are familiar with the Logos brand, which they perceive as professional software, designed exclusively for Protestant clergy and academics.
As time goes on, I have no doubt that more and more Catholic priests will discover and use Verbum. While that is good, I think that Faithlife needs to be careful about limiting the product’s marketing to clergy and academia. That is a very small market- especially in the west and I don’t see it growing in a substantial way any time soon. I believe that Verbum needs to be heavily marketed to the layperson with spiritual growth as a primary (not secondary) selling point. A lot of contemporary (and successful) technology/software companies distill their products and marketing into two distinct groups: “consumers” and “professionals.” As a “consumer” rather than a professional, I had to really dig to discover the benefits of Verbum for myself and my family. Those benefits should be front and center and there should be more affordable (smaller) libraries designed for practicing Catholic laity with options to expand as time goes on. The professional market will always be there because Verbum/Logos is the industry leader in this area. I hope that this is not an end to investment in the Verbum brand because there is still a huge untapped market that is waiting to discover this wonderful product.
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