Assemblies of God

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"This is it. This is my passion," Pete van der Harst says. "Low-cost Christianity."

PCI's warehouse and manufacturing plant are located behind the company's offices. In one corner, swatches of nubby, charcoal gray carpet roll through a glue machine that coats them with liquid adhesive so they can be affixed to the finished containers. Toilet tissue, hand sanitizers, masking tape, highlighters, and batteries spill forth from metal cabinets like fruits from a horn of sundries.

This is also the scene of much of PCI's never-ending R&D, which is spiritedly ad hoc. On one day, a technician fashions a video box to keep glare off a screen used in a high school cafeteria that has 30-foot skylights. On another occasion, van der Harst scoots repeatedly down a diminutive plastic sliding board that he has modified to fold up easily. Workers standing on ladders clip hanging signs to ceiling tiles to make sure they leave no mark. In fact temporary signage has received van der Harst's most assiduous attention. Among his innovations: the use of WindMasters -- those spring-mounted, aluminum-frame signs that are ubiquitous outside gas stations -- and messages printed on vinyl bags that can be pulled over existing signs, a device employed by banks just after an acquisition.

Not everything PCI invents is strictly functional, however. There are, for example, the Solo Parent Parking signs, which designate prime spots for folks burdened with multiple children and their trappings. "My wife is a fanatic on that," says van der Harst. "On Sundays it's often just her and the kids because I'm traveling, and she's very specific that she's a solo parent and not a single mom. We're trying to keep the connotations down."

Van der Harst is also sensitive to the connotations suggested by his company's Christian roots. Consequently, he labors to ensure that suppliers take PCI seriously. "We're absurd about prepaying and rapidly paying all our suppliers," says van der Harst. "Anything with the word church in the title is typically slow paying and has a bad reputation. That really grinds me, but it's the reality."

On the flip side, van der Harst must maintain businesslike relationships with customers who aren't always businesslike. For example, some pastors believe that the very act of consulting is morally wrong, because "asking someone to pay for what resides in your brain cells is not right," he explains. Others want financing or heavy discounts, requests that van der Harst denies. "Usually, I'll make some snide joke: 'You know our employees are here in Michigan, and it's a really weird state. They cash their paychecks," he says.

Not all of van der Harst's troubles arise from the pastors' naïveté. Lately, more and more have been challenging him on pricing, claiming to have found comparable items for less money on Web-based auctions. Van der Harst suspects that, in most instances, the objects in question are hot. "We're being quoted $1,500, and we know that dealer cost is $5,000, so there's something wrong," he says. "But I have to say, eBay is bugging me quite a bit."

The other matter bugging van der Harst is his travel schedule: he takes as many as six trips a month, which puts considerable strain on the day-to-day operations of his company and his family. (The van der Harsts now have three children; a fourth is due this month.) But that won't change until he manages to recruit and train more consultants -- people who can sit down with the pastor, the music director, the children's minister, and other launch team members to determine their needs in excruciating detail. There's nothing cookie-cutterish about the process: churches differ greatly in their circumstances and desires.

But in training, as in advertising, creating a discipline from scratch has its drawbacks. There are no books, seminars, or trade publications that address the science of portable-church assembly: it reposes exclusively in van der Harst's brain, and in the brain of Bob Paige, 54, the company's only other consultant. Paige learned the game by trailing van der Harst for two months, but the "hang-around-with-Pete method is expensive and not at all efficient," says the company owner. "The job for me now is to do a massive brain dump and distill everything I know into some kind of tight, concise form -- maybe written, maybe taught in a classroom."

Van der Harst must also train more workers who can, in turn, train the church teams. He calls a paucity of skilled employees the biggest rock in PCI's road to expansion. So far the company has completed about 150 portable churches, but van der Harst estimates that there are 24,000 portable churches in the United States, many of which need help with a launch, an efficiency upgrade, or a retrofit for a new facility. Those churches have nowhere else to turn, and although van der Harst is not especially protective of his monopoly, he doesn't expect to lose it anytime soon. Having invented the industry, he can reel off the reasons why there aren't more entrants: the anorexic single-digit margins, the years of financial hardship, a travel schedule that would test Job. Frankly, he concludes, "I can't think of a coherent business reason why anyone would want to compete with us."

Leigh Buchanan is a senior editor at Inc.

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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. @LeighEBuchanan