Assemblies of God

Before he could set up a business, the founder of Portable Church Industries faced a more daunting task: inventing an industry.

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As a man of faith, Pete van der Harst harbors no fear of blank slates. After all, in the beginning there was only a Word, and from there the world rapidly kicked into gear without the benefit of sophisticated modeling programs, industry benchmarks, or the counsel of experienced investors. So when van der Harst dreamed up Portable Church Industries, he was confident that customers' hearts would quicken to a wholly unprecedented service. "There's some education involved in any new venture, but there's more when you're selling a product that no one's ever heard of," says van der Harst, 36. "And we couldn't do market research on something that didn't exist."

Starting any company qualifies as an act of creativity. Launching Portable Church Industries, based in Madison Heights, Mich., required an exercise of imagination akin to inventing not only a better mousetrap but also a whole rodent-ambush industry. The industry van der Harst invented -- for which he coined the term portable church -- involves the physical outfitting of nomadic congregations. Having identified the niche, van der Harst fabricated out of whole cloth all the services, and some of the products, that his customers require. "There was no information source on how to do this," he says, "no place to go for advice." How much should such a company charge for consulting? He swiped a figure from a consultant he'd met. Should a business that serves the church operate as a nonprofit? No, he decided, and so he dubbed his company Industries instead of Ministries to broadcast its for-profit status. As for PCI's offerings, they represent a fusion of ideas culled from every job van der Harst has ever held. And then some. "I'd steal an idea from anywhere," he says. "I'd see something neat at the local Starbucks and say, 'I've got to use that!"

The beneficiaries of van der Harst's magpie-like proclivities are his customers: new, chiefly evangelical, churches "planted" by entrepreneurial worshipers who are bothered by the faint odor of mothballs wafting from established institutions. Since the cost of buying a church building is at least $5,000 per seat, these start-ups shelter like hermit crabs wherever they can. Harbor of Hope Christian Church, for example, launched itself last year in a hotel conference room in Lowell, Mass., and now docks in a middle-school auditorium. Two-year-old Gateway Community Church, meanwhile, takes over an Austin multiplex every Sunday, transforming six theaters into one adult meeting space and five children's classrooms. Gateway's leaders pay the cinema a fee and agree to vanish before the first matinee.

The challenge for those churches is to set up and break down their equipment -- thousands of items, including sophisticated audio and video systems, children's play sets, and coffee services -- with the speed and precision of Formula One racers. And they must do so using labor that is often unskilled and unpaid. Before starting the company, van der Harst explains, "every portable church that we looked at was an administrative disaster. People hauling armloads of junk. Shoulders drooping. Everybody whipped. One guy we worked with said it was like moving a three-bedroom house every weekend."

To solve that problem, van der Harst came up with an ingenious solution, or rather a series of ingenious solutions. Portable Church Industries assembles customized sets of equipment, many of the items engineered or invented by van der Harst himself. It encases that equipment in containers designed for easy unpacking, delivers those containers in tractor-trailers that provide transportation on Sundays and storage during the week, and then trains its customers in the choreography of efficient assembly and dismantling. "It would take us as least twice as long to set up without his system," says Toney Salva, family pastor at Harbor of Hope, who refers to van der Harst fondly as "Porta-Pete." "And it all looks so professional. Things don't start to wear and tear the way they would if you were carting stuff back and forth in tubs and Rubbermaid."

Reduced to business-model terms, PCI is an outsourcer: the company manages its customers' nuts-and-bolts operations so that they can concentrate on their core competencies. But it is an outsourcer whose mission addresses perhaps the oldest decentralization issue in the book. "Pastors are called to be in the life-change business," says van der Harst. "They're not project-management specialists. We are." Not that PCI can fairly be lumped into any generic category of businesses. In fact, it is difficult to imagine PCI being created by anyone other than van der Harst, and it's almost as hard to imagine van der Harst creating any other company. "There have been many strands in my life, and they all came together in this," he muses.

A briskly cheerful man with immaculately trimmed hair and beard, van der Harst looks and sounds like the engineer he is. Numbers dropped casually into conversation may extend a decimal point or two; output devices are lovingly described by their given names. His office -- in a light-industrial-bland building in a light-industrial-bland suburb north of Detroit -- is functional to the point of sterility; its furnishings include bookcases fashioned from the same carpet-covered plywood as his company's packing cases. "We rent as is, so we can't be choosy," says van der Harst. "It's ugly. It works."

The first strand of experience that would ultimately form the weave of PCI emerged during van der Harst's undergraduate days at the University of Michigan, where he supplemented his engineering courses with an internship at United Parcel Service. Assigned to a work-methods and measurement project, this son of a mechanical engineer was dazzled by the company's ability to translate exhaustive metrics into productivity gains. "At the end of the day, they can tell their drivers to the hundredth of an hour what their time should have been worth," says van der Harst enthusiastically. "And it's accurate! That's the stunning thing! It's accurate!"

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Leigh Buchanan

Leigh Buchanan is an editor at large for Inc. Magazine. A former editor at Harvard Business Review and founding editor of WebMaster magazine, she writes regular columns on leadership and workplace culture, and she contributes Inc.'s capsule book reviews, "A Skimmer's Guide to the Latest Business Books."

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